Note: I haven’t really thought that much about abortion, so I’m sure most of what I say has been covered elsewhere or is for one reason or another foolish. But at least by writing my thoughts down, someone will (hopefully) tell me the reasons that what I’m saying is foolish.
A consequentialist can come to very different conclusions about abortion depending on their theory of the good/bad. If one is a anti-frustrationist (as described by Fehige in "A Pareto Principle for Possible People"), the bad is frustrated preferences. Unborn children don't have preferences at all, so not conceiving them is fine. But a 10 year old probably has a preference for life, killing them would frustrate that preference which is what grounds its dis-value according to anti-frustrationist consequentalism. Abortion, as the midpoint between killing kids and contraception, is notably murkier. When does a fetus gain a strong enough preference for life that killing them would be bad enough that we should generally assume it would be wrong to do so? I'm not sure and am pulled in different directions here.
Beyond that, if one is a longtermist, I think the instrumental considerations outweigh direct ones here. Sure, on the hedonistic total utilitarian (HTU) conception more children living happy lifes is good (AMF, pro-natalism, ...), but if we think that a particular child could develop great anti-extinction tech or marginally increase extinction risk then this plausibly outweighs the direct happiness they experience in HTU's eyes.
I think you completely miss the point about abortion. Women, like other living being, are free to dispose of their own bodies. Whenever we agree or not, women will keep aborting. The utility to provide safe methods is a mather of public health. That's all there is to it.
I hope it’s clear from the piece that I think abortion should be both safe and legal. The question I’m trying to think about is whether we should care if abortion is rare.
You could back up the casual chain one step and argue it is better for the conditions under which most abortions occurs should be more rare. For example, it would be better to have less rape, wiser use of a contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies and so on.
One, "techno-libertarian" style proposal I read years ago was that we should tradeoff the woman's bodily autonomy against the viable self-autonomy of the baby. So in that sense, it doesn't make sense to allow slavery where a woman is forced to cary to term, but rather than abort, if viable (such as in late pregnancy stages or in the more conventional case of post-birth) the child should be given to adoption. This puts some kind of technical bound on the timeframe. There are other similar implications. Like maybe right now we shouldn't mass-produce kids from volunteer ova and sperm, because of cost burdens and clarity regarding child-rearing practices. But presuming some future innovations (high-grade robo-suragate nannies) such a thing might be highly moral to advocate for utilitarians.
The key line in your piece is that societies that are cavalier about mass infanticide are often cavalier about many other things. The psychological effect of abortion on individuals and societies is notable.
I don't think "legally force people to have kids they don't want" is necessarily the answer, but people should probably be ashamed of abortion. They should avoid ending up in the situation and they should give birth unless they feel strongly that its a very bad idea.
It's an open question if "rare" is a stable cultural equilibrium. People who have gotten abortions don't want to be shamed, but the shame is critical to a healthy society.
We don't let mothers murder their children even though caring for a child is exhausting and effects your body.
Nor is adoption necessarily an out because adoption isn't pleasant for the mother either. You do occasionally read of mothers killing their own children. They could have put them up for adoption, but preferred them dead.
In some theoretical future with artificial wombs pregnant women not even carry the child to term, yet I still suspect many would prefer the child dead than put in an artificial womb and given up for adoption. They don't like the idea of "their" child being "out there", they want it to not exist.
As to whether woman will keep aborting, that's as true as the fact that people keep murdering even though murder is illegal and murders are often punished severely.
I favor some equilibrium of legal abortion and massive social shaming against it. This "my body my choice" stuff impedes that.
But that is not a utilitarian position! The whole idea of consequentialist thinking is that moral decisions should rely on what the consequences are, not on people's "rights" or "duties" or other deontological notions.
Thanks for your reply. I know my point is murky but what I wanted to say is that abortion will happens whatever philosophical view we take on it so we better focus on the consequences of that fact and what it means for public health rather than asking if abortion should happens more or less and the consequences for future population numbers
OK. But all sorts of things have a frequency that cannot plausibly be reduced to zero in the near future and yet we can massively influence their prevalence in either the positive or negative direction: take alcohol consumption (Prohibition reduced it, different countries/cultures have different rates), adultery, child abuse, picking one's nose (more common in the Netherlands, apparently), catching a cold, burning fossil fuels ... Incentives matter and each of these (& abortion too) can be encouraged, discouraged, stigmatised, endorsed, subsidised, frowned-upon and so on. For a utilitarian it must be an open question as to which approach should be adopted to each practice.
Indeed, if we are to take seriously the idea that moral progress is possible - i.e. that we might be wrong about some things we now believe - then a good place to start is to revisit the idea that there is nothing wrong with the extra-judicial killing of currently existing (albeit small) humans who will live worthwhile lives. Although perhaps more awkward from a social point of view than thinking about possible future trillions, it would display more of a commitment to logical consistency, following arguments to their conclusions and so on - all of which are (I think) worthwhile aims too.
I think people should have as many kids as they can comfortably care for (physically, emotionally, financially) without being a burden on others.
That will differ from person to person, but at a societal level something about women wanting 2.5 kids on average and ending up with 1.5 kids on average seems wrong. Don't even get me started on the TFR black hole that is East Asia.
I don't have a problem with abortion if its in service to this goal. A family that aborted a Downs Syndrome kid would be fine with me, especially if it was an attempt to increase their family size and doing so allowed them to better care for their remaining kids (and perhaps have more).
The kind of abortion that freaks me out is the kind were you are fucking around with the wrong sort of partners and basically using it as a form of birth control. A lot of women do this, I've seen it, and it's basically what people really dislike when they dislike abortion.
A consequentialist can come to very different conclusions about abortion depending on their theory of the good/bad. If one is a anti-frustrationist (as described by Fehige in "A Pareto Principle for Possible People"), the bad is frustrated preferences. Unborn children don't have preferences at all, so not conceiving them is fine. But a 10 year old probably has a preference for life, killing them would frustrate that preference which is what grounds its dis-value according to anti-frustrationist consequentalism. Abortion, as the midpoint between killing kids and contraception, is notably murkier. When does a fetus gain a strong enough preference for life that killing them would be bad enough that we should generally assume it would be wrong to do so? I'm not sure and am pulled in different directions here.
Beyond that, if one is a longtermist, I think the instrumental considerations outweigh direct ones here. Sure, on the hedonistic total utilitarian (HTU) conception more children living happy lifes is good (AMF, pro-natalism, ...), but if we think that a particular child could develop great anti-extinction tech or marginally increase extinction risk then this plausibly outweighs the direct happiness they experience in HTU's eyes.
I think you completely miss the point about abortion. Women, like other living being, are free to dispose of their own bodies. Whenever we agree or not, women will keep aborting. The utility to provide safe methods is a mather of public health. That's all there is to it.
I hope it’s clear from the piece that I think abortion should be both safe and legal. The question I’m trying to think about is whether we should care if abortion is rare.
You could back up the casual chain one step and argue it is better for the conditions under which most abortions occurs should be more rare. For example, it would be better to have less rape, wiser use of a contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies and so on.
One, "techno-libertarian" style proposal I read years ago was that we should tradeoff the woman's bodily autonomy against the viable self-autonomy of the baby. So in that sense, it doesn't make sense to allow slavery where a woman is forced to cary to term, but rather than abort, if viable (such as in late pregnancy stages or in the more conventional case of post-birth) the child should be given to adoption. This puts some kind of technical bound on the timeframe. There are other similar implications. Like maybe right now we shouldn't mass-produce kids from volunteer ova and sperm, because of cost burdens and clarity regarding child-rearing practices. But presuming some future innovations (high-grade robo-suragate nannies) such a thing might be highly moral to advocate for utilitarians.
The key line in your piece is that societies that are cavalier about mass infanticide are often cavalier about many other things. The psychological effect of abortion on individuals and societies is notable.
I don't think "legally force people to have kids they don't want" is necessarily the answer, but people should probably be ashamed of abortion. They should avoid ending up in the situation and they should give birth unless they feel strongly that its a very bad idea.
It's an open question if "rare" is a stable cultural equilibrium. People who have gotten abortions don't want to be shamed, but the shame is critical to a healthy society.
We don't let mothers murder their children even though caring for a child is exhausting and effects your body.
Nor is adoption necessarily an out because adoption isn't pleasant for the mother either. You do occasionally read of mothers killing their own children. They could have put them up for adoption, but preferred them dead.
In some theoretical future with artificial wombs pregnant women not even carry the child to term, yet I still suspect many would prefer the child dead than put in an artificial womb and given up for adoption. They don't like the idea of "their" child being "out there", they want it to not exist.
As to whether woman will keep aborting, that's as true as the fact that people keep murdering even though murder is illegal and murders are often punished severely.
I favor some equilibrium of legal abortion and massive social shaming against it. This "my body my choice" stuff impedes that.
But that is not a utilitarian position! The whole idea of consequentialist thinking is that moral decisions should rely on what the consequences are, not on people's "rights" or "duties" or other deontological notions.
Thanks for your reply. I know my point is murky but what I wanted to say is that abortion will happens whatever philosophical view we take on it so we better focus on the consequences of that fact and what it means for public health rather than asking if abortion should happens more or less and the consequences for future population numbers
OK. But all sorts of things have a frequency that cannot plausibly be reduced to zero in the near future and yet we can massively influence their prevalence in either the positive or negative direction: take alcohol consumption (Prohibition reduced it, different countries/cultures have different rates), adultery, child abuse, picking one's nose (more common in the Netherlands, apparently), catching a cold, burning fossil fuels ... Incentives matter and each of these (& abortion too) can be encouraged, discouraged, stigmatised, endorsed, subsidised, frowned-upon and so on. For a utilitarian it must be an open question as to which approach should be adopted to each practice.
Indeed, if we are to take seriously the idea that moral progress is possible - i.e. that we might be wrong about some things we now believe - then a good place to start is to revisit the idea that there is nothing wrong with the extra-judicial killing of currently existing (albeit small) humans who will live worthwhile lives. Although perhaps more awkward from a social point of view than thinking about possible future trillions, it would display more of a commitment to logical consistency, following arguments to their conclusions and so on - all of which are (I think) worthwhile aims too.
I think people should have as many kids as they can comfortably care for (physically, emotionally, financially) without being a burden on others.
That will differ from person to person, but at a societal level something about women wanting 2.5 kids on average and ending up with 1.5 kids on average seems wrong. Don't even get me started on the TFR black hole that is East Asia.
I don't have a problem with abortion if its in service to this goal. A family that aborted a Downs Syndrome kid would be fine with me, especially if it was an attempt to increase their family size and doing so allowed them to better care for their remaining kids (and perhaps have more).
The kind of abortion that freaks me out is the kind were you are fucking around with the wrong sort of partners and basically using it as a form of birth control. A lot of women do this, I've seen it, and it's basically what people really dislike when they dislike abortion.
This just seems like a reductio of utilitarianism to me, FWIW.
Loads of reasons you could have here but what are they?
Motivated reasoning is definitely a thing.
I'd say we evolved to find stuff like this abhorrent because it helps us keep the next generation going and leave it at that.