Deep Moral Dilemmas and the Futility of Formalisation
I’d like to begin this very big and ambitious essay by
talking about abortion.
When it comes to the highly
charged subject of abortion, I imagine that most people in the West today are
basically non-absolutist pro-choicers. That is to say, I imagine most people would
say that there is some kind of critical period in which it is permissible for a
woman to terminate, and after that period, it is less clear that it is morally
acceptable. This seems to be a reasonable claim.
Many philosophers writing about
abortion like to deliberate over what the optimal moral boundary should be –
whether capacity of the foetus to feel pain or consciousness or what. Often extenuating
factors come in also, such as socio-economic status, age, health and whether
she consented or was raped. I am not interested in exploring any of these
matters. Instead, I am interested in exploring the basic beliefs people have
about abortion. In carrying out this exploration, I hope to highlight the stark
inconsistency of our moral intuitions on the subject. Later, this will serve a
deeper argument about the problem of our moral intuitions in general. For now,
though, let’s entertain a thought experiment.
Imagine, if you will, a healthy
woman late in the first trimester of her pregnancy, roughly 10-12 weeks in (the
start of foetushood). Suppose, if you can, that one day this woman contracts a
very strange and disturbing urge. For whatever reason – be it insanity,
iniquity or both – there is nothing in the world she wants more to do than scramble
her foetus’ brains. We can also suppose she has three methods at her disposal.
She could hire an unscrupulous and highly skilled surgeon who could use keyhole
surgery to get inside the uterus, break through the weak skull and fiddle
around carefully with the developing brain; she could ingest some kind of
futuristic nanotechnology capsule which heads directly towards the uterus and,
when on a conduit towards it, begins to release some kind of neurotoxic
chemical; or she could just drink a lot of alcohol and take a lot of harmful
drugs. Since her desire is not wanton malice, it is important to her that she
does not do so much damage that the foetus dies. Indeed, she does want the foetus
to survive to become a braindamaged baby and human. Thus, whichever method this
woman opts for, we can be sure she will be careful not to take it too far.
If we assume that all of these
methods of maiming result in the same level of pain to the insensate foetus –
namely, zero – then I claim we must also assume that they are all morally
equivalent. However, it doesn’t even matter if you don’t think, for whatever
reason, that they’re all exactly equivalent methods, as long as you agree that
they’re all wrong. I believe that
everyone would agree that, whatever the method, the scrambling of the foetus’
brains is a profoundly immoral and possibly evil
act, because it is a deliberate act of malice intending to cause grievous
harm to an organism that will eventually become a human being. As a consequence
of this mother’s malevolence, the child will forever be constrained,
handicapped – prevented from living a full and fruitful life, or being a fully
functioning member of society. It is a cruel act, and one worthy of indignation
and outrage.
Next, let us imagine a typical
abortion case. A healthy and capable young woman is heading into an abortion
clinic during the first trimester of her pregnancy, roughly 10-12 weeks in. She
is nervous but has convinced herself that she should feel no guilt. After all,
she has a right to bodily autonomy, she has the right to choose.
The procedure is a success. She
goes home feeling relieved and unburdened, with a heavy weight off her
shoulders.
As I suggested in the
introduction, in the second case most people would regard the act as morally
acceptable. The woman’s rights obviously trump those of an insensate, insentient
proto-human that, like the foetus in the first case, felt no pain as it was affected
by external human agency. This conviction is based on our notion of inviolable
human rights, particularly the idea of a human’s inalienable right to self-determination.
Yet, here’s a curious fact: in
both cases the woman’s act was deliberate and premeditated. Of course, we
naturally see a heavy element of malice in the former, and I had to impute a
pathology to the woman to even make the case plausible. But in the former case,
the foetus survived; in the latter, it did not. Given that it does not normally
matter whether someone thinks their act is wrong, just that it is deliberately
enacted, we must conclude that both women are responsible for their actions in
the morally relevant sense. Given also that what makes the former case bad is the effect in the future, we should obviously be thinking about the future potential of the foetus in the latter case. Therefore, it could be argued that by our standard moral reasoning, we
should deem both as morally repugnant. Indeed, it could be argued that we should regard the latter case as more morally
repugnant, because it results in oblivion rather than mere injury. The former is removing some potential of the future child, and the latter is removing all.
Now, a pro-choicer, when
confronted with this dilemma, might decide that both decisions should be
morally acceptable, because – when you think about it – they both resulted in acts
committed against insensate, insentient foetuses. Perhaps, therefore, we should
not inculpate the woman in the former case at all; she did nothing wrong.
But this seems to me to be too violent
a contradiction of our moral intuitions, and in fact obviously wrong. I believe
we should not conclude that, because we don’t think the second case is bad, neither are bad. They do seem to be morally concomitant, however. So the most
sensible conclusion to reach does seem to be that they are both egregious acts.
What other possible objections
can one adduce to this paradox? Well, one response would be to try to further
elaborate and refine the view that neither act is bad, in disaccord with my
conclusion above. One could argue that we really should discount the future of
the foetus in both cases, because all that matters morally is the immediate
consequences on the foetus. Typically, in both intuitive morality and formal
moral theories, we don’t discount future consequences, as long as they’re not
too distant. For example, we would regard it as bad for someone to pollute a
waterway even if it was, say, ten years before it came to be used as a resource
by a community and deleterious effects were felt. Similarly, it would be morally
irresponsible and borderline criminal to encourage a teenager to become
addicted to smoking even if it was many years before the habit manifested in
noticeably harmful effects on his health. Nevertheless, you might claim that
there is a morally relevant difference between harm inflicted against
insensate, insentient foetuses and harm inflicted against already living humans
(even if there’s a delay on when the “harm” actually occurs in both cases).
Then again, if you’re suppressing
one’s essentialist moral intuitions enough not to set an absolute threshold on
abortion or to believe in some kind of fixed “ensoulment”, why wouldn’t you
suppress them in dealing with this problem? The question is, is there a
super-intuitive reason why my other examples of wrong acts with a delayed harm
are different from the cases involving a foetus? I don’t think so. Just as you
might say you can’t inflict immediate harm on an insensate, insentient foetus,
you can’t inflict immediate harm on a person by polluting a lake they will
drink from in ten years, or by encouraging them to start a habit that will give
them lung cancer in fifty. However, the latter two cases obviously are morally
wrong, because they still do inflict harm, just at a delay. Therefore, based on
the previous conclusions reached, I submit that this objection also fails. To
codify the refutation of the objection:
1.)
Even if you don’t want to say the first case
would have an immediate bad effect, we agreed that damaging the brain of an
insensate, insentient foetus had some kind of future deleterious effect, handicapping the future child
2.)
There is no logical way of arguing that that act
is morally worse than a healthy and capable woman terminating a similar foetus
completely, because ending life must trump scrambling brains
3.)
We typically regard acts that inflict harm at a
delay as very bad despite the delay
Therefore, we should still conclude
that in both cases, the woman commits an egregious act.
A pro-choicer will be very
unhappy with this conclusion, so let us try some other possible attacks on the
paradox. Another attempt at resolving it in favour of the pro-choicers would involve
implementing what I will call a consequentialist
survival model. Contra what I said earlier, one could argue that the two
cases are not morally concomitant,
because when a woman, even a healthy woman, aborts a foetus, there is no
guarantee that, if she hadn’t, the foetus would survive to become a fully-fledged
human being. By contrast, if she doesn’t abort it and instead injures it, and it then survives, she has done harm
to an organism that is now an infant. On this view, if a woman just like the
one in the first case injured her baby and it didn’t survive, then she would not be culpable and the act of
injuring would not be wrong. The essential measure here is survival.
In my opinion, this model is weak
for two reasons. The first is that, while there’s no guarantee that a foetus in
a healthy woman would survive to become a fully-fledged human being, the
probability of its anthropomorphosis is not so low that we would, in other
moral situations, regard it as permissible. To wit, if there was even a 20%
chance that your sick and temporarily insentient grandmother was going to live to once again be healthy,
you would not want anyone killing her pre-emptively on the likelihood that she
might not. And when we’re discussing foetuses in healthy mothers, the
probabilities of survival are much higher than 20%.
The second is the related riposte
that this model requires such an extreme strain of consequentialism that not
even a self-professed consequentialist would abide it under normal
circumstances. Intentions are entirely out the window under this extreme
consequentialist model. The very strange implication of this is that it becomes
totally repugnant if a foetus is injured through malice and survives, but
totally morally acceptable if the foetus is sent into oblivion, even if its
existence is also ended through overreaching malice.
Of course, one could argue that neither
of these rebuttals to this moral model are actually good, because they are
essentially just restatements of the paradox. This would mean that the model
actually has the right implications, because it gives some kind of formal
justification for the paradox. My first
rebuttal relies on the premise that extreme consequentialism must be wrong, but
the moral model assumes that extreme consequentialism is right when one is
talking about abortion. So I’m not properly engaging with the meta-ethical
assumption. My second rebuttal is basically just saying “The model is weak
because the implications are the same strange ones we noted at the start via
the thought experiments”. When you think about it, this is also only right, since
the point of the model is to defend
the strange implications!
And here we reach a fork in the
road. We could say that using an extreme consequentialist model to defend the moral
difference between the two cases is prima facie wrong, and accept that there is
a very good case against late first trimester abortions. Any adoptee of this stance
would presumably lower his or her threshold of abortion permissibility, because
the relevant index would have switched from consciousness or sensation to
foetushood itself. Alternatively, we could say that we should use an extreme consequentialist model to defend the moral
difference between the two cases, and therefore resign oneself moral inconsistency,
because you couldn’t possibly be such an extreme consequentialist all the time.
Which fork should you take?
I am going to defer judgement on
that question for the moment, and instead take an excursion into the history of
secular moral thought. By the end, we may have a better vantage point to view
it from.
Ever since the Humanitarian Revolution of the Enlightenment, civilised
morality has progressed with two major, corollary trends: it has moved away
from essentialism, and it has become increasingly reliant on reason over gospel.
Since time immemorial, Christians have cherrypicked the Biblical passages that
seem most felicitous to them and entirely overlooked the many tenets and
parables that seem wrong or aberrant. The Bible is such a diverse and
heterogeneous tome that even if you do try to set up an absolutely pious, pure
society founded on its guidelines, like the Puritans or the Westboro Baptists, you
necessarily fail, and end up
rejecting certain tenets. The Westboro Baptists, for example, seem – generally
speaking – to prefer the Old to the New Testament (while also hating Jews,
despite that group being the authors of the Old Testament).
Yet, in the Enlightenment,
philosophers began to think about morality with a far more secular frame of
mind than they had once done, moving away from theology altogether. Although
many still drew assistance from the Bible with a core of secular reasoning, or
drew directly from the Bible with a pretence of secular reasoning, some brave souls
tried to put aside the Bible altogether. Many of the thinkers in this
revolutionary era began trying to deduce what is right and what is wrong from “first
principles”, with the founding assumption that morality might turn out to be
much like the revolution that was Newtonian physics. In the 17th
Century, for example, John Locke controverted the prevailing assumptions of his
day by elevating women above the status of property in the Second Treatise of Government, and suggesting they be both granted the
right to look after the home in the absence of a man and the capacity to leave
the compact of marriage themselves. Just like his entire political theory, this
affirmation of (some of) the rights of women was a product of thinking about
morality secularly, without allowing the dirty sediment of religion to muddy
the waters – at least not so directly as had been done in the past.
In the 18th Century, the
secularisation of morality took a huge leap forward as there arose many
thinkers engaged in the enterprise of establishing a morality wholly
independent of the gospel. Immanuel Kant is probably the most famous of these.
Kant attempted to formulate a Rationalist doctrine of morality from reason
alone, and thereby claimed to have identified the true, ineluctable principles
of morality. Admittedly, these principles roughly supported the Ten Commandments,
but they were not worded like any moral laws in the Bible and Kant was sure to
exclude religious dogma from their deduction. Though now regarded as highly
flawed, Kant’s grandiose moral labours would have a massive influence on moral
thought for the next few centuries, and even continue to exercise philosophers
today. Around the same time in the late 18th Century, Mary
Wollstonecraft was writing a book that what would later be regarded as perhaps
the greatest feminist polemic of all time, A
Vindication of the Rights of Women. In this magnum opus, she famously
proclaimed that women were not at all inferior to men. Given the Bible does
suggest numerous times, both explicitly and implicitly, that women are inferior
to men,[1] this
was obviously a highly blasphemous stance. Most importantly, it epitomised the secular
spirit of the age: the willingness of thinkers in the Enlightenment to privilege
the inviolable principles of pure reason over ancient religious dogma. Because
of thinkers like Kant and Wollstonecraft, by the turn of the 19th
Century, morality was no longer the province of a holy book and its public
spokesmen; it had become a matter of reason. The age of secular morality had
begun. Slavery would be its first victim.
As everyone knows, the onset of
the Industrial Revolution brought with it massive social upheavals, and would
eventually further propel the moral advance. Although the rights of women were
barely advanced in the 19th Century, there were some notable moral
movements of other kinds. Fascinatingly, they were in large part fostered by righteous,
passionate fiction writers seeking to nurture empathy for excluded or reviled groups.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is known to have had an enormous impact on the
American abolitionist movement, while Dickens novels like Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations achieved enormous success in entreating their
readers to ponder the social stratification, injustice, cruelty and absurdity
of British society, and the plight of the working-class, particularly children.
Never before had so many upper-class aristocrats been made to ponder their
privilege and the humanity they shared with the millions of unwashed ruffians
below them. In his book The Better Angels
of our Nature, Steven Pinker follows most of the historians of the period in
adducing this explosion of polemical literature as one of the main exogenous
causes of the shift in the zeitgeist and expansion of the moral circle.
With the arrival of the first
wave of the feminist movement and its vociferous campaign for female suffrage,
this quest to advance moral thought through pure reason redoubled. Within
decades, women across the civilised world had obtained the right to vote. Then,
in the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement began to gain momentum. Black
activists proclaimed that they were as human as whites and should no longer be
forced to suffer discrimination. By the late 1960s, after the work of such heroic
figures as Martin Luther King had begun to uproot entrenched racist attitudes,
legal discrimination against blacks had ended across the civilised world.
As soon as the civil rights
movement had run its course, the second wave of the feminist movement began to
surge forward, using civil rights as its model. Within only a few years,
feminists had achieved massive gains in legislation and quantifiable changes in
attitudes, leading to an immense expansion of female opportunities and autonomy,
and a revolutionary liberation from patriarchal control. The gay rights
movement followed soon after, eventually winning for itself the total
legalisation of homosexuality and an increasing acceptance of homosexual
practices. This has culminated in the phenomenally high levels of gay tolerance
that we enjoy in the West today.
The animal rights movement also
began to pick up during this period, although it is important to note that, like
female liberation, its seeds had been sown back during the Enlightenment. Just
as Mary Wollstonecraft rejected the reasons why women were thought to be
inferior to men, the 18th Century utilitarian humanist, Jeremy
Bentham, is famous for having remarked, “The question is not, “Can they
reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?”” In the 1970s and 80s, animal
activists began to use such arguments to encourage people to expand the
recently expanded moral circle of the West yet further – not just within our
species, but beyond it. The movement to invest animals with rights and end
their suffering and slaughter rapidly amassed an ardent following. As a result
of this movement, vegetarianism went from totally unthinkable for any sane
human being to merely radical, and rates of vegetarianism in the West continue
to increase (bumpily) to this day.
One is liable to forget just how
many dramatic moral leaps have been made over the last centuries, and how much
the world has changed in the moral concatenation of the decades since the
1950s. As Pinker argues, people constantly fail to see how much more permissive
and tolerant our norms are, and how much better than the past the world we live
in now is. The truth is that the expansiveness of the moral norms we in the
West have now is utterly aberrant: it is historically unprecedented, and it is unparalleled
in any human society ever documented. Collectively speaking (and the internet notwithstanding), us 21st
Century Western citizens are astronomically more pacifistic, empathetic, soppy,
mawkish, softcocked, sissyish and abstemious than any other human beings that
have ever lived. The rates of violence and tolerance of violence in our
societies right now are infinitesimal
compared to those of every other society ever documented.
When you think about the
evolution of morality, the fact that highly peaceful, tolerant modern Western
societies are anomalous is hardly surprising. After all, human morality is
fundamentally built on only two selectional mechanisms: kin altruism and
reciprocal altruism. These manifest themselves in our myriad moral emotions,
such as sympathy, compassion, admiration, honour and sense of justice, along
with guilt, shame, anger, indignation, disapprobation and vengefulness. They
also manifest themselves in norms and taboos that vary from society to society,
circumscribed only by the human emotional palette. While I earlier suggested
that one of the main developments in secular morality was the shift away from religion
and gospel, in truth, the deeper shift of the Humanitarian Revolution and the
rights movements of the 20th Century was away from our primal moral
intuitions, and towards cerebration and reasoning. The Bible is itself merely a
bricolage of ancient moral attitudes, so it is no surprise that it features
advocacy of massacres and rapes in war, a recurring abasement of women to mere
“chattel” (along with its general endorsement of patriarchy) and a general discord
with modern, progressive moral beliefs about just about anything (slaves,
homosexuals, animals). As with most primitive people, the authors of the Bible
extended empathy only to a limited circle and only in certain circumstances,
and moral rules were always contingent (none of the Ten Commandments were meant
to apply to foreign peoples, for example). A certain essentialism was also a
given. All women were regarded as the same and thought of as deserving the
same, oppressive treatment, despite women being as varied and diverse a group
of individuals as men, and including people who are innately closer to the
average of the opposite gender than the average of their own. All foreigners
were regarded as one homogenous group, typically with certain animalistic,
wicked, demonic or repulsive traits – an essentialist attitude that enabled the
complete erasure of empathy in warfare and the resultant pillaging, depredation
and rape. All animals were regarded as fundamentally inferior on a very deep
level and therefore could be abused or killed with total impunity.
Importantly, these kinds of barbaric
attitudes towards people outside the in-group are more in tune with the
predictions of evolutionary psychology than any of our moral beliefs. It would be suicide in the wild for an animal
to extend its empathy to human beings outside of its kin or to any party
unlikely to have any chance of future reciprocation. Yet it is precisely this
that our humanistic norms, slowly built up over hundreds of years, encourage us
to do.
So despite the primal impulses to
the contrary, us contemporary humans have managed to extend our empathy way
beyond our kin and way beyond those who might reward us for our concern. Most
of us abjure all violence against other humans, abhor prejudice and
discrimination against all races, creeds and classes, revile war as a great
moral evil that we must do everything in our power to avoid, and some of us
even refrain from eating animals. Every single one of these moral stances would
be quite literally inconceivable to a
hunter-gatherer.
(And now we return to
abortion).
In primitive societies, there is
extensive documented evidence of infanticide. You might intuit that this could
have interesting implications for abortion. Perhaps before inculcation into our
Christian-dominated social norms, we should naturally incline towards an
insouciant attitude towards abortion. However, I don’t think this is quite
true, and for a few reasons.
Firstly, while the existence of a
behaviour in many human cultures is a good indication that the behaviour is an
innate instinct, it doesn’t guarantee it.
Secondly, abortion is not actually
infanticide (defined as killing after birth), and primitive societies certainly
don’t practise abortion widely. One
might think that this would be irrelevant because infanticide is basically like
a worse version of abortion, meaning that abortion and infanticide should go
together morally. But this is not how human psychology works: even if abortion
is logically a kind of not-really-infanticide that isn’t as bad, the fact that
infanticide and abortion play out very differently makes them very emotionally
different, too.
Thirdly, in all the cultures in
which it is documented, infanticide is not practised wantonly, but with
specific motivations that make sense in terms of evolutionary psychology.
Babies are killed if they are deformed or dopey; mothers kill their babies if
they think they cannot support them sufficiently or would be foolish to do so with
other healthy offspring around; and men murder any previous children raised by
the woman they are shacking up with. For a primitive person to abort a foetus
would be rare because there would be few motivations to compensate for the
great dangers that would presumably be involved. For a mother to get someone to
perform some sort of improvised, dangerous abortion on her, she must be willing
to risk her future reproductive potential and possibly her life. She would not
risk those things on the off chance that her foetus was deformed, and she would
not risk those things on the possibility that her future child will not be
healthy and hardy enough to invest in. A man would also be unlikely to
violently force a woman to abort a baby even if he was sure that baby was not
his, because he could injure or kill the woman, and it would not be in his
interests to do that.
The fourth and most important
reason why it doesn’t make much sense to say that we might incline towards a
permissive stance on abortion is that the central pillar of pro-lifeism, the notion
of the soul, is itself an intuition of innate human psychology. The
quintessential essentialist attitude is that all human beings have an essence
which distinguishes us from all the other animals, and endows us with all the
fundamental human traits. Thus, belief in the soul is a profoundly primitive
conviction.
So it seems to me that pro-choice
as a position probably relies slightly more on the denial of intuition than
pro-life. Like most contemporary Westerners, I believe that pro-choicers
rightly dismiss the essentialist, pro-life attitude towards abortion as superstitious,
unscientific nonsense, just as philosophers have been arguing for centuries
that all essentialist attitudes towards out-groups are superstitious,
unscientific nonsense.
Yet, here’s where we return to
our dilemma. The paradox raised by the comparison of the two thought
experiments was highly useful for illustrating how some kinds of primal moral
intuitions still infect our moral reasoning, even when we discard essentialist
thinking. Indeed, the application of modern science to morality has really
opened up a Pandora’s Box of dilemmas that pose such deep problems to our moral
reasoning that people prefer to pretend they don’t exist. Despite what some may
like to think, everyone’s morality is still underpinned by numerous
essentialist beliefs and assumptions, and science has only complicated the
picture. Every reasonable person in the West agrees that it would be best for
our morality to be as rational, logical and scientific as possible, so we do
allow scientific knowledge to enter the mix – but only with massive constraints.
What do I mean by that? Well, here are three examples of monolithic essentialisms
that pervade the supposedly well-reasoned and anti-superstitious moral beliefs
of us Westerners:
1.) People are fully rational, autonomous agents
fully responsible for their actions
This essentialist claim basically undergirds the entire criminal justice
system and much of our intuitive morality, yet you have to define “rational”,
“autonomous” and “responsible” in very peculiar ways to even attempt to reconcile
this essentialism with modern neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
Rationality is pretty much impossible to define scientifically. If you take “optimal
rationality” in the way a layman would, to mean something like “Always making
decisions based on reasoned deliberation and solid inferences”, it’s fair to
say that the average human is light years distant from the ideal. Reasoned
deliberation and solid inferences are used in science, but human beings in the
real world tend to use heuristics, best-guesses and act on impulse. Meanwhile,
autonomy is, scientifically speaking, very close to meaningless. Autonomy is
basically synonymous with free will, and no neuroscientist thinks that our most
pure conception of this notion fits with our picture of the brain. Indeed, as
all philosophers know, our deep attachment to these two words, autonomy and
free-will, clashes violently with modern science and raises some very deep
questions. How can you really apply the dictionary definition of this word
“autonomy” to any human being when none of us have any choice over what genes
we are born with, how our brains are wired into the uterus, how we come out of
the birth canal, what environment we are raised in, what our parents are like, where
we go to school, who we interact with, etc? How can we say we have free will
when our brains are merely highly sophisticated computational systems that
operate almost entirely under the cover of darkness, with most of the
machinations occurring totally beneath our awareness? How can we say we are
self-determined when the impression everyone has of being a kind of executive
or concertmaster over their mind and body is totally illusory? How can we say
that we are autonomous beings when it there is no one real “self” but only a
brain composed of a series of highly complex intricate electrical networks
arranged into highly complex interacting modules? And this brings us to
responsibility. Are we responsible? Probably not – at least not on any normal
definition.
2.)
All human
beings are sacred. The fact that we even have “human rights” suggests that
we have wacko superstitious beliefs about ourselves. After all, what are “rights”
from a physicist’s perspective? (Put it this way, they’re not quarks.) Clearly,
we invented the notion of rights to make legislating morality easier, using the
same logic as the fictions of rationality, autonomy and responsibility, which,
as I said, are necessary to undergird prosecution and punishment. Nevertheless,
isn’t it completely insane that we don’t accept killing a severely disabled
baby or a demented, vegetated old person with sophisticated methods that would
cause no pain, but we totally accept killing animals that are more sentient and
possibly more sensate with far more macabre and traumatic methods? Literally the
only reason people can adduce to defend this discrepancy is the sanctity of life, and that isn’t even a reason. I mean, you would think this is code
for “soul” if it weren’t for the fact that irreligious people use it a hell of
a lot. In fact, it is a kind of proxy
for the soul, but one that makes even less sense, because, unlike the soul, a
general “sanctity” doesn’t have any kind of referent. The soul at least resides
somewhere in the noumenal realm or something. Sanctity, by contrast, is pure
poetry. Basically, if you think about the logic behind most people’s uses of
the phrase, you conclude that if they were fully honest they’d have to replace
the phrase with the following: “I don’t know what the “sanctity of life” means
but I feel it is significant and it seems to solve the logical conundrum of our
speciesism. If we don’t have this phrase to rely on, I can’t justify my strong
moral prioritisation of the lives of humans over the lives of other animals. I therefore
need this essentialism to preserve my moral beliefs.” Now, I do not mean to
suggest that we should totally dispense with the idea of human sanctity, because
the truth is that we do actually need
the belief. If we did truly carry out Jeremy Bentham’s dream and simplified our
norm of wrongdoing to all acts that cause suffering, we could not cope. To
truly end any prioritisation of human beings over other sensate animals would
quite literally extend our moral circle beyond its logical limits. We could not
hope to actually implement a morality where every sensate creature was equally
worthy of moral concern as humans, and any attempt would probably soon be
self-defeating.
3.)
Family
members and kin are more deserving of affection, compassion and charity than strangers
and nobodies. Can you imagine trying to treat every single human being
equally? Can you imagine being a parent and refusing to prioritise the
feelings, wants and needs of your children over any other person’s? Can you
imagine going to a nursing home at which
your grandparents reside and chatting to every single geriatric without fail, allocating
the same 3 minutes and 30 seconds of attention and affection to each, including
your own? Obviously, it would be impossible to actually implement anything even
remotely close to a literal moral impartiality. But let’s say you made the
minimum number of compromises of impartiality necessary to still live a
relatively normal and fruitful life. Imagine being a parent trying to do this.
Thinking about it rapidly becomes utterly absurd. There is no one abstemious
and emotionally repressive enough in the entire world to even get close to any
kind of impartial moral ideal. It is quite clear that any
greater-than-half-hearted attempt to treat strangers and non-kin the same as
family and kin would just not be humanly possible. Yet, importantly, there can
be no good logical justification for our massive bias towards family and kin
(only an evolutionary explanation for
it). All it is is a base instinct, not a well-reasoned preference.
It should be clear by now that even in this advanced state
of moral development, when reason has been entrenched as the default method of
moral arbitration for centuries, our moral beliefs are still hopelessly reliant
on primal, essentialist intuitions. So what should we do?
If you want my answer – nothing. I
am firmly of the view that we should not try to fight these intuitions to the
death, because the true extermination of our essentialist moral intuitions
would mean the near-total obliteration of human nature itself, and certainly the
extirpation of morality. Instead, we should resign ourselves to our fate:
morality is not a science, it cannot be formalised and we are forever doomed to
be logically inconsistent when applying it. It is a bleak claim, but it is the
truth.
I am now finally in the position
to judge which fork one should take in response to the paradox I set up all
those pages ago. Now is the time when all must be revealed. And the answer is…
Neither!
It saddens me to say it, but the
truth is that I tricked you. To me, neither of the forks are quite acceptable. I
believe the best one would probably be a third, subtler sidetrack that I never
mentioned before – one that is not quite the second, but branches off slightly from
it.
Contra the first fork, I submit
that the apparent clash of the intuitions is ultimately immaterial. The reason I
believe this is that such a clash is not anomalous in contemporary, secular morality.
Indeed, we should be used to our morality being riddled with inconsistencies. As
I have argued, that has increasingly become the nature of the beast since we
abandoned the moral certitude of the Church and started to question our primal
intuitions.
But why is the second fork – to
accept an extreme consequentialist model that only need apply to abortion – not
quite ideal either? It is not quite ideal, in my view, because it is an
unnecessary complication of a problem that isn’t really resolved just by
bandying around fancy philosophical terms.
So what is this magical third
fork then? Well, to be honest, it’s rather anti-climactic. The third fork available
to one confronting such a dilemma is basically to shrug the entire thing off
and say the following: “It is true that our moral intuitions seem to be
contradicting each other here, but at least believing that there is some kind
of difference between an early foetus and a human being is better than
believing that there is none because of an imaginary thing called a “soul”. Any
kind of attempt to constrain the most hard-line essentialism in morality has got
to be a good thing, because it brings morality closer to reason and truth, and
this is worth the cost of seeding moral reasoning with more blatant
inconsistencies. A mixture of essentialism and science is always better than
pure essentialism, even if the mix is very dirty.”
Surely, this is our only real option.
[Credit to H. Ramage for steering me back on course]
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