The abortion debate is hard because people differ deeply over basic questions of value. Some abortion opponents see the embryo as absolutely and infinitely valuable from the beginning. Proponents of a more permissive point of view aren't likely to agree and may even find some versions of the conservative view bewildering. However, all sides ought to be able to agree on this: the value of the embryo -- however great or small that value may be -- can't be a brute fact. Let me explain.
Suppose your neighbor has a rather ordinary-looking rock on display in his living room. He tells you proudly that this is the most important, most valuable physical object in the world. You make a few polite inquiries: what's it made of? Nothing special; certainly not anything rare or precious. What is it's history? Once again, nothing special. Your neighbor just found it one day in in his garden. When you ask what makes the rock so valuable, the owner tells you, deadly seriously, that it's just a fact about this rock: it just is valuable beyond all price.
To say the least, you'd be sure your neighbor was deeply confused. Many rocks are more or less worthless. If this one is especially valuable, something has to make it so: what it's made of, the beauty of its shape, something about who has owned it or its role in some significant event -- something other than just raw superadded value.
If the embryo has the sort of extraordinary value that many people think it has, we can also ask why. And it's not as thought there are no facts to point to. The embryo has the same genetic code that you and I have, though whether that counts on its own is actually pretty obscure. More promisingly, it has the potential to develop into a full-fledged human being with the same capacities as any other full-fledged human being. We could add a good deal more, and all these points are inconsiderable. It's not unintelligible that some people should see the embryo as having an extraordinary value -- something that abortion liberals would do well to keep in mind. But it's also not unintelligible that someone confronted with the vast differences between an early embryo and the person across the room from them should find it hard to make sense of the idea that embryos and eight-year-olds, for example, are really in the same moral category. This, in turn, is something that abortion conservatives need to recognize.
Some anti-abortion advocates say that in days to come, we will see the history of abortion as the history of something as monstrous as the Holocaust. This leaves pro-choice partisans bewildered. Even conceding that embryos aren't just one bit of biological detritus among others, one needn't be confused or morally blind to think that embryos and eight-year-olds are morally very different sorts of things. But some on the pro-choice side treat the right to an abortion as virtually exceptionless, no matter at what stage of the pregnancy and no matter for what reasons. (Various reactions from the left to Barack Obama's call for a weighty interpretation of the health exception to bans on late-term abortions make this clear.) Abortion opponents are equally bewildered. How, they ask, could late-term abortion simply be a matter left to individual choice when there's so little apparent difference between this case and infanticide?
None of this solves anything. But it may still get us somewhere. First, bald assertions of value or the lack thereof won't do, whichever side they come from. Second, each side should be able to see why the other is utterly unconvinced by the positions at the left and right extremes. It's not puzzling that someone should be baffled by a view that treats a 2 mm conceptus with the mere beginnings of a neural tube as the moral equivalent of a conscious, thinking being with plans, purposes and ongoing concerns. But it's also not puzzling that someone would be deeply distressed at the thought that a 7-month fetus isn't entitled to a great deal of legal protection. People at the extremes have taken on a big burden of proof.
Of course, all of this sidesteps one important bit of metaphysics: the relationship between religious claims and the abortion issue. We'll take that up in another post.
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2 comments:
Great post, Allen. I’d like to probe one of your points a little further. You wrote that “the value of the embryo – however great or small that value may be -- can’t be a brute fact.” By “brute fact”, I assume you mean a fact that needs no further explanation or justification.
But couldn’t a defender of the conservative view object along these lines: “I take it to be a “brute fact” that human life is valuable and precious. If you pressed me to explain my belief or provide a justification for it, I’m not sure what I could say. The value of human life is a basic belief of mine. For me and many others, it stands in no need of further explanation or justification. If you’ll grant me that, then consider the implications. An embryo is just a human life at its earliest stages. Because it’s a human life, it’s valuable and precious, too. The fact that many good people who otherwise value human life don’t value the humanity of the embryo is an unfortunate psychological fact about them. A failure, I think, of imagination and sympathy.”
How would you reply to that line of thinking, Allen? By the way, it’s not the view that I hold, but in certain moods, I can see the attraction of it. As you’ve argued so well, there’s nothing simple about the abortion debate.
(BTW, I think your blog is terrific and hope you keep it going.)
Hi Russ,
Good to hear from you!
On the one hand, there's nothing puzzling about the idea that the value of some things can be brute. Otherwise, we'd run the risk of a regress. And I don't think it's flat-out inconsistent for someone to say that human life is infinitely valuable full stop. But saying that brings a lot of questions in its wake: only human life? Human life in the barest biological sense, regardless of anything else about that life? Human life as opposed to the right sort of complex artificial being?
As I noted in the original post, it's not as though there's nothing for conservatives to say. And it's also not a matter of saying that people who believe in the value of human life are obliged to come up with a justification before they're entitled to their view. The point here is metaphysical rather than epistemological: human life is valuable because of something about what humans are like -- something about their characteristics or capacities or origins or relations to other things or beings.
That said, justification isn't beside the point. One reason that I would think conservatives and liberals alike would want to agree that it's bad news to invoke brute fact is that it makes reasonable defense of one's own position, or critique of anyone else's, all but impossible. Suppose, for example, that someone says: what's infinitely valuable is life itself: all living things have equal (and infinite) value? My guess is that most abortion conservatives wouldn't agree. But it seems to me not only that they don't need to; it also seems to me that there are distinctions they can draw and characteristics they can point to if they want to draw lines. And so the "brute fact" position seems to me to suffer not just from metaphysical implausibility. It also has bad dialectical side-effects, even for those who want to hold it.
Cheers,
Allen
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