Topics Ethics

Question I am interested in learning more about Philosophy, both the history of the development of ideas, and its practical application (or is that an oxymoron!). I am currently enrolled in two MOOCs, one taught by Mitch Green (Know Thyself) and the other by Michael Sandel (Justice). As a Clinical Psychologist, I have been skating around the edge of philosophy in my work as a therapist, so am excited about learning more of this field in depth. My question/curiosity is in the area of maternal obligation. More specifically, under certain circumstances, is it ever justifiable that a mother kill her infant. Lest this question sound too horrible to consider, I can imagine this scenario: a child is born with massive, multiple physical deficits that would make his/her life less than that which an animal might experience and would entail untold expenses, time, and emotional costs for the parents and society. There is clearly, here, an issue of the moral obligation of a mother to her infant, but I think even that is just an assumed rather than examined position. I'm interested in hearing from any panelist on this matter, as well as being directed to any relevant writings.

Accepted:
March 15, 2013

Comments

I feel certain that even in this extreme case, the mother would be at least charged with homicide, if not murder, from a legal perspective. And I think it would also be a case of wrongful homicide or murder from a moral point of view (or, more specifically, from the stand point of natural law, which I accept). You are, after all, asking us to imagine a killing, the mother actively taking her child's life through, say, suffocation or a gun shot or drowning or using a knife to cut off the baby's head. This would seem very much like a murder and just as murderous than if the mother cut off the head of her healthy baby. Still, the way you describe the case, it seems that even keeping the baby alive through childhood alone would require extraordinary measures. Often ethicists think that (under normal circumstances) while a person is obligated to take ordinary measures to stay alive, she is not obligated to take extraordinary measures. So, if I am dying of heart failure, but simply taking a few aspirins would keep me alive (and imagine I have several aspirins within reach and I can easily swallow them), many would think that my failure to take them would consider my death a kind of suicide. But imagine that I am dying and the only thing that will save me is an extraordinary heart transplant that may cause unbearable pain. If I refused the heart transplant, most would not think of my death as a suicide. So, if the baby would not live without, say, extensive measures (organ transplant, the amputation of both hands, a dangerous brain surgery that may cause even more harm), the mother would (I think) have the authority (legally and morally) to withhold extraordinary measures with full awareness that her baby would not live.

For a good book on this topic, you may find The Ethics of Homicide useful. Baruch Brody also has some excellent insights on cases such as you mention. For a philosopher who would be far more sympathetic to your case, you may want to look at the work of Peter Singer (Princeton University). I believe his home page has various essays attached to it and you can easily do a google search to find his views on infanticide. For a very strict, anti-Singer perspective, you might look at the work of Robert George (also at Princeton) or John Finnis (Oxford).