A little while ago on Skholiast’s blog, Elisa Freschi pointed to an argument from Nicholas Shackel attacking the “pro-choice” position on abortion. Shackel objects deeply to the following claim from the US’s newly elected Catholic vice-president, Joe Biden:
I accept my church’s position on abortion…. Life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews…I just refuse to impose that on others.
As Shackel notes, such a position is hardly unique to Biden. Forms of this position are very common; in many Western countries, they may even be the most common. It is the position one could reasonably call “anti-abortion but pro-choice”. And as far as Shackel is concerned, such a position is ignorant or worse. He says nothing in the article about a pro-abortion position – the position expressed perhaps most eloquently by Episcopal Divinity School dean Katherine Ragsdale in her speeches claiming that “abortion is a blessing”. No doubt Shackel would have strongly negative things to say about views like Ragsdale’s as well, but he rightly avoids saying anything about them in this piece, for they are not his point. He’s not writing about being pro-abortion, he’s writing about being anti-abortion but pro-choice. Which is a more common position to take, but also more difficult to make philosophically consistent. (As, one should add, is its flip side: making abortion illegal except in cases of rape and incest.)
Shackel asks good and pointed questions about Biden’s worldview. The official position of the Roman Catholic Church is that abortion is murder. Since human life begins at conception, those who end it are intentionally ending an innocent human life, which is murder. If you accept this position, how can it make sense to “refuse to impose that on others”? It is not controversial that governments should outlaw murder, and impose that outlawing on others. Biden presumably believes that. So if you do believe that abortion is murder, how can you believe on good conscience that a government should allow it?
Shackel interprets Biden’s approach as relativism, which is a position I have come out against often enough. Relativism logically entails positions that make little sense. In this case, Shackel interprets Biden as saying that abortion may be morally wrong for me, but not for others, so that logically I should go to jail if I do it, but someone else shouldn’t if they do. And it’s hard, as Shackel notes, to see how the same reasoning would not then apply to other kinds of killing.
But there is another, non-relativist, possibility that I don’t think Shackel acknowledges anywhere in this post. This position is that we simply aren’t sure enough of our own position – and that where such doubt applies, we should be stricter on ourselves than we are on others. So I might think that abortion is wrong and be confident enough in that to accept the Church’s teaching in my own life, but not confident enough to force it on others. As far as I can tell, this is not a relativist position and does not entail the negative consequences of relativism. It is merely a position of epistemic humility: a recognition that moral questions are hard, and that while it is vitally important to reflect on them and live by the results of our reflection, we should be cautious about being too quick to extend those results to others. There may be other ideas we hadn’t thought about.
I think such a humility is generally well taken. There has been a vast amount of reflection on what it is to live well and make good decisions, an amount very difficult to take in even for philosophers. We need to act regardless, but we don’t necessarily need to impose that action on others. We can systematically deceive ourselves, and so can others, but we are rarely better equipped to identify that deception than they are. For this reason, many submit to the judgement of a church or tradition as better equipped than they are – but traditions, too, are made up of fallen human beings. We often cannot trust ourselves – but given his track record, in my view, even God has not displayed himself worthy of our trust.
One might well compare all this uncertainty to uncertainty about empirical matters. If I serve on a jury, I may believe that the defendant probably stabbed his brother. Maybe I’m 65% confident of this. And this may well be enough for me to justifiably avoid this man if I pass him on the street, to refuse to associate with him in my personal life. For I believe that he’s a murderer. But that limited degree of confidence is not good enough for me to agree that he be sentenced for murder. Unless my doubts on the matter are silenced, I must pronounce him not guilty and refrain from punishing him.
It seems to me that what is true in the particular and empirical case can also be true in the general and moral case. I may be sufficiently confident in church teaching that I would never abort a fetus myself, never ask for it, discourage my family members from doing it in the strongest possible terms. But I may still know just how many different views have been taken on the matter, and have a degree of doubt significant enough to matter – significant enough that I refuse to sentence others to punitive jail terms over something that might, in the end, not actually be wrong. In short: If abortion really is murder and we let people involved in it go free, that’s bad. If abortion really isn’t murder and we punish people for it as if it were, that’s worse.
I do not know whether any of this is Joe Biden’s position. He has left sufficient room for his statement to be read in many ways. One might be able to understand his position more effectively by reading more of his public statements, but there is no need to do that here, for my point is not about Joe Biden, and if I understand Shackel, neither is his. The point is about whether it is possible to consistently hold a position that is anti-abortion but pro-choice, and I believe that it is – on these grounds of epistemic humility.
The importance of epistemic humility is also the reason I have made this post here. Love of All Wisdom is not a “political blog” in the usual sense, and I generally avoid wading into the details of particular political issues. (Note I didn’t say anything here about my own substantive position on the issue.) While I do not believe that political activism is essential to the good life, I have noted before how reflection on politics can tell us interesting and important things about the good life. And I think abortion is of significant interest here because it illustrates what epistemic humility can look like in practice.
An interesting post marred by imprecision. Check the Catholic Catechism on the subject of abortion
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a5.htm
and you will find that there is no mention of murder or manslaughter etc. These are legal terms and involve a legal judgement. Even in the old days abortion in Britain was prosecuted as the crime of procuring a miscarriage.
As to whether Biden is a Catholic in good standing the answer must be no. It is simply not open to a Catholic to take an independent position on this issue. As a Catholic he is obliged to oppose this evil and not facilitate it in any way.
To second Mr. Reidy’s points, those who are pro-life believe that abortion is homicide, the killing of a human being. However, not every homicide is legally a murder–not even every intentional homicide is murder. Intentional killing in self-defense is often legally excused and sometimes publicly praised. Likewise, a killing while under some form of duress is often shown leniency. Most homicides are the result of negligence or malpractice. My torts professor once asked the following trick question: A person is found dead the victim of an unlawful homicide; who is the most likely killer? The answer: a doctor. Medical malpractice, negligent homicide, is the most common form of homicide. Negligent killers are always liable in tort, but they are not always criminally liable. Of course, moral responsibility is much broader, and deeper, than criminal liability.
As to the consistency of Biden’s position, or one like his, one of the difficulties is trying to assess why he believes what he believes. Like Mario Cuomo before him, Biden presents his faith-derived belief that life begins at conception as fairly opaque. We don’t get his reasons for accepting the Church’s position; he accepts the belief because it is the Church’s position. The rhetorical move places the belief that life begins at conception in the same category of beliefs as transubstantiation and the Assumption of Mary. This move shields him from questioning on the one hand; on the other hand, it also allows him to claim that his belief, because derived from faith or authority, cannot be a part of public reason. The belief that life begins at conception is placed in a very problematic epistemic category. It’s placed in the same category as the beliefs that constitute or follow from the fundamental leap of faith, which, depending on your tradition, cannot be understood in the same way as other beliefs.
However, for most pro-lifers, even Catholic pro-lifers, this move is a fundamental mistake. The belief that life begins at conception is derived from human reason and not revelation. As such, it is an appropriate belief to bring into the public sphere. The reasons for the belief can be articulated and interrogated and they do not ultimately rely on the authority of the Church.
Biden’s position is not so much an exercise in epistemic humility as it is, at best,an epistemic category mistake, or, at worst, an insincere rhetorical sleight of hand. Biden’s position is not so much a call for us to weigh the strength our beliefs about abortion as it is an invitation not to think too much about them. Abortion becomes an issue like eating meat on Fridays during lent or keeping kosher–supremely important to a devout believer but utterly devoid of public meaning.
Thank you, Michael, and welcome to the blog. The distinction between homicide and murder is relevant to the discussion and worth bringing up, since I didn’t speak precisely enough, though I don’t think it affects the general scope of the argument.
I agree that how we assess Biden himself depends on his own reasoning, and I’m willing to believe that it is not what I articulated here. But the point wasn’t to defend Biden so much as to note that an anti-abortion but pro-choice position can be philosophically consistent.
I also don’t think that “religious” beliefs should be excluded from the public sphere, for any legitimate belief in revelation should itself be founded on reason. But then I’m not American…
@ Michael Formichelli:
You are right about the low cunning of Biden in trying to turn ‘life begins at conception’ into an element of Catholic Voodoo. I don’t think that there is anyone on the pro-abortion/pro-choice side that denies that there is life in the womb, it’s blindingly obvious that there is. What they do however is deny that this life is to be weighed in the balance against the wishes of the mother. In any case many anti abortion/pro-life people are non-Catholic or are without any affiliation to a religion.
I think epistemic humility is misplaced in much the same way that it would be in relation to racism or slavery.
The “obviousness” here seems to me to rest on an equivocation between “life” and “a life”. Is it obvious that there is life in the womb? Well yes, as it is obvious that there is life in any other part of the body. There is life in a toe, and if it is amputated, then the life in that toe is ended. But you don’t hear anybody saying that amputating a toe is homicide, or that the life of the toe is to be weighed against the wishes of the one the toe is attached to.
The trouble with the criticism of Biden — as with a lot of argument on both sides of the abortion debate — is that it proceeds by false analogy.
An embryo is manifestly not a child or a fully developed, independent human being — just as an embryo is not simply a piece of non-sentient organic matter. That is why the abortion question is not an easy one — even though polemists tend to portray the issue in simple and absolute terms.
Even the Catholic church recognizes that the mother and embryo are linked and that the mother’s right to life is superior in the context of ectopic pregnancies and other situations where a woman’s life is at risk.
And where moral choices are nuanced, it can be a rational and wise position to say that — regardless of personal opinion — choice is best left in the hands of an individual most intimately involved (the pregnant woman)and should not be the subject of state intervention based on inflexible rules.
So, I find myself agreeing with Mr. Biden — one of my least favorite politicians. The issue is less about the substance of the moral decision and more about the best process for making the decision. Being both pro-life and pro-choice can make perfect sense — although I defer to others on the issue of whether Mr. Biden is a good Catholic.
If one thinks that opposing abortion is a matter of faith but not, say, a matter of natural law or reason (which I don’t think is the position of the RC Church, but I am no expert here), is it possible to believe such a matter should not be imposed upon people of other religions? Or does the murder/manslaughter bit overrule this? I have heard both explanations, but am really not sure I find either convincing.
I think the responses of many pro-life advocates suggest that in practice they do not actually believe abortion to be murder on the same level as that of a born person. I’m unsure whether this is their actual position, though, or an attempt to find a middle ground in the debate…ie, by saying that women who procure abortions should not be prosecuted, that it is a matter of their own conscience, or that abortions should be permitted in cases like rape, etc. Is it simply too unpalatable to say that yes, abortion should be utterly banned across the board, 13 year-old incest victims be damned? Or are many pro-life people actually believers in a much grayer category than they think?
An interesting addition might be the point of view of the Catholic Church about the baptism of fetuses who are doomed not to survive. This used to be a delicate topic for centuries, since baptism was conceived as the conditio sine qua non for one’s future heavenly life. If I am not wrong, the official position has been that what has “ictu oculi” not the appearance of a human being cannot be baptised. This seems to suggest that the Catholic tradition itself is more variegated than its today’s interpreters in the US.
A major achievement of the pro-choice movement has been to plant the idea that opposition to abortion is based on religious considerations and therefore has no rational basis. Thus I was not surprised to hear on the Moral Maze programme (BBC 4) the Hindu director of ‘Life’ a charity that supports women in crisis pregnancies having his views characterised as arising on religious grounds and therefore outside the purview of rational discussion. He quickly denied that but was not engaged on the general moral foundation of the pro-choice argument. The assumption is that this is no longer part of the discussion, we, the members of the church of reason, have moved on and only a flurry of panic about ‘gendercide’ had revived the flagging discussion. The statistic that in Britain amongst the Hindu population male to female births were running at 120 to 100. The hardy pro-choice folk on the panel regretted the attitude that caused this, but somewhat ignored the fact that this is not a legal ground for abortion. Only Melanie Phillips aka ‘Mad Mel’ questioned what proportion of abortions were strictly legal under the act. For the sake of balance you have to have one ‘nutter’ who questions the liberal consensus.
So to come back to Biden, with his great white shark grin, is he a good Catholic? From what I read when he’s on tour his aides have to find a church that will allow him to receive communion. Res ipse loquitur. Papists are dogmatic, no one is their own theologian. They also hold that the pro-life position is a rational one. Most people get that if any of us in this discussion were to have been eliminated in the first trimester we would not be here to have this discussion. There’s a kind of moral oscillation between me not being here now and the so-called clump of cells. That span is covered by the concept of nurturance. Does abortion on demand develop or hinder a nurturant society?
To attempt to turn this question into one about which epistemic humility is appropriate is a rationalist version of the religious voodoo gambit. Those that propose it are very likely quite sure of their own positions.
These are very difficult issues. even the Catholic church has moved its position over the years. I recall reading that in the early Middle Ages the church took the position that the soul didn’t enter a fetus until some weeks after conception.
A related issue is the extent of appropriate state control over a gestating woman. I think that most Americans would object to laws punishing women for improper diet or behaviors while pregnant. But, arguably, the state has a greater interest in the health of a child that a woman has decided to carry to term than in the decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. In the late 1980s there was a flurry of concern about “crack babies” and efforts by some prosecutors to use existing involuntary civil commitment statutes to incarcerate pregnant women who were cocaine addicts. Of course, these were always poor women and easily vilified. The much greater problem of fetal alcohol syndrome was never addressed by these advocates for the unborn.
Interestingly, here’s an Alexander Pruss post that takes the same premise of Lele, epistemic humility, and comes to a very different conclusion
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.de/2009/09/abortion-and-probability.html
(this topic confuses the hell out of me)
Very interesting comparison, though I actually think the conclusions are almost entirely compatible. Pruss is arguing that if we’re not sure, we should assume abortion is wrong. I argued that if we’re not sure, we should assume abortion should be legal. The two fit together in exactly the way I was defending here: anti-abortion but pro-choice.
I say “almost” because of that third “observation”, which is the only part that says anything about legality rather than morality. But that’s where the argument seems disastrously weak, because it’s based solely on cost-benefit analysis. If it is 95% likely that fetuses lack moral standing, then outlawing abortion is 95% likely to place thousands of innocents in prison. Very few would condone such a policy regardless of its benefits!
Pruss’s calculus seems perfectly unpersuasive. Besides he himself is sure that the fetus should be respected as a rights bearing being of the human family or something along those lines. So he’s not humble really. From the general tendency of his argument I deduce that he would prefer if there had to be abortion it would be extremely restricted. That Amod takes this to mean that legal enforcement of a changed law would mean jailing large numbers of people seems wrong. Given the American legal situation the pro-life people are working towards a massive change of attitude something similar to that wrought on the slavery question. That would then lead to changed law not requiring incarceration. You could fine abortion providers to test their commitment.
Quixotic I suppose.
Jim Wilton:
Does this FAS awareness day strategy have pro-life credentials?
(from http://fasday.com/)
Amod, good discussion. I think the distinction between murder and homicide also has a bearing on your more fundamental epistemic question. The difficulty with abortion as it is often discussed is that it seems to me there are two separate questions that get elided. The first is whether or not there is a homicide. The second is, if there is a homicide, whether the homicide is culpable and to what degree.
Most people I have met who consider themselves pro-choice, or personally pro-life but not politically pro-life, are reluctant to consider abortion homicide because they do not want to find the women who seek them to be culpable or culpable as murderers. Many people have pointed out the contrasting modus ponens/modus tollens inferences people draw from the conditional “If abortion is murder, then women who have them are murderers.” A pro-choice person is more sure that the consequent is false than that the antecedent is true; they conclude via modus tollens that abortion is not murder. A pro-lifer, by contrast, is assumed to be more certain of the antecedent, and so they are accused of believing all women who have abortions are murderers.
However, from the fact that people do not view women who have abortions as murderers, it does not follow that abortion is not homicide. Murder at common law was a crime that required “malice aforethought” rather than recklessness, negligence, or some mental state derived the effects of duress. Willful malice is still what stands out in most peoples’ minds when they think of a murderer.
Most people who are pro-choice paradigmatically think of abortion in the case of rape or ectopic pregnancy. They are highly reluctant to defend purely elective abortion. The paradigmatic pro-choice case is more like a case of duress. (It is worth noting that the paradigmatic case is not the same as the statistically most common case. Fewer than 10% of the 1.2 million abortions, probably fewer than 5%, involve the kinds of duress or force most often cited.)
I think the epistemic question of whether abortion is homicide is complicated by this sort of pragmatic implication. This is similar to the “Knobe Effect” that Joshua Knobe has written about. In surveys he conducted, he discovered an asymmetry between ascriptions of responsibility for harms and benefits. Most people when presented with cases of side-effect harm do not describe the harm as intentional. However, when presented with side-effect ‘help’ or benefit, they are more likely to describe the help or benefit as intentional.
Likewise, I think some people are tempted to say that abortion is not homicide precisely because they are reluctant to blame women who they paradigmatically assume are under some form of duress. But this confuses culpability for an act with a description of the act for which one may be culpable. Even if many abortions are the result of duress or even the threat of death, such that culpability may be nil, it does not follow that there has been no homicide.
It is a provocative but fundamentally flawed analogy to compare abortion to murder for the reasons that I mentioned above — but also because the intent of the act is very different.
Even the Catholic church recognizes this — an abortion intended to save a mother’s life is not a sin.
But even most ordinary abortions are not like murders because the intent is quite different. A young pregnant woman might choose an abortion because she is unwilling to subject herself to the emotional, physical and financial consequences of pregnancy and childbirth — including not inconsequential health risks. She does not intend to terminate a life in the same way that a murderer intends to terminate life.
A person who denies a starving man bread is morally culpable — but could not be said to commit murder. A person who declines to donate a kidney to a dying man is not even said to be culpable. A kidney transplant is generally quite low risk and the pain and recovery are quite a lot like having a caesarean section. The difference between the reluctant kidney donor and the pregant woman having an abortion are nearly identical in intent. The difference between the two is that one is passive — a failure to act — and the other an overt act.
But intention is all important. That is why we are bothered by the thought that abortion might be used to select gender. In that case, the pregant woman is not intending to avoid pregancy and its consequences and risks — but rather to decide which healthy fetus will be brought to term. That intent is closer to the intent simply to end a life — much more like murder (although there are distinctions even here).
Jim, I think you may have missed my point. It’s not that intention doesn’t matter–intention is essential for establishing that an act occurred and differentiating types of acts. In particular, intention is necessary to distinguish licit from illicit homicide. The fact that I don’t intend to kill someone, however, does not establish the fact that I have not killed him or her. People kill for all sorts of reasons. Sociopaths kill as an end in itself, for the pure enjoyment of it; mobsters do it for business. Admittedly, it is sometimes difficult to establish or link outcomes to agents where there is a lack of a specific intent, as in the case of negligence. However, just because I didn’t mean to do it, doesn’t mean I didn’t do it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The liberal panic about gendercide in a way underlines the paradox of abortion. Abortion is not about eliminating the fetus as such, it is about eliminating the child that would result as the natural continuance of the pregnancy. It’s that child which is not wanted and the the route to that desired goal i.e. no child, is through abortion. Surely the central fact of elimination where the sex is unknown is no different to elimination where the sex is known. It adds no further level of harm to that entitiy. If you’re gone you’re gone. Those proponents of abortion on demand are correct and consistent in not being unduly concerned about this aspect of abortion. They fear that any restriction would act as a thin edge for more restriction of ‘good’ abortion, the blessing sort that the Rev. Episcopalian celebrates. Actually in fact they would not accept an abortion regime that would only allow it in the famous hard cases. Then the response is to expand the hard case to everybody by saying ‘but you are forcing a women to have a child she doesn’t want’.
That attitude of every case being a hard case is questionable.
Once again, I agree with Mr. Reidy.
To expand, I don’t think you can say what counts as a ‘good’ reason for abortion, or what constitutes a hard case, until you decide what it is. If abortion is homicide, the threshold reasons for permissibility or excuse are much higher than if it is something akin to contraception. You can’t decide who should choose until you describe the type of thing they would like to choose to do.