REPLY TO JULIA DRIVER,TIMM TRIPLETT,AND KATHLEEN WALLACE

Abstract: Julia Driver, Timm Triplett, and Kathleen Wallace challenge my account of moral arrogance, and Triplett and Wallace challenge its application to the problem of abortion. I try to show here that Driver's attempt to defend consequentialism from my charge that it promotes moral arrogance is successful only if consequentialism explicitly gives up what has been considered one of its major virtues. I acknowledge that Triplett has uncovered some unclarity in my claim that the moral acceptability of abortion is an unresolvable moral issue. I also acknowledge that Wallace has uncovered some unclarity in my account of moral arrogance. After clarifying that account, I try to meet her challenge to defend my claim that it is not morally arrogant for a state to place some restrictions on abortions.     

Abortion,Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority

A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion‐as‐evacuation'’ as equivalent to “abortion‐as‐killing.'’ This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion‐as‐killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence.     

Adoption is Not Abortion‐Lite

It is standardly taken for granted in the literature on the morality of abortion that adoption is almost always an available and morally preferable alternative to abortion — one that does the same thing so far as parenthood is concerned. This assumption pushes proponents of a woman's right to choose into giving arguments that are based almost exclusively around the physicality of pregnancy and childbirth. On the other side of the debate, the assumption that adoption is a real alternative seems to strengthen the contention that a woman who wishes to abort is morally deficient, whatever the status of the foetus: that she is selfish or short‐sighted in her refusal to bear the temporary physical burden of pregnancy. In this article, I will argue that adoption is not a genuine alternative to abortion. It does not ‘do the same thing’, even setting aside the physicality of pregnancy. I will show that on the most successful model of parental obligation — a causal account that formalises the distinction between parent: progenitor, and parent: carer — birth mothers and fathers remain obliged, life‐long, to their birth children even when the child is adopted out.     

Sandra Day O'Connor and the justification of abortion

The recent Supreme Court decision upholding Roe v. Wade and in particular, the dissent by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, sheds new light on the issue of abortion. Let us consider any stage of a pregnancy when abortion is medically safe for the mother. If at that stage it is also medically viable to save the fetus, is an abortion performed at that stage of pregnancy morally justifiable? For example, if it is, or becomes, medically safe to perform abortions after first trimester of pregnancy and at the same time saving a fetus is, or becomes, medically viable or not unusual during some stage of the second trimester, can abortions during and after that stage of pregnancy be justified? With a number of qualifications I shall argue the thesis that as a general rule, but not an absolute rule, abortion in these instances is not usually justifiable. For if it is, then one will also have to grant the moral justification for a number of other highly questionable medical practices. This thesis is not to be identified with the stronger claim that abortions of viable fetuses can never be performed. There are surely exceptions such as when the life or health of the mother is in danger. But, I shall argue, the justification for making such exceptions is on different grounds than is sometimes claimed because one must weigh the health of the mother against the life of another human being.     

Revisiting the argument from fetal potential

One of the most famous, and most derided, arguments against the morality of abortion is the argument from potential, which maintains that the fetus' potential to become a person and enjoy the valuable life common to persons, entails that its destruction is prima facie morally impermissible. In this paper, I will revisit and offer a defense of the argument from potential.     

Animality and Agency: A Kantian Approach to Abortion

This paper situates abortion in the context of women's duties to themselves. I argue that the fundamental Kantian requirement to respect oneself as a rational being, combined with Kant's view of our animal nature, form the basis for a view of pregnancy and abortion that focuses on women's agency and characters without diminishing the importance of their bodies and emotions. The Kantian view of abortion that emerges takes abortion to be morally problematic, but sometimes permissible, and sometimes even required.
After sketching Kant's account of duties to oneself, I discuss the challenges pregnancy poses to women's agency. I then argue that abortion is morally problematic because it is antagonistic to an important subset of morally useful emotions that we have self-regarding duties to protect and cultivate; thus, there is a rebuttable deliberative presumption against maxims of abortion for inclination-based ends. I close by considering objections.     

The Unfair Burdens Argument Against Carbon Pricing

Carbon pricing is one of the most politically important approaches for the mitigation of climate change in the world today. Most political actors who are not committed to climate change denial favor carbon pricing, either as emissions trading or carbon taxation. In this article, I argue that carbon pricing should be considered unfair in most of its forms. I present a line of criticism called the Unfair Burdens Argument. It states that the most politically relevant ways to price carbon needlessly burden the less affluent more than the more affluent. This is unfair because, among other things, the more affluent have on average done more to create the problem of climate change in the first place. Principles for the fair distribution of burdens under climate change mitigation like the Polluter Pays Principle, which were thought to support carbon pricing, turn out to speak against it, when interpreted properly. Although the Unfair Burdens Argument on its own cannot show that carbon pricing is impermissible, it offers important clues for what a morally permissible form of climate change mitigation would look like.     

Scalar Properties, Binary Judgments

In the moral realm, our deontic judgments are usually (always?) binary. An act (or omission) is either morally forbidden or morally permissible. ¹ 1 I realize that I appear to be omitting the category of ‘morally required’ here. But that category does not affect my analysis in part because we can always substitute for a morally required act a morally forbidden omission to act. The question would then be whether the omission to act is permissible or forbidden. In any event, my focus is on deontic boundaries, and it is immaterial how many there are. Thus, I shall continue to speak of acts being morally forbidden or permissible.
Yet the determination of an act's deontic status frequently turns on the existence of properties that are matters of degree. In what follows I shall give several examples of binary moral judgments that turn on scalar properties, and I shall claim that these examples should puzzle us. How can the existence of a property to a specific degree demarcate a boundary between an act's being morally forbidden and its not being morally forbidden? Why aren't our moral judgments of acts scalar in the way that the properties on which those judgments are based are scalar, so that acts, like states of affairs, can be morally better or worse rather than right or wrong? I conceive of this inquiry as operating primarily within the realm of normative theory. Presumably it will give aid and comfort to consequentialists, who have no trouble mapping their binary categories onto scalar properties. For example, a straightforward act utilitarian, for whom one act out of all possible acts is morally required (and hence permissible) and all others morally forbidden, can, in theory at least, provide an answer to every one of the puzzles I raise. And, in theory, so can all other types of act and rule consequentialists. They will find nothing of interest here beyond embarrassment for their deontological adversaries. The deontologists, however, must meet the challenges of these puzzles. And for them, the puzzles may raise not just normative questions, but questions of moral epistemology and moral ontology. Just how do we know that the act consequentialist's way of, say, trading off lives against lives is wrong? For example, do we merely intuit that taking one innocent, uninvolved person's life to save two others is wrong? Can our method of reflective equilibrium work if we have no theory by which to rationalize our intuitions? And what things in the world make it true, if it is true, that one may not make the act consequentialist's tradeoff? I do not provide any answers to these questions any more than I provide answers to the normative ones. But they surely lurk in the background.     

A Moral Defense of Trophy Hunting

ABSTRACT

This paper defends the morality of hunting for sport, also known as recreational or trophy hunting. Using an argument from analogy, I argue that there is no morally relevant difference between trophy hunting and another activity that most of us regard as uncontroversial. Since the latter is morally permissible, so is trophy hunting. Several disanalogies are examined and found irrelevant.     

Prenatal diagnosis, personal identity, and disability

A fascinating criticism of abortion occasioned by prenatal diagnosis of potentially disabling traits is that the complex test-and-abortion sends a morally disparaging message to people living with disabilities. I have argued that available versions of this "expressivist" argument are inadequate on two grounds. The most fundamental is that, considered as a practice, abortions prompted by prenatal testing are not semantically well-behaved enough to send any particular message; they do not function as signs in a rule-governed symbol system. Further, even granting, for the sake of argument, the expressive power of testing and aborting, it would not be possible, contra the argument's proponents, to distinguish between abortions undertaken because of beliefs about the disabling conditions the fetus might face as a child and abortions undertaken for many other possible reasons -- e.g., because of the poverty the fetus would face or the increase in family size that the birth of a new child would occasion. Here, I respond to criticisms of those arguments, and propose and defend another: the expressivist argument cannot, in general, distinguish successfully between abortion and therapy as modalities for responding to disabilities.     

If Abortion,then Infanticide

Our contention is that all of the major arguments for abortion are also arguments for permitting infanticide. One cannot distinguish the fetus from the infant in terms of a morally significant intrinsic property, nor are they morally discernible in terms of standing in different relationships to others. The logic of our position is that if such arguments justify abortion, then they also justify infanticide. If we are right that infanticide is not justified, then such arguments will fail to justify abortion. We respond to those philosophers who accept infanticide by putting forth a novel account of how the mindless can be wronged which serves to distinguish morally significant potential from morally irrelevant potential. This allows our account to avoid the standard objection that many entities possess a potential for personhood which we are intuitively under no obligation to further or protect.     

A Good Abortion Is a Tragic Abortion: Fit Motherhood and Disability Stigma

In the context of abortion stigma, most abortion stories remain untold. The stories we do tell of abortion are often told to morally recuperate the status of the woman who has an abortion through a recourse to tragedy. Tragedy frames experiences where every choice produces some suffering, so decisions are geared toward maintaining individual integrity rather than adherence to absolute moral truths. This article argues that one dominant tragic abortion narrative, that of the disabled fetus, works to recuperate the moral status of “fit” mothers while actively constructing disabled lives as unlivable and undesirable. The option to stigmatize disability in recuperating the moral status of the woman who has an abortion relies on eugenic logics that also construct a variety of women (racialized, poor, disabled, and young) as illegitimate reproductive subjects. The article analyzes narratives of Sherri Finkbine's 1962 abortion in relation to contemporary narratives of late‐term abortions involving nonviable fetuses to expose how investment in medical judgments of good births enables particular women to make use of tragic narratives to maintain their status as moral mothers without disturbing broader abortion stigma or eugenic logics.     

The moral status of a human fetus: a response to Lee.

It is an undeniable empirical fact that a human fetus is a member of the species homo sapiens from the moment of conception. There is thus an important sense in which it is a human being in itself, and not simply part of a pregnant woman's body, despite what defenders of abortion on demand might want us to think. It is also reasonable to suppose that all human beings, and thus human fetuses, are persons, with all that entails, but this is a metaphysical presupposition as opposed to an empirical fact, and is thus contentious. It is argued, however, that this should be of little comfort to the defenders of abortion, because the mere fact that human fetuses have an inherent tendency to become persons is sufficient reason to confer a moral status upon them, which renders abortion morally problematic at best.     

Why the Duty to Self-Censor Requires Social-Media Users to Maintain Their Own Privacy

Revelations of personal matters often have negative consequences for social-media users. These consequences trigger frequent warnings, practical rather than moral in nature, that social-media users should consider carefully what they reveal about themselves since their revelations might cause them various difficulties in the future. I set aside such practical considerations and argue that social-media users have a moral obligation to maintain their own privacy that is rooted in the duty to self-censor. Although Anita L. Allen provides a paternalist justification of the duty that supports my position that social-media users are obligated to self-censor what they reveal about themselves, I justify the obligation through considerations that are more palatable to liberals than is paternalism. I accomplish this by arguing that the failure to self-censor often creates for others undue burdens that individuals are obligated morally not to create. In particular, social-media revelations often create undue burdens for those, such as employers and university personnel, who are obligated morally to respect individuals’ privacy in their decision-making processes. I also demonstrate that this argument is not for a broad duty to self-censor, but, rather, for a narrow duty that applies to particular circumstances such as certain uses of social media.

     

What philosophy of mind can tell us about the morality of abortion: personhood, materialism, and the existence of self

I attempt to show that, under materialist assumptions about the nature of mind, it is a necessary condition for fetal personhood that electrical activity has begun in the brain. First, I argue that it is a necessary condition for a thing to be a moral person that it is (or has) a self--understood as something that is capable of serving as the subject of a mental experience. Second, I argue that it is a necessary condition for a fetus to be (or have) a self that some form of electrical brain activity occurs. Third, I argue that since the beginning of brain activity typically occurs at around 10 weeks of gestational age, most fetuses are not persons during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and hence that abortion of most fetuses during this period does not rise to the moral level of murder.     

Are Humanitarian Military Interventions Obligatory?

I argue here that certain species of war, namely humanitarian military interventions (HMIs), can be obligatory within particular contexts. Specifically, I look at the notion of HMIs through the lens of just war theory and argue that when a minimal account of jus ad bellum implies that an intervention is permissible, it also implies that it is obligatory. I begin by clarifying the jus ad bellum conditions (such as just cause, right intentions, etc.) under which an intervention is permissible. I then turn to the claim that permissibility necessitates obligation, by first showing that whenever an intervention is permissible, it is also minimally decent. Second, I show that minimally decent actions are morally obligatory by arguing that the notion of minimal decency is a conceptual bridge between negative and positive duties. Third, I argue that performing minimally decent actions is necessary for a state to be just. Ultimately, my conclusion arises from the following observation: if a humanitarian crisis is bad enough for one to hold that it is permissible to breach sovereignty of a nation, then it is bad enough to hold that there is an obligation to intervene.     

Killing, Letting Die, and the Morality of Abortion

abstract   David Boonin, in his A Defense of Abortion, argues that abortions that involve killing the foetus are morally permissible, even if granting for the sake of argument that the foetus has a right to life. His primary argument is an argument by analogy to a 'trolley case'. I offer two lines of counterargument to his argument by analogy. First, I argue that Boonin's analogy between his trolley case and a normal unwanted pregnancy does not hold. I revise his trolley case in light of my objections. Second, I argue that Boonin's arguments for the permissibility of killing, when applied to this revised trolley case — and by extension, typical unwanted pregnancies — do not succeed in justifying killing.     

Sexual Morality: Is Consent Enough?

The liberal view that valid consent is sufficient for a sex act to be morally legitimate is challenged by three major philosophies of sex: the Catholic view of sex as ordained for procreation and properly confined to marriage, the romantic view of sex as bound up with love, and the radical feminist analysis of sex in our society as part and parcel of the domination of women by men. I take a critical look at all three, focusing on Mary Geach's recent statement of the procreation view, Roger Scruton's theory of sexual desire as naturally evolving into intimacy and love, and several radical feminist discussions of sex in sexist society which argue that the notion of consent is unhelpful and, indeed, irrelevant. I argue that none of these lines of argument is convincing, and that consent remains the touchstone of morally permissible sex – although, dmittedly, it may not be very helpful in discussing ideals of human sexuality.     

Exploring tradeoffs in accommodating moral diversity

This paper explores the space of possibilities for public justification in morally diverse communities. Moral diversity is far more consequential than is typically appreciated, and as a result, we need to think more carefully about how our standard tools function in such environments. I argue that because of this diversity, public justification can (and should) be divorced from any claim of determinateness. Instead, we should focus our attention on procedures—in particular, what Rawls called cases of pure procedural justice. I use a modified form of the procedure “I cut, you choose” to demonstrate how perspectival diversity can make what looks like a simple procedure quite complex in practice. I use this to reframe disputes between classical liberal and contemporary liberal approaches to questions of public morality, arguing that classically liberal procedures, such as a reliance on the harm principle, can generate rather illiberal-looking outcomes when used in a morally diverse community. A seemingly less-principled approach, which simply balances burdens, appears to generate outcomes that look closer to what we would expect from classical liberalism. However, since both approaches are based on pure procedures that we can justify without reference to outcomes, it remains indeterminate which we ought to choose.     

The Ontic and the Ontological in Heidegger's Philosophy of Technology: Response to Thomson

Iain Thomson's critique is persuasive on several points but not on the major issue, the relation of the ontological to the ontic in Heidegger's philosophy of technology. This reply attempts to show that these two dimensions of Heidegger's theory are closely related, at least in the technological domain, and not separate, as Thomson affirms. It is argued that Heidegger's evaluations of particular technologies, the flaws of which Thomson concedes, proceed from a flawed ontological conception.