Utilitarianism and the Argument for Potential: Are Utilitarians Cozy with the Theo-cons?!?!
Dig it, hepcats. We hear all day long from utilitarians that abortion is a-ok, that fetuses don't feel pain, they aren't persons. So why is there trouble in paradise? Turns out that ain't the end of the story, daddy-o. Remember those anti-abortion Theo-con shitbirds that like to countenance the argument from potential in response to the above? Well, turns out consistent utilitarians are drinking from the same bottle of bourbon. Utilitarians like Peter Singer and his band of welfare-counting brothers can only get half the story. If the Singster wants to be a utilitarian, he's got a lot of 'splainin' to do when it comes to the permissibility of abortion.
ITEM! Utilitarians are committed to judging increases in population based solely upon the value of the resulting state of affairs. So, when I'm judging whether or not I ought to have a kid, it's based only on whether that kid's welfare will increase, or decrease, the overall welfare when it comes into full personhood (whenever that is).
ITEM! The resulting state of affairs is only evaluable based on the potential of the kiddo to achieve a positive level of welfare (that is, a life worth living). But dig this: whether or not a fetus will add value to the resulting state of affairs depends only on her potential, not on whether, at the time of fetus-hood, that fetus is a person.
ITEM! Whether abortion is permissible is thus a matter of population ethics: and for utilitarians (remember the Repugnant Conclusion?!?!?!), everyone who will have a positive lifetime welfare must be brought into existence. Aborting a fetus, for a consistent Sing-o, is only permissible if the resulting state of affairs is neutral or worse than carrying the fetus to term. Current ways of solving the RC don't do the job either: the critical level Sing-o's are still committed to the impermissibility of abortion for any fetus that would have a lifetime well-being above the critical level.
Dig: the only response is the welfare of others, especially the mother. But this is going to be a high burden, because in most cases, the kidsky is going to live longer than mommy dearest, giving it longer time to accrue positive welfare values. The bottom line: there is no blanket permission for abortion.
So there you have it, hepcats. Utilitarians are committed to (something like) the argument from potential. Remember, you heard it here first: off the record, on the QT, and very Hush-Hush.
ITEM! Utilitarians are committed to judging increases in population based solely upon the value of the resulting state of affairs. So, when I'm judging whether or not I ought to have a kid, it's based only on whether that kid's welfare will increase, or decrease, the overall welfare when it comes into full personhood (whenever that is).
ITEM! The resulting state of affairs is only evaluable based on the potential of the kiddo to achieve a positive level of welfare (that is, a life worth living). But dig this: whether or not a fetus will add value to the resulting state of affairs depends only on her potential, not on whether, at the time of fetus-hood, that fetus is a person.
ITEM! Whether abortion is permissible is thus a matter of population ethics: and for utilitarians (remember the Repugnant Conclusion?!?!?!), everyone who will have a positive lifetime welfare must be brought into existence. Aborting a fetus, for a consistent Sing-o, is only permissible if the resulting state of affairs is neutral or worse than carrying the fetus to term. Current ways of solving the RC don't do the job either: the critical level Sing-o's are still committed to the impermissibility of abortion for any fetus that would have a lifetime well-being above the critical level.
Dig: the only response is the welfare of others, especially the mother. But this is going to be a high burden, because in most cases, the kidsky is going to live longer than mommy dearest, giving it longer time to accrue positive welfare values. The bottom line: there is no blanket permission for abortion.
So there you have it, hepcats. Utilitarians are committed to (something like) the argument from potential. Remember, you heard it here first: off the record, on the QT, and very Hush-Hush.
posted by dd0031 at 1:29 PM
5 Comments:
You might find RM Hare's essay "Possible People" or "When does Potentiality count?" (I can't recall which it is) in his Essays on Bioethics interesting.
Thanks. I figured there was probably a response to this sort of argument, but I had a hankering to try out a philosophical argument in Ellroy-eze.
Oh, no, he doesn't respond. He puts forward this argument.
It's maybe worth pointing out that your kind of utilitarian argument against abortion would work just as well against contraception. Indeed one response to this argument against abortion is to say that abortion is ok if you're planning to have a child at a later date. So really it's more of an argument against not having children at all i.e. always using contraception. That might mean it doesn't make sense to call it an argument from potential, since most theo-cons take the argument from potential to differentiate between the foetus and the sperm+egg (i.e. to be against abortion not contraception).
Basically I think the moral to draw is just the one that Parfit does: people are pretty short of ideas on how to apply utilitarianism to choices affecting the number of people who'll exist, at least when average and total utility pull in opposite directions. My own view is that we have to jettison transitivity in the Mere Addition type cases, saying that sometimes A is better than B, B is better than C, but C is better than A. That's a pretty tough one to swallow though.
By the way, Hare also gives a different bad argument against abortion: it's not universalizable because that would mean accepting that it would have been ok for you to have been aborted, and you can't think that would have been ok (for some reason I don't get).
Daniel -
Thanks for your comment. I fully agree with Parfit. I was previously of the mind that arguments of the sort offered by Blackorby, et. al., concerning the "critical level" at which additions to the population become net gains were convincing, i.e., they (adequately enough) solved Parfit's repugnant conclusions. But, as it turns out, they don't fully work against an argument against abortion. It seems to me that if utilitarianism can't justify abortion, at least in most cases, it becomes so unintuitive as to strain our considered moral judgments to their breaking point.
Also, it's not really an argument from potential in the same way that the theological argument is, but it has some "potentialistic" features - whether the fetus would live a life above neutrality. Further, I don't really see how denying transitivity would work in this case: you'd have to pick a way to index the value of states of affairs. Let's settle on aggregate well-being. So you might say that the Z-world is worse than the A-world by denying transitivity somewhere down the line. But it would be difficult to deny the betterness of the B-world along welfarist dimensions if the only difference is that one new person was brought about as a result of a non-abortion. One thing you might say is that involved in denying transitivity is a wide swath of neutrality (maybe the B through Y worlds are just morally neutral). This would allow people to pick whether or not to procreate on their own terms. Fair enough. But gosh, denying transitivity is strong medicine. I think I'm convinced that it can't be consistently done (See Broome's Weighing Lives for good arguments along this line).
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