For the past week or so, Arc has been running a series on abortion. After responding to the first few installments in the series, Berny Belvedere published a post in which my responses, as well as Belvedere’s, were presented in their entirety.

In this installment — Part 8 — I provide a more comprehensive answer to Belvedere’s responses.

I am grateful to Arc for hosting a series in which a topic as explosive as this receives honest, fair, and respectful treatment. Even though I am politically far removed from the center-right stance of the publication’s editors, I have no qualms about promoting their work as a breath of fresh air in a political landscape that can only be described as a toxic wasteland. I also believe this debate being conducted in such good faith by all parties is a testament to the importance and continued relevance of philosophy to public life, and it is no accident that many of the authors for Arc have philosophical training in their backgrounds.

In the spirit of continuing this debate with the same careful approach and charity that has been displayed so far, I will provide my responses to Belvedere’s own responses to my comments, and I hope that even if neither of us is moved to accept each other’s positions on the subject of abortion, our exchange can allow readers to see just how thorny, difficult, and complex the issue is, and why assuming that the other side is simply obviously wrong is far less obvious than previously thought. If the reader can at least acknowledge that on the topic of abortion reasonable people can and do disagree, then that will have been a good enough result to warrant having the exchange in the first place.

So, off we go.

Abortion is an extremely difficult issue to grapple with. It touches on matters of personal suffering, life and death, politics, and the nature of the source of human value in the first place. I do not claim to have any answers, nor do I know that my views are right. At most, I am committed to my views being rationally defensible, subject to revision, and open to disagreement by fellow rational individuals. In these debates, I find it helpful to delineate what issues are at stake and where the sources of disagreement really lie. I take the abortion debate to center around the following questions:

Is abortion immoral?

Which in turn leads to the following two questions:

Are all abortions immoral?

Are only some abortions immoral?

The second central question is:

Should abortion be illegal?

Which also in turn leads to the following two questions:

Should all abortion be illegal?

Should some abortions be illegal?

My answer to these questions are as follow:

No, not all abortions are immoral. Yes, some abortions are immoral. No, all abortion should not be illegal. I don’t know.

Where does our disagreement lie? As far as I can tell, Belvedere can at the very least agree on the answer to #2: Some abortions are immoral. I don’t know what he believes with regards to questions 1, 3, and 4, so it is these questions that serve as the sources of possible disagreement. In what follows, I will respond to his objections to my arguments and see if any progress can be made.

Belvedere:

Although I was referring to normal cases, I’ll comment here just to say that I disagree that Thomson has “established” anything of the sort. She certainly thinks her violinist thought experiment justifies abortion in these cases, and she thinks many people would agree with her, but I am not convinced. Even if this is right — which in my piece I was more or less sidestepping since reasonable people from the “pro-life” camp can and do disagree about whether to allow “exceptions” to abortion’s impermissibility — the result would be a resounding success. If all Marquis’ argument establishes is the impermissibility of abortion in most cases, this would represent a spectacular victory for the “pro-life” side.

Regarding Thomson, I’ll grant that she has not established that depriving someone of their life as in the violinist argument is morally permissible. Intuition pumps like these aren’t designed to prove anything as much as they aim to show our ethical intuitions conflict and thereby force us to reflect deeper on the issue at hand.

I do think unplugging from the violinist is ethically permissible, and so too is an abortion in cases of rape, but at a bare minimum Thomson’s thought experiment serves as a good demonstration that there are cases where we have conflicting moral obligations. True, depriving a fetus of a future like ours (which Marquis argues is the central wrongmaking property of abortion) is morally objectionable, but so too is it morally objectionable to deprive someone of their bodily autonomy.

So, our ethical theorizing must confront the question of what a human being ought to do when presented with two choices, both of which have an aspect of moral wrongness attached to them.

What this shows is that Marquis’s conclusion that it is wrong to deprive someone or some thing of a future of value like ours is not the end of our ethical theorizing, because there are still unanswered questions we have to confront even if we grant Marquis his conclusion.

These questions are:

How should I weigh my right to bodily autonomy against the seemingly wrong nature of depriving some thing of a valuable future like ours?

Would it be right for society to punish the individual who weighs her right to bodily autonomy as higher than her moral obligation not to deprive other beings of a valuable future like ours?

Marquis already grants that the question of depriving someone or something of a valuable future can be confronted with other moral considerations such as extreme life-or-death situations so that the question of abortion becomes far more difficult to answer in cases of rape or in order to save the life of the mother. However, he claims these are “extreme” cases, and he’s focusing on “normal” cases.

Here, however, he does not quite tell us just what counts as a “normal” case of abortion. We would all rightly agree that randomly killing a stranger on the streets would be wrong. Such a killing would be arbitrary and would have no overriding moral considerations that we must grapple with in order to determine whether the killing was justified. This would seem like the kind of “normal” case of killing an adult that Marquis wants us to think about when making the analogy to abortion.

But is this what “normal” abortions amount to? I am concerned here with a problem prevalent to the kind of ethical theorizing that goes on in Western analytic philosophy. By the very act of abstracting away individual cases of the behavior being analyzed, as it homogenizes such cases into the label of “normal” cases, it ends up missing, erasing, and failing to grapple with the lived realities of the individuals making those decisions. Not all abortion stories involve life or death circumstances, but to ignore the details of their cases and categorize them under the generic term of “normal cases” prevents us from identifying morally salient features that must be taken into account in such cases. I do not believe that there is anything like a “normal abortion story.” The following is one such case. Is this a normal case? What does that mean?

I have schizoaffective disorder. I’m fine on my meds, but I was scared I might hurt a child like my parents hurt me. When I started understanding my family’s history of mental illness, my husband and I said, “Okay, let’s stop the cycle of abuse and not have kids.” When I found out I was pregnant, I just started sobbing. The doctor slipped me some cards for clinics in different states. She couldn’t be pro-choice publicly — we live in a very religious area in West Virginia — but she knew that I couldn’t keep taking my meds during a pregnancy. We drove three and a half hours to Maryland so we could get it done in one day and miss less work. Outside, nuns prayed; protesters threw themselves on their knees with holy water. “Wonderful” is a weird word to use, but inside the clinic was wonderful. There was a sensation of finally being able to breathe. I had the suction procedure. On a scale of one to ten, the pain was an eight. On the drive home, I was nauseous, had light period bleeding, and we had to stop a few times. My husband’s family stopped talking to us. It taught us who our friends are. There’s an intersection of stigma — mental illness and abortion. I can’t live off my meds. I can honestly say if I hadn’t had that abortion, I’d be dead.

Further, what about cases of abortion due to medical reasons, not all of which have to do with saving the life of the mother? Are these normal, or does Marquis consider them extreme cases?

To summarize, of course we all agree that depriving an individual or thing of a future like ours is bad, all else being equal. But abortion is disanalogous with “normal” cases of murder in that often — always, in fact — there are relevant moral considerations that must be weighed against the badness of deprivation.

So Marquis has helped us understand why killing a fetus is morally relevant, but he has not allowed us to infer that all, or even most, abortions are morally prohibited. After we acknowledge Marquis’s deprivation account of the wrongness of killing, we must then ask the question “Does this case of abortion possess morally relevant considerations that override our duty not to deprive something of a future?”

And this is why Marquis is the beginning of our ethical theorizing on abortion, not the finish line.

Furthermore, even though I agree with Marquis that one wrong-making property of killing a human being is depriving that being of a valuable future, the analogy to a normal case of killing another person is not a proper analogy to abortion.

Here’s why:

If I wake up one morning and decide I want to kill a random stranger today, I have two options: go through with the killing, or stay home and not kill anyone. Deciding not to kill anyone has zero drawbacks. I stay home, my life goes on, that person’s life goes on. Doing nothing has no negative consequences on my life.

Pregnancy isn’t like this. If a woman becomes pregnant, she’s faced with similar options: abort the fetus, or doing nothing and carrying it to term. The doing nothing and carrying it to term option is unlike choosing not to kill another human being in that doing nothing has a huge number of costs on the mother. Costs that will continue for the rest of her life. One type of cost are medical ones. Pregnancy imposes health concerns and risks on the mother, risks such as anemia, UTIs, mental health risks, hypertension, gestational diabetes mellitus, obesity and weight gain, infections, hyperemesis gravidarum, among many others.

So there is a non-negligible disanalogy between killing an adult human being and that of aborting a fetus, and the disanalogy is that not killing another human being does not impose potentially life threatening medical risks on the person who chooses not to commit murder on that day. Carrying a fetus to term does impose health risks, many of them during the pregnancy and after.

It is immoral to force a person to incur such risks if they don’t want to. That is why doctors are legally obligated to inform patients of the risks associated with medical procedures. Because patients have a) a right to know such risks, and b) a right to decline being exposed to said risks. If saving a life always, or more often than not morally overrides our concerns for bodily autonomy, then we might very well have structured a society in which dangerous medical procedures might be forced upon people even if they declined them. But we don’t live in such a society, because it seems that our ethical commitments sometimes, often, force us to value bodily integrity and autonomy more highly than the saving of life. In fact, this is an idea conservatives are often extremely happy to embrace.

Opposition to state run healthcare often has empirical challenges about efficiency, but often also has moral challenges coming from individuals who believe it is wrong to force you to pay for someone else’s life saving medical attention.

These are routinely expressed moral views that saturate our society, so I’m not invoking alien moral principles to defend my views, I’m invoking moral principles that often animate the moral arguments of conservatives themselves. Why then, (if the reader is this type of conservative), is it wrong to force you to pay for the medical care of others, saving their lives, whereas it isn’t wrong to force a woman to carry a fetus to term? Especially when the cost is far higher for the pregnant woman than the average taxpayer?

That is why the argument from bodily autonomy is so powerful: it is your body, the only one you will ever have, that is exposed to all sorts of medical maladies, and it is your decision, and yours alone, to decide the sorts of risks your body ought to be exposed to, especially in cases where you took all precautions to minimize the likelihood of pregnancy.

Medical risks are not the only factors in pregnancy that are disanalogous to cases of murdering other human beings. There are financial, social, and personal costs as well. This fetus will be attached to your body for nine months, with all the medical complications that that brings, and once born will impose financial constraints on you for at least the next 18 years of your life. The fetus will have the power to derail your plans, the goals and aspirations you’ve set for yourself, goals and aspirations that are partially constitutive of having a life you value in the first place. The baby will have the power to seal off entire avenues and possibilities available to you financially, educationally, and romantically. It can financially set you back in ways that can drastically reduce the quality of life for both of you, financial drawbacks that are arguably one of the biggest predictors of the type of future the child will face.

Once again, this is why the argument from bodily autonomy is so powerful, because it is simply wrong to demand that a foreign object or being impose such costs and risks on you without you having any say so on the matter. The being in question has the power to alter the circumstances of your life so fundamentally that to deny a woman a say in the decision is morally callous at best, morally reprehensible at worst.

Marquis glosses over such costs and risks, and by doing so removes relevant details that differentiate abortion from killing another human being — details that once spelled out in full pull our intuitions in the other direction, that is, in favor of bodily autonomy.

Once these details are spelled out in full, it is not at all clear that depriving another human being of a future of value is wrong if the reason you’re doing so involves being exposed to tremendous medical, financial, and social costs/risks. To argue that you should have no say on the matter is an extreme form of moral paternalism many of us would rightly oppose.

Belvedere writes:

If you’re assuming (a) the truth of Marquis’ theory of what it is that makes killing an innocent human being wrong and (b) that it is no different for a fetus, then, via the overridingness of the wrongness of killing an innocent human being, no other non-life-or-death consideration, such as, say, bodily autonomy, can plausibly trump the wrongness of killing a fetus. If the above is an accurate reading of what you’re accepting, in your response, then Marquis is the finish line, not the starting point.

I accept that Marquis has identified one reason why killing another human being is wrong, but he has not given us a full account of the wrongness of killing. I also hold that there are morally salient factors involved in pregnancy that are not present in standard cases of killing, so there is a disanalogy between the two that serves as the basis for thinking that while Marquis is helpful in analyzing the moral status of abortion, his account is by no means exhaustive of the ethical considerations and principles we must employ in investigating actual cases of it.

Here’s one area where we agree. I accept Marquis’s thesis that depriving a human being a future of value like ours is morally relevant and at least partially an explanation for the wrongness of killing. I accept that a fetus at least potentially has a future like ours, and thus a fetus does possess some moral value. I also accept the following principle:

If a being has moral value, there can be no moral justification for failing to take that being’s value into consideration.

The above is a slightly modified version of the moral principle Peter Singer advances in defense of the moral relevance of non-human animals, which reads: “If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.” The value of a fetus ought to be weighed against other values, and if there are no morally overriding reasons for extinguishing that life, then, all else being equal, it would be wrong to take that life.

There are some cases of abortion that (to my mind) fit this description. One such case is that of so-called “abortion doping,” a

rumored practice of Olympian female runners of deliberately getting pregnant then aborting right before a competition; the added hormones produced by the recently terminated pregnancy are said to enhance performance.

If such cases do truly exist, I would grant their wrongness on the basis of 1) depriving these beings of a future of value, 2) the woman deliberately having brought the being into existence for the purposes of personal gain, and 3) there being no overriding or competing moral justification for having extinguished that life.

Belvedere writes:

This, conceptually, is in the same neighborhood as my position on why I take abortion to be murder yet don’t prescribe the same set of legal consequences for its occurrence. With garden-variety murder, we should toss everyone who was involved in prison, with the worst actors even getting the guillotine. Not so much when it comes to abortion. In a future post I’ll spell out my position more fully. But there is a danger to this position, and the danger has to do with the enlightenment deficit, as it were, between a notion that I’ll call ideal public reasonableness and the unreasonableness of the masses. That sentence is not so easy to grasp, so I’ll untangle it a bit. By “enlightenment deficit” I mean the intellectual gap, the reasonableness gap, between an ideal reasoner and the folks who actually populate our societies. Take Nazi Germany as a preliminary example. Let’s say that the belief that Jews are sub-human is held by a majority of the population. This is obviously an abhorrent position to take. Whether through genuine racism or through being misled (i.e. via propaganda), the majority takes a Jew to not amount to a person, and, concomitantly, to not be in possession of human rights. The “public reasons” that are “accessible and available to all” within this society are such that there is great controversy over whether Jews are persons. But we would think it’s a very strange position — deeply immoral, even — to take Jews as being persons, with human rights, but to also think it should be legally permissible to exterminate them. The problem here is the enlightenment gap between what people on the ground believe and what people as ideal reasoners would believe. If we could ensure the latter, then this formula for finessing personal/legal distinctions would be plausible. Because only the more defensible set of reasons would form the set of public reasons. The problem is we can’t ensure this. So how confident should a Christian be that the public reasons in his or her society are the right ones (right as in “defensible” or “reasonable” — not as in “accurate”)? What if the entire society is just missing it so very badly? This is the sentiment Christians take toward the abortion debate. It is clear to us, for theological and philosophical reasons, that abortion is a great wrong. A corresponding sentiment is that the public reasons deployed to argue against this view are so very badly mistaken. The very presence of widespread disagreement is not enough to justify, for us, the personal/legal distinction the way Kaine has used it. Just as the disagreement within Nazi Germany would not have justified the distinction there, either. We get results such as: “My religion says we should wear red hats on Saturdays but since I get that others don’t share these theological beliefs I won’t pursue enforced compliance.” But what happens when the nature of the belief — whether theological, philosophical, or whatever (one shortcoming of your characterization is it specifically targeted ‘theological’ beliefs, when a better formulation would’ve generalized it further as ‘beliefs stemming from one’s conception of the good’ — a formulation that doesn’t target religious conceptions but includes any kind of comprehensive picture of the world) — is not held to be a theological article, or a theological distinctive, but constitutive of reality? Souls, certainly, are a theological article (despite the fact that the people who believe in them outnumber the people who don’t), but the theologically-driven anti-abortion position doesn’t depend on the theological framework even though that’s how a church might profess the matter when giving its self-presentation. In other words, the position that abortion is wrong is the kind of belief that, even if it has a theological formulation, also has a public-reason-backed version as well. Just like it would be off to say: “I’m against killing Jews, but since I get that your conception of the good includes seeing Jews as subhuman, I’m all right with you doing it legally,” so too should it be off to say: “I’m against killing babies, but since I get that your conception of the good includes seeing them as a clump of cells, I’m all right with you doing it legally.”

I cannot speak for Kaine, obviously, but one possible response could be the following: the position that abortion is wrong is informed by two types of consideration,

A religious and metaphysical conception of the good that assigns moral value to a creature on the basis (or at least partially) of their being a certain type of being, possessing a certain property like a soul (or being partially constituted by one, if you lean Aristotelian on this debate), or Philosophical argumentation that is the domain of public reason (like Marquis’s arguments).

With regards to #1, this belief can be held a number of ways: (a) by faith, or (b) by accepting the arguments of natural theology. He might believe that faith based beliefs cannot and should not be the basis of law in a democratic and pluralistic society, so the remaining options are to appeal to the strength of natural theology to justify (1), or think that even if (1) cannot be a sound basis for the legal anti-abortion stance, (2) might be.

However, Kaine would not be the first or only Christian to reject natural theology’s aims at demonstrating the truth of the Christian worldview, and so give up on (1) being a good justification for criminalizing abortion. And likewise, he might believe that even though anti-abortion advocates do advance arguments against abortion on the basis of public reason they might nevertheless also fail on philosophical grounds.

So Kaine, I think, would be consistent in believing that abortion is immoral, but have grave doubts that the view can be adequately defended in a pluralistic society on rational grounds accessible to all, not just because there is widespread disagreement in such a society, but because that disagreement is itself to be expected and rational, given that it suffers from the type of inconclusiveness that infects most if not all of our deepest philosophical disputes.

This would depend on you yourself accepting that our disagreement is a rational one — that you and I both can and are rationally justified in our beliefs about the moral status of abortion, even though we both know we can’t both be right. I myself do grant this, and I see it as a plausible account as to how Kaine’s view isn’t incoherent. Now, whether or not he’d agree with me is another matter, but if there is an obvious inconsistency or incoherence lurking there somewhere, it requires more digging.

Belvedere writes:

This is too fast. I think what should be said is that if you’re operating within a utilitarian framework the empirical question of whether recriminalizing abortion would lead to more net harm overall is a salient consideration. But if, say, you’re operating under a deontological framework it’s not at all clear, and in fact it’s not very likely, that this consideration should matter. Under a deontological scheme, murder is overridingly bad, even if outlawing it introduces more harm into the world than allowing it. But, yes, if utilitarianism seems right to you then this would absolutely be a relevant, and even significant, consideration.

I do not know what ethical theory you’re committed to, so I can’t push this argument much further.

I myself am not an advocate of deontological ethics, nor do I know if Marquis was either. It does seem to me that his argument is consistent with deontology and utilitarianism, though his argument was not presented in terms of Kantian obligations and the like.

I do think this is another partial reason why the abortion debate seems so intractable. It’s embedded in a massive web of related philosophical disputes where disagreement abounds everywhere. In this particular context, we’re not just disagreeing on our moral theory, or on our views on the personhood of a fetus, or how much weight we assign morally sentient considerations like bodily autonomy, but we’re now also forced to talk and defend our personal views on the nature and proper role of government as well.

I know next to nothing about deontological accounts of political philosophy, so I will not attack the view here, but I do find it puzzling how and why an individual who believes abortion is immoral, assigning it the same moral weight as the killing of an adult human being, would argue for its criminalization even if that individual believed criminalizing it would not lead to a reduction in the number of abortions performed, and further increase the amount of suffering in the world considering what those abortions would look like for the women who undergo them.

From a purely philosophical and academic perspective, sure, perhaps that suffering and death wouldn’t factor into your moral consideration, but surely as an individual who wants to minimize suffering and death in the world (which I assume you do, as do all deontologists, even if they don’t want it for reasons stemming from deontological grounds), you yourself would think twice about how much advocacy against abortion you’d publicly engage in if you really did believe such a world would not only have equal or higher rates of abortion, and far more suffering as a result of those abortions being so destructive for the women who undergo them. I suspect our disagreement is more empirical than ethical, and if so, I would reiterate my position that if you do believe recriminalizing abortion would lead to less death and suffering in the world, that said position must be argued for in the legal case that typically follows the moral case against abortion.

My view (a relatively standard one) about the nature and purpose of the state and laws is to promote the public good. There are many ways to unpack and understand that claim, but the standard understanding of that view of the law is that the state and laws in general are there to guide and shape public behavior in desirable ways that promote societal cohesion and safety. It would be an extremely odd view (though its oddness by no means entails its falsehood) to instead have a conception of the law as merely aiming to reflect the moral law, regardless of its actual effect on shaping public behavior. Of what use is a law if it is known to not minimize and decrease the rates of the behaviors we’re attempting to criminalize? Such an understanding of the law would seem to be one that takes laws to be merely symbolic embodiments of the types of behaviors we’d like to see, even if their symbolic power has no actual effect on actual human behavior. Again, I don’t know what your view is with respect to the nature of law, so I will not attribute a view to you that you don’t actually hold nor have actually defended here, but if we’re attempting to sidestep the empirical objection to the anti abortion position then we’re owed an account of what you understand the role of law to be, if it isn’t to guide and shape human behavior and to provide for the common good. If I provide an empirical objection to your legal anti-abortion stance, it doesn’t get us very far to respond with “well, if you’re a deontologist this objection isn’t worrisome”. Very well, I agree with that, but we’re debating your views and positions here, so if you’re a deontologist then you ought to state so and continue the debate from that standpoint, and if you’re not, then an appeal to someone else’s philosophical view doesn’t get you out of the challenge.

I would also contend that if you do double down on your deontological case for criminalizing abortion, then your defense for not punishing the women who undergo them the same way we punish other types of murderers would itself have to be grounded on a deontological theory of punishment in order to avoid inconsistency. Otherwise why depart from your deontological commitments when it comes to punishment but not when it comes to assessing the likely consequences of criminalization?

Belvedere writes:

Whenever I speak of the “killing of an innocent person” I’m referring to publicly agreed-upon cases of unjustified killings. This isn’t begging the question because the entire point of Marquis’ argument is to begin with cases that everyone agrees constitute unjustified killings. That’s the common ground starting point. He’s in essence saying: “See that activity that you and I and everyone else thinks is super wrong? Abortion is like that.” That’s precisely the force of the argument. Otherwise, the argument would be bizarre: “See that action whose morality we disagree about? Abortion is like that.” What follows from what I’m saying here? That if you give me an instance of killing which does not have this agreed-upon wrongness, it obviously doesn’t apply to what we’re talking about. Marquis would say that for the same reasons we take killing an adult wrong (in cases which we agree), we should take killing Philando Castile wrong, or killing non-combatants wrong. He could, in essence, deploy an argument in the same way toward the very cases you’re bringing up. So I don’t see how this is supposed to problematize Marquis or the concept of murder’s overridingness. Yes, people often get this wrong or fail to apply murder’s overridingness, but that doesn’t mean there’s something off about the principle.

Fair enough, though the point was that you stated that there are no moral considerations that justify killing innocent human beings. I pointed out that there are, or at least we think there are, such as self-defense, the defense of others, and the law itself does allow circumstances in which the death of an innocent individual is justified, or at the bare minimum, accepted. So once again we find ourselves in the position of agreeing with Marquis but then having to ask “okay, it’s wrong to deprive beings of a future like ours, in most contexts, is this one of those contexts though?”

Marquis has helped us clarify why killing a fetus might be wrong even if it’s not a person, but he has not shown that abortion across the board lacks overriding moral reasons that justify it. And the next move is to say “well, most normal abortions lack such reasons” which forces us to clarify just what counts as a “normal” abortion and if a case of a “normal” abortion is analogous to a case of a “normal” case of murder. I think there are morally relevant features that abortions have that most, if not all, murder cases lack, so there’s an asymmetry in the analogy that must be addressed in order for Marquis’s argument to succeed in establishing that even “normal” cases are wrong.

Belvedere writes:

I don’t know what you’re taking his follow-up argument to be, but this is a crucial claim in Grossman’s follow-up as I understand it: “A fetus has moral value, but less moral value than a person.” By construing Marquis as essentially relying on “personhood,” Grossman’s counterargument crucially introduced a continuum on value based on the “measure” of personhood a being possesses. If we strip Grossman of his ability to couch this in terms of personhood, what does he have? A claim that “a fetus has moral value, but less moral value than a human adult.” But then how does this in any way respond to Marquis’ argument, which a case for taking there to be no moral difference between an adult’s and a fetuses’ “moral value” (to use Grossman’s term)?

This is not quite right. Notice that even though he used the phrase “less moral value than a person,” his argument does not rely on the term for its force. He equally could have said “a fetus has moral value, but less moral value than an adult human” and the argument would have been just as forceful. And this is because Grossman correctly pointed out that the moral value of a fetus or an adult human is not wholly constituted by its having a valuable future like ours. And this is for the same reason I mentioned earlier, Marquis has identified one wrong-making property of killing a human being, but this property is by no means exhaustive of what makes it wrong to kill. A fetus has a valuable future like ours, sure, and killing a human adult and a fetus would deprive them both of that future, but killing a human adult deprives him of something more, as well: it deprives him of a life he currently values and currently desires it to not be extinguished. “Personhood” is not doing any of the moral work here, even if Grossman used that word in advancing his argument. It’s not because a human adult is a person that places them higher on the hierarchy of values; it’s their current and actual valuing of life that is allowing him to make the claim that a fetus is lower on the value continuum.

Belvedere writes:

This two-tiered value — present and future — seems vulnerable to a counterexample of this kind: Imagine a comatose patient whom doctors assure is not presently valuing anything but whom doctors assure will emerge out of the coma in one day to go on and enjoy his or her life. Would it be any less wrong to kill this patient than it would to kill anybody else? I don’t think any of us would think so. And that’s because, intuitively, it’s the future of value, not the present valuing, that is doing all the wrongmaking work.

The case of the comatose patient is an interesting intuition pump, but it fails because it commits us to a false notion of what it means to value something.

This thought experiment asks us to imagine a comatose patient and relies on the intuition that since he or she is not currently valuing anything (because he or she is not currently conscious), then I would be forced to conclude that killing that patient is not as bad as killing a fully conscious human being.

But this intuition can be resisted. Imagine that Belvedere’s children are currently sleeping, and the child’s mother says the following:

“Hey Berny, we should take the kids to Disney world, we both know how much they love Disney.”

To which Berny replies,

“Ah, but actually it’s false to say the kids love Disney world, because the kids are asleep, and you can’t value things when you’re asleep, so right now, in this moment, we can’t really say they love Disney world. Let’s revisit this discussion in the morning, when they’re awake. Then we can say they love Disney world. The claim that they love Disney is only true when they’re awake.”

This is an extremely odd way to understand the nature of what it means to value something. It would mean that the truth or falsity of a statement about who values what depends on a) their currently being conscious, b) their currently thinking about the thing they value. If these two conditions are not met, then the truth of a claim like “the kids love Disney” will change every day, depending on whether they’re awake or sleeping, and whether they’re currently thinking about what they value and desire.

But this is completely wrong. It is true that the kids love Disney even if they’re not awake and even if they’re currently completely focused on a task that prevents them from even thinking about Disney in the present moment. Because what grounds the truth of the claim is not their current mental state but their historical preferences, their utterances that have expressed those preferences, and their actually valuing Disney. The kids, and by extension, all of us, have standing desires that ground the truth of a claim about what we value, even if those desires are not currently at the forefront of our minds nor occupying our conscious attention. To deny this view would be to deny that any of us have any desires and values apart from what we currently, in this very moment, happen to be desiring and valuing.

A fetus has no such past. It has never valued anything because it is not yet the kind of creature that can value anything at all. To value anything there must be a certain cognitive capacity that fetuses lack. Not only do they lack that cognitive capacity, but there is no history of verbal utterances that serve to ground the truth of any claim about what fetuses value. They’ve never desired or valued anything, and they currently don’t desire or value anything, any more than a molusk desires and values anything, it’s simply a category mistake to ascribe such a capability to a fetus.

There is nothing to ground any claim about value for a fetus, but there is a history that grounds the truth about value claims for sleeping people and comatose ones. Therefore, the intuition pump Belvedere offers about the comatose patient fails to establish that our current valuing of our life is not a morally relevant difference between ourselves and a fetus.

So, I submit that normal human adults have a feature that fetuses lack, a feature that is morally salient, and therefore serves as a justification for the claim that an adult has more value than a fetus. This is one reason why abortion to save the life of a mother is not only morally justified, it is morally obligatory if that’s what she desires. Her interests trump the interests of the fetus.

Further, Marquis’s account of why it is wrong to kill another human being is simply not exhaustive of the reasons why killing is wrong. His account owes us an explanation of why killing the terminally ill against their wishes would be wrong. If the value of a being is grounded on its possessing a certain kind of future then cases where we can be certain no such future exists become problematic for his account.

On my multi-tiered theory of value there is a ready explanation for the wrongness of killing the terminally ill against their wishes. Marquis’s account leaves us without any such account, so on this basis my view is superior because it has wider explanatory power.

So, where does this leave us? I’m not sure. I think some abortions are immoral. I am sure not all of them are. I am also sure that not all abortions ought to be criminalized, and whether some of them should not be allowed is a question I’m open to exploring, but only on the grounds of what a society that disallows them would look like. I am sure that a world in which abortions are legal is a better world than one in which they’re illegal but more common and includes more suffering due to the consequences of its effects on the mothers who have them. I don’t see in what way a world in which abortion is common and includes more suffering than our world as a result could possibly be called more just, fair, or better.

I do think that normal functioning human adults have more value than a fetus, though I’m happy to concede I don’t know this to be the case. I merely believe it based on what I think is sound and persuasive philosophical argumentation.

I also do not hold or believe that Belvedere is immoral, unethical, or a moral monster in the service of the patriarchy. I am happy to accept that abortion is an extremely philosophically complex issue, the sheer complexity of which provides us with many possible places where reasonable disagreement is possible and unavoidable. We share the same, or extremely similar, values: a desire to reduce suffering in the world, and a desire to uphold and affirm the value of life. That this debate has been possible while managing to avoid the nastiness and hatefulness it all too often devolves into is a testament to the value of philosophy as a vehicle by which to have civilized, charitable debate with those who disagree with us even when the issues at stake are nothing less than the lives and deaths of other human beings, and what we ought to do in response to them.

I want to thank Arc for providing a platform where this kind of conversation is possible, and I hope others may use it as a template and inspiration for the type of dialogue that could be had if we would just make an effort to see it happen.

Here is the series in full.

Part 1: Abortion Is Wrong Even If The Fetus Is Not A Person by Berny Belvedere

Part 2: On Legality and Morality by Berny Belvedere

Part 3: The Legality and Morality of Abortion by Nicholas Grossman

Part 4: Misunderstanding Marquis by Berny Belvedere

Part 5: Abortion, Legality, and “Moral Value” by Ryan Huber

Part 6: What’s the Moral Value of a Fetus? by Nicholas Grossman

Part 7: Personhood and Value by Berny Belvedere

Part 8: Abortion and the Grounds of Human Value by Andrés Ruiz