Ep. 301: Is Abortion Morally Permissible? (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 301, part 2. We've been discussing Judith Jarvis Thompson's A Defense of Abortion, 1970, and we have a couple other articles that we will definitely get to here. Wes was talking about altruism and the pond thing, and Dylan brought up this Covid Example, the one thing that I

0:31 Dylan: was just going to add to Wes's comment was Thomson. She has this distinction of the indecent and the unjust. And the unjust ends up being the line by which you would be able to force an action. So an obligation becomes an action that would be of moral force. Indecent is something short of that, where it falls into the category. It would be frightfully nice of you to do X, Y, or Z. For instance, in the violinist example, it would be noble or decent or kind of you to say, no prob, I'm totally good. I'm glad to be saving the violinist's life. I'm kind of irritated that I got kidnapped in the middle of the night and this is going to irritate me in my life.

But I get it. What's done is done. I'll hang out here for nine months. That falls in the category of being decent. But the line that gets turned over is just versus unjust. I become a little bit confused at the end where it's not clear that there aren't cases that she was earlier labeling as questions of decency and not questions of justice don't become questions of justice.

1:45 Mark: My giving that well example shows that maybe I'm not as sympathetic with Thompson's argument as you guys are, that if the fetus is a full person, and I don't think it is, and this is why I think Mary Anne Warren is right to say we have to talk about personhood. And what we don't want is to have sort of two bad arguments, neither of which gets us all the way to the pro choice position. But it's kind of like, well, if this doesn't work, Thompson's right, we don't even need the personhood to work.

Oh, well.

But if the distinction between positive obligations versus the indecent and the morally wrong doesn't work, then we still have personhood to fall back on. We don't want that. So if you consider. I forget what source I saw this in, but even that plant baby example, I think a more realistic analogy to that is somebody puts a newborn baby on your doorstep, certainly we're obligated to do something about that. You can't just walk over it, right? You have to turn it over to the authorities or something. And imagine if there are no authorities to turn it over.

Nobody is going to take this baby. Is it morally incumbent on you to do it? And I think according to Thompson's thing, well, it would be nice for you to do it, but, man, that's A lot of work to take care of a baby. You're not actually morally obliged to do it. It would be indecent for you to just let it die there. But there's no prohibition to you doing so. And I feel like I'm open to a sort of tragic sense of the moral. That sometimes life is just not goddamn fair. And so if it really, in that circumstance, if there's a baby that's put on your doorstep, it's going to die unless you devote the next 20 years of your life to saving it.

No one else is going to take it. Then I think you actually are morally obliged to take this under your wing. That merely being nice becomes a moral obligation in some circumstances, like when there's just no alternative. And in fact you would be morally obliged to love this thing, not just begrudgingly like you should be grateful that I saved you from dying on the street. So I think that is just as neighbor to the situation we're considering as the plant baby one.

3:41 Dylan: It's actually a really good example, Mark. And I think that's exactly the kind of thing that has to be wrestled with as well. Because you're adding in another dimension in the violinist example. Marquis gets you a little bit of this with the potential life argument. But it has to do with the moral distinction of innocence or being a child or the ability to take care of themselves. And the difference there is, like with the violinist being an adult, that there's a loss of certain kinds of obligations or benefits from obligations to others based upon them being somehow self sufficient. So you're drawing attention to an axis that isn't very well explored here. It's not personhood either, but that there being a gradation. We feel different obligations towards children than we do towards adults.

4:31 Mark: Can I add one more thing before Seth tells me that I'm full of shit? Because I didn't think that I was trying to make the point that you just said, Dylan. Because I think the well example works just as well. If I have the only well in town, you will all starve unless I give you some of my well. I'm perfectly able to give you some of my well. Or let's say it would be a serious sacrifice to give you some of my well. But I still think that it is the fact that I own the well. If it is that scarce a resource, this is their only alternative and this would save their life. That whatever the level of sacrifice to you, you're probably obliged. If it's a full person, it has nothing to do with it being a child, you're obliged to go that extra mile.

5:06 Dylan: You're going to have to bring in the extrapolation argument, right? Because it seems hard to imagine that if it was you versus 10,000 other people out there, and you have your own well, and you know they're all going to die out there, but if you let them in, you're going to die, too, because there isn't enough water in the well for all those 10,000 people. And there's no way to open the door and be discovered by only one of them or two of them. You're going to have to open it up to all 10,000. It seems also not true that you're obligated to do that.

5:39 Mark: It's a different example, right?

5:40 Dylan: Yeah, but it's a related example, right? Because it was getting to. Is that that magnitude matters, distance matters. And then I was adding in that there is this other aspect of different kinds of obligations to adults and to relative ability to take care of themselves or not. And we make those judgments all the time. The less able someone is able to take care of themselves, the more we tend to say that there's an obligation for someone who can do so to do so. And then the argument becomes, where is that line? Where do they have that obligation to do so?

6:12 Mark: Dylan might have clearly articulated where I was going to go, but my feeling was, in the first example of the baby on the doorstep, to me, that's not materially different than what Wes's criticism of Singer. It's like, well, when's the next baby going to come? And nobody's going to take that one, and you got to take that one and then the next baby, like, when does it stop? Right?

6:31 Wes: There are lots of babies all over the world who are dying, dying. For instance, malnutrition or starvation. You could go get them right now, and yet you don't. So you shouldn't pretend that you actually. I don't think you actually believe that intuition. Because otherwise, why wouldn't you be taking in an infant right now? Who otherwise is going to die because of the distance?

6:51 Dylan: I mean, it's not just that intuition. It's also the fact that proximity matters. And that's one of the faults with Singer's argument, is that it matters if it's right next to you, you're standing

7:02 Mark: in front of them or inside of you.

7:05 Dylan: But proximity matters in this case, right? And to say that proximity doesn't matter is to ignore one of the important variables in this kind of thing.

7:14 Wes: I don't think it does. I think proximity. Technology creates proximity. Right. You could say, well, it's relatively easy to find a starving child or several and support them and to the best of your ability. And so you live on a subsistence means, which is what Singer advocates.

7:28 Mark: So Mark introduced two different examples. One was the baby on the doorstep, which I think we just addressed. The second is this notion of the well. So Dylan was talking about proximity and the number of people and the exhaustion of the. This is what Thomson is doing when she moves from like nine years to nine months to an hour. Let's say there's just one person who's going to die without water. And your well is essentially has limitless capacity. It's literally no imposition on you to provide water. You just basically turn a blind eye and they walk through your back gate.

8:00 Dylan: Yeah. You don't even have to get the water out of the well.

8:02 Mark: You don't even have to do it, do anything. It will have no material impact on your life. Right. I think our intuition is if you were to lock the gate and just let them die, that it would be more than just you being a prick. Right. There is a moral obligation there, I think. I don't know.

8:22 Wes: Right. I don't think that's actually an analogous, though, because, I mean, we're talking about someone having a right to your body or to your time. There has to be some element of sacrifice. And having a limitless well, and a gate does not involve any element of sacrifice.

8:39 Mark: I'm not. I'm setting it up. I'm not trying to make it analogous. What I'm saying is in that instance, because there's literally no imposition on you and literally life is at stake even if you have property ownership. I think people would say that that's at least immoral, if not unjust in some respect.

8:56 Dylan: And that's where the analogy hits. Right. Because of the body being our property and what the obligations are with regard regards to things of our property.

9:04 Mark: You could start adding to this example. Right. You could start adding more constraints on you. Or maybe you have to physically endure pain or something for the water to be extracted. Like, it's only you have to do backbreaking labor for an hour to get the water out of the well so this person can survive. And I think we would reach a point where we would say, okay, there is a notion of undue burden. There's burden, but there's undue burden. And the idea that body is property, is that the idea that really your own body is the first instance of property.

That's the Lockean.

Yeah, the Lockean approach. And then we extend that to possessions. But there is something fundamentally different about thinking of a body as property than something external to us. Except in the instance where that something external to us is life sustaining. Because ultimately then that has a connection directly back to the sustenance or the sustaining of the body. So this is very hard.

9:59 Wes: She's not arguing abortion is always permissible.

10:02 Mark: No, but she takes the example and she says, suppose it's only an hour that you have to be connected to the violinist. Not nine years, not nine months. Suppose it's only an hour, which really would be an inconvenience. And when I was reading this, I was thinking, well, maybe if they would give me a sedative or morphine or something, just knock me out for the hour, I'd say, yes. But if I had to sit there and listen to him groan, maybe not. I don't know. But she's saying you have to watch

Sean Hannity during the hour. Is that.

Yeah. Okay, then her point is, just because we think you ought to do something doesn't mean that the person for whom we think you ought to do it has a right to make that claim on you.

10:37 Dylan: This is the decency injustice question that I brought up.

10:40 Mark: Yeah. She turns it into kind of like an is ought distinction in some respects. How do you derive obligation? From the isness?

So you're saying indecency is an isness, whereas the right is the oughtness. I mean, those are both different kinds of oughtness. I thought that was the wrinkle that we were introducing in here, because I think we often. At least I think etymologically, whatever. Like, where do we get this notion of rights? Well, it comes from right. It comes from the right thing to do. So therefore, it seems like it follows analytically that if something is the right thing to do and it would benefit someone, then those people that you would benefit have the right to force you to do that. Like, it seems like those should all go together. But of course, that's not actually how, as she correctly points out, that things break down.

No, exactly. I'm saying it's analogous in some respects to is-ought, where you're trying to derive a moral obligation from a factual state. Here you're trying to derive a moral obligation from a judgment, a community judgment about what you ought to do. We're trying to derive a right from an ought, I guess a right for one person from the ought of another person.

11:43 Wes: So let's say a little Bit about what she means by saying that abortion is not always permissible. Right. So this is on page 65. Well, I do argue that abortion is not impermissible. I do not argue that it is always permissible. There may well be cases in which carrying the child to term requires only minimal decent Samaritanism of the mother. And this is a standard which we must not fall below. Here's her famous example. It would be indecent in the woman to request an abortion and indecent in a doctor to perform it. If she is in her seventh month and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad.

And then she goes on to say, while I am arguing for the permissibility of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the unborn child. And so we've discussed that already. But if there's a way to terminate the pregnancy while keeping the child alive, then we ought to do that.

12:33 Mark: And we should connect it back to that example that she says. You have the right to detach yourself from the violinist, but you don't have the right to turn around and slit his throat. Whereas I think on a purely consequentialist view, like, he's gonna die anyway. Man, I've always wanted to slit somebody's throat. Like, this is a perfect opportunity. I see somebody who's on their way out. Shouldn't I be able to get that added pleasure? Sorry, Dylan, go ahead.

12:54 Wes: I'm not going to even respond to that. I'm not going to dignify that with a response.

12:58 Dylan: I was just going to point out that famous part of her example, the qualification regarding it would be indecent for her to want to get an abortion in the seventh or eighth month just to keep from interrupting her planned trip to Europe. And that both is to me, where she was being confusing about her indecency. And there seemed to be. She was turning it to be an unjust. That we would say that she was agreeing that the woman would be under the obligation to maintain the pregnancy, that the reason for the termination did not rise to be sufficiently grave to overcome the obligation that she had to the fetus.

But it's also, in the case of Marquis, he just basically finds that inconsistency to be just a sign of a problem with the argument altogether. That for him, it just means that the violinist example in itself is not helping clarify the problem at hand. Which is why he goes into that it's a question of when is killing allowed argument.

14:01 Wes: All Right. I guess we better get to the Marquis.

14:03 Mark: Yeah, let's jump to that. It's shorter than the Warren I think we might get once we get on personhood. That might be a pit that would be hard for us to emerge from. And the fact that this was, as we've said, the Marquis is. It was a new to me argument. I mean, it boils down to a potentiality argument, but it is a matter of, as Seth said or somebody said, is that having a future like ours is what makes killing somebody wrong in general. And he actually is very systematic.

14:31 Wes: We're depriving someone of a future like ours when we kill them.

14:34 Mark: Yep. And he considers possible. If you think, like, that's not the thing. Because according to this, like, well, it's not like a sperm has a future like ours. Like, no, it has to actually be a zygote. It has to be the conceptum, the sperm. And. But once you have that thing that is identifiable as that is the same individual, or maybe once it's implanted, he's willing to even give us some. But once it is, like, on the road to becoming a human being, to being born, then it is an entity to which we can assign some interests. Right. That it doesn't matter what its current capabilities are.

It doesn't matter whether it can communicate. It can't. It does. It is just a clump of cells. But the fact that it will. He avoids this potential personhood, like that sounds a little arcane. Like, what does potential mean metaphysically? Just by saying it will, under normal circumstances, have the kind of future that we find valuable? Isn't that a reason to say that it has interests and it would be deprived of that future if you were to abort it? And so we've done something wrong.

Yeah. And he entertains the idea that he doesn't need to know that it has a future, and he rejects that and a few other objections.

Doesn't need to want the future.

15:44 Wes: That's an argument by Boonin, another famous argument that we actually have to take into account. Someone actually has to possess the desire to have that future.

15:52 Mark: He makes. I think he uses this a couple of times. It's not so much an argument as more of a rhetorical flourish, but it makes sense where he says, you know, if you have a teenager that's contemplating suicide and they don't want that future, but you prevent them from doing that, and they go on to have a rich and meaningful life because they're able to come out of their teenage depression, and what have you, then that's prima facie an argument against the notion that you have to want it.

Can I throw in another weird consideration that he. He actually seems to feel like after you're dead, you could still be wronged. So if you were an author, and as soon as you die, I come and I take all the works you've ever produced and I burn them, there are no copies, then I have wronged you. I've not just deprived the world of your genius or something.

16:39 Wes: Even if the author wanted that.

16:40 Mark: Even if the author wanted that, right.

16:42 Wes: The author says, burn all my stuff after I die. Yeah, that seemed weird to me. Desire, counter, judge.

16:49 Mark: No man happy until he's dead.

16:51 Wes: Well, he was wrong about the value of his work.

16:54 Mark: I mean, ultimately what it comes down to is just what Mark said, that the account is killing in general is wrong because killing a human being or something like a human being.

17:05 Wes: No, you don't have to make that qualification. This future like ours includes that. That's trying to capture that right. So we don't want to get into

17:11 Mark: the mess of saying killing anything that could have a future like ours is murder. And it's wrong. Whatever status of the embryo or zygote or whatever has a future could potentially

17:23 Dylan: have a future like ours.

17:25 Mark: Therefore killing is wrong. But then he points out that it's a pretty broad definition. And then I think there are some challenges or some issues with the notion that. What about people who are unconscious that can't have a future like ours, or are disabled in some way or injured in some way, and they can't have a future like ours? That's challenging.

17:45 Wes: I think listeners might be confused at this point because we haven't said really what a future. For one thing, what motivates this is the fact that talking about personhood or talking about being a human being, they include or exclude cases that we want to capture. And I won't go into those specific details, but. So he wants to say why killing is wrong in a way where we don't have to define the entity in question. And so on page, I think just to give people an idea of what a future like ours means, on page 189, section two, he'll say what primarily makes killing wrong is neither its effect on the murderer nor its effect on the victim's friends and relatives, but its effect on the victim.

The loss of one's life is one of the greatest losses one can suffer. The loss of one's life deprives one of all the experiences, activities, projects and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one's future. Therefore, killing someone is wrong primarily because the killing inflicts one of the greatest possible losses on the victim. To describe this as a loss of life can be misleading. However, the change in my biological state does not by itself make killing me wrong. The effect of the loss of my biological life is the loss to me of all those activities, projects, experience, and enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted my future personal life.

So just in case listeners are confused about the future like ours, that's what he's trying to get at, is all our future experiences that we're deprived of when we are killed. And that's the valuable thing that's lost. And therefore that's the thing that explains the wrongness of killing, not just these more abstract considerations like you're a person, therefore you ought not to be killed. It doesn't really explain explain that much.

19:21 Mark: Have you heard somebody refer to something as the euthyphro fallacy? I heard this a couple times in regard to considering this argument as opposed to the desire one. So what you just described is, and the way that Marquis describes it is there are goods. Life provides goods. You're missing out on those goods. And yes, you could be a Buddhist, you could be antinatalist and say, the whole life is suffering. So if somebody doesn't yet have stake in it, if they're not yet conscious, it's actually better for them. But let's just grant that on the whole.

Grant that on the whole life will have more goods. That basically, like, even if you were going to live a life that is, you're going to see a lot of suffering, generally we choose to do it anyway. So the euthyphro fallacy is, you might say, how do we determine that they're good just because we actually do desire them? But that's the euthyphro question is, are these goods good because we desire them, or do we only desire them because they are good?

I didn't feel like the strength of his argument was in the goods that you would be deprived of from it felt more Heideggerian in the sense of a future like ours means you have an aspiration, you have projects you want to accomplish and do and see and feel. You could call these things goods, but really it's more about thinking about it in terms of, like, vital life activities. You're stopping somebody's projection into their future possibilities. That's what's truly wrong about killing.

20:42 Dylan: So one of the questions I had about this is how seriously I should be Taking the notion of relative potentiality and the size of that loss, he calls that because killing someone inflicts the greatest possible losses on the victim. So there's a size of this potentiality. And so when he starts talking like that, there's a whole bunch of things going on immediately to my mind, like the older you get, the smaller your future becomes. And so therefore, the less wrong it is to kill someone, the older they are. That's one I couldn't help myself wondering about all the other versions of understanding that scope of potential loss and the value we would put on that loss depending upon the conditions that you put onto it.

Seth brought up a couple earlier about your relative physical ableness to be able to partake of those goods and what the normative status of them are, from being just unconscious all the way to various levels of attenuation from something like normal. The other one would be life circumstance, your ability to partake of those things, and then the relative amount of suffering that you're undergoing. To me, he opens himself up immediately to gradiating the level of loss because he says that potential is the greatest possible losses because I've lost all that potential.

But then you immediately begin to me begin thinking about what are the sizes of those potentials. In the end, he doesn't want to have there be sizes to those potentials, even though he talks that way. He immediately gives them a size from the very beginning, making him the greatest. And so therefore there's going to be different sizes. But I think in his argument there's only one size which is they're all the greatest.

22:34 Wes: He's connecting loss, so the value of my life in terms of loss of a future to wrongness. So those are two different metrics. And I think all of us would say if I die when I'm 80, my loss is less than if I die when I'm 18. Or at least I would. I think we can accept that. I think that. Dylan, the problem you're pointing to is we generally don't think in terms of the wrongness of killing, is having the gradation, right? So there's definitely gradation to loss, but wrongness can't really track that. So then how do we resolve that problem?

23:08 Mark: Really? Well put, Wes.

23:10 Dylan: I think you're absolutely right about the characterization. But age. But what about relative illness? It might be exactly the same kind of age, but we normally wouldn't say killing somebody who has basically months or weeks left to live because of their terminal illness. Putting aside a euthanasia question of Whether or a suicide question. They want to. Let's just say we wouldn't consider that less wrong than killing a six year old. But maybe we would. I mean, the law certainly doesn't do that, right?

23:39 Mark: I think just what you said, we would consider it just as wrong. We would just consider the loss to be less.

23:46 Dylan: It's that thing that to me was both enlightening about his argument but challenging about his argument that I found that it wasn't doing all the work that he wanted it to.

23:55 Mark: That's what I said in that one paragraph in the beginning of the paper. He says there hasn't really been a good philosophical argument in the literature for the wrongness, the moral impermissibility of abortion. It's like, not that there haven't been lots of conversations and arguments made, just not in the philosophical literature. So he is trying to establish, and I think it does give us a garden path kind of argument that takes you down and you're like, well, it seems fairly reasonable, but you're right. I think there's two ways to challenge it.

One is, as you're saying, Dylan, that is there something in the notion of gradation that could potentially disrupt the validity of the premise? And then there's the other piece of, okay, what are the extenuating consequences of this? And does that disrupt the intuition around it? So all the things that this also makes morally impermissible, do we feel that way about it?

24:45 Wes: One of the things he does is just to say, well, it works better than the other alternatives. Right? So like, if you want to appeal to personhood, you have a huge problem with an infant. Right. How do you describe the wrongness of killing an infant when they don't have self consciousness and rationality and a lot of the other stuff that you want to associate with personhood? It seems like you have to go to one of these potentiality arguments. And the more standard potentiality argument involves development. It's a potential person. One day it will be a person, one day it will be rational. Leaving aside the problem of mental disability. Right. And all that stuff. And I think those potentiality arguments are less appealing also than this appeal to the future, which is really more like a, you know, personal identity argument. Right. If we think back to our personal

25:34 Mark: identity episode, that personal identity thing made me think of the time t thing. It's like the way you would formalize this if you were an analytic philosopher is like if the entity at time t sub 0 could have a future at time t sub N, the personal

25:50 Wes: identity might be A bad example, because the possible upshot, right, is that the person in the future is actually different. We have no more interest in their future than we do in anyone else's future. But anyway, leave that aside. Let's just assume personal identity works the way we intuitively think it does.

26:07 Mark: I think that is another good thing for our, you know, personal identity flavored nightcap or abortion flavored nightcap, whatever. If we have one of these. Another discussion because I.

Did you just say abortion flavored?

26:19 Wes: God.

26:19 Mark: Okay, I won't call it that. I won't call it that. Jesus Christ.

26:23 Wes: This could have been a lot worse. Mark has been behaving pretty well.

26:27 Mark: That's true. But I was really thinking a lot about. I think when you're evaluating this argument, you do end up drifting into thinking about at least something adjacent to the notion of personhood. That if you want to say as I do that there's really. Okay, yes.

All right.

The thing that is a zygote right now has. Will eventually evolve into something. So it has a future of a full person or at least it's likely to do so in a way that maybe an individual sperm does not because there's so many sperm. Probably, you know, you're not going to be the one that hooks up with the egg, but let's even maybe the egg, you could say, okay, this individual egg. But the way in which it has a future is very different. I mean, you could say that a rock has a future, its future is just going to be continuing to be a rock. And you could say, well, if I grind up the rock, it's not going to have a rocky future. Well, this whole point, of course, was a future like ours. Yes, yes.

27:16 Wes: That hides a lot, right? That are like ours. Hides a ton of stuff. Yes.

27:22 Mark: So what, what do we really think a zygote has a future like ours or that it will eventually become a thing that has a future like ours? The infant, the nine month old fetus, maybe that actually does, is an identifiable individual that has a future like ours. But the zygote, because of its level development, because of something of its level of humanity or personhood, does not yet have a future like our.

27:43 Wes: And also, how do we define ours? Do animals count? And if we want to say they don't count, then don't we have to make distinctions that appeal to something very similar to personhood, Blah, blah, blah.

27:52 Mark: And I'm going to guess that Marcus is a middle class white guy. Okay, well, there's a lot of babies being born out There that don't have futures like his.

28:02 Dylan: Sure.

28:03 Wes: Well, he just means a human future,

28:05 Mark: but I know what he means. But he's talking about a certain this

28:08 Wes: is going back to the life and suffering, I think argument for Mark.

28:11 Dylan: Exactly.

28:11 Mark: There's an implicit notion of flourishing in there that you can't discount.

28:15 Dylan: No, that's right. But the way we were just talking about it wants me to point back to Thomson because the future like ours is dodging the question of the relative obligation of the investment to get there. So there are different levels of resources that come from different places required to actualize that potential future like ours along that whole line. That's what Thompson's frame is all about, is that the question of obligation has to do with the question of what can individuals be required to do in order to tend to that future like ours. And by putting that all in that case, having to do all that work, he's dodging that question about the relative obligation and the gradation of obligation. Right.

29:07 Mark: I think you're right, Dylan. But I also think that he's self conscious about that. Right. This is intended to be simply an argument in favor of the moral impermissibility. It doesn't say anything about practical considerations which would establish conditions where you have to make judgments between two people's lives, for example, or that sort of thing.

29:27 Dylan: Well, but that's the whole problem with the argument, right? Honestly, even the case regarding the right or wrongness of killing, you're going to get into killing by actual act or killing by the act of not acting. But that's going to come true. Putting aside the abortion question, that comes true with all kinds of other existence, with full independent walking around human beings and our relative obligations with respect to them. And the well argument is just one example that you have this gradation between how much obligation demand does it make upon you or a community with respect to and the sacrifice it requires to the relative need on their case.

And these arguments are trying like his in particular is trying to say, well, there is a rule that's going to give me guidance for all of them. I think in that way it fails because it's not going to be very hard to come up with examples where you test significantly where you just would come up on the other side of the fence on it.

30:25 Mark: Let me throw out just something that Habermas, I think, is going to be our saving grace here. In other words, the idea that I got from Habermas, the way that I sum it up, is moral things are just under negotiation so that Euthyphro thing, that either there is an objective thing, as Plato thought, that is the good and we all like it, or so far as we're paying attention, because it is the good, or the relativist thing, it's just what people think, and we somehow derive the good from that. That Habermas is providing us with a midpoint position. Or maybe Hume gave us an example before that. That these things are ultimately grounded on, as I think most of our authors acknowledge, like our intuitions, our desires, our perceptions. So that maybe we are.

31:09 Wes: This is the constructivist. Yes.

31:11 Mark: So that it is not just a matter of, like, either the fetus is or is not a person. It is. We are kind of deciding. We are figuring that out based on other desires that we have. And there's sort of more I could go into with this, but I feel like that is also very much at play when we're talking about positive rights. So that you might think as a Lockean or somebody, that we only have just negative rights toward each other. Don't get in my way. But part of us also wants to feel, you know, if you're a liberal, that, like, we all have the right to nutrition, for instance.

We all have a right, you know, human needs. We all have the right to have our basic needs fulfilled. But that creates an obligation on the rest of us, like, if it is actually a right. So in the case of the fetus, it's. Every fetus has the right to a home. Well, that actually would then put a right in the way. Thomson says we absolutely do not have. It would put an obligation on the mother to provide that home or continuing to provide that home. But this is a thing that comes up all the time. We feel like you have a right to vote, but that means the rest of us have a right to fund voting machines, to man polling places.

Yes. There's so many obligations that go with a lot of rights. And this is something that is sort of the ongoing as we are able to provide more things. This whole thing about the orphan left on your doorstep or whatever. As we become a richer society, I feel like, yeah, we actually have the obligation to take care of unwanted children. Whereas this is often brought up even by Peter Singer, who says infanticide is okay. Especially in societies where there's extreme scarcity and people, you know, put their babies out on the ice floes if they couldn't afford to take care of them.

That, like, there actually might be something culturally relative, you know, that we are working out as a culture having these moral Conversations. So it's not just a matter of like is infanticide okay or not? Is abortion okay or not? Like so much goes into what we can do, what the latest arguments based on what our facility is. That doesn't answer the question. But anyway, that was my way of opening up. This personhood thing is going to be a well, but it's going to be a well. That actually takes us into interesting meta ethical considerations.

There you go, man. Morality is tied to economic prosperity.

That is one.

And by the way, those babies that are being left out to exposed to die are usually female.

33:31 Wes: I'm not going to argue with that. I do think there is no such thing as morality or we have to make a choice about different ways of grounding it. Whether it's Kantian, utilitarian. I mean Mark, I think what you're pointing us to is a little bit towards constructivism, but also that, you know, we could try to use contractualist ways of grounding morality and saying that it supervenes on the social, let's say, or on the community.

33:52 Mark: Well, we have to come up with a plan to how to treat each other and work together in a society at the very least.

33:57 Wes: Yeah, if that's what we want. Right.

34:00 Mark: By saying it's constructionist that you actually have to go through the effort of having to actually construct it. That's not the same at all. To say it's just relative, it's just arbitrary. It's just whatever we decide. This is why I say this is based in Hume, that if the basic stuff that we're dealing with is people's moral intuitions, we still want to build a systematic morality out of that. But we shouldn't be surprised when then it can't decide hard cases. Right. If these are just. It's a cluster concept. Personhood is a cluster concept. It is something that, geez, I mean we need something to decide who we're going to treat as a person or not.

But maybe like it can't answer in advance whether an advanced AI or a particularly developed animal or a fetus exactly which month is going to count. As a person we should expect there to be gray areas. And I think Warren's presentation of this is just there's a bunch of psychological characteristics that we could identify for personhood and we could go through the list but you know, being able to be self moving, whatever consciousness, we expect there

35:01 Wes: to be gray areas because reality is fuzzy and as entities we don't just pop into existence. We are the product of development and we are also made of dust. We definitively do not think of ourselves as dust, but that's what we are composed of. And there. So there are all sorts of ontological problems associated with this and those are what create the ethical gray areas.

35:22 Mark: I don't want to go into. I was going to get into Warren and I just decided I don't want to.

Yeah, I think just kind of give. I was just trying to give a closing very briefly.

35:29 Wes: We could just say, well, you know, we don't want to do that. We just do that in the third part.

35:33 Mark: I mean, people can find it about this personhood argument in lots of places. So I think, I guess we are going to have to save the bulk of it for our third part, slash. I guess it's not a nightcap anymore, it's an actual third part. If we're going through one of the articles, give a summary. It's cool.

35:47 Wes: Well, I think she's going to say personhood is relevant. She doesn't think Thomson works because I think she thinks that if you engage in a behavior that brought this entity into being and it's dependent on you, you do have some obligation. Then if it is a person, then you actually do have those obligations. So we have to be able to say that it's not a person.

36:05 Mark: What she says is not that it's not a person, but that it's not a member of the community of moral beings or.

Yes, that's what personhood means.

36:13 Wes: Yeah, she's going to define personhood in

36:15 Dylan: terms of member of a community of moral beings. Yeah, but the point is that she is saying you can't give up personhood as being the fulcrum because once you grant personhood, then you incur obligations. That's where she disagrees with Thomson.

36:31 Wes: In section two, defining the moral community, she's really defining personhood. Personhood and being part of the moral community are the same thing. And she gives five criteria and I won't just read them all, but I think this just gives people the flavor of what philosophers are often trying to do when they define personhood. So criterion one is consciousness, two is reasoning, three is self motivated activity, four the capacity to communicate, and five, the presence of self concept, self awareness, and so on. So of course once you get into that, then you get into extremely thorny problems. And as Mark pointed out, gray areas. And it's, it's the kind of thing that his argument was motivated by. It's not clear that those criteria will capture every entity that we want. And.

37:13 Mark: Well, I should say that this Mary Anne Warren article 1973, but it includes postscript on infanticide, 1982, it took nine years. I would think this would have been raised in the first five minutes, you know, of her putting this out. And I'm sure it was that. If you say that a fetus is not a person, then it's really hard to argue, right? Because it lacks any of these five things. It's not even just like it's a borderline case. Like it is a paradigm case of not a person. This is how she gets around the Wittgensteinian, you know, worry about concepts.

37:42 Wes: But then a newborn infant isn't exactly.

37:44 Mark: And. And Peter Singer then bites the bullet on that and says, the only reason that we care about newborns is because we care about newborns. It really is a euthyphro thing. It is desirable because we desire it. And in the case of something, you know, that is not in another human's uterus, then even if you, the mother, don't want the child, somebody else will take it under normal circumstances. But maybe in a primitive society where they're short on food, killing that infant would have been just fine.

38:13 Wes: I think Singer says infanticide is permissible, like an early.

38:17 Mark: And if it were really easy, this might be another thing of, like, what if you just stayed attached for an hour to the violinist, that if the mother is in her ninth month, then to say, no, you can't kill that thing. Somebody wants it. And if you just can hold on a little longer, or maybe we'll even take it, maybe it's viable, we can take it out of you. Now, I didn't hear anybody explicitly dealing with this possibility of someone in their eighth or ninth month saying, time's up. I don't want this baby anyway. I want it to be adopted. Take it out of me.

Now it seems like it's medically more difficult for everybody. Like, it would be very hard to just based on your right to your body. But it seems like this is at least where Jarvis is. Like, that's indecent because people want it. So it's the same reason we want a newborn. It creates two different distinct loci of moral value. And I actually agree with this is that there are some things that are maybe valuable we could say for rational reasons. In other words, this personhood Kantian thing, basically you have rights because you complain. Or you're the type of thing that complains and asks me for rights.

And maybe that's why I don't give it to certain animals because they, you know, we haven't communicated with them yet. But if you can clearly communicate, that seems to provide a rational grounding for me to refrain from killing you and to include you in the moral calculations. Whereas some other things we only include because, like, you know, for sort of sentimental reasons. Because, like, we all just instinctually really don't want to kill babies. And I think that's legitimate. I'm not saying those people are irrational. Oh, they're just irrational.

We can just be reasonable, just kill the baby. Like, that's a legitimate source of moral desire. Because I have this overall humane view that says it's just two sources of desire. It's just those are very different. Seth is.

39:57 Wes: Seth is like, let's end this.

39:58 Dylan: We are.

40:00 Mark: Perhaps we can take this out.

40:01 Wes: There's a joke. There's a joke there that I'm not going to make. Oh,

40:06 Mark: we are.

40:07 Dylan: We are too late.

40:07 Wes: I guess I made it by not making it.

40:09 Mark: You're too late in the term of the podcast.

40:11 Dylan: You made it by talking about not making it.

40:13 Mark: Yeah, but we can still end it. That's not the same thing. It's its natural conclusion.

It's.

It's telos.

40:19 Wes: This conversation has been attached to me for long enough.

40:23 Dylan: I guess we're going to continue this sort of more in depth than a third. Just in closing, I guess the one thing that I wish was a little bit more in these articles, or maybe we'll revisit it, I don't know. Is considering some other hard cases that have really been coming to the fore in the wake of the Dobbs decision regarding autonomy and where the decision making ought to be happening.

40:46 Mark: Would you like to hear my hard case? I mean, it's no secret that my wife and I conceived using IVF and donor eggs and we had a surrogate. We still have one embryo left over. What's happening now is all these fertility clinics. I live in Texas, too, by the way. So you have to make a decision every year. When they send you the bill for the storage for that embryo, do you want it destroyed? Do you want to donate it, or do you want to pay for another year? So it sounds to me like I live in a place where, if I choose option one, I am a murderer.

41:18 Wes: There's a whole range of. To say it's indecent doesn't make you a murderer. Why destroy it versus donate it?

41:25 Mark: Well, no, I'm just saying. My point is they send you the form. It has three checkboxes.

41:30 Wes: Is one of them murder? Murder it.

41:33 Mark: I'm guessing the state legislature. I'm guessing all those genius philosophical theologians in the Texas state legislature who by the way, look like a rogues gallery of thinking, they didn't take that into account as a corner case that hey, you know what, you just basically in essence criminalize the practice of people who are trying to have children and anyway, I'm done.

Thanks for listening. We'll reflect on this in the future. At some point very soon. Why don't you let us know via email or a comment at partiallyexaminedlife.com or on Facebook or on Twitter if we should do more stuff like this. Should we have a euthanasia episode? Should we, you know, Wes has been oh, death penalty.

42:19 Wes: Let's.

42:19 Mark: Should we do death penalty? Wes is proposing that we should do this one on constitutional, you know, protecting the. But basically another episode on this. But getting into the Dobbs. Do you all want that? We're going to actually next episode we're going to do Erasmus in Praise of Folly just so we would have more time to research philosophy of law or like how we're actually going to get to this point or whether we're going to get to this point. Wes is suggesting. Because I didn't want to just unilaterally make this decision. So we're doing something totally irrelevant to this next.

We're open to your suggestions and comments. Do you think this was a good discussion? Do you think this was horrible because none of us are women? Do you think that's an irrelevant thing to even worry about for any topic? I would think this would be the topic you'd worry about if anything. But we'd love to hear from you.

43:04 Wes: Peartiallyexaminedlife.com Mark and I will debate that. Mark, you better prepare.

43:09 Mark: Nope, I'm not off the cuff.

43:12 Wes: No, prepare for the consequences.

43:14 Mark: All right. Thank you for listening. Good night, everybody.

43:16 Wes: Good night.

43:17 Mark: Good night.