Abstract
1.1.1 I have two main goals in this book. The first is to give an account of the moral significance of merely possible persons – persons who, relative to a particular circumstance, or possible future or world, could but in fact never do exist. I call that account Variabilism. My second goal is to use Variabilism to begin to address the problem of abortion.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
References to merely possible persons and, later on, to persons who do exist – existing persons – and persons who will exist – future persons – can succeed only if they are understood in relation to particular circumstances, or possible futures or worlds. Thus, a person may be merely possible (or future or existing) relative to one world but not relative to another. Accordingly, I relativize those terms to worlds throughout this work.
Some philosophers would rather not talk about the merely possible as though they were alive and well and sleeping on the couch in the next room. The concern is that such talk will predispose us to think that the merely possible matter morally. But talk about the merely possible is not inherently question-begging. At least, it does not beg any question of interest here. And making talk about the distinct ways in which the future might unfold and the distinct populations that do or will exist within those futures – within those worlds – out of bounds also makes it very cumbersome to say what we do need to say about the merely possible. It would be like trying to say exactly what it means to say all men are mortal without availing oneself of the quantifier. See, for example, Russell (1903), pp. 18–23.
- 2.
We can leave open whether that obligation itself is rooted in an obligation to make things better for certain things for their own sake or an obligation to make things better for certain things for the sake of the universe. See part 1.3.3 below.
- 3.
Of course, much depends on what we mean here by thinking. But it seems clear that mere electrical activity is not enough. Nor are mechanical responses to pain stimuli. See Peter Singer (1994), pp. 104–105. At the same time, for purposes here we want a concept of thinking that is broad enough to extend to conscious beings whose thoughts are quite unsophisticated. They need not have a life plan or a clear concept of themselves as continuing beings. Moreover, we should recognize that thinking often takes place beyond our own conscious awareness. I thus take it for granted that the cognitive activity and degree of continuity we typically see in both the human neonate and in many non-human animals is enough to show that the destruction of those individuals is a matter of ending the life of an already-existing person and not the choice not to bring a new person into existence to begin with. More generally, the guide for what counts as thinking for purposes here is the idea that the kinds of things that matter morally – that are persons – are the kinds of things such that it matters to them (1994) whether we treat them in one way rather than another. If there’s enough cognitive activity that that latter is the case, then that activity should be considered thinking, for purposes here. The connections among being a person, mattering morally and thinking are discussed in more detail in parts 1.6.5, 5.2 and 5.3 below.
- 4.
The maximizing account of loss I adopt for purposes here is described in parts 2.2.1–2.2.3 below. Briefly, my account provides that a person – existing, future or merely possible – incurs a loss whenever agents (1994) create less wellbeing for that person when they could have created more wellbeing for that same person. To say that a person incurs a loss is not to say that that person has been wronged, or that a wrong has been done.
This maximizing, comparative account of loss rejects both a temporal approach to loss (a person incurs a loss only if that person is worse off at a later than at an earlier time) and a counterfactual approach (a person incurs a loss only if that person would have been better off had the act under scrutiny not been performed). It also rejects a non-comparative approach to loss – an approach that defines loss by reference either to a list of specific bad effects (e.g. substantial pain) or to a threshold (e.g. a minimally decent wellbeing level). Finally, it accepts the concept of netting benefits generated by an act for a person against burdens. On my account, we cannot conclude, from the fact that burdens have been generated by the performance of a particular act, that that act imposes a loss on a person at a world. A vaccination can impose pain, but that the vaccination imposes some pain does not mean that the vaccination imposes a loss; pain can be imposed even in a case where wellbeing has been maximized.
I also accept, for purposes here, that one way of causing a person to incur a loss – one way, that is, of creating less wellbeing for a person rather than more – is to leave that person out of an existence worth having. Some theorists take the position that a person cannot incur a loss at a world where that person never exists at all. It seems to me, however, that the concerns that lead to that position can be overcome, and that comparisons between a person’s wellbeing level at a world where that person never exists at all against that same person’s wellbeing level at a world where that person does or will exist are fully cogent. For a brief discussion of this issue and references to work in this area, see part 2.2.2 and note 45 below.
Some theorists might think that the nonidentity problem means that there will be many cases (1994) where we want to say – and where naively think we can say and need to be able to say, if we want to make loss central to an account of wrongdoing – that a loss bears on the permissibility of a given act but (1994) that in fact involve no harm, or loss, at all. We can see how agents could have brought a nonidentical person into a better existence, but we cannot – or so the nonidentity problem asserts – see how agents could have brought that very same person into a better existence.
In this book, I discuss the nonidentity problem only briefly, in part 2.2.5 below and in Appendix B. For purposes here, I mainly set it aside, in part because I have discussed it in detail elsewhere (e.g. Roberts 2009c, 2007) and in part because I believe that – properly understood – it undermines nothing we want or need to say here. My basic point is that the type of nonidentity problem considered among the most telling relies on a fallacy. Cases where I argue that that is so include (1994) Parfit’s depletion and risky policy examples, Kavka’s slave child and pleasure pill examples and cases involving historic injustices. Once we recognize the fallacy, I argue, we can and must recognize that losses have been incurred and harms imposed. Moreover, in the rare case where we are dealing with a type of nonidentity problem that validly establishes that the act under scrutiny harms and is bad for no one – where, for example, a genetically impaired child is brought into an existence that is unambiguously worth having and the choice to bring that child into existence is maximizing for that child and for each other existing or future person – we are also dealing with a type of nonidentity problem that never clearly establishes that a wrong has been done.
Thus, it seems to me that we should not be too concerned with the nonidentity problem in constructing our moral theory. It is not that I think that the choice of depletion or the risky policy, or the choice to enter into the slave child contract or to take the pleasure pill, is permissible. It’s rather that we can discern harm, that is, loss (1994) in each of those cases. I thus argue that we can resolve the nonidentity problem without making the merely possible matter morally more than they ought and without disconnecting wrongdoing from acting in ways that are bad for some person or another. The key is to take the various types of nonidentity problem one by one and not try to resolve them all in one blow.
- 5.
Exclusion Alpha, in other words, violates Wlodek Rabinowicz’s Principle of Normative Invariance. See note 61 below.
- 6.
This result violates a standard deontic axiom that asserts that if one act is obligatory, its alternatives cannot be permissible. See part 2.2.4 below.
- 7.
Broome (2004), p. 143 (2004). I here compress (2004) the deontic reading and the teleological reading of the person-based intuition. One pertains to the evaluation of acts; the other to the two-place betterness relation that we may think obtains between outcomes, or worlds, or acts performed at worlds. See Broome (2004), pp. 140–149. The two constructions of the person-based intuition are prized apart in part 2.10 below and Appendix C.
- 8.
Singer (1999), pp. 103–104.
- 9.
McMahan (2009), p. 49.
- 10.
See McMahan (2006) and Chapter 3 below.
- 11.
McMahan sees the later person as numerically identical to the earlier fetus, the fetus that is the subject of the hypothetical fetal injury. I adopt a distinct metaphysics for purposes here. The fetus, a human organism, may well be identical to the human organism that develops in utero, is born and then dies. On the way I am looking at things here, however, it’s not identical to the person, a being whose coming into existence is (2) signaled by its first thought. This way of looking at things, I believe, lends clarity to the discussion and has an independent plausibility. But whether I am correct or not on that point, it would be a mistake to think that the metaphysics is ultimately what is at issue here. A different metaphysics is not going to erase the substantive moral issues that are (2) raised by McMahan’s Paretian analysis. At most, it would force us to rearticulate, not to concede, the underlying moral issues. See notes 24 and 143 below.
- 12.
See Hare (1973) and part 4.3 below.
- 13.
See Marquis (2008) and part 4.4 below.
- 14.
See Harman (2000) and part 4.5 below.
- 15.
I owe this point to Mark K. Greene.
- 16.
The argument against wrongdoing that is proposed here may sound vaguely like the problem of collective harm. The problem of collective harm is urgent. Where, whatever I as an agent do, others will suffer by virtue of what still other agents will do, it may seem unclear whether what I do can harm those others. And it, accordingly, may seem unclear what my obligations in that context really are. I argue elsewhere that the problem of collective harm does not absolve us from our participation in the group act that leads to that harm. I can, as a participant in a group, impose harm even if I have not, as an individual, imposed harm. The problem of collective harm arises in virtue of the fact that we have overlapping agents: groups of individual agents, overlapping with individual agents. The group may have a way to create more wellbeing for a person rather than less when the individual does not. Recognizing that fact can help us, I argue elsewhere, to address the problem of collective harm. See Roberts (2006). But the problem presented by late abortion is quite different. There, the question is whether, if everyone else is blithely doing wrong things, why is it wrong for me to do wrong things as well. And the answer is: it just is; it is wrong to do wrong things.
- 17.
The person-based principles I have elsewhere described include the person-affecting, or person-based, intuition. That core intuition provides just a necessary, not a sufficient, condition on wrongdoing. The particular version of the person-based intuition I elsewhere adopt – and that is part of Variabilism in combination with an otherwise plausible permissibility theory and specifically OPPP2; see part 2.2.4 below – is the traditional narrow version. According to that principle, an act performed at a world is wrong only if that act makes things worse for at least one person who does or will exist at that world than things are for that same person at some alternate world accessible to the agents. The act that, performed at a given world, is bad must be bad for – must, that is, harm, or impose a loss on – some person who does or will exist at that world. Put in the terms of Variabilism: that act must impose a morally significant loss on a person.
Under this narrow version of the person-based intuition, an act that leaves a person out of an existence worth having cannot be declared wrong just on the ground that it imposes a loss on that merely possible person. Again, in terms of Variabilism, the loss that act imposes is not itself morally significant. If such an act is wrong at all, it is wrong on other grounds.
A “wide” version of the person-based intuition, in contrast, might assert that the loss incurred when a merely possible person is left out of an existence worth having can on its own ground a finding of wrongdoing. This version is represented by Inclusion in combination with OPPP2; see part 2.2.4 below. The wide version of the intuition is not very interesting. (We may even think it misses the intuition altogether.) In any case, OPPP2 itself is consistent with both the wide and the narrow version of the person-based intuition.
At the same time, the version of the person-based intuition I describe elsewhere and adopt here (2006) is broader in a certain critical respect than what John Broome calls the Neutrality Intuition. Broome (2004), p. 143; see also part 2.10 below and Appendix C. On the version I adopt, the necessary condition on wrongdoing is satisfied whenever agents create less wellbeing for an existing or future person when they could have created more for that same person. According to this view, when we compare two acts in order to determine their respective moral betterness, and ultimately the wrongness of one of those two acts, the loss that counts toward moral worseness, and ultimately wrongness – the loss that counts as morally significant – can be established, not only by our noting that the one act is worse for an existing or future person than the second act is, but also by our noting that the one act is worse for that person than some third act. The Neutrality Intuition operates quite differently, and Broome – rightly, I think – rejects it. The Neutrality Intuition itself, along with the related Prior Existence View that Singer earlier articulated and rejected (Singer 1999, pp. 102ff.), is discussed in part 2.10 below. Broome’s more sweeping objection against the person-based approach generally is discussed in Appendix C below.
Another clarification: the person-based approach I have elsewhere described is not equivalent to Exclusion (2004); my principles (barring an occasional lapse; see Roberts (2002), p. 328, where it should have been made explicit that each person who “exists in Y also exists in X”) do not leave the merely possible and all their losses out of the picture altogether. They do not, that is, imply that merely possible persons cannot be wronged – or, more specifically, that the losses they incur cannot make the acts that impose those losses wrong and cannot make the acts that avoid those losses right. My principles by their terms apply to all acts performed at all worlds, actual or not. And they are, at the same time, restricted to reflect the point that an act that makes things worse for, for example, actual persons is not necessarily wrong in a case where the only way of making things better for those persons would have been to bring still other persons into existences that are less than they might have been. See Roberts (1998), (2002), (2003a), (2003b), (2004), (2006), (2007), (2009).
Variabilism enables me to make this point more clearly. Thus: a person who counts as merely possible relative to a world w but who does or will exist relative to a world w′ can incur a morally significant loss at w′ – a loss, that is, that bears on the moral status, not just of acts that impose that loss at w′, but also of acts that avoid that loss at w.
The critical point is that Variabilism, in combination with the otherwise plausible permissibility theory, clearly establishes that a person-based approach is not equivalent to Moral Actualism. A person-based approach need not, even if some do, put actual persons – or even persons who would be actual were the particular act under scrutiny itself performed – on a moral pedestal. Among other things, this means that, even though Caspar Hare’s arguments against Moral Actualism were not mistaken, his conflation of Moral Actualism with the person-based approach was. Hare (2007), n. 5.
- 18.
Sidgwick (2006/1884), Preface.
- 19.
I am paraphrasing Narveson (1976), p. 73.
- 20.
We all are vulnerable to having our lives made less than worth living, however well-off we might now be or might have been. Wrongful life is a more limited concept. The life is wrongful when the existence is less than worth having and where an existence worth having, or at least a perfectly neutral existence, is not something agents could have brought about. In the typical wrongful life case, the possible world where the person born with the serious genetic or chromosomal disorder – so serious that the life is made less than worth living – is given a life that is worth living or at least neutral is inaccessible to agents. We do not, that is, yet have the medical technology required to repair or ameliorate the underlying disorder.
- 21.
Thus Earl Conee notes that the following argument can seem sensible to any theorist who thinks that an act’s permissibility is determined, at least in part, by the consequences of that act: “Assuming that an early fetus is not a person, consequentialist considerations still argue against the moral permissibility of some early abortions. If an early fetus would grow to become someone who would lead a sufficiently valuable existence, then on objective consequentialist grounds it would be seriously wrong to kill the fetus.” See Conee (1999), p. 629.
- 22.
On the view I describe, once in existence, a person can continue to exist even if that person does not continuously think. Intermittent thinking alone is enough to keep one in existence. The person doesn’t cease to exist, then, until the conclusion of that last thought – even if their bodies, sustained by natural or artificial means, manage to cling to life far beyond that point. In short, our first thought signals our coming into existence at a world and our last thought signals our going out of existence at that world, but, between these two points, we exist whether or not we continuously think.
- 23.
But we need also to make sure that the concept of thinking we make use of here – that we want to connect with being the kind of thing that matters morally – is not too broad. See note 3 above and parts 5.2 and 5.3 below. In my household, there has been a good bit of discussion regarding whether insects think in the sense that they feel pain. My son thinks they do: how otherwise could they manage not to get themselves killed the moment they are out on their own? I asked my spouse: do you think insects feel pain? His response was: what do you mean by pain? I explained: pain in the sense of what I feel when I say “Ouch, that hurts!” Do they say: “Ouch, that hurts!”? He replied: yes, I think that’s exactly what happens. They say “Ouch, that hurts!”
- 24.
Thus, if an alternate metaphysics turns out to be correct – if, in particular, it turns out that we are each non-thinking embryos and early fetuses for awhile, and then, when thinking emerges, we become persons – then the debate here will need to be rearticulated. Instead of talking about when a person comes into existence, we will talk in terms of when the live organism transitions from its non-person-phase to its person-phase. And we will need to revise the definition of early abortion. It will become, not the choice not to bring a person into existence, but rather the choice to prevent the live organism from transitioning to its “person-phase.” And the issue of moral significance of the merely possible will become, not whether we have obligations in respect of merely possible persons, but rather whether we have obligations in respect of individuals who have not yet transitioned and never will transition into their respective person-phases. But a different metaphysics is not going to make the substantive moral debate go away. See note 143 below. For discussion of the “irrelevance of metaphysics to the moral issue,” see Conee (1999), p. 620 and, more generally, pp. 619–646.
- 25.
Thomson (1971), pp. 47–66.
- 26.
This example is from Caspar Hare. See Hare (2007), p. 503.
- 27.
This point is, of course, controversial. For further discussion, see part 2.2.2 below (2) and Roberts (2003a).
- 28.
Heyd (2009), p. 16.
- 29.
At issue here would be, for example, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. See part 5.7 below.
References
Broome, John. 2004. Weighing Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Conee, Earl. 1999. “Metaphysics and the Morality of Abortion.” Mind 108(432): 619–646.
Hare, Caspar. 2007. “Voices from Another World: Must We Respect the Interests of People Who Do Not, and Will Never, Exist? Ethics 117: 498–523.
Hare, R.M. 1973. “Rawls’ Theory of Justice.” Philosophical Quarterly 23(92): 241–252.
Harman, Elizabeth. 2000. “Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 28 (4): 310–324.
Heyd, David. 2009. “The Intractability of the Nonidentity Problem.” In Harming Future Persons, eds. M.A. Roberts and David Wasserman. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 3–25.
McMahan, Jeff. 2006. “Paradoxes of Abortion and Prenatal Injury.” Ethics 116: 625–55.
McMahan, Jeff. 2009. “Asymmetries in the Morality of Causing People to Exist.” In Harming Future Persons, eds. M.A. Roberts and David Wasserman. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 49–68.
Marquis, Don. 2008. “Abortion and Human Nature.” Journal of Medical Ethics 34: 422–426
Narveson, Jan. 1976. “Moral Problems of Population.” In Ethics and Population, ed. Michael Bayles. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co., pp. 59–80.
Roberts, M.A. 1998. Child Versus Childmaker: Future Persons and Present Duties in Ethics and the Law. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Roberts, M.A. 2002. “A New Way of Doing the Best that We Can: Person-Based Consequentialism and the Equality Problem.” Ethics 112: 315–50.
Roberts, M.A. 2006. “Supernumerary Pregnancy, the Problem of Collective Harm and the Nonidentity Problem.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 34(4): 776–792.
Russell, Bertrand. 1903. Principles of Mathematics. New York: Norton (reprinted under Berne Convention).
Singer, Peter. 1999. Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1971. “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(1): 47–66.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Roberts, M.A. (2010). Introduction. In: Abortion and the Moral Significance of Merely Possible Persons. Philosophy and Medicine(), vol 107. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3792-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3792-3_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-3791-6
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-3792-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)