There's a certain logic to the position of Peter Singer and Democrats who are moving towards his position. If you make the right to life contingent on physical or cognitive development, then that's always a matter of degree rather than kind, so where the line is drawn is arbitrary. It could be drawn sooner or later, higher or lower.
The trimester distinction in the abortion debate was always arbitrary. Likewise, viability was arbitrary in part because that's variable, depending on the state of medical technology to sustain a premie outside the womb. The threshold changes. In addition, it's an arbitrary to make viability the criterion because many adults require something artificial to sustain life. Medications. Surgical implants.
A basic problem with a Singer-style argument is that it either proves too little or too much. Since human life and the lifecycle range along a continuum of physical and psychological development, IQ, and health, it becomes a question of who makes the cut. If it's a choice between treating someone with an IQ of 100 and someone with an IQ of 140, do we save the patient with the 140 IQ and euthanize or neglect the patient with the IQ of 100?
What about the disabled? They may be psychologically normal or even be a genius. Do they make the cut?
Peter Singer is now 72. Why should scarce medical resources be squandered on him rather than someone younger?
It degenerates into the law of the jungle where power is the decisive factor. Those with more power crush those with less.
To my knowledge, the most influential papers arguing for or defending infanticide are Michael Tooley's infamous "Abortion and Infanticide" and Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva's "After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?". I believe they strongly influenced Singer's arguments too.
ReplyDeleteSinger far antedated Giubilini and Minerva, actually.
ReplyDeleteSorry, my mistake. You're right.
DeleteI believe Tooley did strongly influence Singer though?
I don't know. Singer's been around a while. I tend to think of him and Tooley as approximate contemporaries, but Tooley may well be older. My impression is that Singer influences himself. :-) All of these papers serve to make the ideas respectable. I'm not sure how influential they are on each other even when one comes before the other.
DeleteThanks, Lydia. :)
DeleteOn that note, Chris Kaczor has a good chapter critiquing arguments for infanticide (including Tooley, G&M, and a wee bit on Singer) in his book The Ethics of Abortion (2nd ed.). I posted an excerpt here, but the entire chapter is well worth reading, in my humble opinion:
https://epistleofdude.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/a-critique-of-arguments-for-infanticide/
It’s sad to me that we’ve apparently come to a point in our culture where we can’t take for granted that some people will instinctively see the gross immorality of infanticide.
Abortion has a lot of the blame for that. Twenty years ago a fellow grad student in the English program, a rabid feminist and lefty, told me about how her parents forced her to have an abortion in her teens. But, she argued, they were right because she wasn't ready to be a mother, had been doing drugs, etc. But she said to me, "It's a baby. Your body tells you it's a baby." Nonetheless, she thought it was right to have the abortion. And there we are. Pre-birth infanticide. Post-birth infanticide.
Delete"Abortion has a lot of the blame for that."
DeleteGreat point. The one feeds into the other which feeds back into the other. It's...I don't even know what to say at this point.
And that anecdote...sigh. It's one thing to think it's not a baby, then have an abortion. However, to think that it's a baby, and likewise to argue for abortion? I guess I just can't think like she thinks. However, I'm not a woman, so I guess I don't have a say! ;)
Their paper was very derivative. In fact, that was how Julian Savulescu (the editor) defended them. Basically he said that the defense of infanticide was old hat already in the professional philosophical ethics community, and had been for decades, and that all that was new in their article was arguing that it should be allowed for non-serious reasons. It was a garbage-y paper from every possible perspective. It was scarcely even original. It had no interesting arguments or content. It also happened to be morally heinous, which should matter but of course doesn't matter. But even from the cold-blooded perspective of "looking good" as a piece of philosophy, it looked like a derivative grad-student paper that got published because it was edgy.
ReplyDeleteDespite being the older paper, my understanding is Tooley's was at least a better philosophical argument than G&M (not that I think much of any argument for or defense of infanticide!).
Delete