Joshua Greene on Abortion
Joshua Greene on Abortion
The best discussion of abortion that I have seen is by Joshua Greene in his book “Moral Tribes.” [i]
The theme of the book is that we have moral instincts that work well for making quick decisions or for following the norms of our group, but for considered judgments and for inter-group matters, we should use a utilitarian approach.
Greene uses abortion as a case study [ii] of a bitter debate between moral tribes that can usefully be considered from a utilitarian perspective.
According to Greene, the tribes talk past each other when they claim a “right to life” or a “right to choose.” Talk of rights gives a false objectivity to group intuitions and is unhelpful to reasoned discussion between groups.
Instead, on a utilitarian approach, we should consider the effects of restricting legal access to abortion. Greene thinks the three main effects would be a reduction in sexual activity, more illegal abortions and more births. Using his words, but edited for brevity:
How does all of this add up? Let’s start with people who change their sexual behaviour. For most adults, non-procreative sex is a highly enjoyable and fulfilling part of life. It is a major source of happiness, not only for the young and the restless but for couples in stable monogamous relationships. For fertile couples, non-procreative sex is made possible by contraception, but as we all know, contraception provides no guarantee, even when used responsibly. Thus, for millions of sexually active adults, the option to have an abortion provides an important safeguard against unwanted pregnancy.
Next, let’s consider alternative routes to abortion. For people of means or with access to foreign abortion services, making abortion illegal would simply make obtaining an abortion more expensive and inconvenient. Less fortunate women would turn to a domestic market that caters to the desperate for an illegal abortion which may be horrific and dangerous. From a utilitarian perspective, causing people to seek alternative routes to abortion leaves them with options that range from bad to terrible.
Finally, let’s consider the effects of increased birth. Forcing women into unwanted pregnancies is horrible. Pregnancy is an enormous emotional strain under the best of conditions, and women carrying unwanted foetuses may, consciously or unconsciously, take less good care of them. Carrying a foetus to term not only is a great emotional strain, but can severely disrupt one’s life. In sum, forcing women to have babies against their will is very, very bad.
Nevertheless, one could argue that the benefits of forcing women to go through with unwanted pregnancies are even greater. By giving birth, a woman allows a new person to live. If the woman does not want to keep her baby, she can give the baby up for adoption. In the best case, the baby will go to a loving home with plenty of resources. So long as the adopted child’s life is overall worth living, it’s hard to say that the biological mother’s suffering outweighs the value of her biological child’s entire life. Many happy families include children born of unplanned, and initially unwanted, pregnancies. In other cases, the unwanted child’s life may not go so well as we would like, but for abortion to be preferable, it would have to be the case that the child’s life is, overall, not worth living—or that the child’s existence would have to make the world worse off overall, or that the child’s existence precludes the existence of another child who would go on to live a happier life. It’s here, with this awkward utilitarian accounting, that the pro-lifer makes her strongest case.
So outlawing abortion would incur very high costs but would grant life to many people who would otherwise not get to exist. Greene continues:
The pro-lifer’s life-saving utilitarian argument is a good one. The problem is that it’s too good. Lives are lost not only from abortion, but also from contraception and abstinence. If we’re opposed to abortion because it denies people their existence, then we should be opposed to contraception and abstinence, too, since these practices have the same effect. This, however, is an argument that almost no pro-lifers want to make.
This deeply pro-life argument is, in fact, analogous to the utilitarian argument in favour of extreme altruism, or turning ourselves into happiness pumps. One way to pump out happiness is to allocate resources more efficiently and another way is to pump out more happy people. But this is too much to ask of nonheroic people.
For better or worse, we can’t take the pro-lifer’s life-saving utilitarian argument seriously. But the pro-choicer’s utilitarian arguments are not too good. They’re just plain good. Disrupting people’s sex lives, disrupting people’s life plans, and forcing people to seek international or illegal abortions are all very bad things that would make many people’s lives much worse, and in some cases much shorter. And that’s why, in the end, I believe that utilitarians should be pro-choice. I make no appeal to “rights,” just to a realistic consideration of the consequences.
On Greene’s view there is no magical event at conception and a foetus becomes a moral subject over time as it develops from a single cell to full-term. We can deliberate about where exactly the abortion line should be drawn, recognising that this will inevitably be somewhat arbitrary.
Greene appreciates that a pro-lifer could be upfront that his view is based on a metaphysical belief that ensoulment occurs at conception. But there is no evidence that supports this belief, so it seems wrong to “nevertheless insist that his faith-based view dictate the law of the land.” As I have discussed elsewhere [iii], there is wide philosophical and scientific agreement that our instinctive view that we have souls is wrong. The abortion debate arguably comes down to religious dogma on one side against naturalistic, welfarist reasoning on the other.
Footnotes
[i] Greene, Joshua (2014). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and The Gap Between Us and Them. Amazon UK. My Notes
[ii] In Chapter 11