The X-Schema X1) Emm is (or has) X
12. Making Laws
I have argued that abortion is seriously immoral, at least in cases like UNWANTED PREGNANCY. But it would be a mistake to think that this settles the question of whether it should be legal. For, as we saw in section 1, there are plenty of things we take to be immoral that no one thinks should be illegal, for instance cheating on your boyfriend.
My own view is that, despite being seriously immoral, abortion should be legal in cases like UNWANTED PREGNANCY. It is one thing to think that, in deciding to abort a healthy pregnancy, Taylor did something seriously immoral. It is quite another to think that it would have been permissible for government officials (or anyone else for that matter) to force her to remain pregnant, or
to punish her for terminating the pregnancy. The government would arguably have a role to play if Taylor were violating Emm’s rights by terminating the pregnancy. But, as we saw in sections 6- 7, aborting the pregnancy doesn’t violate Emm’s rights—including Emm’s right to life—since Emm never had a right to use Taylor’s womb in the first place. The reason that it was seriously immoral to abort Emm is because Emm had FLO, not because it violated Emm’s right to life.
It may be illuminating to compare UNWANTED PREGNANCY with the following variation on THE ROCK:
ROCK FORCED
The only thing that can save your life is the touch of The Rock’s cool hand on your fevered brow. As it happens, The Rock is passing through the hospital where you lay dying.
You ask for his help and he refuses. You grab his hand, but he pulls it away.
Even if The Rock’s refusal is morally monstrous in this case—and I would agree that it is—surely it should not be illegal. He shouldn’t be legally required to assist you, and the police should not have the authority to forcibly prevent him from withdrawing his hand. It’s his hand, and since you have no right to it, he should not be legally required to share it with you.
Similarly, even if you think Taylor was morally required to keep the pregnancy—because you think Emm was a person, with a right to life, with a valuable future ahead of her, and with interests that aren’t outweighed by Taylor’s own interests in wanting to terminate the pregnancy—you shouldn’t think she should be legally required the keep the pregnancy. One can (and should) be pro-life without supporting forced birth.
Reflection Questions
1. Can you find a way to rescue the rights-based arguments in sections 5-7 from my objections? For instance, can you find a more promising way to argue that the embryo has a right to the womb?
2. Can the case of THE VIOLINIST from section 6 be used to resist MF3 of the Modified FLO Argument in section 10?
3. In section 9, I considered a competing account of what makes killing wrong. Can that account be defended against my objections?
4. We saw that the Modified FLO-argument cannot be used to show that abortion is immoral in the case of rape or life- threatening pregnancies. Can you think of an argument that does cover these cases, and that does not fall victim to the objections raised in sections 4-7?
5. Consider the key idea behind the FLO-arguments: that the embryo would have had a future full of valuable experiences had it not been killed. What does this assume about personal identity? Is the Psychological Descendant Account (discussed in chapter 3) compatible with the idea that fully-grown people used to be embryos? Is your preferred response to the Too Many Thinkers Argument (discussed in chapter 4) compatible with the idea that we used to be embryos?
Sources
The Violinist argument and the critique of the Right to Life argument are drawn from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” The FLO-argument is drawn from Don Marquis’s
“Why Abortion is Immoral,” as are many of the criticisms of bad pro-life and pro-choice arguments discussed in sections 3 and 4.
Here are some additional resources:
• David Boonin: Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should Be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person
• David Boonin: A Defense of Abortion
• Sidney Callahan: “Abortion and the Sexual Agenda: A Case for Pro-Life Feminism”
• Ann E. Cudd: “Enforced Pregnancy, Rape, and the Image of a Woman”
• Jane English: “Abortion and the Concept of a Person”
• Elizabeth Harman: “Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion”
• Elizabeth Harman: “The Potentiality Problem”
• Elizabeth Harman: “What Amy Coney Barrett Doesn’t Understand About Abortion”
• George W. Harris: “Fathers and Fetuses”
• Margaret Olivia Little: “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate”
• Alastair Norcross: “Killing, Abortion, and Contraception: A Reply to Marquis”
• Michael Tooley: “Abortion and Infanticide”
• Mary Anne Warren: “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”
C
HAPTER9 Eating Animals
Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments advanced in other chapters. Different chapters represent different philosophical perspectives.
1. Introduction
In what follows, I will defend the view that, in most cases, buying and eating meat is morally impermissible. First, I will argue that there is no good reason to think that eating meat is morally permissible. In particular, I address three common reasons for thinking that it’s not wrong to eat meat: that it is natural to eat meat, that it is necessary to eat meat, and that people have always eaten meat. Second, I argue directly for the immorality of buying and eating meat, by developing an analogy in which puppies are subjected to much the same treatment as farm animals (sections 5-6). I then defend my argument from analogy against various objections (sections 7-8).
In defending the claim that it is morally impermissible for you to eat meat, I will be making some assumptions about you. First, I am assuming that you know that the meat you eat is the flesh of slaughtered animals. A friend of mine once had the following conversation with her children at the dinner table:
Them [eating chicken]: “Mom, where does chicken come from?”
Her: “Well… it comes from chickens. You’re eating a chicken.”
Them: “C’mon, mom!! Seriously, where does chicken come from?”
Perhaps you didn’t know. Now you know.
Second, I am assuming that the meat you eat was killed in order to be eaten. Perhaps you eat only dead animals you find in the road. In that case, go for it; my arguments do not apply to you.
Third, I am assuming that you do not live in some faraway land, where you have to eat meat because there is no way to get your hands on tofu, broccoli, oatmeal, avocados, almonds, beans, pumpkin seeds, hummus, lentils, quinoa, tempeh, peanut butter,
veggie burgers, or other such alternative sources of protein. I am assuming that you are not stranded on a deserted island with nothing to eat but wild boar. Perhaps I’m wrong. If you are currently stranded on a deserted island, go ahead and eat the boar.
More generally, just because you can imagine some possible situation in which it’s morally okay to do a certain thing, that doesn’t mean it’s morally okay to do that thing in ordinary situations. If a hiker gets caught in a blizzard and will freeze to death if he doesn’t break into someone’s empty cabin for the night, it’s morally okay for him to break in. That obviously doesn’t mean that it’s morally okay for you, right now, to break into a random person’s home. If the Nazis are at the good Samaritan’s door, it’s morally okay for her to lie to them to save the Jews hiding in her attic. That obviously doesn’t mean that it’s morally okay for you, right now, to lie to whomever you want, whenever you want. And just because it’s okay for certain people to eat certain types of meat in certain situations, that doesn’t mean that it’s okay for you—in the situation you currently find yourself in—
to eat whatever meat you want whenever you want.