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The Journal of Value Inquiry

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23.11.2020 | Original Paper

Abortion Is Neither Right Nor Wrong

verfasst von: Martin Peterson

Erschienen in: The Journal of Value Inquiry | Ausgabe 2/2022

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When Ana got pregnant at the age of seventeen, she decided to have an abortion. In an interview six years later, she described the circumstances that influenced her decision as follows:

New York, 2007

Unlike many Latinos, we’re not religious. My parents are progressive and always said I needed an education. It was my senior year of high school. My boyfriend was homeless. I bought a pregnancy test at Duane Reade and went to the bathroom in the middle of class. I sort of panicked but also thought, Let me get back to this tomorrow. On the train going home, I saw a sign. In my daze, all I saw was -abortion. It was one of those places where they convince you to keep the baby. They showed me the ultrasound, but I wasn’t falling for that. Later, I went to see a counselor, and she made an appointment at Planned Parenthood. I had it on a Friday so I could recover for school. On Monday, I found a note on my bed—my boyfriend had left for California. When I got pregnant later that year, I was in Argentina. Abortion’s illegal there. I drove around with a doctor looking for someone who would do it. I can’t even say why I decided to keep the baby. I didn’t want an illegal abortion. And I was in love, I guess. I didn’t think I could go to college with a kid, but I’m graduating this year.¹

Did Ana act wrongly? The discussion over the ethics of abortion is deeply polarized. For decades, Pro-Choicers and Pro-Lifers have debated (sometimes in a very combative manner) whether abortion can ever be morally right, and if so, under what circumstances. This essay seeks to depolarize the abortion debate by articulating an alternative, more nuanced view, which I call the Middle Ground Position. …

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Winter, M. (2013) “My Abortion”, The New York Magazine, Nov. 8, 2013.

See Cristian Constantinescu, “Moral Vagueness: A Dilemma for Non-Naturalism,” pp. 152-185 in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 9. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Tom Dougherty, "Vague value," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2014): 352-372, as well as "Moral Indeterminacy, Normative Powers and Convention." Ratio 29 (2016): 448-465; Miriam Schoenfield, "Moral vagueness is ontic vagueness," Ethics 126 (2016): 257-282; Robert Williams, "Indeterminate oughts," Ethics 127 (2017): 645-673.

Schoenfield, op. cit., p. 263.

Williams, op. cit. For a similar distinction, see Martin Peterson, The Dimensions of Consequentialism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 114-116.

Williams expresses this idea in a slightly different terminology: “A choice to X is decision permissible iff it is not determinately objectively impermissible to X”. See Williams, op. cit., p. 670. He notes that his discussion should not be interpreted as a “definitive recommendation”.

Susanna Rinard, “A Decision Theory for Imprecise Probabilities”, Philosophers' Imprint 15 (2015): 1-16 and Adam Bales, "Indeterminate permissibility and choiceworthy options," Philosophical Studies 175 (2018): 1693-1702.

Peterson, op. cit. and Robert Williams, "Decision making under indeterminacy." Philosopher's Imprint 14 (2014): 1-34.

Thomas Hurka, "More seriously wrong, more importantly right," Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5.1 (2019): 41-58, p. 41.

If we belive that squirrels are no less important than humans we can of coures modify the example by replacing the squirrels with roaches, ants, or spiders.

Alastair Norcross, "Reasons without demands: Rethinking rightness." Contemporary debates in moral theory (2006): 38-53. See also his Morality by Degrees: Reasons Without Demands. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Lockhart, op. cit., mentions the possibility that rightness and wrongness may comes in degrees but focuses on decision making in situations with quotidian moral uncertainty.

The locus classicus for the gradualist account of belief is Frank P. Ramsey’s “Truth and Probability”, written in 1926 and reproduced in e.g. The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays (New York: The Humanities Press, 195-), 156-184.

This type of quotidian moral uncertainty is discussed by Ted Lockhart, Moral Uncertainty and its Consequences. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Terence Horgan, "Robust vagueness and the forced-march sorites paradox." Philosophical Perspectives 8 (1994): 159-188; and Elizabeth Barnes, "Arguments against metaphysical indeterminacy and vagueness," Philosophy Compass 5 (2010): 953-964.

Philippa Foot, Moral Dilemmas: and Other Topics in Moral Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002), page 182.

All these reasons are best conceived as normative reasons. Psycological or motivational reasons are of little importance in the present discussion.

See, for instance, Leonard S. Carrier, "Abortion and the right to life." Social theory and practice 3 (1975): 381-401), and Ellen F Paul and Jeffrey Paul, "Self-ownership, abortion and infanticide." Journal of medical ethics 5 (1979): 133-138.

See, for instance, Chris Kaposy, "The real-life consequences of being denied access to an abortion." The American Journal of Bioethics 7 (2007): 34-36.

Thompson famously argues that if, for instance, the circulatory system of a famous violinist was to be plugged into yours against your will, it would be permissible to unplug the violinist even if you knew that would cause the violinist’s death. In a similar vein, a pregnant woman has no obligation to refrain from “unplugging” an unwanted fetus from her circulatory system. See Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A defense of abortion.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971): 47-66.

For a philosophical discussion of this argument, see Robert Audi. "Preventing Abortion as a Test Case for the Justifiability of Violence." The Journal of Ethics 1.2 (1997): 141-163.

See Don Marquis, "Why abortion is immoral," The Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 183-202.

This argument is discussed by, for instance, E. Christian Brugger, "The problem of fetal pain and abortion: Toward an ethical consensus for appropriate behavior." Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 22 (2012): 263-287.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to support this assumption with detailed arguments. I advise the reader to study the op. cit. papers by Thompson, Paul and Paul, Marquis, Audi, and Kaposy.

There was a polarized debate over slavery in the distant past, but at that time the verdictive reasons against slavery had not yet been clearly articulated in a manner that was easily accessible for everyone.

I leave it open how “truth” should be understood in ethical contexts. The Middle Ground Position can arguably be rendered compatible with all major metaethical positions.

For a classic discusson of the inference to the best explanation, see Peter Lipton, Inference to the best explanation, (London: Routledge, 1991).

John Broome, Rationality through reasoning, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), pp. 55-60.

See Peterson, op. cit, pp. 192-194 for details.

Once we have this generalized semantics in place, the next step is to generalize the axioms of SDL and prove that the new logic is a conservative extension. See Peterson, op. cit.

Barnes explicitly writes that she takes “‘vagueness’ to refer to a sub-species of indeterminacy – those special cases of indeterminacy which yield a sorites series”. See Barnes, op. cit, p. 953.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Why Sex Is Not Binary,” The New York Times, 25 Oct. 2018.

This notion of biological maleness is not a social construction and it is intended to be as value-free as other scientific claims about reproductive, biological properties. I make no claim about whether having, or not having, a certin type of chromosomal property would be desirable or undesirable.

Matti Eklund, "Metaphysical vagueness and metaphysical indeterminacy." Metaphysica 14 (2013): 165-179.

Schoenfield, op. cit., p. 263.

Schoenfiled premsis her argument on the assumption that some robust form of moral realism is true. I will not discuss that premise here.

Elizabeth Barnes, "Fundamental indeterminacy," Analytic Philosophy 55 (2014): 339-362, p. 339.

Schoenfield, op. cit., p. 266.

Schoenfield op. cit., p. 277.

Horgan , op. cit, and Barnes, "Arguments against …”, op. cit.

In this example I assume that the fetus would have future positive wellbeing, which I assume would have positive moral value. I also assume that the fetus becomes a person several months or years after birth.

Elizabeth Barnes, "Ontic Vagueness: A Guide for the Perplexed," Noûs 44 (2010): 601-627.

Doughery, “Vague value”, op. cit. p. 369, via Schoenfield, op. cit.

How do we define right and wrong in terms of \({\text{O}}\left( {\text{p}} \right)\)? The answer is that it is right that p iff it is not impermissible that p, and it is wrong that p iff it is impermissible that p.

Note that the second part of the conjunction in the antecedent is a general moral verdict that closes the gap between is and ought, meaning that Sarte’s example does not violate Hume’s Is-Ought thesis.

Barnes, "Ontic Vagueness” , op. cit.

See Barnes, “Arguments against …” and “Ontic vaguness” for discussios of such arguments.

Williams, op. cit. See also Robert Williams, "Decision making under indeterminacy." Philosopher's Imprint 14 (2014): 1-34.

Bales, op. cit., and Peterson, op. cit., ch. 6.

Williams, op. cit. Williams notes that his discussion should not be interpreted as a “definitive recommendation”.

Bales, op. cit., p. 1694.

See Timothy Williamson, Vagueness, (London: Routledge, 1994). Supervaluationist theories of vagueness are accepted by many influential advocates of epistemic and semantic theories of vagueness.

The same applies to Bales’ counterexample, since it presupposes supervaluationism. See Bales, op. cit., 1694-5.

As pointed out by Bales, op. cit., this view seems to be implicit in Rinard, op. cit.

Bales, op. cit.

Williams, “Decision-Making Under Indeterminacy”, op. cit., p. 11.

Ibid.

Ibid.p. 11.

I assume that we can measue degrees of rightness on a scale from 0 to 1. For a discussion of this assumption, see Peterson, op. cit.

Titel: Abortion Is Neither Right Nor Wrong
verfasst von: Martin Peterson
Publikationsdatum: 23.11.2020
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: The Journal of Value Inquiry / Ausgabe 2/2022
Print ISSN: 0022-5363
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0492
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09773-y

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