thanks again for your thoughtful and honest response. Because it seems there are only a limited number of responses to one posting allowed, I answer in a new one. I have some preliminary concluding remarks, but I gladly respond if you have further questions or challenges for me ;-)
It seems I used the term "argument" in a too strict sense. What I wanted to so say is that my thought experiments were not meant as a "justification" or "explanation" for the conclusion I drew. Of course, they can in a sense be seen as an argument for the core tenets and the coherence of DDE. But the problem seems to be that without applying DDE to these cases many people (including you) come to very different conclusions.
DDE, on the other hand, includes a set of basic moral principles which are grounded in natural law and, at least by my lights, seem to be intuitively plausible (e .g. you may not do evil so that good my come, some acts are intrinsically evil, the end never justifies the means, an act with an evil or vicious intention in and of itself can never be good). DDE comprises four criteria to be met, each of which must be necessarily satisfied and which, taken together, are sufficient to justify a non-obligatory act with both good and reprehensible effects that a morally responsible and reasonable actor would wish to perform. Therefore, the "compilation" of the four core tenets of DDE in turn form a principle to generally evaluate the moral permissibility of actions with a good and bad effect.
In my opinion this clearly seems to be the case with the violinist case, the twin case and in pregnancy. In all these situations and without any serious health or life threatening issues at least (K4) is violated and therefore the action of separation which causes the death of another human being cannot be justified. Moreover, in normal cases of pregnancy where the mother is seeking an abortion and therefore the deliberate killing of an innocent human being, DDE does not even begin to apply, not only because the disproportionality is obvious and therefore (K4) is violated, but because the death of the child is directly and intentionally intended and therefore (K2) and (K3) are violated, too.
For these reasons I think that IF you accept some version of DDE you are logically committed to the conclusion that it is not morally licit to separate from the violinist, the twin or to have an abortion. Therefore, I fail to see how you can coherently reject the conjunction of (a) accepting DDE and (b) the claim that DDE implies that it's wrong to unplug oneself from the violinist.
I have not yet read Ross but in my opinion ethical pluralism has some very serious problems. First, I think it is difficult to prevent it from collapsing in some form of relativism. Second, it seems to exclude that there are inherently wrong actions (like killing innocent people, rape or enslaving people). But most seriously it seems that it cannot give us rationally justified and binding guidelines to adequately evaluate difficult situations like the one´s I mentioned. Correct me if I am wrong but as far as I know ethical pluralism includes the view that for some real moral questions or situations there is no "right" answer. But if this is the case then how can we be sure that there are objectively binding right answers to moral questions in the first place? How exactly or by which criterions do we determine which questions are answerable and which are not? These are at least some of the difficulties I have with this view.
Great post! I had very similar thoughts when I read the Responsibility chapter in Beyond Roe.
Maybe the replicator scenario can be made even more analogous to a pregnancy in the following way:
The replicator machine is specifically designed to only create children. It's publicly available and anyone can use it. When you press the big red "Make a child" button a catheter is connected to your side and a five-year-old child is created on the other end of it. The child is your biological child, it's healthy and normal in every way except that it will need to stay connected to you for a couple of months until her own kidneys start working properly. Disconnecting the catheter would kill the child immediately. To motivate people to use the machine, pressing the red button gives a pleasing physical sensation comparable to an orgasm. Now Betty wants to experience the sensation but doesn't want the child so she makes sure to wear extra thick clothes to prevent the catheter from connecting but she knows that every now and then it doesn't work. She decides to take the risk anyway and presses the button. She finds herself connected to a walking/talking/smiling five-year-old. Should she be legally permitted to kill the child by unplugging herself?
The reason why this example is closer to an unplanned pregnancy is that we know from biology what sex is for (not just for humans but for all animals). A baby is not just an unconnected side effect of having sex. It's what having sex is naturally ordered towards. Not in the sense that someone designed it that way but in the sense that we recognize what was its primary function that caused it to be selected by natural selection throughout evolution. The same way can say the heart is "for" pumping blood, eating is "for" putting nutrients into the body etc. So there is no relevant difference between a tool for making children designed by humans and our reproductive systems having evolved through natural processes into tools for making children. Having sex is then exactly like pressing the "Make a child" button.
As Boonin advocates for abortion even if the pregnancy was planned and the mother just changed her mind later, I doubt this example would make a difference to him. But at least in my mind it further strengthens my intuition that the state should be permitted to legally protect the children created by the replicator machine by parents who voluntarily pressed the button, especially if this became a common thing and the number of children killed this way was reaching a million each year.
There is another point that can be made to show that allowing abortion based on Boonin's first responsibility principle (RP-A) is bogus. If pregnancy is equivalent to the Toxic chemicals case and we can argue that the unborn child doesn't have a right to the mother's assistance because without her voluntary act in the past the child wouldn't exist now, the same logic could be applied to any born child. If McFall doesn't have a right to Shimp's assistance in the Toxic chemicals scenario, no born child would then have a right to their mother's assistance either. After all, without her having sex in the past, the child wouldn't exist now. But that is surely absurd.
My own view is that Boonin's argument is very strong when it's restricted to cases of pregnancy that are the result of rape. I'm open to thinking that his argument succeeds for these cases and that for this reason pro-lifers ought to accept a rape exception to legal bans on abortion. Many pro-lifers don't approve of this sort of moderate pro-life position, but this is where reason seems to be leading me.
That said, I do think there are some interesting and promising responses to Boonin's argument for cases of rape. This article by folks at Justice for All is good: http://doc.jfaweb.org/Training/DeFactoGuardian-v03.pdf. It discusses several well-known strategies for dealing with bodily rights arguments in cases of rape, and helpfully identifies some limitations of those strategies. It also presents a novel strategy (see especially pages 16-18) that I find plausible. The paper is addressing Thomson's bodily rights argument. But applying the novel strategy to the case of McFall v. Shimp, the idea would be that the following is a relevant difference between the case of pregnancy and the McFall v. Shimp case: the woman who is pregnant as the result of rape is the 'de facto guardian' (in a sense the paper elucidates) of the fetus whereas Shimp is not the 'de facto guardian' of McFall.
In my opinion the correct solution to all bodily rights issues is provided by applying the principle of double effect (I think Kate Greasley got it mostly right in her book on abortion ;-) ) and it also explains why even in rape cases abortion is not a morally licit option. I think it can also be shown that e .g. the bone marrow case is ethically fundamentally different from pregnancy and therefore the cases are not analogous and cannot be compared in the first place. If you are interested, I can share my thoughts on the matter in more detail.
here is my response to the bodily rights argument, defended by philosophers like Judith Thomson (the violinist case) and David Boonin (the bone marrow case). I think something like the following formulation is the strongest version of the argument to which I will respond:
(P1): Every person has a right to life. (P2): Unborn human beings are persons (conceded at least for the sake of argument). (C1): All unborn human beings have a right to life. (P3): Every person has the right to bodily autonomy and integrity. (P4): No human being has a legal claim to the use or even continued use of the body or organs of another human being. (C2): The right to life of an unborn human being does not include the legal right to use or even to continue to use the woman's body or organs. (P6): Abortion, and thus fatal deprivation of the use of the woman's body or organs, does not violate the right to life of the unborn human being. (C3): Abortion, and thus the fatal deprivation of the use of the woman's body or organs, should not be legally prohibited.
Now, I think the parental obligation objection (there is a strong duty of parents to care for their depended offspring) as well as the responsibility objection (if you deliberately engage in an act that may result in the creation of a helpless, innocent or morally incapacitated and depended human being, you are - even without further explicit consent - responsible to care for this human being; at least you are not allowed to kill it in any case) is helpful, persuasive for many people and applicable in most circumstances. But I am afraid it does not go to the heart of the matter.
For example, I can come up with a thought experiment on pregnancy which is, at least by my lights, in turn analogous in all morally relevant aspects to the violinist case of Thomson and therefore sidesteps all Pro-Life objections which try to block the argument by pointing out dissimilarities. But I (as well as all Pro-Lifers I know of to which I presented this case) still think it is not permissible to remove the child from the uterus of the woman.
Imagine that in the future an incubator will be developed which is what we may call an artificial womb, and which can already care for a human being in the first stages of its development and let it mature until "birth". In this future, however, there is also a hereditary disease, which the growing child can only survive if it remains connected to the woman's body during pregnancy. In this thought experiment, the basic care of the child can thus obviously be provided without the woman's body and the connection would have to be maintained for therapeutic reasons alone. Suppose a woman does not want to carry her child (which is diagnosed with this disease) because it was conceived through rape and the psychological and physical strain until birth seems unbearable to her (we can even strengthen the case by assuming the embryo is a "stranger" and comes from a fertilized egg of another woman and was implanted without her consent). In this case, does she have the right to demand that the child be transferred to an appropriate incubator, even if this procedure unavoidably leads to the death of the child?
I think it is not permissible to do that and in my estimation in this case as well as in the case of the violinist the principle of double effect (DDE) needs to be considered. When we consider the conditions of DDE, I think all these cases are successfully resolved - even if we grant for the sake of argument Thomson´s premise that not even one’s own child has a natural right to the use of the woman´s body (I am aware that this principle has recently come under heavy attack by philosophers like Singer, Sandel and even Thomson. But I think there are defenses available, which persuasively respond to the criticism - e. g. by Oderberg, Cavanaugh or Černý). Here is my preferred formulation of the criterions of DDE:
(K1) The intended action must in itself be either good or at least permitted or morally indifferent. (K2) The good main effect, i.e. the intended effect of the action, must follow at least as directly from the action as the reprehensible side effect. It should be noted that it is not the temporal aspect but the causality that is decisive for the immediacy. The reprehensible side effect must therefore either be caused by the good main effect or directly by the act which also directly causes the good main effect. It is not permissible for the good main effect to be caused by the reprehensible side effect, since in this case the actor would have to intend the reprehensible side effect as a means to bring about the good main effect (he who intends the end always also implicitly intends the means). However, the end never justifies the means. One must not, under any circumstances, intend something morally reprehensible, regardless of the good that can be achieved. (K3) The reprehensible or evil side-effect must never itself be intended or willed as an end, but must merely be foreseen and permitted. Even if the reprehensible side effect does not cause the good main effect, it could still be equally intended. In this case, however, the actor would explicitly intend something morally reprehensible and thus it would be impermissible to perform the act altogether. The actor must also strive to minimize the reprehensible side effect as far as possible. (K4) There must be a proportionate and sufficiently serious reason for allowing the reprehensible side-effect and performing the act that has a good main effect. One would not have such a reason if one carried out an act with a good main effect but a comparatively disproportionate reprehensible side effect.
Furthermore, there are thought experiments apart from pregnancy which highlight severe problems with the bodily rights reasoning of Thomson and Boonin. For example, consider the following case which is inspired by an idea from Francis Beckwith: Imagine that two girls, Lara and Lea, develop as conjoined twins. Furthermore, only in the body of Lea kidneys are formed and we know that Lara's body does not accept any donated kidney. Lara is therefore dependent for her survival on the connection to Lea's body and, in contrast to Lea, would not survive a potentially possible separation. In this scenario we are therefore even faced with the extreme case described by Thomson, in which the connection between two people must be maintained for a lifetime. Suppose that through the connection between the two bodies, the girls suffer for a few months every few years from physical and psychological problems comparable to a pregnancy, in addition to the otherwise already stressful situation. Lara is a fighter and has come to terms with the situation, not least for lack of alternatives. However, Lea, who has all the vital organs in her body, does not want to accept this situation any longer. In this case, does Lea have the right to demand separation, even if it means her sister Lara's death? According to the argument of Thomson or Boonin, I think this would have to be affirmed.
(P1): Every person has a right to life. (P2): Conjoined twins are persons. (C1): All conjoined twins have a right to life. (P3): Every person has the right to bodily autonomy and integrity. (P4): Lara has no legal claim to the use or even sustained use of the body or organs of Lea. (C2): The right to life of Lara does not include the legal right to use or even continuous use of the body or organs of Lea. (P6): The separation of Lara and Lea, and thus the fatal deprivation of the use of the body or organs of Lea, does not violate the right to life of Lara. (C3): The separation of Lara and Lea, and thus the fatal deprivation of the use of the body of Lea, should not be prohibited by law.
We can also further modify this thought experiment to make it even more like the situation of pregnancy. Let us assume that medical progress will at some point make it possible to extract stem cells from Lara's bone marrow, modify them and mature functioning kidneys for Lara within nine months. After that, a separation could take place in which both women could survive and then lead an independent life. However, this procedure and the subsequent operation are extremely time-consuming and associated with a significantly longer recovery time. Due to the current high psychological and physical strain Lara does not want to postpone the operation any longer and insists on an immediate separation. If Thomson, Boonin and their comrades-in-arms want to defend a right to abortion with the principles they have laid down, they would, in my opinion, not only in the previous situation but also in this one, must agree unconditionally to the demand for immediate separation and even direct killing if separation is otherwise impossible or more "burdensome" (at least according to Boonin). If this conclusion is unacceptable then it seems to me there must be something fundamentally wrong with Thomson´s and Boonin´s argument.
What makes Thomson's argument seem so convincing to many people at first glance is, at least in my opinion, on the one hand the constructed apparent proximity to the situation of organ failure, where there is generally a justified conviction that one has no obligation to donate an organ, but on the other hand also the "distribution of roles". Imagine, for example, that you and the violinist wake up after nine months and you are told that the violinist is now cured, but that you will die if he does not stay with you for another nine months until you too have recovered. Does the violinist, who himself is obviously not responsible for the fact that you are connected with him, now have the right to separate from you? From this perspective, things suddenly look different for many people and intuition changes accordingly. Of course, I don't know what considerations led Thomson to this construction. But the argument seems to me to be as suggestively brilliant as it is perfidious.
It seems to me it is correct that the violinist has no positive right to use or even sustained use of your kidneys (or, in the case from Boonin, of your bone marrow). You are therefore not obliged to make yourself available to the violinist as a living dialysis machine, to donate a kidney or bone marrow (you may even defend yourself and resist being plugged into him). It would be very kind of you if you would do so. Not doing so, however, is not a culpable omission.
However, if - for whatever reason - a connection to the violinist already exists and the separation requires an action on your part or on the part of a third party which, under the given circumstances, causes the death of the violinist, then this can only be justified according to the principle of double effect without violating the negative right to life, if your own health is in very serious or life threatening danger by maintaining the connection (e.g. if your own body is poisoned and is damaged in such a way that e. g. you fall in a permanent vegetative state or you even die in the end) and the separation does not involve a direct intended killing action.
Contrary to Boonin's argumentation, the refusal to donate an organ or bone marrow is thus, at least by my lights, ethically fundamentally different from the act of separation, which leads to death or other serious damage to the violinist's (or to the other twin´s) health. It seems it does not matter whether a natural or third-party event causing death was already present before your involvement, since in both situations it is now your action or that of third parties that causes the violinist's death. Therefore, in the case of the violinist, the case of the conjoined twins and the case of my analogue pregnancy example at least condition four of DDE is violated (there must be a proportionate reason to allow the bad effect) and if we look at the case of abortion condition two (the good effect must not be achieved or caused by the bad effect) and condition three (only the good effect may be intended) of DDE are always violated. Therefore, under the condition that the unborn human being is a person, I think DDE explains why abortion is never morally and legally permissible. Here is a summary of the final argument concerning abortion:
(P1): Every person has a right to life. (P2): Unborn human beings are persons (assumed for the argument). (C1): All unborn human beings have a right to life. (P3): Every person has the right to bodily autonomy and integrity. (P4): An unborn human being has no legal claim to the use of the woman's body or organs (granted for the sake of argument). (C2): The right to life of an unborn human being does not include the legal claim to the use or even sustained use of the woman's body or organs (granted for the sake of argument by P4). (P5) An act by which an innocent or incapacitated person is intentionally - i.e., either as a means to an end or as an end in itself - directly or indirectly killed, is, without exception, morally wrong and inadmissible. An act in which the death of an innocent person is caused unintentionally and indirectly can only be permissible if the criterion of proportionality is satisfied and thus one's own life is at stake or one´s own health is seriously and permanently damaged. (P6): An abortion is an act, in which an unborn human being is intentionally directly or indirectly killed, i.e., by a direct attack or the lethal deprivation of the use of the woman's body. (C3): An abortion is, without exception, morally wrong and inadmissible.
What do you think about this reasoning? I´d be interested to read your thoughts, too. Thanks in advance :-)
Interesting thoughts! I have a clarificatory question. As I understand it, the bodily rights argument appeals to the idea that a certain thought experiment (the violinist for Thomson, the McFall v. Shimp case for Boonin) is analogous to the case of pregnancy and abortion, such that it's reasonable to think that since someone in the thought experiment doesn't have a right to someone else's assistance, neither does the fetus have a right to the woman's gestational assistance. And as I understand it, an adequate pro-life reply involves pointing to a relevant difference between the two cases that shows that they are plausibly not analogous, after all.
So I've been assuming that a prolife reply that appeals to the doctrine of double effect would work as follows: it'd be argued that this doctrine is such that it permits unplugging from the violinist and it permits Shimp to refrain from helping McFall, it does not permit the pregnant woman's having an abortion.
Is the above a correct understanding of your approach? To me it seems like it might not be the way you're using the doctrine of double effect because you write this: "Therefore, in the case of the violinist, the case of the conjoined twins and the case of my analogue pregnancy example at least condition four of DDE is violated (there must be a proportionate reason to allow the bad effect)." This makes it sound like you think the doctrine of double effect doesn't actually permit unplugging from the violinist in Thomson's case.
Is your response to the violinist argument something like this?: We have good reason to adopt a version of the doctrine of double effect that implies that we're actually not permitted to unplug from the violinist, after all, contrary to our initial intuitions.
thanks again for your response! I could not reply to your last response and therefore I had to reply to the second to last, sorry. I have some further questions and thoughts concerning the points you mentioned. I address them in the order you listed them (FYI: I am from Germany and therefore not a native speaker. So, if some things I say or have said are unclear please feel free to ask me to clarify)
ad (i) My version of DDE is not a novel or special one. Its basic principles are found in the SEP (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/) and many other books and articles. I only gave a more detailed description and short explanation of the core principles to avoid misunderstandings and defuse some main objections. Therefore, I would like to know where you think I differ from standard formulations of DDE and which of the core tenets of my formulation you reject for what reasons.
ad (ii) Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me you may have misunderstood the main point of my whole initial argument. Of course, you can respond to a thought experiment with another thought experiment with which your opponent might have more problems to give a consistent answer because in this case he is commited to a conclusion which conflicts with his intuitions and he therefore might be willing to give up his initial position. This is certainly also not a wrong or dubious tactic, maybe initially helpful and it may even compell your opponent to change his views in a conversation about controversial topics. But stopping here does neither explain nor justify any conclusion of these thought experiments.
Therefore, I think we need an explanation and a rational justification for the moral conclusions we draw. In my opinion this is an indispensable prerequisite for having any fruitful discussions on (controversial) moral questions. I think we must do the hard work to find, explicate and defend the principles which undergird our conclusions and revise them if reasons compel us (by the way, I once also believed that it is permissible to unplug from the violinist).
I think our moral intuition is something like a "guide" that helps us discover basic moral truths and principles which then have to be systemized to build a robust rationally justified ethical system. Then this system with its principles can be applied to difficult or unclear cases, where our intuition may mislead us and where people for this reason even come to contrary conclusions. Therefore, what I was trying to do is to apply basic moral principles (like DDE and the difference between positive and negative rights and duties) to the thought experiments I mentioned to evaluate them and rationally justify the conclusions I draw. The thought experiments themselves are not meant to be an "argument" for any conclusion I drew.
ad (iii) Because of what you said in the rape case, I suspected that you do not think it is obvious that "unplugging" from the child in my first example is morally illicit. But I did not claim that this specific example in some way "proofs" that the responsibility objections does not go the heart of the matter, and neither was it meant as an argument (see above). What I was merely trying to say instead, is, that together with the twin case it might indicate that something crucial is missing in these cases. After that, I offered an argument on the basis of DDE with which I tried to show what is indeed missing in these cases and for what principled reasons, I think it is morally illicit to unplug from the child, the twin, or the violinist.
So even if you think it is morally licit to disconnect from the child in my first example, I think you still have to give a principled reason why you think this is the case and if you also think it is illicit to disconnect from the other twin you have to show a crucial morally relevant difference in these cases and why this leads to opposite conclusions (I do not think it makes a difference but we can make the siamese twins case some form of "rape", too, by imagining that an evil embryologist kidnapped the mother and deliberately connected the healthy twin to the one with the missing kidneys at a very early stage in pregnancy).
ad (iv) I think this is the main point where our convictions differ, and which lead us to different conclusions. Rooted in my account of natural law I have the firm conviction that it is never morally permissible to intentionally kill an innocent human being. My reason for this position is that I think that (a) the end never justifies the means, (b) every person has an inviolable right to be treated as an end in itself and never as a means to and end and (c) every person has an inviolable equal right to life.
It seems to me your position on the other hand implies some form of consequentialism and utilitarianism which I reject. If you think that sometimes it is permissible to intentionally kill an innocent human being what exactly are the conditions that justify such an act? How many lives have to be at stake or how many atrocities have to be prevented to justify killing an innocent person? For example, is it morally licit for me to kill your daughter if this is the only way to produce a drug which cures leukaemia for all people on this planet? (or to give a more realistic example: Is it morally permissible to abort a child if this is the only way to develop and produce a vaccine which could save many lives?). Or may I painlessly kill your child if otherwise my own child would be tortured to death? Of course, I have a strong desire to protect my own child and if I would be in such a situation maybe I would end up actually killing your child. But my strong intuition and desire to save my child no matter what cannot change the fact that it would be objectively wrong to act this way because this would clearly violate your daughter´s inviolable right to life. Because our desires and passions can therefore have a strong influence on our moral evaluation and can quickly misguide us, especially in extreme situations that affect us in a special personal way, I think it is crucial to have a firm and rationally grounded ethical foundation to think and evaluate difficult situations properly and as objectively as possible.
I hope this further clarified my position and explained why I argued the way I did. Please let my know if you have further questions or remarks and of course I am interested in your response to the questions I raised :-)
I don't know much about DDE, never having seriously studied it. So your version of DDE could be completely standard, for all I know. Even so, if it conflicts with the intuitive judgment that it's permissible to unplug oneself from the violinist, this seems to me like a strong reason against it.
I don't necessarily reject your DDE, though. What I reject is the conjunction of (a) DDE and (b) the claim that DDE implies that it's wrong to unplug oneself from the violinist.
You wrote, 'The thought experiments themselves are not meant to be an "argument" for any conclusion I drew.' Then maybe I did misunderstand what you were saying, because I thought that you were pointing to a few thought experiments as support for DDE, arguing that DDE accounts for our intuitive judgments on those thought experiments and that this is reason to accept DDE. If the thought experiments aren't meant as support for any of your premises, then a question that comes to mind is: why should we accept the DDE you're appealing to? If there isn't strong reason to accept it, then if there's tension between DDE and the intuitive judgment that it's permissible to unplug from the violinist, this seems to me like adequate reason to reject DDE.
You wrote, 'So even if you think it is morally licit to disconnect from the child in my first example, I think you still have to give a principled reason why you think this is the case and if you also think it is illicit to disconnect from the other twin you have to show a crucial morally relevant difference in these cases and why this leads to opposite conclusions.' Yes, this seems like a good point to me. It might be that the following argument is strong: it's wrong for the twin to unplug herself; there's no morally relevant difference between the twin unplugging herself and the woman in your first example disconnecting from the child; so, it's wrong for the woman in your first example to disconnect from the child. And this conclusion would threaten my view that it's permissible to unplug from the violinist, given the similarity between unplugging from the violinist and the woman in your first example disconnecting from the child. I need to think more about this argument.
Regarding the point about whether it's sometimes permissible to intentionally kill an innocent human being, I don't accept consequentialism, by which I mean the view that the value of an act's consequences is the only thing relevant to whether the act is morally permissible. I'm inclined to accept a kind of ethical pluralism along the lines of WD Ross'. I think the value of an act's consequences is one of the things relevant to whether the act is morally permissible. And when refraining from doing an act would lead to disaster, I think this can give us a decisive moral reason to do it, even when there are strong moral reasons against doing it that derive from more Kantian considerations. The questions you pose are hard to answer because my answering them requires me to have views about how considerations about consequences interact with considerations about rights violations on the sort of pluralism I accept. I don't have a lot of detailed views about this matter.
thank you for your response and the clarification question. Indeed, I think that unplugging from the violinist is wrong, too! By my lights this is the clear result if you accept some form of natural law ethics and apply DDE to all of these cases. In my opinion most of the ongoing difficulties in the responses to Thomson´s or Boonin´s arguments result exactly in trying to argue that "unplugging" from the violinist is permissible, but "unplugging" from the fetus is not and by accepting that not having a duty to donate an organ (where the needy person has indeed no positive right to claim our organs) is in some relevant sense similar to not having a duty to refrain from actively withdrawing already existing life preserving bodily support, as in pregancy or in the twin case (where we therefore would almost always have to act in a way which violates the negative right to life of the other person). For these reasons I also come to the conclusion that the bone marrow case is fundamentally different from pregnancy because there has not yet been established a connection and it is not an action from you that causes the death of the other person. Therefore, as I have tried to show, I think that indeed our intuitions in these constructed cases are easily misled (e. g. see my reversed violinist case) and it is therefore crucial to analyze them with solid ethical principles.
Because of the reasons I have given I think under normal circumstances, where there is no life threatening situation, both actions ("unplugging" the violinist and the fetus) are clearly impermissible (although we can of course claim appropriate compensation from the kidnappers in the violinist case (or the rapist in the pregnancy case) as well as their appropriate punishment for the violation of our liberties or personal/bodily integrity).
For the record, besides the reasons I have given regarding the bodily rights issue, I think from the concept of normative natural teleology it follows that the unborn human being has a fundamental right to be allowed to grow up in the body of its biological mother due to the natural orientation of the sexual act and the female reproductive organs, and that it is the duty of mother and father to protect the life of the child.
For these reasons I think the "dissimilarities strategy" surely pulls severe holes in many bodily rights arguments and often is a useful tool in conversations. But I think to successfully make a general case against them and to put the Pro-Life position on a firm ethical foundation we have to assume a natural law framework which, on the one hand, grounds the personhood of any human being by anchoring moral status in the constitutively inherent and thus essential disposition of the species-specific nature to develop rational and moral capacities and, on the other hand, gives us solid ethical tools to carefully evaluate conflicts with rights and duties in the thought experiments put forward.
So if you think that unplugging from the violinist (or the child with the hereditary disease or the siamese twin) is permissible I would be interested to know where you disagree with my reasoning and which ethical principles I used to examine these cases you think are false or at least implausible.
(i) I agree that it's worth considering the prospects of responding to the violinist argument by trying to undermine our confidence in the intuition that it's permissible to unplug from the violinist. I have reservations about trying to undermine the violinist intuition by appeal to your version of the DDE. Like most people, I find it really intuitively plausible that it's OK to unplug from the violinist. So in response to an argument against this intuitive judgment that appeals to an elaborate version of DDE, I'm inclined to give a Moorean response and reject the conjunction of the premises of this DDE-based argument instead of taking this DDE-based argument as adequate grounds for rejecting the intuition about the violinist.
(ii) But there are other ways to undermine the intuition that it's permissible to unplug the violinist that seem more plausible to me and that are suggested by some of the thought experiments you appeal to. I share the intuition that it would be wrong for Lea to 'unplug' from Lara. I also share the intuition that it would be wrong for the violinist to unplug from you, in the modified violinist case you mention. I don't know how to explain why these judgments about these cases would be true while at the same time it would be permissible to unplug from the original violinist case. So a simple argument from analogy like the following strikes me as interesting and promising: (1) It's wrong for Lea to unplug from Lara; (2) there's no relevant difference between Lea's unplugging from Lara and your unplugging from the violinist; (3) So, it's wrong for you to unplug from the violinist. Since this attempt to undermine our intuition about the violinist doesn't appeal to anything too theoretically complicated like a specific version of DDE, it strikes me as more compelling.
(iii) I don't myself find it intuitively obvious that it's wrong to 'unplug' from the child in the first case you give, which is supposed to show that the responsibility objection doesn't really get 'to the heart of the matter.' So it doesn't make me think that I really need something other than the responsibility objection.
(iv) I'm not on board with P5 of your final argument: "An act by which an innocent or incapacitated person is intentionally - i.e., either as a means to an end or as an end in itself - directly or indirectly killed, is, without exception, morally wrong and inadmissible." If I have to intentionally kill an innocent or incapacitated person to prevent a billion people from being tortured to death, I think it's morally OK to do it.
In the Gentic Case it certainly wouldn't pass muster in court. Legally speaking, the parent would not be compelled to donate bone marrow, so I can't agree that it's intuitive it is that there is a right to the bone marrow there.
Does an obligation to assist always require the highest level of assistance no matter the effect on the person assisting or the potential risks? You position pregnancy as temporary but it makes permanent changes to your body and health. And even a normal pregnancy has a risk of death with little to no warning.
In the Gentic Case it certainly wouldn't pass muster in court. Legally speaking, the parent would not be compelled to donate bone marrow, so I can't agree that it's intuitive it is that there is a right to the bone marrow there. What do you mean by "legally speaking"? Laws are influenced by our morality. If our morality changes, the law will change accordingly. Was there any point in this comment?
Does an obligation to assist always require the highest level of assistance no matter the effect on the person assisting or the potential risks? Yes. The "burdensomeness threshold" (assuming this is a thing) does not apply in this case. The act that resulted in your obligation to assist was VOLUNTARY (with the obvious exception of rape). We don't live in Gilead (or whatever other dystopian world pro-choicers use to fearmonger). There are no wives holding your legs while a commander forcibly ejaculates in your womb.
The reason is because each person is the owner of their body and only they can decide who can be inside it. Correct. As the owner of your body, you decided to use it and have sex (after giving consent to it). One of the foreseeable results of this action is that a new human being will spawn inside your body. By giving consent to that action, you accept its potential results. When you agree to play poker, you accept that you might lose. Assuming that this new human you allowed to spawn inside your body is a person with the right to exist, you have no excuse to evict them. And no, it doesn't matter whether your body and health will be permanently affected or not, cause that was your choice. No amount of stretch marks or urinary incontinence will ever give you permission to kill another human being. Period.
We should distinguish between moral rights and legal rights, and here is how I think of the distinction. When we have a legal right to something, that just means that the legal system we're subject to is a certain way. If I have a legal right to free speech, that just means that the legal system I'm subject to is such as to require certain others to permit me to express myself in certain ways, for example. But moral rights aren't dependent on legal systems in this way. They're prior to legal systems. For example, we have a moral right to life even if we're under a deeply unjust legal system according to which it's legally permitted for others to kill us for no reason.
When I say that it's intuitive in the Genetic Case that McFall has a right to Shimp’s assistance, I mean that it's intuitive that McFall has a moral right to Shimp's assistance. I assume you're right that 'legally speaking, the parent would not be compelled to donate bone marrow.' That means that McFall lacks a legal right to Shimp's assistance under the current legal system. But that doesn't show that McFall lacks a moral right to Shimp's assistance. All I need for my purposes is that McFall has a moral right to Shimp's assistance. That's enough to show that RP-C, which (I will now clarify) is a principle about moral rights, accounts for something true about the Genetic Case.
Good question about levels of assistance. No, I don't think that 'an obligation to assist always requires the highest level of assistance no matter the effect on the person assisting or the potential risk.' If I thought that, then I would be committed to thinking that a pregnant woman is obligated to assist the fetus even when doing so would very likely kill her, and I don't think that. I think that a person has an obligation to provide assistance in this context only if the assistance doesn't surpass a certain level of burdensomeness. Call that threshold, whatever it is, “the burdensomeness threshold.” Your question helps me see that RP-C needs a bit more detail to capture my view:
RP-C: If as a foreseeable result of your voluntary act someone will die if you don’t assist them, and if they wouldn’t need your assistance if you hadn’t done the act, and if the reason why they wouldn’t need your assistance if you hadn’t done the act is that they would never have existed if you hadn’t done the act, *and if the burdensomeness of providing the needed assistance would not surpass the burdensomeness threshold, then they have a right to your assistance.
I don’t have much to say yet about where exactly the burdensomeness threshold is correctly drawn. What’s important for my purposes is that the burdens of pregnancy and birth (which of course are enormous) don’t surpass that threshold; for if those burdens did surpass it, then RP-C* would not imply that the fetus has a right to the woman’s life-saving assistance. And I think we have good reason to think that the burdens of pregnancy and birth don’t surpass the threshold. Consider a version of the Replicator Case in which the life-saving assistance Betty can offer the baby she just created is approximately as burdensome as pregnancy and birth. It still seems that Betty would be wronging the baby by walking away and letting it die, and so it still seems that the baby has a right to Betty’s assistance. That indicates that the burdensomeness threshold is high enough that the burdens of pregnancy and birth don’t surpass it.
Given that your org is seeking to make abortion illegal, I don't see the point in making the distinction. At the end of the day, you are making a case to restrict legal rights. That's why the fact that it would not pass muster legally, matters here. Your goal is really not in line with the way the law is applied in any other instance.
Anytime you say that one person has the right to be inside of another person's body, you have crossed “the burdensomeness threshold”. It's absolutely not appropriate to ever strip someone of the ownership of their body, even temporarily.
No, if the assistance required is AS BURDENSOME as pregnancy, requiring something inside her she does not want there, potentially resulting in permanent health consequences or even death, no, Betty has no such obligation. No one is EVER obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body.
Well, the distinction seems very important to me. It's true that my ultimate conclusion is something about what legal rights fetuses ought to have, but my reasoning in favor of that conclusion appeals at a certain point to the premise that fetuses have moral rights of a certain sort. So drawing the distinction is important because it allows me to clearly explain the nature of my reasoning.
You say that 'no one is EVER obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body.' Do you mean that no one is ever legally required to allow another person to remain inside their body? Or, do you instead mean to suggest that no one is ever morally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body? If you mean the first thing, then it doesn't conflict with my argument or position. My view isn't that pregnant women are currently legally required to allow fetal persons to remain inside their body, but rather that they ought to be legally required to do this in most cases.
If your claim is that no one is ever morally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body, then your claim is too extreme to be plausible, for two reasons. First, suppose that a woman is pregnant with a healthy 39-week-old fetus, that the earliest she could be induced to give birth is next week, and that there’s one way that she could be rid of the fetus today: have a late term abortion. And let’s suppose that the abortion would be just as painful and risky for the woman at this point as giving birth. If no one is ever morally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body, then it’s morally permissible for the woman in this case to have an abortion in this situation. But that seems implausible. The view that abortions that late in pregnancy are morally permissible is an extreme view.
Second, sometimes it's surely morally obligatory to allow another person to be attached to your body without being inside it. (See below for such a case.) And since this is so, it would be surprising if it could never be morally obligatory to allow another person to be inside one's body. It’s hard to think of a reason why it would be true both that allowing one sort of connection would sometimes be obligatory and that allowing the other sort of connection could never obligatory. (Can you provide such a reason?) So it shouldn’t surprise us if it were sometimes obligatory to allow someone to be inside one’s body - at least for a time and when doing so doesn’t surpass a certain threshold of burdensomeness.
Here's a case in which it's morally obligatory to allow another person to be attached to your body without being inside of it, drawn from a recent article by philosopher Perry Hendricks:
CABIN: "Sally is 9 months pregnant. Unfortunately - as occasionally happens - she doesn't know that she's pregnant. One day, while out hiking, a snowstorm unexpectedly hits, and she is forced to take shelter in a cabin. To make matters worse, she goes into labor while stuck in the cabin. The birth goes well, and her baby is healthy. Sally is stuck in her cabin for 7 days before she is finally dug out. Rescuers find her alive and well, but her infant is dead due to starvation - Sally did not feed her infant, despite having ample food for herself, and producing ample breastmilk (there was no baby formula available in the cabin)." (https://philpapers.org/archive/HENMBN.pdf)
Surely it would be morally wrong for Sally to refrain from breastfeeding her baby. In other words, she's morally obligated to breastfeed her baby. And so, it's sometimes the case that one is morally obligated to allow someone to be connected to one's body without them being inside one's body. And so, it would be surprising if one is never morally obligated to allow someone to be connected to one's body while being inside it.
If your grounds for believing that Betty would not be wronging the baby she created by letting him die is that this follows from your more general view that 'no one is EVER obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body,' then it might be worth reconsidering whether you really have good grounds for your belief.
Sure, a fetus has moral rights but it's important to note that when it comes to legal rights, and even moral rights, you are wanting to grant them something extraordinary. I personally don't care what you think of anything morally, I care about people trying to strip women of their rights and their humanity, making them incubation machines.
I mean it morally. And yes, the first part would conflict with your position, because again, you want to change that legally.
" suppose that a woman is pregnant with a healthy 39-week-old fetus, that the earliest she could be induced to give birth is next week, and that there’s one way that she could be rid of the fetus today: have a late term abortion. "
If you want to complain about extreme, stop coming up with ridiculously extreme examples. There is no way there is an abortion available and no way to induce labor. If a surgeon in there, they can do a C-section. But since you want to play stupid games, yes she has the right to end the pregnancy EVEN IF IT MEANS KILLING THAT 39 WEEK OLD FETUS. A woman always has the right to not be pregnant and not have someone inside her body. Period, no matter what you want to throw at me. It's the basic principle I'm starting from.
"But that seems implausible."
Wow, you have some nerve after the implausible situation you just put forth!
You think it's extreme, I think the right to body sovereignty is extremely important. Yes, THAT important. It is THE MOST fundamental right you have. It's WHY you have a right to life.
We are not talking about being attached, we are talking a bout being inside, and no, one does not automatically mean the other is true. They are very different.
" It’s hard to think of a reason why it would be true both that allowing one sort of connection would sometimes be obligatory and that allowing the other sort of connection could never obligatory."
The reason is because each person is the owner of their body and only they can decide who can be inside it. Not hard for me to come up with. I mean, the fact that they are two separate and different things and therefor are treated differently should have been the obvious answer for you. I find it downright bizarre that you conclude that because you sometimes have a moral obligation to breast feed, you therefor have a moral obligation to be pregnant. Where is the logic there, exactly? Because again, two very different things with VERY different burden levels.
The right to be the sole owner of your body is an excellent grounds for my belief. Frankly I think the crusade to outlaw a woman's right to control what happens inside her body to be disgusting.
You write: "And yes, the first part would conflict with your position, because again, you want to change that legally."
Oh, I think we might just be understanding the phrase 'conflicts with' differently. When I said that the claim that no one is ever legally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body does not 'conflict with' my position, I just meant that my position and arguments aren't shown to be mistaken by the fact (assuming it is a fact) that no one is ever legally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body. But it's true that its being the case that no one is ever legally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body does 'conflict with' my position in the sense that my position entails that it ought not be the case that no one is ever legally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body.
You write: "But since you want to play stupid games, yes she has the right to end the pregnancy EVEN IF IT MEANS KILLING THAT 39 WEEK OLD FETUS."
That's quite a bullet to bite! Well, if you have really managed to believe that aborting a 39 week old fetus in that situation is morally permissible, then I can see why the first argument I gave for thinking that it's sometimes morally obligatory to allow another person to be inside one's body wouldn't be convincing to you.
You write: "The reason is because each person is the owner of their body and only they can decide who can be inside it. Not hard for me to come up with."
It sounds like you're reasoning as follows:
(1) Each person is the owner of their body. (2) Part of what it is for a person to own her own body is for her to never be morally obligated to allow another person inside it. (3) So, each person is such that she is never morally obligated to allow another person inside her body.
Here's my response. The above argument seems just as plausible as this parallel argument:
(1) Each person is the owner of their body. (2)* Part of what it is for a person to own her own body is for her to never be morally obligated to allow another person to be attached-to-but-not-inside it. (3)* So, each person is such that she is never morally obligated to allow another person to be attached-to-but-not-inside her body.
So if the first argument should convince us, then the second one should, too. But the second argument shouldn't convince us, for (as the Cabin case I gave illustrates) the conclusion (3)* is false. So, the first argument shouldn't convince us either. And so, the reason you give for thinking that it's true both that allowing one sort of connection would sometimes be obligatory while the other sort could never be obligatory fails.
Assuming that you share my intuition in the Cabin case that the breastfeeding is obligatory, I think you'll probably want to resist my argument by saying that (2) is more plausible than (2)*. Am I correct in thinking so? If so, it would help me understand where you're coming from if you could explain why you believe that being the owner of one's body does make it so that one is never morally obligated to allow another person inside one's body yet does not make it so that one is never morally obligated to allow another person to be attached-to-but-not-inside one's body. What reason is there for thinking that ownership of one's own body works like this?
I agree that we own our bodies, but having property rights over something is obviously compatible with many restrictions on how one can permissibly use it. The fact that I own my body is compatible with the fact that it's not morally permissible for me to use my body to (for example) hit people for no reason, and it's also compatible with the fact that it's sometimes not morally permissible for me to refrain from allowing somebody to be connected to my body. It feels arbitrary to draw an absolute moral line at allowing another person (such as a fetus) to be inside one's body, as you do.
Breastfeeding still has nothing to do with being inside someone's body. Whether or not someone has an obligation to breastfeed (which again is not necessarily a given) does not mean they have an obligation to have someone inside them. They are very different.
" If so, it would help me understand where you're coming from if you could explain why you believe that being the owner of one's body does make it so that one is never morally obligated to allow another person inside one's body yet does not make it so that one is never morally obligated to allow another person to be attached-to-but-not-inside one's body."
I didn't take a position on the moral obligation to breastfeed other than to point out it's irrelevant because they are two different things. I STILL don't get your insistence that one means the other. You are just arbitrarily declaring that.
"and it's also compatible with the fact that it's sometimes not morally permissible for me to refrain from allowing somebody to be connected to my body."
You are certainly free to have your opinion, not everyone is going to agree with your subjective position on that.
" It feels arbitrary to draw an absolute moral line at allowing another person (such as a fetus) to be inside one's body, as you do."
Your feelings don't mean that's true. My positions are not just based on a whim. Calling two different things different seems far less arbitrary that insisting they are the same for... reasons?
You write, "Calling two different things different seems far less arbitrary that insisting they are the same for... reasons?"
Clearly I haven't denied that two different things are different. I'm denying that two different things are relevantly different. That is, I'm denying that those two things -- allowing someone to be inside one's body and allowing someone to be connected-to-but-not-inside one's body -- are different in such a way that ownership of one's body entails that one of them is sometimes morally obligatory yet does not entail that the other is sometimes morally obligatory.
Thanks for your thoughts on my article, I've found it helpful to think through the issues you raised.
They are so different in scale and impact, the "burdensome threshold" so different for each, I find your position absurd. It seems based more on your want for an argument than any real logic.
"Further, the reason why the fetus wouldn’t need the woman’s assistance if she hadn’t had voluntary sex is that the fetus would never have existed had the woman not done this act. So, RP-C implies that the pregnant woman’s fetus has a right to the pregnant woman’s assistance. And since the only way for the woman to assist the fetus is to let the fetus use her uterus, the fetus must have a right to use the woman’s uterus."
And who is demanding the right (hint: it isn't the fetus)?
"Intuitively, the baby in this case has a right to Betty’s assistance, and RP-C can explain why, for all of the conditions mentioned in RP-C hold true in this case: a foreseeable result of Betty’s voluntary act of using the machine is that a baby will die if Betty does not assist him; the baby wouldn’t need Betty’s assistance if Betty hadn’t performed the act; and the reason why the baby wouldn’t need Betty’s assistance if she hadn’t done the act is that the baby would never have existed if Betty hadn’t done the act."
This is a very poor analogy for pregnancy because it doesn't take into regard the nature of pregnancy and how it affects the pregnant person. What sort of "assistance" does she have to offer? Also, in this case, the death is natural instead of by a "deliberate" act — as Pro-lifers would like to call it.
"Intuitively, McFall has a right to Shimp’s assistance, and RP-C can explain why, for all of the following are true: a foreseeable result of Shimp’s voluntary act of having a biological child is that McFall will die if Shimp does not assist him; and McFall wouldn’t need Shimp’s assistance if Shimp hadn’t performed the act; and the reason why McFall wouldn’t need Shimp’s assistance if Shimp hadn’t done the act is that McFall would never have existed if Shimp hadn’t done the act. "
Ah, the classic "parents have a special obligation to their children." I think the outcome of the case would remain the same if the plaintiff and defendant were parent and child instead of cousins. Again this is a natural death, so what's wrong with that?
Apologies for the delay in replying; I just noticed your comment.
I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the Replicator and Genetic cases. I agree that the former is 'a very poor analogy for pregnancy' if by that you mean that it's really different from the case of pregnancy in many ways. That doesn't undermine my suggestion that a certain thing is true of the Replicator case (the baby in that case has a right to Betty's assistance) that's accounted for by my general principle (RP-C), and that consequently there is some reason to accept my general principle. With respect to the Genetic Case, you interpret me as adopting the pro-life 'classic' that 'parents have a special obligation to their children.' But I never adopted that view (and in fact I'm agnostic about whether that kind of biological relationship generates special duties to assist). The Genetic Case is just meant to be another case in which something seems true that is explained by my general principle, and thereby gives us further reason to accept the general principle.
You wrote, "And who is demanding the right (hint: it isn't the fetus)?" I don't understand what you're getting at. I think you might be suggesting that the fetus has a right to the woman's assistance only if the fetus is demanding that right; and that since the fetus is not doing any such demanding, the fetus must lack the right to the woman's assistance. If that's what you have in mind, I deny that a person has a right to something only if they are actively demanding that right.
thanks again for your thoughtful and honest response. Because it seems there are only a limited number of responses to one posting allowed, I answer in a new one. I have some preliminary concluding remarks, but I gladly respond if you have further questions or challenges for me ;-)
It seems I used the term "argument" in a too strict sense. What I wanted to so say is that my thought experiments were not meant as a "justification" or "explanation" for the conclusion I drew. Of course, they can in a sense be seen as an argument for the core tenets and the coherence of DDE. But the problem seems to be that without applying DDE to these cases many people (including you) come to very different conclusions.
DDE, on the other hand, includes a set of basic moral principles which are grounded in natural law and, at least by my lights, seem to be intuitively plausible (e .g. you may not do evil so that good my come, some acts are intrinsically evil, the end never justifies the means, an act with an evil or vicious intention in and of itself can never be good). DDE comprises four criteria to be met, each of which must be necessarily satisfied and which, taken together, are sufficient to justify a non-obligatory act with both good and reprehensible effects that a morally responsible and reasonable actor would wish to perform. Therefore, the "compilation" of the four core tenets of DDE in turn form a principle to generally evaluate the moral permissibility of actions with a good and bad effect.
In my opinion this clearly seems to be the case with the violinist case, the twin case and in pregnancy. In all these situations and without any serious health or life threatening issues at least (K4) is violated and therefore the action of separation which causes the death of another human being cannot be justified. Moreover, in normal cases of pregnancy where the mother is seeking an abortion and therefore the deliberate killing of an innocent human being, DDE does not even begin to apply, not only because the disproportionality is obvious and therefore (K4) is violated, but because the death of the child is directly and intentionally intended and therefore (K2) and (K3) are violated, too.
For these reasons I think that IF you accept some version of DDE you are logically committed to the conclusion that it is not morally licit to separate from the violinist, the twin or to have an abortion. Therefore, I fail to see how you can coherently reject the conjunction of (a) accepting DDE and (b) the claim that DDE implies that it's wrong to unplug oneself from the violinist.
I have not yet read Ross but in my opinion ethical pluralism has some very serious problems. First, I think it is difficult to prevent it from collapsing in some form of relativism. Second, it seems to exclude that there are inherently wrong actions (like killing innocent people, rape or enslaving people). But most seriously it seems that it cannot give us rationally justified and binding guidelines to adequately evaluate difficult situations like the one´s I mentioned. Correct me if I am wrong but as far as I know ethical pluralism includes the view that for some real moral questions or situations there is no "right" answer. But if this is the case then how can we be sure that there are objectively binding right answers to moral questions in the first place? How exactly or by which criterions do we determine which questions are answerable and which are not? These are at least some of the difficulties I have with this view.
Great post! I had very similar thoughts when I read the Responsibility chapter in Beyond Roe.
Maybe the replicator scenario can be made even more analogous to a pregnancy in the following way:
The replicator machine is specifically designed to only create children. It's publicly available and anyone can use it. When you press the big red "Make a child" button a catheter is connected to your side and a five-year-old child is created on the other end of it. The child is your biological child, it's healthy and normal in every way except that it will need to stay connected to you for a couple of months until her own kidneys start working properly. Disconnecting the catheter would kill the child immediately.
To motivate people to use the machine, pressing the red button gives a pleasing physical sensation comparable to an orgasm.
Now Betty wants to experience the sensation but doesn't want the child so she makes sure to wear extra thick clothes to prevent the catheter from connecting but she knows that every now and then it doesn't work. She decides to take the risk anyway and presses the button. She finds herself connected to a walking/talking/smiling five-year-old.
Should she be legally permitted to kill the child by unplugging herself?
The reason why this example is closer to an unplanned pregnancy is that we know from biology what sex is for (not just for humans but for all animals). A baby is not just an unconnected side effect of having sex. It's what having sex is naturally ordered towards. Not in the sense that someone designed it that way but in the sense that we recognize what was its primary function that caused it to be selected by natural selection throughout evolution. The same way can say the heart is "for" pumping blood, eating is "for" putting nutrients into the body etc.
So there is no relevant difference between a tool for making children designed by humans and our reproductive systems having evolved through natural processes into tools for making children. Having sex is then exactly like pressing the "Make a child" button.
As Boonin advocates for abortion even if the pregnancy was planned and the mother just changed her mind later, I doubt this example would make a difference to him. But at least in my mind it further strengthens my intuition that the state should be permitted to legally protect the children created by the replicator machine by parents who voluntarily pressed the button, especially if this became a common thing and the number of children killed this way was reaching a million each year.
There is another point that can be made to show that allowing abortion based on Boonin's first responsibility principle (RP-A) is bogus. If pregnancy is equivalent to the Toxic chemicals case and we can argue that the unborn child doesn't have a right to the mother's assistance because without her voluntary act in the past the child wouldn't exist now, the same logic could be applied to any born child. If McFall doesn't have a right to Shimp's assistance in the Toxic chemicals scenario, no born child would then have a right to their mother's assistance either. After all, without her having sex in the past, the child wouldn't exist now. But that is surely absurd.
That said, I do think there are some interesting and promising responses to Boonin's argument for cases of rape. This article by folks at Justice for All is good: http://doc.jfaweb.org/Training/DeFactoGuardian-v03.pdf. It discusses several well-known strategies for dealing with bodily rights arguments in cases of rape, and helpfully identifies some limitations of those strategies. It also presents a novel strategy (see especially pages 16-18) that I find plausible. The paper is addressing Thomson's bodily rights argument. But applying the novel strategy to the case of McFall v. Shimp, the idea would be that the following is a relevant difference between the case of pregnancy and the McFall v. Shimp case: the woman who is pregnant as the result of rape is the 'de facto guardian' (in a sense the paper elucidates) of the fetus whereas Shimp is not the 'de facto guardian' of McFall.
Here's a video by of Josh Brahm using the 'de facto guardian' strategy (starting at 36:20): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aapKV1la2w
Thank you for this interesting article :-)
In my opinion the correct solution to all bodily rights issues is provided by applying the principle of double effect (I think Kate Greasley got it mostly right in her book on abortion ;-) ) and it also explains why even in rape cases abortion is not a morally licit option. I think it can also be shown that e .g. the bone marrow case is ethically fundamentally different from pregnancy and therefore the cases are not analogous and cannot be compared in the first place. If you are interested, I can share my thoughts on the matter in more detail.
here is my response to the bodily rights argument, defended by philosophers like Judith Thomson (the violinist case) and David Boonin (the bone marrow case). I think something like the following formulation is the strongest version of the argument to which I will respond:
(P1): Every person has a right to life.
(P2): Unborn human beings are persons (conceded at least for the sake of argument).
(C1): All unborn human beings have a right to life.
(P3): Every person has the right to bodily autonomy and integrity.
(P4): No human being has a legal claim to the use or even continued use of the body or organs of another human being.
(C2): The right to life of an unborn human being does not include the legal right to use or even to continue to use the woman's body or organs.
(P6): Abortion, and thus fatal deprivation of the use of the woman's body or organs, does not violate the right to life of the unborn human being.
(C3): Abortion, and thus the fatal deprivation of the use of the woman's body or organs, should not be legally prohibited.
Now, I think the parental obligation objection (there is a strong duty of parents to care for their depended offspring) as well as the responsibility objection (if you deliberately engage in an act that may result in the creation of a helpless, innocent or morally incapacitated and depended human being, you are - even without further explicit consent - responsible to care for this human being; at least you are not allowed to kill it in any case) is helpful, persuasive for many people and applicable in most circumstances. But I am afraid it does not go to the heart of the matter.
For example, I can come up with a thought experiment on pregnancy which is, at least by my lights, in turn analogous in all morally relevant aspects to the violinist case of Thomson and therefore sidesteps all Pro-Life objections which try to block the argument by pointing out dissimilarities. But I (as well as all Pro-Lifers I know of to which I presented this case) still think it is not permissible to remove the child from the uterus of the woman.
Imagine that in the future an incubator will be developed which is what we may call an artificial womb, and which can already care for a human being in the first stages of its development and let it mature until "birth". In this future, however, there is also a hereditary disease, which the growing child can only survive if it remains connected to the woman's body during pregnancy. In this thought experiment, the basic care of the child can thus obviously be provided without the woman's body and the connection would have to be maintained for therapeutic reasons alone. Suppose a woman does not want to carry her child (which is diagnosed with this disease) because it was conceived through rape and the psychological and physical strain until birth seems unbearable to her (we can even strengthen the case by assuming the embryo is a "stranger" and comes from a fertilized egg of another woman and was implanted without her consent). In this case, does she have the right to demand that the child be transferred to an appropriate incubator, even if this procedure unavoidably leads to the death of the child?
I think it is not permissible to do that and in my estimation in this case as well as in the case of the violinist the principle of double effect (DDE) needs to be considered. When we consider the conditions of DDE, I think all these cases are successfully resolved - even if we grant for the sake of argument Thomson´s premise that not even one’s own child has a natural right to the use of the woman´s body (I am aware that this principle has recently come under heavy attack by philosophers like Singer, Sandel and even Thomson. But I think there are defenses available, which persuasively respond to the criticism - e. g. by Oderberg, Cavanaugh or Černý). Here is my preferred formulation of the criterions of DDE:
(K2) The good main effect, i.e. the intended effect of the action, must follow at least as directly from the action as the reprehensible side effect. It should be noted that it is not the temporal aspect but the causality that is decisive for the immediacy. The reprehensible side effect must therefore either be caused by the good main effect or directly by the act which also directly causes the good main effect. It is not permissible for the good main effect to be caused by the reprehensible side effect, since in this case the actor would have to intend the reprehensible side effect as a means to bring about the good main effect (he who intends the end always also implicitly intends the means). However, the end never justifies the means. One must not, under any circumstances, intend something morally reprehensible, regardless of the good that can be achieved.
(K3) The reprehensible or evil side-effect must never itself be intended or willed as an end, but must merely be foreseen and permitted. Even if the reprehensible side effect does not cause the good main effect, it could still be equally intended. In this case, however, the actor would explicitly intend something morally reprehensible and thus it would be impermissible to perform the act altogether. The actor must also strive to minimize the reprehensible side effect as far as possible.
(K4) There must be a proportionate and sufficiently serious reason for allowing the reprehensible side-effect and performing the act that has a good main effect. One would not have such a reason if one carried out an act with a good main effect but a comparatively disproportionate reprehensible side effect.
Furthermore, there are thought experiments apart from pregnancy which highlight severe problems with the bodily rights reasoning of Thomson and Boonin. For example, consider the following case which is inspired by an idea from Francis Beckwith: Imagine that two girls, Lara and Lea, develop as conjoined twins. Furthermore, only in the body of Lea kidneys are formed and we know that Lara's body does not accept any donated kidney. Lara is therefore dependent for her survival on the connection to Lea's body and, in contrast to Lea, would not survive a potentially possible separation. In this scenario we are therefore even faced with the extreme case described by Thomson, in which the connection between two people must be maintained for a lifetime. Suppose that through the connection between the two bodies, the girls suffer for a few months every few years from physical and psychological problems comparable to a pregnancy, in addition to the otherwise already stressful situation. Lara is a fighter and has come to terms with the situation, not least for lack of alternatives. However, Lea, who has all the vital organs in her body, does not want to accept this situation any longer. In this case, does Lea have the right to demand separation, even if it means her sister Lara's death? According to the argument of Thomson or Boonin, I think this would have to be affirmed.
(P1): Every person has a right to life.
(P2): Conjoined twins are persons.
(C1): All conjoined twins have a right to life.
(P3): Every person has the right to bodily autonomy and integrity.
(P4): Lara has no legal claim to the use or even sustained use of the body or organs of Lea.
(C2): The right to life of Lara does not include the legal right to use or even continuous use of the body or organs of Lea.
(P6): The separation of Lara and Lea, and thus the fatal deprivation of the use of the body or organs of Lea, does not violate the right to life of Lara.
(C3): The separation of Lara and Lea, and thus the fatal deprivation of the use of the body of Lea, should not be prohibited by law.
What makes Thomson's argument seem so convincing to many people at first glance is, at least in my opinion, on the one hand the constructed apparent proximity to the situation of organ failure, where there is generally a justified conviction that one has no obligation to donate an organ, but on the other hand also the "distribution of roles". Imagine, for example, that you and the violinist wake up after nine months and you are told that the violinist is now cured, but that you will die if he does not stay with you for another nine months until you too have recovered. Does the violinist, who himself is obviously not responsible for the fact that you are connected with him, now have the right to separate from you? From this perspective, things suddenly look different for many people and intuition changes accordingly. Of course, I don't know what considerations led Thomson to this construction. But the argument seems to me to be as suggestively brilliant as it is perfidious.
It seems to me it is correct that the violinist has no positive right to use or even sustained use of your kidneys (or, in the case from Boonin, of your bone marrow). You are therefore not obliged to make yourself available to the violinist as a living dialysis machine, to donate a kidney or bone marrow (you may even defend yourself and resist being plugged into him). It would be very kind of you if you would do so. Not doing so, however, is not a culpable omission.
However, if - for whatever reason - a connection to the violinist already exists and the separation requires an action on your part or on the part of a third party which, under the given circumstances, causes the death of the violinist, then this can only be justified according to the principle of double effect without violating the negative right to life, if your own health is in very serious or life threatening danger by maintaining the connection (e.g. if your own body is poisoned and is damaged in such a way that e. g. you fall in a permanent vegetative state or you even die in the end) and the separation does not involve a direct intended killing action.
(P1): Every person has a right to life.
(P2): Unborn human beings are persons (assumed for the argument).
(C1): All unborn human beings have a right to life.
(P3): Every person has the right to bodily autonomy and integrity.
(P4): An unborn human being has no legal claim to the use of the woman's body or organs (granted for the sake of argument).
(C2): The right to life of an unborn human being does not include the legal claim to the use or even sustained use of the woman's body or organs (granted for the sake of argument by P4).
(P5) An act by which an innocent or incapacitated person is intentionally - i.e., either as a means to an end or as an end in itself - directly or indirectly killed, is, without exception, morally wrong and inadmissible. An act in which the death of an innocent person is caused unintentionally and indirectly can only be permissible if the criterion of proportionality is satisfied and thus one's own life is at stake or one´s own health is seriously and permanently damaged.
(P6): An abortion is an act, in which an unborn human being is intentionally directly or indirectly killed, i.e., by a direct attack or the lethal deprivation of the use of the woman's body.
(C3): An abortion is, without exception, morally wrong and inadmissible.
What do you think about this reasoning? I´d be interested to read your thoughts, too. Thanks in advance :-)
So I've been assuming that a prolife reply that appeals to the doctrine of double effect would work as follows: it'd be argued that this doctrine is such that it permits unplugging from the violinist and it permits Shimp to refrain from helping McFall, it does not permit the pregnant woman's having an abortion.
Is the above a correct understanding of your approach? To me it seems like it might not be the way you're using the doctrine of double effect because you write this: "Therefore, in the case of the violinist, the case of the conjoined twins and the case of my analogue pregnancy example at least condition four of DDE is violated (there must be a proportionate reason to allow the bad effect)." This makes it sound like you think the doctrine of double effect doesn't actually permit unplugging from the violinist in Thomson's case.
Is your response to the violinist argument something like this?: We have good reason to adopt a version of the doctrine of double effect that implies that we're actually not permitted to unplug from the violinist, after all, contrary to our initial intuitions.
thanks again for your response! I could not reply to your last response and therefore I had to reply to the second to last, sorry. I have some further questions and thoughts concerning the points you mentioned. I address them in the order you listed them (FYI: I am from Germany and therefore not a native speaker. So, if some things I say or have said are unclear please feel free to ask me to clarify)
ad (i) My version of DDE is not a novel or special one. Its basic principles are found in the SEP (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/) and many other books and articles. I only gave a more detailed description and short explanation of the core principles to avoid misunderstandings and defuse some main objections. Therefore, I would like to know where you think I differ from standard formulations of DDE and which of the core tenets of my formulation you reject for what reasons.
ad (ii) Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me you may have misunderstood the main point of my whole initial argument. Of course, you can respond to a thought experiment with another thought experiment with which your opponent might have more problems to give a consistent answer because in this case he is commited to a conclusion which conflicts with his intuitions and he therefore might be willing to give up his initial position. This is certainly also not a wrong or dubious tactic, maybe initially helpful and it may even compell your opponent to change his views in a conversation about controversial topics. But stopping here does neither explain nor justify any conclusion of these thought experiments.
Therefore, I think we need an explanation and a rational justification for the moral conclusions we draw. In my opinion this is an indispensable prerequisite for having any fruitful discussions on (controversial) moral questions. I think we must do the hard work to find, explicate and defend the principles which undergird our conclusions and revise them if reasons compel us (by the way, I once also believed that it is permissible to unplug from the violinist).
I think our moral intuition is something like a "guide" that helps us discover basic moral truths and principles which then have to be systemized to build a robust rationally justified ethical system. Then this system with its principles can be applied to difficult or unclear cases, where our intuition may mislead us and where people for this reason even come to contrary conclusions. Therefore, what I was trying to do is to apply basic moral principles (like DDE and the difference between positive and negative rights and duties) to the thought experiments I mentioned to evaluate them and rationally justify the conclusions I draw. The thought experiments themselves are not meant to be an "argument" for any conclusion I drew.
ad (iii) Because of what you said in the rape case, I suspected that you do not think it is obvious that "unplugging" from the child in my first example is morally illicit. But I did not claim that this specific example in some way "proofs" that the responsibility objections does not go the heart of the matter, and neither was it meant as an argument (see above). What I was merely trying to say instead, is, that together with the twin case it might indicate that something crucial is missing in these cases. After that, I offered an argument on the basis of DDE with which I tried to show what is indeed missing in these cases and for what principled reasons, I think it is morally illicit to unplug from the child, the twin, or the violinist.
So even if you think it is morally licit to disconnect from the child in my first example, I think you still have to give a principled reason why you think this is the case and if you also think it is illicit to disconnect from the other twin you have to show a crucial morally relevant difference in these cases and why this leads to opposite conclusions (I do not think it makes a difference but we can make the siamese twins case some form of "rape", too, by imagining that an evil embryologist kidnapped the mother and deliberately connected the healthy twin to the one with the missing kidneys at a very early stage in pregnancy).
It seems to me your position on the other hand implies some form of consequentialism and utilitarianism which I reject. If you think that sometimes it is permissible to intentionally kill an innocent human being what exactly are the conditions that justify such an act? How many lives have to be at stake or how many atrocities have to be prevented to justify killing an innocent person? For example, is it morally licit for me to kill your daughter if this is the only way to produce a drug which cures leukaemia for all people on this planet? (or to give a more realistic example: Is it morally permissible to abort a child if this is the only way to develop and produce a vaccine which could save many lives?). Or may I painlessly kill your child if otherwise my own child would be tortured to death? Of course, I have a strong desire to protect my own child and if I would be in such a situation maybe I would end up actually killing your child. But my strong intuition and desire to save my child no matter what cannot change the fact that it would be objectively wrong to act this way because this would clearly violate your daughter´s inviolable right to life. Because our desires and passions can therefore have a strong influence on our moral evaluation and can quickly misguide us, especially in extreme situations that affect us in a special personal way, I think it is crucial to have a firm and rationally grounded ethical foundation to think and evaluate difficult situations properly and as objectively as possible.
I hope this further clarified my position and explained why I argued the way I did. Please let my know if you have further questions or remarks and of course I am interested in your response to the questions I raised :-)
I don't necessarily reject your DDE, though. What I reject is the conjunction of (a) DDE and (b) the claim that DDE implies that it's wrong to unplug oneself from the violinist.
You wrote, 'The thought experiments themselves are not meant to be an "argument" for any conclusion I drew.' Then maybe I did misunderstand what you were saying, because I thought that you were pointing to a few thought experiments as support for DDE, arguing that DDE accounts for our intuitive judgments on those thought experiments and that this is reason to accept DDE. If the thought experiments aren't meant as support for any of your premises, then a question that comes to mind is: why should we accept the DDE you're appealing to? If there isn't strong reason to accept it, then if there's tension between DDE and the intuitive judgment that it's permissible to unplug from the violinist, this seems to me like adequate reason to reject DDE.
You wrote, 'So even if you think it is morally licit to disconnect from the child in my first example, I think you still have to give a principled reason why you think this is the case and if you also think it is illicit to disconnect from the other twin you have to show a crucial morally relevant difference in these cases and why this leads to opposite conclusions.' Yes, this seems like a good point to me. It might be that the following argument is strong: it's wrong for the twin to unplug herself; there's no morally relevant difference between the twin unplugging herself and the woman in your first example disconnecting from the child; so, it's wrong for the woman in your first example to disconnect from the child. And this conclusion would threaten my view that it's permissible to unplug from the violinist, given the similarity between unplugging from the violinist and the woman in your first example disconnecting from the child. I need to think more about this argument.
Regarding the point about whether it's sometimes permissible to intentionally kill an innocent human being, I don't accept consequentialism, by which I mean the view that the value of an act's consequences is the only thing relevant to whether the act is morally permissible. I'm inclined to accept a kind of ethical pluralism along the lines of WD Ross'. I think the value of an act's consequences is one of the things relevant to whether the act is morally permissible. And when refraining from doing an act would lead to disaster, I think this can give us a decisive moral reason to do it, even when there are strong moral reasons against doing it that derive from more Kantian considerations. The questions you pose are hard to answer because my answering them requires me to have views about how considerations about consequences interact with considerations about rights violations on the sort of pluralism I accept. I don't have a lot of detailed views about this matter.
thank you for your response and the clarification question. Indeed, I think that unplugging from the violinist is wrong, too! By my lights this is the clear result if you accept some form of natural law ethics and apply DDE to all of these cases. In my opinion most of the ongoing difficulties in the responses to Thomson´s or Boonin´s arguments result exactly in trying to argue that "unplugging" from the violinist is permissible, but "unplugging" from the fetus is not and by accepting that not having a duty to donate an organ (where the needy person has indeed no positive right to claim our organs) is in some relevant sense similar to not having a duty to refrain from actively withdrawing already existing life preserving bodily support, as in pregancy or in the twin case (where we therefore would almost always have to act in a way which violates the negative right to life of the other person). For these reasons I also come to the conclusion that the bone marrow case is fundamentally different from pregnancy because there has not yet been established a connection and it is not an action from you that causes the death of the other person. Therefore, as I have tried to show, I think that indeed our intuitions in these constructed cases are easily misled (e. g. see my reversed violinist case) and it is therefore crucial to analyze them with solid ethical principles.
Because of the reasons I have given I think under normal circumstances, where there is no life threatening situation, both actions ("unplugging" the violinist and the fetus) are clearly impermissible (although we can of course claim appropriate compensation from the kidnappers in the violinist case (or the rapist in the pregnancy case) as well as their appropriate punishment for the violation of our liberties or personal/bodily integrity).
For the record, besides the reasons I have given regarding the bodily rights issue, I think from the concept of normative natural teleology it follows that the unborn human being has a fundamental right to be allowed to grow up in the body of its biological mother due to the natural orientation of the sexual act and the female reproductive organs, and that it is the duty of mother and father to protect the life of the child.
For these reasons I think the "dissimilarities strategy" surely pulls severe holes in many bodily rights arguments and often is a useful tool in conversations. But I think to successfully make a general case against them and to put the Pro-Life position on a firm ethical foundation we have to assume a natural law framework which, on the one hand, grounds the personhood of any human being by anchoring moral status in the constitutively inherent and thus essential disposition of the species-specific nature to develop rational and moral capacities and, on the other hand, gives us solid ethical tools to carefully evaluate conflicts with rights and duties in the thought experiments put forward.
So if you think that unplugging from the violinist (or the child with the hereditary disease or the siamese twin) is permissible I would be interested to know where you disagree with my reasoning and which ethical principles I used to examine these cases you think are false or at least implausible.
(i) I agree that it's worth considering the prospects of responding to the violinist argument by trying to undermine our confidence in the intuition that it's permissible to unplug from the violinist. I have reservations about trying to undermine the violinist intuition by appeal to your version of the DDE. Like most people, I find it really intuitively plausible that it's OK to unplug from the violinist. So in response to an argument against this intuitive judgment that appeals to an elaborate version of DDE, I'm inclined to give a Moorean response and reject the conjunction of the premises of this DDE-based argument instead of taking this DDE-based argument as adequate grounds for rejecting the intuition about the violinist.
(ii) But there are other ways to undermine the intuition that it's permissible to unplug the violinist that seem more plausible to me and that are suggested by some of the thought experiments you appeal to. I share the intuition that it would be wrong for Lea to 'unplug' from Lara. I also share the intuition that it would be wrong for the violinist to unplug from you, in the modified violinist case you mention. I don't know how to explain why these judgments about these cases would be true while at the same time it would be permissible to unplug from the original violinist case. So a simple argument from analogy like the following strikes me as interesting and promising: (1) It's wrong for Lea to unplug from Lara; (2) there's no relevant difference between Lea's unplugging from Lara and your unplugging from the violinist; (3) So, it's wrong for you to unplug from the violinist. Since this attempt to undermine our intuition about the violinist doesn't appeal to anything too theoretically complicated like a specific version of DDE, it strikes me as more compelling.
(iii) I don't myself find it intuitively obvious that it's wrong to 'unplug' from the child in the first case you give, which is supposed to show that the responsibility objection doesn't really get 'to the heart of the matter.' So it doesn't make me think that I really need something other than the responsibility objection.
(iv) I'm not on board with P5 of your final argument: "An act by which an innocent or incapacitated person is intentionally - i.e., either as a means to an end or as an end in itself - directly or indirectly killed, is, without exception, morally wrong and inadmissible." If I have to intentionally kill an innocent or incapacitated person to prevent a billion people from being tortured to death, I think it's morally OK to do it.
Does an obligation to assist always require the highest level of assistance no matter the effect on the person assisting or the potential risks? You position pregnancy as temporary but it makes permanent changes to your body and health. And even a normal pregnancy has a risk of death with little to no warning.
What do you mean by "legally speaking"? Laws are influenced by our morality. If our morality changes, the law will change accordingly. Was there any point in this comment?
Does an obligation to assist always require the highest level of assistance no matter the effect on the person assisting or the potential risks?
Yes. The "burdensomeness threshold" (assuming this is a thing) does not apply in this case. The act that resulted in your obligation to assist was VOLUNTARY (with the obvious exception of rape). We don't live in Gilead (or whatever other dystopian world pro-choicers use to fearmonger). There are no wives holding your legs while a commander forcibly ejaculates in your womb.
The reason is because each person is the owner of their body and only they can decide who can be inside it.
Correct. As the owner of your body, you decided to use it and have sex (after giving consent to it). One of the foreseeable results of this action is that a new human being will spawn inside your body. By giving consent to that action, you accept its potential results. When you agree to play poker, you accept that you might lose. Assuming that this new human you allowed to spawn inside your body is a person with the right to exist, you have no excuse to evict them. And no, it doesn't matter whether your body and health will be permanently affected or not, cause that was your choice. No amount of stretch marks or urinary incontinence will ever give you permission to kill another human being. Period.
We should distinguish between moral rights and legal rights, and here is how I think of the distinction. When we have a legal right to something, that just means that the legal system we're subject to is a certain way. If I have a legal right to free speech, that just means that the legal system I'm subject to is such as to require certain others to permit me to express myself in certain ways, for example. But moral rights aren't dependent on legal systems in this way. They're prior to legal systems. For example, we have a moral right to life even if we're under a deeply unjust legal system according to which it's legally permitted for others to kill us for no reason.
When I say that it's intuitive in the Genetic Case that McFall has a right to Shimp’s assistance, I mean that it's intuitive that McFall has a moral right to Shimp's assistance. I assume you're right that 'legally speaking, the parent would not be compelled to donate bone marrow.' That means that McFall lacks a legal right to Shimp's assistance under the current legal system. But that doesn't show that McFall lacks a moral right to Shimp's assistance. All I need for my purposes is that McFall has a moral right to Shimp's assistance. That's enough to show that RP-C, which (I will now clarify) is a principle about moral rights, accounts for something true about the Genetic Case.
Good question about levels of assistance. No, I don't think that 'an obligation to assist always requires the highest level of assistance no matter the effect on the person assisting or the potential risk.' If I thought that, then I would be committed to thinking that a pregnant woman is obligated to assist the fetus even when doing so would very likely kill her, and I don't think that. I think that a person has an obligation to provide assistance in this context only if the assistance doesn't surpass a certain level of burdensomeness. Call that threshold, whatever it is, “the burdensomeness threshold.” Your question helps me see that RP-C needs a bit more detail to capture my view:
RP-C: If as a foreseeable result of your voluntary act someone will die if you don’t assist them, and if they wouldn’t need your assistance if you hadn’t done the act, and if the reason why they wouldn’t need your assistance if you hadn’t done the act is that they would never have existed if you hadn’t done the act, *and if the burdensomeness of providing the needed assistance would not surpass the burdensomeness threshold, then they have a right to your assistance.
I don’t have much to say yet about where exactly the burdensomeness threshold is correctly drawn. What’s important for my purposes is that the burdens of pregnancy and birth (which of course are enormous) don’t surpass that threshold; for if those burdens did surpass it, then RP-C* would not imply that the fetus has a right to the woman’s life-saving assistance. And I think we have good reason to think that the burdens of pregnancy and birth don’t surpass the threshold. Consider a version of the Replicator Case in which the life-saving assistance Betty can offer the baby she just created is approximately as burdensome as pregnancy and birth. It still seems that Betty would be wronging the baby by walking away and letting it die, and so it still seems that the baby has a right to Betty’s assistance. That indicates that the burdensomeness threshold is high enough that the burdens of pregnancy and birth don’t surpass it.
Anytime you say that one person has the right to be inside of another person's body, you have crossed “the burdensomeness threshold”. It's absolutely not appropriate to ever strip someone of the ownership of their body, even temporarily.
No, if the assistance required is AS BURDENSOME as pregnancy, requiring something inside her she does not want there, potentially resulting in permanent health consequences or even death, no, Betty has no such obligation. No one is EVER obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body.
You say that 'no one is EVER obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body.' Do you mean that no one is ever legally required to allow another person to remain inside their body? Or, do you instead mean to suggest that no one is ever morally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body? If you mean the first thing, then it doesn't conflict with my argument or position. My view isn't that pregnant women are currently legally required to allow fetal persons to remain inside their body, but rather that they ought to be legally required to do this in most cases.
If your claim is that no one is ever morally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body, then your claim is too extreme to be plausible, for two reasons. First, suppose that a woman is pregnant with a healthy 39-week-old fetus, that the earliest she could be induced to give birth is next week, and that there’s one way that she could be rid of the fetus today: have a late term abortion. And let’s suppose that the abortion would be just as painful and risky for the woman at this point as giving birth. If no one is ever morally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body, then it’s morally permissible for the woman in this case to have an abortion in this situation. But that seems implausible. The view that abortions that late in pregnancy are morally permissible is an extreme view.
Second, sometimes it's surely morally obligatory to allow another person to be attached to your body without being inside it. (See below for such a case.) And since this is so, it would be surprising if it could never be morally obligatory to allow another person to be inside one's body. It’s hard to think of a reason why it would be true both that allowing one sort of connection would sometimes be obligatory and that allowing the other sort of connection could never obligatory. (Can you provide such a reason?) So it shouldn’t surprise us if it were sometimes obligatory to allow someone to be inside one’s body - at least for a time and when doing so doesn’t surpass a certain threshold of burdensomeness.
Here's a case in which it's morally obligatory to allow another person to be attached to your body without being inside of it, drawn from a recent article by philosopher Perry Hendricks:
CABIN: "Sally is 9 months pregnant. Unfortunately - as occasionally happens - she doesn't know that she's pregnant. One day, while out hiking, a snowstorm unexpectedly hits, and she is forced to take shelter in a cabin. To make matters worse, she goes into labor while stuck in the cabin. The birth goes well, and her baby is healthy. Sally is stuck in her cabin for 7 days before she is finally dug out. Rescuers find her alive and well, but her infant is dead due to starvation - Sally did not feed her infant, despite having ample food for herself, and producing ample breastmilk (there was no baby formula available in the cabin)." (https://philpapers.org/archive/HENMBN.pdf)
Surely it would be morally wrong for Sally to refrain from breastfeeding her baby. In other words, she's morally obligated to breastfeed her baby. And so, it's sometimes the case that one is morally obligated to allow someone to be connected to one's body without them being inside one's body. And so, it would be surprising if one is never morally obligated to allow someone to be connected to one's body while being inside it.
If your grounds for believing that Betty would not be wronging the baby she created by letting him die is that this follows from your more general view that 'no one is EVER obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body,' then it might be worth reconsidering whether you really have good grounds for your belief.
I mean it morally. And yes, the first part would conflict with your position, because again, you want to change that legally.
" suppose that a woman is pregnant with a healthy 39-week-old fetus, that the earliest she could be induced to give birth is next week, and that there’s one way that she could be rid of the fetus today: have a late term abortion. "
If you want to complain about extreme, stop coming up with ridiculously extreme examples. There is no way there is an abortion available and no way to induce labor. If a surgeon in there, they can do a C-section. But since you want to play stupid games, yes she has the right to end the pregnancy EVEN IF IT MEANS KILLING THAT 39 WEEK OLD FETUS. A woman always has the right to not be pregnant and not have someone inside her body. Period, no matter what you want to throw at me. It's the basic principle I'm starting from.
"But that seems implausible."
Wow, you have some nerve after the implausible situation you just put forth!
You think it's extreme, I think the right to body sovereignty is extremely important. Yes, THAT important. It is THE MOST fundamental right you have. It's WHY you have a right to life.
We are not talking about being attached, we are talking a bout being inside, and no, one does not automatically mean the other is true. They are very different.
" It’s hard to think of a reason why it would be true both that allowing one sort of connection would sometimes be obligatory and that allowing the other sort of connection could never obligatory."
The reason is because each person is the owner of their body and only they can decide who can be inside it. Not hard for me to come up with. I mean, the fact that they are two separate and different things and therefor are treated differently should have been the obvious answer for you. I find it downright bizarre that you conclude that because you sometimes have a moral obligation to breast feed, you therefor have a moral obligation to be pregnant. Where is the logic there, exactly? Because again, two very different things with VERY different burden levels.
The right to be the sole owner of your body is an excellent grounds for my belief. Frankly I think the crusade to outlaw a woman's right to control what happens inside her body to be disgusting.
Oh, I think we might just be understanding the phrase 'conflicts with' differently. When I said that the claim that no one is ever legally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body does not 'conflict with' my position, I just meant that my position and arguments aren't shown to be mistaken by the fact (assuming it is a fact) that no one is ever legally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body. But it's true that its being the case that no one is ever legally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body does 'conflict with' my position in the sense that my position entails that it ought not be the case that no one is ever legally obligated to allow another person to remain inside their body.
You write: "But since you want to play stupid games, yes she has the right to end the pregnancy EVEN IF IT MEANS KILLING THAT 39 WEEK OLD FETUS."
That's quite a bullet to bite! Well, if you have really managed to believe that aborting a 39 week old fetus in that situation is morally permissible, then I can see why the first argument I gave for thinking that it's sometimes morally obligatory to allow another person to be inside one's body wouldn't be convincing to you.
You write: "The reason is because each person is the owner of their body and only they can decide who can be inside it. Not hard for me to come up with."
It sounds like you're reasoning as follows:
(1) Each person is the owner of their body.
(2) Part of what it is for a person to own her own body is for her to never be morally obligated to allow another person inside it.
(3) So, each person is such that she is never morally obligated to allow another person inside her body.
Here's my response. The above argument seems just as plausible as this parallel argument:
(1) Each person is the owner of their body.
(2)* Part of what it is for a person to own her own body is for her to never be morally obligated to allow another person to be attached-to-but-not-inside it.
(3)* So, each person is such that she is never morally obligated to allow another person to be attached-to-but-not-inside her body.
So if the first argument should convince us, then the second one should, too. But the second argument shouldn't convince us, for (as the Cabin case I gave illustrates) the conclusion (3)* is false. So, the first argument shouldn't convince us either. And so, the reason you give for thinking that it's true both that allowing one sort of connection would sometimes be obligatory while the other sort could never be obligatory fails.
Assuming that you share my intuition in the Cabin case that the breastfeeding is obligatory, I think you'll probably want to resist my argument by saying that (2) is more plausible than (2)*. Am I correct in thinking so? If so, it would help me understand where you're coming from if you could explain why you believe that being the owner of one's body does make it so that one is never morally obligated to allow another person inside one's body yet does not make it so that one is never morally obligated to allow another person to be attached-to-but-not-inside one's body. What reason is there for thinking that ownership of one's own body works like this?
I agree that we own our bodies, but having property rights over something is obviously compatible with many restrictions on how one can permissibly use it. The fact that I own my body is compatible with the fact that it's not morally permissible for me to use my body to (for example) hit people for no reason, and it's also compatible with the fact that it's sometimes not morally permissible for me to refrain from allowing somebody to be connected to my body. It feels arbitrary to draw an absolute moral line at allowing another person (such as a fetus) to be inside one's body, as you do.
" If so, it would help me understand where you're coming from if you could explain why you believe that being the owner of one's body does make it so that one is never morally obligated to allow another person inside one's body yet does not make it so that one is never morally obligated to allow another person to be attached-to-but-not-inside one's body."
I didn't take a position on the moral obligation to breastfeed other than to point out it's irrelevant because they are two different things. I STILL don't get your insistence that one means the other. You are just arbitrarily declaring that.
"and it's also compatible with the fact that it's sometimes not morally permissible for me to refrain from allowing somebody to be connected to my body."
You are certainly free to have your opinion, not everyone is going to agree with your subjective position on that.
" It feels arbitrary to draw an absolute moral line at allowing another person (such as a fetus) to be inside one's body, as you do."
Your feelings don't mean that's true. My positions are not just based on a whim. Calling two different things different seems far less arbitrary that insisting they are the same for... reasons?
Clearly I haven't denied that two different things are different. I'm denying that two different things are relevantly different. That is, I'm denying that those two things -- allowing someone to be inside one's body and allowing someone to be connected-to-but-not-inside one's body -- are different in such a way that ownership of one's body entails that one of them is sometimes morally obligatory yet does not entail that the other is sometimes morally obligatory.
Thanks for your thoughts on my article, I've found it helpful to think through the issues you raised.
And who is demanding the right (hint: it isn't the fetus)?
"Intuitively, the baby in this case has a right to Betty’s assistance, and RP-C can explain why, for all of the conditions mentioned in RP-C hold true in this case: a foreseeable result of Betty’s voluntary act of using the machine is that a baby will die if Betty does not assist him; the baby wouldn’t need Betty’s assistance if Betty hadn’t performed the act; and the reason why the baby wouldn’t need Betty’s assistance if she hadn’t done the act is that the baby would never have existed if Betty hadn’t done the act."
This is a very poor analogy for pregnancy because it doesn't take into regard the nature of pregnancy and how it affects the pregnant person. What sort of "assistance" does she have to offer? Also, in this case, the death is natural instead of by a "deliberate" act — as Pro-lifers would like to call it.
"Intuitively, McFall has a right to Shimp’s assistance, and RP-C can explain why, for all of the following are true: a foreseeable result of Shimp’s voluntary act of having a biological child is that McFall will die if Shimp does not assist him; and McFall wouldn’t need Shimp’s assistance if Shimp hadn’t performed the act; and the reason why McFall wouldn’t need Shimp’s assistance if Shimp hadn’t done the act is that McFall would never have existed if Shimp hadn’t done the act. "
Ah, the classic "parents have a special obligation to their children." I think the outcome of the case would remain the same if the plaintiff and defendant were parent and child instead of cousins. Again this is a natural death, so what's wrong with that?
I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the Replicator and Genetic cases. I agree that the former is 'a very poor analogy for pregnancy' if by that you mean that it's really different from the case of pregnancy in many ways. That doesn't undermine my suggestion that a certain thing is true of the Replicator case (the baby in that case has a right to Betty's assistance) that's accounted for by my general principle (RP-C), and that consequently there is some reason to accept my general principle. With respect to the Genetic Case, you interpret me as adopting the pro-life 'classic' that 'parents have a special obligation to their children.' But I never adopted that view (and in fact I'm agnostic about whether that kind of biological relationship generates special duties to assist). The Genetic Case is just meant to be another case in which something seems true that is explained by my general principle, and thereby gives us further reason to accept the general principle.
You wrote, "And who is demanding the right (hint: it isn't the fetus)?" I don't understand what you're getting at. I think you might be suggesting that the fetus has a right to the woman's assistance only if the fetus is demanding that right; and that since the fetus is not doing any such demanding, the fetus must lack the right to the woman's assistance. If that's what you have in mind, I deny that a person has a right to something only if they are actively demanding that right.