As J.S. Mill noted in his book On Liberty, people generally do not limit liberty in a principled and consistent way. Rather, they impose or oppose restrictions based on unreasoned likes and dislikes. The political, moral and legal issues of abortion are, obviously enough, areas where this occurs.
Conservatives purport to oppose regulations and favor liberty; yet they tend to support imposing strict and even harsh restrictions on abortion. Liberals purport to favor regulations to protect people, yet also tend to accept abortion. This apparent inconsistency raises the interesting problem of working out a consistent moral position regarding liberty and regulation. I will begin with the generic conservative and then move on to the generic liberal while noting that I understand there are nuanced positions.
While it is a stereotype, conservatives are often cast as opposing many regulations aimed at protecting people from harm. For example, environmental regulations are generally supposed to be aimed at protecting people from toxins. As another example, safety regulations for products and business operations are supposed to be aimed at protecting consumers and workers. Naturally enough, few conservatives will say that they oppose protecting people; however, they argue against such regulations by claiming that they harm business and thus “kill jobs” and limit profits. Some will contend that the claims about the dangers of things like pollution are simply fabrications by liberals who are motivated by their hatred of capitalism.
Pushing aside the rhetoric, an objective look at the general conservative stance towards regulations of this sort is that they are willing to tolerate harms, such as the deaths of children from pollution, as part of the cost of economic advantages. This is a utilitarian/consequentialist approach: a certain amount of harm (pollution, safety issues, health problems, etc.) is an acceptable price to pay for the economic advantages. This is also a cost-shifting approach: the cost is moved from the business to those impacted by the weak or lack of regulations. For example, weak regulations on pollution and environmental damage allow businesses to make more profits because they do not need to pay the full costs of these harms. They are instead shifted on to the people impacted by then. To give a specific illustration, allowing toxins to go out of a factory saves the company money, but costs those exposed to the toxin in terms of their health and economically, if only from health care costs. The idea is, in general terms, that the interests of business outweigh the interests of those harmed—even when those harmed are the unborn and young children. This is a classic consequentialist approach for resolving competing interests.
In the case of abortion, the conservatives generally profess to be against it. This is generally presented in moral and religious terms of how life is sacred, that the unborn must be protected from harm, and so on. They do not, of course, present it as imposing on liberty. The obvious problem with this position on abortion is that it directly contradicts their professed position on regulations aimed at protecting people: they oppose such regulations by arguing in favor of economic interests. Obviously enough, if it is acceptable to allow harm to the unborn when doing so is in the interest of those doing the harm, this general principle must also be applied to abortion as well—it should be acceptable when the interests of the woman outweighs that of the unborn.
This line of reasoning can be countered on utilitarian grounds: allowing businesses to harm to the unborn for economic interests outweighs the harms; allowing women to have abortions when it is in their interest does not. This could also be argued by contending that women matter less (or not at all) in the calculation, unless they are in business and harming the unborn via business activity. This approach, while honest, does seem terrible: the unborn should not be harmed, unless doing so is profitable for the right economic interests. As noted above, liberals also run into a problem here.
While it is a stereotype, liberals are supposed to favor regulation that protects people—even when doing so imposes considerable economic costs. They are also supposed to be pro-choice and support the liberty of a woman to have an abortion.
When arguing for protective regulations, one approach is to do so on utilitarian grounds: protecting people from harm creates more good than bad, even when the economic harms are factored in. There is also the fairness argument: when businesses can shift the costs to the people being harmed by their activities, this is stealing from those people. And, of course, there is the more deontological approach (that actions are good or bad in themselves) that allowing people to be harmed is just wrong.
The utilitarian justification can, obviously enough, be used to justify abortion: the benefits gained outweigh the harm done. Obviously not for the unborn, though. This suggests that the same approach can also justify opposing protective regulations—if it is acceptable to kill the unborn when doing so is in one’s interest, then this would apply both to abortion and business.
The fairness argument, also quite obviously, also seems to tell against abortion: the cost is being imposed on the unborn—they are killed for the interests of another; which seems analogous to cost shifting in business. The deontological approach would also seem to tell against abortion: if regulation is needed to protect the unborn from the harm of pollution and such, then it would also be needed to protect them from abortion.
It is important to note that I am not addressing in this essay the matter of which position is correct. Rather, my objective has been to map up the conflict between views of protective regulations and abortion. Pro-life folks should be for protective regulation across the board, or have a reasonable argument why aborting the unborn is wrong but killing them through environmental pollution is acceptable. Pro-choice folks should be tolerant of the liberty to harm others when doing so is in one’s interest, or have a reasonable argument why aborting the unborn is acceptable but harming them with pollution is not. I am confident that wise thinkers can easily address these minor challenges.
As an intellectual exercise, the next time you write something like “allowing women to have abortions” or “the liberty of a woman to have an abortion” I’d like you to write something more accurate like: “allowing women to hire someone to kill their children” or “the liberty of a woman to hire someone to kill her child”.
Regarding environmental regulations aimed at protecting people from toxins, why do we never hear anyone — Democrat or Republican — mention the fact that everything we buy that is made in China is causing environmental disaster, since China has no environmental protections? It makes me sick to know people are dying from things like shoe glue in China, and that I can’t buy a pair of shoes, even expensive shoes, in the US unless they are made in China. This, to me, is inexcusable. And I am powerless to do anything about it. It’s not like I can simply choose not to buy Chinese products, because that’s all I have to choose from! Sure, we have environmental protections in the US, but all the products we buy are made in China! Where is the media on this? Surely this is an important topic that needs to be addressed.
Your search for inconsistencies and contradictions will become more interesting when you aim the analytical lens at us, philosophers and wannabe philosophers.
If it could be shown that expecting people to be rational is not supported by the evidence, would we logic nerds stop having that expectation? I know I wouldn’t, because I already see evidence aplenty, but it seems to have little influence upon my behavior.
I don’t expect people to be rational; but I persist in trying to argue. To use an analogy, doctors know that people often do not follow their medical advice (eat well, exercise, etc.) yet they keep on trying.
Is persisting rational? Perhaps yes, if we are persisting because we enjoy persisting. If we are persisting in the expectation of results, perhaps not.
“…doctors know that people often do not follow their medical advice (eat well, exercise, etc.) yet they keep on trying.”
This is a very interesting point – one that continues to gnaw at me in a different context. Forgive me for going off topic for a moment …
Over the last decade, one issue that has been at the forefront of political discourse or rancor or whatever you want to call it, is healthcare. A very common and fervent argument in favor of Universal Healthcare or Single Payer or some flavor of Obamacare or Romneycare is that our system is flawed, as evidenced by our national average life expectancy – which ranks 31st among nations.
But – you have just illustrated my point exactly. The leading cause of death in the US, accounting for 23 percent of total annual deaths, is heart disease. This is also the single most easily preventable disease that requires no medications, no physicians, no special equipment, no universal healthcare – and you said it yourself. Eat well. Exercise. Added to that is of course, “Maintain a Healthy Weight” and “Reduce the Stress in your Life”.
Number 2, which accounts for 22.5 percent of deaths, is Cancer. While anyone can get cancer for any reason, the cause for many, many forms of cancer are smoking and heavy alcohol use. The World Cancer Research Fund estimates that up to 30% of cancer cases that occur in developed countries like the US are related to being overweight, obese, inactive, or poor nutrition.
Number 3, which accounts for 5.6%, is COPD and related lung issues, which are directly related to tobacco use.
All of these issues can be severely curtailed or eliminated by those simple factors, which stem from just listening to your doctor.
I agree with you – that persisting in this context is highly rational – it is a doctor’s duty to inform and educate his patients and do what he can to improve the overall health of our country’s population.
However, it is extremely irrational to use our life span statistics as an indictment of our healthcare system and make the case for government-sponsored coverage.
It’s true that we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world on a per-capita basis – but just imagine if the medical community didn’t have to deal with the epidemic proportions of heart disease, atherosclerosis, cancer, and lung disease?
Thanks for letting me vent.
I’ve read that the third leading cause of death in the United States is preventable medical errors. I’m not sure how exactly true that is, but it does seem like doctors are at least a significant part of the problem.
Yes, philosophers want to act like doctors by teaching us to be logical, but the credibility of that process gets undermined if the philosophers themselves as being illogical in pursuing a teaching agenda which can not be supported by the evidence.
Here’s the inconvenient evidence. Philosophers have been teaching us for thousands of years, and we’re still bat #$^$ crazy much of the time. We are a civilization with a hair trigger loaded gun in it’s mouth, a well known fact we find too boring to discuss. Bat #$% crazy.
Do you argue with Jehovah’s Witnesses when they knock on your door? Or do you rationally recognize that no amount of reason is going to liberate them from the trance they are enjoying?
Human beings don’t learn from reason. They learn from pain.
BTW, my post above is itself guilty of the crime which it is proposing. I’m clear on this form of irrationality from much personal experience, my own behavior.
As a running fanatic, I agree with you that the health woes of America are largely self-inflicted. This is not a denial of problems in the system, but mortality rates would be much better if people exercised more, ate better, and so on. As Aristotle noted long ago, the advice of physicians is useless if people do not follow it.
Mike,
This post lacks nuance. It amounts to:
Regulation = good
Abortion = good
Conservatives = bad
There seems to be no room in your universe for rent seeking, for example. Or for the notion, firmly held by billions of people, that abortion = murder. You draw a parallel between environmental regulation and opposition to abortion. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of opposition to abortion. Would you dare say that murder should be “regulated”? I am pro-choice myself, but I at least understand where abortion opponents are coming from.
Are you familiar with the story of the “Baptist and the bootlegger”?
It is actually called the “Bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation.
http://youtu.be/msQ_khFmKtU
Thank you for that link, TJB. I remember the principle of the model from long ago, and we see it all the time, but that’s a nice video.
“I will begin with the generic conservative and then move on to the generic liberal while noting that I understand there are nuanced positions.”
I really had to force myself to read beyond that statement. To refer to positions on this argument as “nuanced” is a gross understatement. The moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding this debate are very personal on both sides; there are multiple degrees of commitment to ideology, ideas, circumstance.
I really don’t know what a “generic conservative” or a “generic liberal” is, except that it’s some melange of descriptions put together from what you might read in the Huffington Post or hear on Fox News. You are talking about 350 million thinking, feeling human beings with diverse backgrounds in economic demographics, race, education, religion.
I don’t think that you can assign absolutes on any ideology, then assign a label of hypocrisy for not marching down that line.
At the very most, you might be able to say that, depending on any given circumstance, conservative ideology tends to favor solutions that involve less government, less regulation, while liberal ideology tends to favor regulation – but notice that I am talking about ideology not people. As soon as you start categorizing people, insisting that they follow the ideology YOU think their label calls for, you start to exhibit tendencies one might call “bigoted”.
So yes, there are people who call themselves conservative who would like to see laws banning all abortions regardless of circumstance – but that’s neither generic nor mainstream. I hold many conservative values, but I don’t hold that one. Am I betraying my cause? Am I a hypocrite? The same is true for the other side – there are people who advocate for free and unrestricted abortion, paid for by taxpayers, regardless of circumstance – even approving of “partial birth” abortion and even After Birth Abortion
I would suspect that a distribution of attitudes on abortion, like most things of the sort, would be a bell curve. Right down the middle is the spirit, intent, and language of “Roe V Wade”. To the left of that, as the curve gets smaller and smaller, we move toward expanding choice, increasing funding, and widening the window of “acceptability” until you get to the fringe that represents the “Postpartum Abortion” advocates. Same on the right – as you move to the right, you’ll see smaller numbers advocating the narrowing of the window, limiting government funding, all the way to the fringe who would advocate for jail time for women who undergo the procedure
I think that part of the problem we have with this issue is that we purposely mis-state others’ positions in order to make our points. When Republicans, for example, move to cut government funding for abortion, it is described and written about as a ban. In this example, it is exactly the same as the conversation surrounding Roe v. Wade – i.e., “At what point does the State have an obligatory interest in the life of the unborn?” Roe V. Wade says that point is the beginning of the third trimester, based on fetal “viability”, but in later test cases justices have acknowledged that viability can occur earlier based on medical advances. There are some who would draw this line at 19 or 20 weeks, based on experiments that have shown that a fetus can experience pain much earlier than previously thought. Utah just passed a law that says a doctor must administer anesthesia to a fetus if an abortion is to be performed after 20 weeks.
The same argument happens on the other side for those who seek to expand the “unrestricted” window, who disbelieve or dismiss the science that discusses when a fetus is viable or can feel pain, and believe that the State should not be involved until after 30 weeks, or 40. Or at all.
For me, I would like to see a world where no abortions are necessary, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. Absent that, I believe in the spirit of Roe v Wade, that there is some point at which the State needs to stand up for the rights of the unborn, and I guess I take a fairly conservative point of view on that matter – that if there is even the chance that an abortion will inflict pain and suffering on a living thing, or if that fetus has a chance of surviving outside the womb, then abortion should only be allowed in some very carefully considered cases.
This is not an extreme point of view – the fact is that 89-92% of all abortions in the US take place in the first trimester – <13 weeks; another 7-8% take place between 14-20 weeks, and a mere 1.3% take place after 21 weeks. Considering the fact that there are approximately 1 million abortions annually in the US, we are really talking about 13,000 cases or less. I don't know what the statistics are regarding the reasons for those 13,000 procedures, but when we factor in medical necessity that threatens the life of the mother or child, the number of unrestricted abortions by choice alone is a pretty small number. Yet we fight each other and hate each other and use words like "The most restrictive ban ever!" for attempts to codify what a vast majority of people do anyway.
Of course there's another issue that comes up – and I would say that for many people this is the only issue – and that is federal funding. Again, there is a bell curve – the far end of the left side of the curve calls for unrestricted federal funding for all abortions, the far end of the right side calls for none, but most people fall somewhere in between. There are some pretty staunch conservatives that I know who hold the position, "I don't care what you do or when you do it. Live your own life – just don't ask me to pay for it". I also know some liberals who will say the opposite – "The poor don't have access to the kind of medical treatment available to the rich – the government needs to level the playing field. It is a God-given right!" Neither of these groups are offering any moral position at all – it's a political issue about taxes and economics.
Again, for me, I do think the State does have a moral obligation to protect life – in the same way we have police forces and charity emergency care. I think Roe v. Wade is good law, but one that needs adjustment from time to time based on scientific and medical knowledge. And I am against any and all State funding. I do not think that the government has the right to take my tax money and use it in support of one side of a moral issue, when half the country objects. This argument can, and does, lead to an expanded discussion about war and military intervention – but I will concede again that there are no absolutes, and no requirement for consistency across varied circumstance.
Of course, along with my objection to State funding – I absolutely support the government's support of charitable and philanthropic contribution with tax deductions. I believe that if the government cut 100% of the $500 million in annual funding for Planned Parenthood, enough outspoken pro-choice one-percenters would replace that and more in a heartbeat. People like Rosie O'Donnel, Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen DeGeneres, Steven Spielberg, and dozens and even hundreds of other millionaires and billionaires would create a free-abortion network that is far beyond Planned Parenthood's dreams – and a huge aspect of the political issue of abortion would just vanish. Not all of it, of course, but the debate would sure soften. And check it out – another tax break for the rich!
Labels are for canned goods. Human beings hold to various levels of moral and even fiscal ideology – we all have our lines in the sand. And those lines move constantly as our circumstances change, as we grow to understand the depth of situations, or as we find ourselves in situations we thought we could understand from the outside looking in. There is no hypocrisy in that, and no requirement that we maintain a hard line just because someone chooses to label us "Liberal" or "Conservative".
Actually, I call them generic while noting that I am not including the vast realm of nuanced positions between generic liberal and generic conservative.
Yes, I understand. I maintain that there is no such thing as a “generic” Liberal or Conservative. That just reduces the “vast realm of nuanced opinions” to a neat stereotype. Once you have a stereotype, you no longer have to address or consider individual points of view, which results in that tribalism we’ve talked about here.
This article, following the last one, left me pondering how much of government’s decisions can be consistently addressed on deontological grounds. Not much, I think. Most government decisions are not clearly right vs. wrong.
Anyway, while I’d like to discuss the factual underpinnings of several claims on a sentence by sentence basis, this would have to be a very long series of comments. Ignoring the chaff for now, the question is:
Is the generic conservative position inconsistent in favouring liberty while restricting abortion?
No. Generic conservatives (and liberals, and pretty much everyone else) favours restricting murder. If abortion is a form of murder then it should be restricted.
Is the generic liberal position inconsistent in permitting abortion while generally restricting acts that harm humans?
(First, both the conservative and the liberal positions favour restricting acts that harm others. There’s a whole section of badly-supported chaff to clear through here.)
No. If you believe that a fetus is not a human life, then it is not a human to be harmed.
Thinking about it a bit further, perhaps the more interesting question is WHY most conservatives in the US consider the fetus a human life while most liberals don’t. It isn’t, on its face, a question about political philosophy.
In similar vein, one of the questions that has been nagging at me for the last decade is why US conservatives generally think that global warming alarm is overblown, while US liberals generally think that it is the major threat of the next century. I continue to find this observation quite confounding. The scientific facts (actual facts, not conjecture and projection and modelling) are agreed. There is plenty of uncertainty to provide some justification for almost any position from “there will be a mild benefit from small warming” to “there is a danger of enough warming to cause large demographic shifts that may trigger wars”, or even an outside bet on a dip into a new LIA with an upcoming solar minimum.
So rational people might take almost any position on the actual facts. Why, then, is the distribution so weighted by political view? It’s easy to say that people don’t make informed decisions, and just trust the leaders of their political tribe, and that certainly might account for a lot of it, but why the conformity of opinion among those leaders?
I think the answers are more likely to be found in psychology than philosophy, though.
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
Four hyperlinks seems to be the cutoff here. Posted May 11 or 12 … any chance of getting out of purgatory, or should I re-post and eliminate the hyperlinks?
Would we take health tips advice from a doctor with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth? In order for the “philosopher as doctor” analogy to work we would first have to demonstrate that philosophers as a group are rational, taking the medicine they are prescribing for others. Is this true? Generally speaking, are philosophers rational?
It seems there may be some confusion about the difference between philosophy and reason. For example, imagine that I am tied to the train tracks and can hear the train coming off in the distance. I set the coming train aside and continue working on my article about Plato. Writing an article about Plato would certainly qualify as philosophy, but in this circumstance would it qualify as reason?
This is the circumstance all of us are actually in. The “more is better” relationship with knowledge which defines our civilization has generated threats no less real and no less imminent than the coming train in the example above. And yet here we all are, not just on this blog but across the field of philosophy, indeed across the realm of intellectual elites in general, writing articles about anything and everything except the coming train and the process that generated it.
After trying to engage scientists and philosophers in this topic for years, and having very little success, I’ve concluded that those we look up to as intellectual elites are intelligent, well educated, articulate and generally well intended, but not rational.
And so the never ending passion of these intellectual elites, scientists and philosophers, to provide the rest of us with instruction on the use of reason tends to wear more than a little thin. I accept their sincerity and good intentions, but no longer buy the story they have sold themselves about how they are experts on reason.
Doctor heal thyself. Put out the cigarette. Take your own medicine. And then let’s talk again.
Funny you should mention that. When I had my quadriceps tear, the second doctor I saw “drove” up to me on his mobility scooter, reeking of tobacco. He coughed a lot during the examination; I was worried he was going to die.
No, academic philosophers as people are no more rational than non-philosophers. True philosophers would, of course, be more rational. Just like true mathematicians would be better at math than most folks.
What would true philosophy look like? How do we define “more rational”?
Good topics for an upcoming article perhaps?