How Good People Can Be Guilted Out Of Their Rights

I was talking about abortion with two students today -- we've read a few articles on the issue, including Judith Jarvis Thomson's defense of abortion and Don Marquis' anti-abortion argument.  Thomson's argument is a particularly interesting one, because she argues that abortion is permissible even if we regard the fetus as a person with the same rights as you or I.  This is one of the many picturesque thought-experiments in her piece:

suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don't want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective, and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not--despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won't do--for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.

One of the two students (I think they're on opposite sides of the issue) wanted to argue that even in this case, you're responsible for the upbringing of the person-plant, and that a woman similarly has the obligation to nourish a fetus within her for nine months after it's conceived, even if she used contraception.  She justified her opinion by talking about how bad she'd feel if she had an unplanned pregnancy, even if she had used birth control.  Someone who did something like that, she said, ought to bear the consequences.  And here I discovered something interesting about the issue of abortion, and about the debate over rights in general. 

Our beliefs about rights often come out of our emotions, and sometimes this process leads us to the correct conclusions.  Consider the indignation we feel when we think of slavery and segregation.  We're outraged by these practices, and when we see them through the emotional coloring of outrage, we see them as injustices where human rights are violated. 

But this way of figuring out what rights you have is deeply fallible.  Many good people, for example, have some tendency to blame themselves even in cases where they really shouldn't.  They have a strong desire to do things the right way, and they hold their actions to very high standards.  And when something goes wrong, even though they did everything in their power make sure it went right, they feel very bad. 

(With my students, I brought up a case where someone makes some complex machinery doing absolutely everything possible to make it safe, and an employer installs it exactly as he should, and the worker follows exactly proper procedure, but something one-in-a-trillion goes wrong, and the worker is killed.  In this case, nobody may be to blame, but the maker and the employer are good people, it's hard to imagine them not feeling bad about their role in the death.  Both of my students agreed that in such a situation, people could feel bad but not be blameworthy.  This generated one of those Amazing Philosophy Moments when my anti-abortion student realized that this would make the conception of an unwanted child a similarly non-blameworthy occurrence.  Her friend was excited to see her say that, which is why I think they're on different sides of the issue.) 

The range of things that most good people will feel bad about, then, is wider than the range of things where they do wrong or violate someone's rights.  So -- and this is what I found striking -- it's frighteningly easy to convince good people that they have fewer rights than they do.  If you can make them interpret their bad feelings as feelings that they've committed an injustice, you can get them to believe that they -- and others in their position -- lack certain rights.  (I'm sure this is especially significant with young women who are taught by a patriarchal society to feel guilty about premarital sex.) 

There's a bunch of other stuff here that I find really interesting -- the naturalness of the idea that childbirth is a rightful punishment for having sex, for instance.  And, of course, the premise Thomson famously grants -- that the fetus is a person.  Maybe we'll get a chance to discuss that next time, because they want to talk with me again tomorrow afternoon. 

Comments

[Sir Charles]

Neil,

Strangely enough this reminds me of one of the few things I've ever agreed on with Pat Buchanan -- he asserted that political beliefs are really a product of our visceral sense of right and wrong -- we then take these gut level feelings and construct intellectual rationales to justify the feelings. But the feelings precede the thoughts.

[Stentor]

It's interesting that you, Thomson, and your student all seem to accept that the moral question turns on whether someone is *responsible* for the event that raises the dilemma. I tend to think that it doesn't matter so much who is responsible, what matters in the abortion thought experiments is that the fetus-stand-in is there and liable to suffer because of my actions. As far as the question of abortion, then, to me the pro-choice position still has to rest on the fact of the fetus's non-personhood.

As to the larger question of misallocating rights, in general I think the reliance on over-narrow ideas of responsibility (e.g. "I'm not personally responsible for slavery!") is as much a problem as the kind of over-broadness you highlight here (I feel bad, so it must be wrong).

[ShortWoman]

Neil: we are having a Mothers Day Blogswarm for Maternal Death as a protest to a staged funeral march for aborted fetuses. More details at http://shortwoman.com/?p=571 . Care to join in?

[low-tech cyclist]

I agree with Stentor that responsibility doesn't matter much here. (I can think of a bunch of situations, e.g. dealing with the mortgage crisis, where the question of responsibility only muddies the waters.)

Let's assume nobody's responsible for this being having taken root in my place; it just has. And I can't safely uproot it and plant it somewhere else; either it grows here, for the next several months anyway, or I kill it.

So it's a question of relative rights. (Anyone else have a recent New Pornographers song going through their head, right about now?) Do I have the right to kill it in order to prevent my being inconvenienced in this manner? It does seem to come down to the question of fetal personhood.

It's generally accepted that I don't have the right to kill another person for the sake of my convenience. But I can take my pet to the animal shelter and have it put down because I find the pet inconvenient. If it's not a person, we can do with it as we wish. If it is, we can't. And if it's a question of when it transitions from being something less than a person to being a person, then before that transition, it's our choice, and after the transition, it's not.

[Ron]

Ask Michael Vick if he can do what he wishes with animals, low-tech cyclist.

That's an interesting analogy, Neil, that I've never seen before. I would add to the scenario that it would be important whether you pruned the person-plant as soon as you found it growing on your floor or if you let it take root for 8 months until it was almost ready to flower.

[Neil the Ethical Werewolf]

I think that's totally right, Sir Charles. It's Hume's old view that our moral beliefs come from "gilding and staining all natural objects with the colours borrowed from internal sentiment."

I actually agree with you on all those things, Stentor. (As a utilitarian, I usually don't care who's responsible for a bad situation -- anybody who has the power to fix it should do so.) But in this case, I focused on a fairly narrow aspect of the student's position and dealt with it internal to her view.

And it's certainly true that the absence of moral emotions misleads us quite often. Actually, my big view is that fitting our moral beliefs to our emotionally driven moral intuitions is a generally unreliable process of belief-formation, and that we need to use a more reliable process -- looking inward at our experiences and seeing what they're like -- to find out what's good. That's how we find out that pleasure is good and get the foundations of utilitarianism.

[low-tech cyclist]

Ask Michael Vick if he can do what he wishes with animals, low-tech cyclist.

Ron, it was quite clear in context that I meant I didn't have to ask anyone's permission to take my pet to the animal shelter and bring its life to a peaceful end. Please let's not play games of willful misinterpretation.

[Sir Charles]

l-t c,

Which reminds me -- has Obama denounced Micahel Vick?

[Joe]

"Do I have the right to kill it in order to prevent my being inconvenienced in this manner? It does seem to come down to the question of fetal personhood."

I don't buy this -- or rather, this is where the hypothetical breaks down. The inconvenience in THIS PARTICULAR CASE seems insufficient to justify the death of the seed-person, but it is certainly true that we can imagine scenarios (real-world and not) where the inconvenience is so severe that everyone agrees that justification is present.

For example, if a relative needs a kidney transplant from you and you are the only match, the inconvenience associated with giving up a kidney is generally considered to be so severe that we give people the choice to decline, even if it results in death.

Or, if a homeless person knocks on your door on a very cold night asking to stay in the garage, you are entitled to say no, even if death is possible as a result.

I would argue that the "inconvenience" associated with pregnancy (months-long illness, increased likelihood of developing diabetes, statistically permanent weight gain, painfully enlarged body parts, inevitable need for a long and painful childbirth or major surgery, risk of death) firmly places it in the category of "severe enough to avoid it, even at the cost of death to another person."

[Scott K]

I too would agree that ultimately, from a rational viewpoint, the question of whether abortion is strongly impacted by the decision made on whether a fetus is a person or not. However, this issue is not resolved in philosophy classes, rather, it is resolved in the public realm of politics. The average person never sees a fetus, except for as pictures of some proto-human. People will also draw their own mental associations with the word "fetus", since the word is used to describe an organism's existence over a span of roughly 9 months, even though said organism undergoes some rather drastic changes in its structural makeup. So some people may identify with a protohuman-like image even if the fetus being discussed in a specific situation is actually only about 16 cells clumped together.

I think that there are a fair number of people, especially in the mushy "middle ground" between the strongly opinionated advocates of either side of the argument, who simply set aside that whole argument because they don't feel like they have a clear sense of how to make that type of judgement call. Thus, the anti-choice proponents also put out an alternative argument that spares people from having to make the choice in the first place-- by calling for people to be responsible for their own actions. Through this paradigm, even a minimal amount of doubt about a fetus's personhood is sufficient cause to sway this "mushy fetally confused populace" to consider that it is reasonable to demand that these "irresponsible hedonists" should not be able to take the perceived easy way out of abortion.

Of course, there is also an argument that could be made that forcing people to introduce unwanted children into the world would have a real cost to every taxpayer and citizen, much like there is evidence that "housing first" programs cost less to society even though it seems like we are basically giving people a free place to live without requiring them to take on an equivalent amount of responsibility to the average citizen. But that type of argument is quite difficult to make, so I see more value in making people aware of the potential pitfalls to simply assuming that accidental pregnancies are inherently irresponsible actions. The fetally confused populace are the swing voters of the abortion election!

[low-tech cyclist]

Which reminds me -- has Obama denounced Michael Vick?

Nah, but I hear he's denounced Vick's Vap-o-Rub. Think that's close enough?

[low-tech cyclist]

Of course, maybe Hillary should be asked if she's going to "reject and denounce" Bill on account of pardoning those Weather Underground people.

[Sir Charles]

l-t c,

So are you saying that instead of denouncing cruel dog torturers (not to mention Jay Z, Ludacris and Buckwheat), instead Barack has turned his back on America's favorite minty balm? It figures.

As to your Hillary query -- I believe she would be more than willing to denounce Bill if it would work for her.

[Stephen]

I would argue that the "inconvenience" associated with pregnancy (months-long illness, increased likelihood of developing diabetes, statistically permanent weight gain, painfully enlarged body parts, inevitable need for a long and painful childbirth or major surgery, risk of death) firmly places it in the category of "severe enough to avoid it, even at the cost of death to another person."

Adding to - not disagreeing with - your point, carrying a pregnancy to term has consequences, to use the anti-choicers' poor phrasing, that last far beyond the actual pregnancy. A baby takes a lot of work, energy and money. Since socioeconomic status is closely connected to the likelihood of a woman considering abortion, forced childbirth means putting economic and emotional strain on people who are least able to adjust their lives for it.

The adoption argument is worthless BS; there are thousands of kids in the USA up for adoption who wait, and wait, and wait some more - because they aren't white, or have a physical or mental problem. And the longer they wait, the less likely it is they will ever be adopted.

The abortion debate is good proof for the idea that all one needs to be a liberal is empathy. Anti-choicers by their own admission cannot comprehend the idea that someone could be such a dire situation that they would not want to carry a pregnancy to term and raise the child that results. Nor can they understand that there might be other people, children even, whose lives are adversely affected by the presence of another child in the family. And by "adversely affected" I mean in the amount of food they get to eat, the health care they receive, their ability to pursue education and a host of other things that anti-choicers don't even understand might be optional for some people.

[Sir Charles]

Stephen,

What's really scary is the anti-choicer's view of the child as an appropriate "consequence," i.e. punishment for sexual behavior of which they do not approve. One has to have a rather disturbing world view to see things in that fashion.

[low-tech cyclist]

As a white person, I feel compelled, on behalf of my race, to reject and denounce Celine Dion.

[Sir Charles]

I'd like to think that as the Canadian of the group, Dymaxion John has to bear responsiility for Celine. Of course, that means he can take credit for Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Arcade Fire -- then again, he gets debited for Rush. I'm not sure where that math leaves him.