The following LibProfs abortion discussion arose from the consideration of Harry Browne's (Libertarian Party presidential candidate) position on abortion, and later evolved into a discussion of rights and obligations. ============================================================================ ============================================================================ >From: Bill Woolsey >Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 11:59:14 -0400 (EDT) [...] Wendy McElroy wrote: >let's look at Browne's position on abortion. It is a total obfuscation and -- >I believe -- a deliberate one. He says: leave it to the states to decide. This is false. Browne says that government doesn't work. That includes efforts by states to restrict abortion. Browne believes abortion is wrong, but rejects the use of the political system to stop it. While the discussion in the book speaks in general about government not being the way to control abortion, he has recently been more specific in stating that state governments should not ban abortion because government doesn't work. >If he were dealing with a violation of other >basic liberties, such as freedom of speech, would he say 'leave it to the >states to decide'? Unfortunately, his views on other freedoms are entirely consistent with his views on abortion. Of course, he has never said "let the states decide" on abortion. (Or if he has said that somewhere, some citation would be helpful.) Now he thinks abortion is bad and, apparently, thinks it is bad in all situations. I am sure that he believes that at least some exercizes of some other freedoms are positive goods or morally neutral. So abortion is distinct in that sense. His position would be similar to that of those libertarians who believe heroin use is bad, but that government should not prohibit the sale, possession, and use of heroin.) [...] ============================================================================ >Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 06:18:24 -0400 >From: Wendy McElroy >Subject: Re: Browne and abortion Dear Libprofs: I know that many of you must be uninterested in the current exchange on the Browne campaign -- and I applaud your electoral inertia. For someone who is trying to make the point that libprofs may not be an appropriate place for boola-boola 'let's write our Congressman' political advertisements, I've wasted too much time on non-intellectual matters. I will be making one last post to Bill W.'s recent message and forwarding the two documents I promised to pass onto the list. Then, with as much grace as possible, I will leave you good folks to make up your own minds. Respectfully, and with the intention of 'climbing OFF the bandwagon', Wendy McElroy The following may provide insight on the abortion issue... >> >>>>>Harry Browne has stated that he is opposed to abortion, and would not >>>>>involve the Federal Government in the matter. This opens the door to a >>>>>myriad of different laws and regulations at the whim of state and >>>>>local officials. The woman's right to choose is certainly important >>>>>enough to be protected uniformly by the Federal Government, just as >>>>>our other rights are. >>>>> >>>On page 191 of his campaign book, "Why Government Doesn't Work," Mr. Browne >>>writes of "children who weren't aborted." This is the rhetoric of someone >>>who believes the "victim" of an abortion is "a child." I don't begrudge him >>>the right to that opinion. It's just that I don't see how that opinion is >>>likely to be changed by mailing the man a bunch of coat-hangers ... which >>>would arrive after the vote in Washington this weekend. >>> >>>(You refer to Mr. Browne as "our Presidential candidate." Is that position >>>now filled by appointment by a committee consisting of Michael Emerling, >>>Sharon Ayres, Bill Winter, Perry Willis, and Stuart Reges, based on who is >>>willing to put those five on his payroll at the highest rate? If so, then >>>why is anyone bothering to travel to D.C. this weekend to rubber-stamp a >>>selection already made?) >>> >>>Mr. Browne goes on to write - in a book published last November >>>specifically to outline the positions on which he would run for president - >>>"So long as we wait for government to solve this problem, the abortion >>>clincs will operate at full speed. And, if we have any respect for the >>>Constitution, it surely isn't a metter in which the federal government has >>>any role - either to facilitate or to stop abortion, OR TO PREVENT STATE >>>GOVERNMENTS FROM STOPPING THEM." >>> >>>I'm sorry, but the notion that the Libertarian Party might nominate such a >>>candidate, and then hope to "change his mind" on an issue of personal >>>religious conviction, between July and October, strikes me as absurd. We >>>might as well advise our daughters to marry wife-beaters, and then try to >>>hide all the belts and loose lumber. >>> >>>If you find that Mr. Browne's written approach (not the latest variation >>>his supprters claim he voiced on some obscure radio station last week) >>>reflects your notion of Libertarianism - if you're happy to have a fellow >>>go to the national press and the public as the party's official nominee and >>>explain (often to folks who will be hearing about libertarianism for the >>>first time) that this is libertarianism - nominate Mr. Browne, and let's >>>stop fantasizing. >>> >>>(Someone might want to ask Mr. Browne, though, whether it would be all >>>right with him if the individual states sent their plainclothes police to >>>investigate reported "miscarriages" as suspected homicides, until proven >>>otherwise. I've never figured out how you can outlaw abortion, without >>>indicting for murder the women who hire the "crime" done.) >>> >>>We certainly can't be nominating Mr. Browne because of all the money he's >>>got hoarded away, ready to use in the fall campaign. National Secretary >>>John Famularo - no partisan for either Mr. Tompkins or Mr. Schiff - reports >>>this week that of the $700,000 the Emerling-Browne direct-mail fund-raising >>>operation vacuumed up over the past year and a half, all but $4,000 has >>>been spent, less than 1 percent going to advertising to the general public >>>as promised, with the largest share going directly into the pockets of Mr. >>>Emerling, Ms. Ayres, Mr. Browne, Mr. Browne's daughter Autumn Wilson, the >>>Messrs. Winter, Mr. Reges, Mr. Willis, Mr. Willis' former significant other >>>Kiana Delamare, etc. etc. >>> >>>Mr. Famularo's source: The Browne campaign's own FEC filings. >>> ============================================================================ >Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 17:31:25 -0400 (EDT) >From: Bill Woolsey >Subject: Re: Browne and abortion McElroy was going to provide some documentation showing that Browne has somewhere said, "Let the States decide" on the abortion issue. Instead, we get reposts of statements of critics of Browne. >>>>>>Harry Browne has stated that he is opposed to abortion, and would not >>>>>>involve the Federal Government in the matter. This opens the door to a >>>>>>myriad of different laws and regulations at the whim of state and >>>>>>local officials. The woman's right to choose is certainly important >>>>>>enough to be protected uniformly by the Federal government.... This is an argument by one of Browne's critics regarding Browne's position on abortion. Browne's position is that government should not outlaw abortion. He does not favor having the Federal government stop states that make a mistake in this regard. While I think Browne is a little too distrustful of Federal judges, I think describing his position as "let the state's decide" is innaccurate. This is especially true when one claims, like McElroy, that this involves an unwillingness to take a position on his part. >>>>On page 191 of his campaign book, "Why Government Doesn't Work," Mr. Browne >>>>writes of "children who weren't aborted." This is the rhetoric of someone >>>>who believes the "victim" of an abortion is "a child." I don't begrudge him >>>>the right to that opinion. It's just that I don't see how that opinion is >>>>likely to be changed by mailing the man a bunch of coat-hangers ... which >>>>would arrive after the vote in Washington this weekend. >>>> Browne believes abortion is wrong. He does not favor having government ban the practice. It is not evidence that he favors "Let the states decide." >>>>(You refer to Mr. Browne as "our Presidential candidate." Is that position >>>>now filled by appointment by a committee consisting of Michael Emerling, >>>>Sharon Ayres, Bill Winter, Perry Willis, and Stuart Reges, based on who is >>>>willing to put those five on his payroll at the highest rate? If so, then >>>>why is anyone bothering to travel to D.C. this weekend to rubber-stamp a >>>>selection already made?) Now, this is a really incredible quotation. Someone described Browne as "Our Presidential candidate" prematurely. Someone else responded with something like is the candidate chosen by a committee of his employees. Again, this has nothing to do with Browne's position on abortion. In particular, there is no quotation of Browne saying "Let the states decide." >>>> >>>>Mr. Browne goes on to write - in a book published last November >>>>specifically to outline the positions on which he would run for president - >>>>"So long as we wait for government to solve this problem, the abortion >>>>clincs will operate at full speed. And, if we have any respect for the >>>>Constitution, it surely isn't a metter in which the federal government has >>>>any role - either to facilitate or to stop abortion, OR TO PREVENT STATE >>>>GOVERNMENTS FROM STOPPING THEM." Finally, a quotation from Browne. And notice that it is not "Let the states decide." Browne claims that the constitution does not permit the federal government to stop the state governments from outlawing abortion. Yet even in this short quotation, Browne didn't say that waiting for the _federal_ government to solve the problem will not have the desired consequence. He speaks of government in general. As he did in the other portions of this page. >>>> >>>>I'm sorry, but the notion that the Libertarian Party might nominate such a >>>>candidate, and then hope to "change his mind" on an issue of personal >>>>religious conviction, between July and October, strikes me as absurd. We >>>>might as well advise our daughters to marry wife-beaters, and then try to >>>>hide all the belts and loose lumber. While I agree that Browne is unlikely to change his opinion on this matter, this is just a statement by some critic of Browne. In no part is it a quote by Browne that says "let the states decide." >>>>If you find that Mr. Browne's written approach (not the latest variation >>>>his supporters claim he voiced on some obscure radio station last week) >>>>reflects your notion of Libertarianism - if you're happy to have a fellow >>>>go to the national press and the public as the party's official nominee and >>>>explain (often to folks who will be hearing about libertarianism for the >>>>first time) that this is libertarianism - nominate Mr. Browne, and let's >>>>stop fantasizing. His more recent statements on the issue are quite consistent with what he wrote in the book. Again, nothing here about Browne saying "let the states decide." >>>>(Someone might want to ask Mr. Browne, though, whether it would be all >>>>right with him if the individual states sent their plainclothes police to >>>>investigate reported "miscarriages" as suspected homicides, until proven >>>>otherwise. I've never figured out how you can outlaw abortion, without >>>>indicting for murder the women who hire the "crime" done.) >>>> While Browne didn't deal with this issue specificially in his book, he did suggets that government wouldn't work, that is this approach is not a good way to stop abortion. In his more recent remarks he has specifically said that he would oppose this. But he also would oppose having the Federal judiciary (or Congress) over rule state laws on this matter. The reason he gives is that if the Federal government has the power to stop states from doing bad things, then it will have too much power and become an overpowering national government--as it has done. He also says that people can at least move away from repressive states and that this is difficult when policy is nationalized. While I don't agree with Browne in this area, I must admit that making abortion into a national policy issue does leave the threat that a Republican Supreme Court will claim that abortion violates the 14th amendment rights of fetuses. >>>>We certainly can't be nominating Mr. Browne because of all the money he's >>>>got hoarded away, ready to use in the fall campaign. National Secretary >>>>John Famularo - no partisan for either Mr. Tompkins or Mr. Schiff - reports >>>>this week that of the $700,000 the Emerling-Browne direct-mail fund-raising >>>>operation vacuumed up over the past year and a half, all but $4,000 has >>>>been spent, less than 1 percent going to advertising to the general public >>>>as promised, with the largest share going directly into the pockets of Mr. >>>>Emerling, Ms. Ayres, Mr. Browne, Mr. Browne's daughter Autumn Wilson, the >>>>Messrs. Winter, Mr. Reges, Mr. Willis, Mr. Willis' former significant other >>>>Kiana Delamare, etc. etc. Gee, where is the quotation of Browne saying "let the states decide"? I had thought that Browne may have said something of the sort somewhere. McElroy chided me for being "slippery." Well, I don't know everything that Browne says. I do know what he said in his book. And I know what he said recently about it. The attacks on Browne by various people in the Tompkins' campaign on Browne's position were constantly fully of misrepresenations. Since it appears that McElroy's documentation of Browne's position on abortion is nothing more that a repost of the remarks of some unnamed critic of Browne, I guess I can rest assured that he claim that Browne is being a coward and saying "let the states decide" is false. Bill Woolsey Email: Bill.Woolsey@Citadel.edu Dept. of Business Administration Home: (803) 795-5062 The Citadel Office: (803) 953-5161 Charleston, South Carolina 29409 Fax: (803) 953-7084 U.S.A. ============================================================================ >Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 15:28:05 -0800 >From: Jim Chesher I found Bill Woolsey's latest response (Browne and abortion) to Wendy McElroy unsatisfactory. We get the point that McElroy failed to back her claim that Browne said "Let the States Decide"--but Woolsey has offered very little that is informative about Browne's position on abortion except that Browne holds abortion to be wrong, and further, that Browne believes that government is not a good way to stop abortion. Question: Does Browne believe abortion to be a serious moral wrong, akin to some degree of murder, and if so, does he not believe that the law ought to protect fetuses and punish the murderers? I don't see how this could be done without government. On another point, what about the strong suggestion that Browne was less than honest in his use of campaign funds? --JIm Chesher ============================================================================ >Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 21:54:06 -0400 (EDT) >From: Bill Woolsey This was posted by Dean Ahmad on LPUS A number of questions have been prompted by Harry Browne's abortion position. These questions have all been answered in his response to a caller on the Derrik McGinty radio show on Aug. 8 and in his response to questions I put to him in connection with his appearance at the Cato Institute on August 9. I have transcribed the following from a tape of the interchange on the radio show, with my comments interspersed in brackets and summary comments at the end. [Browne's self-appointed advocates should take a lesson from Browne: Note that throughout he is both courteous and plain-speaking]: CALLER: Many Americans who would not considered themselves libertarian feel that government doesn't have the right to tell women what to do with regard to abortion, to coerce them as you discussed earlier, yet in your book, on page 191 (I looked it up), you explicitly state that government on the state level has the right to practice that coercion over what many people consider to be a question of individual rights, and I was just wondering how, as a libertarian, you could endorse such really massive government coercion into the lives of its citizens. I mean, ... government is government, coercion is coercion .... BROWNE: You're absolutely right in everything that you say, with one exception .... I did not say the states have the right to make these decisions for people. What I said was that the federal government should not take steps to overrule the states when they do wrong things, because when we give the federal government the power to veto what the states do, then we are giving the federal government the power to do virtually anything, and become a national government that can run our lives, which is what has happened. There is no area of our lives today that some senator wont get up on the floor of the house and propose a bill for--to regulate. All I'm saying is that if the states make a mistake, the federal government should stay out of it, because the worst thing that can happen when states make a mistake is that you have to move across a state line to some area that has the same climate and the same atmosphere, and so on. But when the federal government makes mistakes and does the wrong thing, then you have to move to Canada or Mexico to escape it, and that's no benefit to you. Government doesn't work. The War on Poverty is a failure, the War on Drugs is a failure, and if we had a War on Abortion in this country, within ten years, men would be having abortions, with the record of the federal government. So I simply want the federal government to stay out of it completely. Don't endorse it, don't subsidize it, don't prohibit it, don't discourage it, don't overrule state laws, just stay out of it. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the federal government the right to be involved in crime control in any way whatsoever.... That is all that was related to abortion specifically. There was more relating to Browne's view of the proper relationship between state and Federal government in general. Anyway, he didn't say "let the states decide." He said that states didn't have the right to make these decisions for people. Still, he wants the Federal government entirely out of the issue--even regarding the possible overturning of state laws. I think I have mentioned that I disagree with Browne's position on this matter. Fortunately, he is not emphasizing it. I would prefer a candidate who emphasized support for Rowe vs. Wade. But Browne has other strenghts. Again, I would suggest reading Chester Alan Arthur's piece in Liberty on the LP convention. By the way, I hope to see some analysis of the Browne campaign's expenditure, say in December. ============================================================================ >Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 09:45:37 -0800 >From: Jim Chesher In response to my suggestion that Browne's anti-abortion view implies state involvement (i.e. laws against abortion), Mark Murphy suggests that putting forth such a consideration is and that First, how was my query a criticism of the pro-life position? I was simply presenting a line of thought worth serious consideration. Isn't this what this list is about? Second, how does my query make me one of the "polarized" people, whartever that means? Murphy goes on to compare the anti-abortion view with views against gambling, smoking, prostitution, etc., the latter three not necessitating government involvement. The problem with this comparison is that smoking, gambling, and prostitution are "victimless" crimes--at very least, do not in themselves bring harm to innocent people. But, if abortion is a serious moral wrong committed against the fetus, then the law ought to protect the fetus. What are laws for if not the protection of human beings within a society? --Jim Chesher ============================================================================ >Date: Fri, 23 Aug 96 23:06:51 EDT >From: Eleftheria Maratos-Flier >Subject: Is a fetus a person? Robert Sade writes: >>>>>>>>>> The context: my own belief is that fetuses are human beings, but are not persons, and therefore have no rights. They can be aborted at the wish of the woman bearing the fetus at any time, and there is no room for state involvement at any level.<<<<<<< There is a significant problem in trying to formulate abortion policy or even dicuss the issue on the basis of belief. I can no more believe that the fetus is never a person while in utero than I can believe that the a person exists at the moment of conception. Anyway why do you have this belief? The human being that starts out as a single cell at conception changes dramatically during the 40 weeks it spends in utero. If a fetus is never a person why does it acquire personhood at the moment of birth? Reviewing the course of development a 20 week old fetus is much more akin to a newborn baby than it is to a single cell oragnism. It possesses a full complement of organs and it's electroencephalographic pattern is quite similar to that of a newborn. Somewhere between 26 and 28 weeks it becomes viable, which means that it can survive outside the womb. It's very hard for me to consider that the life of a viable fetus does not merit the protection of the state because fundamentally I can't see a moral difference between infanticide at the moment of birth and fetacide in utero prior to induction of labor in a case where the fetus would have been viable. While I believe women have a right to choose abortion I also believe that women have a responsibility to make that choice before the fetus becomes viable. My conclusion has a biological basis -- a human being that is capable of living outside the womb is a person, whether the human being has existed for 28 or 39 or 40 weeks. Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, M.D. ============================================================================ >Date: 26 Aug 1996 11:31:47 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" >Subject: Re: Is a fetus a person? >To: "Eleftheria Maratos-Flier" , " Libprofs" EM-F-- Unfortunately, there is no unproblematic resolution to the abortion debate, including my own. You said *If a fetus is never a person why does it acquire personhood at the moment of birth?* . I didn't say a human being acquires personhood at birth. I do not see personhood as defined by possession of a human genome (single-cell zygotes and, arguably, gametes have that), nor as ability to survive outside a uterus (it's technology, not biology, that makes a 24-week fetus 'viable'; and technology will soon make it possible to do away with human female wombs entirely). With 'viability' then unrelated to need for a human uterus, you will still have the thorny issue of permissible limits of doing away with human tissue. I argue that a person is a living entity that possesses some minimal degree of moral agency--that is, an entity that can make volitional choices, and be responsible for the consequences of those choices. Such persons have rights and bear their accompanying responsibilities. Almost all adults, and most children are persons, by this definition. One does not acquire personhood at some biologically determined point; it is a process that takes place over time. This view is not unproblematic: how does one specify that minimal degree of moral agency; what, exactly, does responsibility mean; if the process is specific to individuals, how does one know when moral agency is present, etc.? I will not get into such sticky points here. On this view, a 21-year old, a 10 year old, and a 4 year are clearly persons, and one cannot lock them away in a room and allow them to wither away and die, even even one is her parent. A fetus, on the other hand, is clearly not a person, nor is a newborn infant. If an 36 week fetus or a newborn infant is found to be anencephalic (or otherwise severely congenitally deformed), it is extremely distressing to kill (the fetus) or allow to die (the newborn), but it is not a violation of rights, and therefore should not be legally prohibited. In fact, except for an ill-advised and short-lived attempt by the federal government in the 1980s to 'protect' handicapped newborns with federal goon squads that invaded neonatal ICUs in response to whistle-blowing calls to an administration hot-line, allowing seriously deformed newborns to die is widely practiced in neonatal ICUs, with little notice or objection. Thus, when you say *. . . fundamentally I can't see a moral difference between infanticide at the moment of birth and fetacide in utero prior to induction of labor in a case where the fetus would have been viable.* , I mostly agree with you. What I can't agree with is hanging your hat on the extremely soft and slippery hook of 'viability'. Best regards. --Bob ___________________________________________________ Robert M. Sade, M.D. Professor of Surgery Department of Surgery Medical University of South Carolina 171 Ashley Avenue Charleston, South Carolina 29425 Office telephone--803 792 5278; Page operator--803 792 2123; Office fax--803 792 8286; Home telephone -803 723 2148; e-mail--sader@musc.edu ============================================================================ >From: Pierre_Lemieux@UQAH.UQuebec.CA >Date: Mon, 26 Aug 96 12:29:47 -0400 >Subject: Of vice and fetuses Indeed, it seems to me that one cannot justify abortion without also justifying infanticide. On the other hand, one cannot condemn abortion without also condemning IUDs. Hence the difficulty of the question. Moreover, I do not think that the "moral agency" criterion is telling -- if only because it would probably allow us to kill a large number of our contemporaries... I am not sure that the abortion problem has one, non-fuzzy, libertarian answer. Pierre Lemieux ============================================================================ >Date: 26 Aug 1996 13:22:04 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" >Subject: Re: Of vice and fetuses I also, like Pierre, *am not sure that the abortion problem has one, non-fuzzy,libertarian answer.* Having been a member of this list for well over a year, however, I'm persuaded that there are very few problems of any kind that have *one, non-fuzzy,libertarian answer.* The abortion problem, while perhaps among the most intractable, nevertheless is an important public issue about which some may be susceptible to reasoned persuasion. I believe we are all interested in finding ways to eliminate unjustified government intrusion into our lives. The key word here, of course, is 'unjustified'. I hope the toughness of the problem as a personal and public issue doesn't foreclose airing (potentially persuasive) thoughts. Best regards. --Bob ============================================================================ >From: "Eleftheria Maratos-Flier" >Date: Wed, 28 Aug 1996 17:34:24 EST Bob Sade writes: >> Unfortunately, there is no unproblematic resolution to the abortion debate, including my own. You said *If a fetus is never a person why does it acquire personhood at the moment of birth?* . I didn't say a human being acquires personhood at birth. I do not see personhood as defined by possession of a human genome (single-cell zygotes and, arguably, gametes have that), nor as ability to survive outside a uterus (it's technology, not biology, that makes a 24-week fetus 'viable'; and technology will soon make it possible to do away with human female wombs entirely). With 'viability' then unrelated to need for a human uterus, you will still have the thorny issue of permissible limits of doing away with human tissue.<< I don't think there is a simple answer. But I wonder about the question. Is it "does a woman have a right to obtain an abortion at any time during her pregnancy, even if the abortion requires killing a viable fetus" or is it "does a woman have a right to end a pregnancy, even if this means premature delivery of a viable fetus?" (not viable through technologic wonders like at 26 weeks but generally viable like at 31 or 32 weeks). What I'm getting at is is the fetus ever entitled to the protection of the state? If biological wombs were redundant and complete development could occur in-vitro would it be OK to start development and then terminate it prematurely for arbitrary reasons -- i.e. I've changed my mind? >> I argue that a person is a living entity that possesses some minimal degree of moral agency--that is, an entity that can make volitional choices, and be responsible for the consequences of those choices.<< Well I'm not sure this is true. I've treated patients with Alzheimers and it is clear that while at some point they may totally lose all degrees of moral agency society tends to continue to treat them as people. When a family member became sick with Alzheimers we continued to have him cared for. He was bathed and dressed and fed, even though technology was not invoked to prolong his life. Not only was he without moral agency, unlike fetuses, babies and young children he was without any potential for ever developing it. >>. One does not acquire personhood at some biologically determined point; it is a process that takes place over time.<< No there's no biologically determined point that one acquires personhood. However traditionally many societies have used either birth or the month after birth as the point that a potential person is entitled to protection by the society. While these points may have seemed appropriate in a world without much technology I wonder if they still are. I have a "picture" of my younger daughter taken by ultrasound while she was in utero. She was about 35 weeks old and the picture readily reveals closed eyes and well defined lips. I confirmed that the picture was right about the lips when she was born. The "real-time" ultrasound revealed a fully formed normal infant that was moving actively. >> If an 36 week fetus or a newborn infant is found to be anencephalic (or otherwise severely congenitally deformed), it is extremely distressing to kill (the fetus) or allow to die (the newborn), but it is not a violation of rights, and therefore should not be legally prohibited.<< Well I agree, but an anencephalic fetus has no brain and will die shortly after birth anyway. It has no way of sustaining it's life let alone acquiring moral agency. Regards, EMF ============================================================================ >Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 08:42:34 -0700 >From: arhu032@uabdpo.dpo.uab.edu (Scott Arnold) >Subject: personhood of the fetus It SEEMS that the best way to approach the abortion question is something like this: First, one must figure out when the fetus (embryo, fertilized egg, whatever) becomes a person. Before that time, that is, before it is a person, it has at most an inferior moral standing; after that time, it has the same moral standing as the rest of us (people). On this view, the central question is the criterion by which we distinguish persons from non-persons. The problem, however, is that it is very hard to reach agreement on what the proper criterion is. Being genetically human, as many philosophers have pointed out, is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is not a sufficient condition, since human organs and structures, e.g. an appendix, are genetically human and yet not persons. It is not a necessary condition, since it could happen that beings with a very different biological make-up (e.g., aliens) are nevertheless persons. It seems that the concept of a person is "fuzzy" around the edges. Both Alzheimer's patients and infants lack the characteristics that philosophers traditionally associate with personhood, such as the capacity to reason, and yet we are reluctant to say they are not persons. (Indeed, on that criterion, many of my students would not be persons, since they lack not only the ability to reason but also the capacity to acquire the ability!) A number of philosophers have suggested that this way of approaching the problem is misconceived, however. The reason is that there is a moral component to the concept of being a person. In other words, to call a being a person is to say something about how it ought to be treated. If this is right, one cannot discover how one ought to treat fetuses (or other beings on the margins of the human community) by FIRST discovering whether or not they are persons. Rather, it is only when one has decided (or discovered) how they ought to be treated that one is in a position to say whether or not they are persons, or how person-like they are. If this is right, it suggests, though it does not entail, that the notion of personhood is a social construct and that the abortion issue should be settled on the basis of the broader consequences of different social policies regarding the practice. For what it's worth, I think this leads to a moderate pro-life position, though (i) I could be wrong about this, and (ii) I am NOT prepared to argue for this claim in this forum. Scott Arnold Professor of Philosophy University of Alabama at Birmingham ============================================================================ >Date: 29 Aug 1996 17:39:38 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" EM-F poses several questions: *"does a woman have a right to obtain an abortion at any time during her pregnancy, even if the abortion requires killing a viable fetus" or is it "does a woman have a right to end a pregnancy, even if this means premature delivery of a viable fetus?" What I'm getting at is is the fetus ever entitled to the protection of the state?* And: *If biological wombs were redundant and complete development could occur in-vitro would it be OK to start development and then terminate it prematurely for arbitrary reasons -- i.e. I've changed my mind?* Some of these questions might be answered by a rights-based approach to political order: that legislation (the legitimate use of physical force) should be aimed only at protecting rights, not violating them; that rights are possessed only by living entities capable of volitional choice at some (fuzzy) level; and that fetuses and newborns have no such capability (nonfuzzy). If these are true, then fetuses are not entitled to protection by the state, and the choices of the women bearing them are; and in vitro embryos and fetuses could be terminated arbitrarily by their creators. Abortion may or may not be a MORAL choice (some say it never is, I would say it depends on context), but the law has no role to play in regulating it, since no rights are violated. The Alzheimer patient is a special kind of tragedy, different from the fetus in that this patient has a history of personhood. This history, including relationships purposefully developed, contracts and agreements entered into, etc.-- the web of connectedness of human life-- justifies a level of respect not due a fetus. Such a person can (and should) have worked out arrangements for end of life care, or have formed relationships with others willing to be responsible for him. But this opens up a lot of other issues not related to abortion. EM-F further says: *I have a "picture" of my younger daughter taken by ultrasound while she was in utero. She was about 35 weeks old and the picture readily reveals closed eyes and well defined lips. I confirmed that the picture was right about the lips when she was born. The "real-time" ultrasound revealed a fully formed normal infant that was moving actively.* I treasure such pictures of my own children when they were fetuses. There is no question they are human, but they are certainly NOT infants, and they are also not persons. My emotional response to fetuses is similar to yours-- mother nature is awe-inspiring-- but can such feelings justify laws that violate the right of women to control their own bodies when those women are not harming another person? Best regards. --Bob ============================================================================ >Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 15:24:15 -0400 (EDT) >From: Bill Woolsey >policies regarding the practice. For what it's worth, I think this leads to >a moderate pro-life position, though (i) I could be wrong about this, and >(ii) I am NOT prepared to argue for this claim in this forum. But at least spell out what you mean by a moderate pro-life position. ============================================================================ >Date: 30 Aug 96 05:00:00 EDT >From: LEMENNICIER <100434.3067@CompuServe.COM> Richard Overton's pamphlet : "Arrow against all Tyrants", written in 1646 from Newgate prison famously proclaimed " To every Individual in nature, is given an individual property by nature , not to be invaded or usurped by any : for every one as he is himself, so he hath a selfe propriety, else he not be himselfe." Do we have to extend this to muslim women? to infant ? to fetus ? Do we have to extend this to animals ? To call a being a person or to proclaim he owns himself is to say something how one ought to be treated. I agree with Scott Arnold that personhood or self ownership of one oneself is a "social construct". This is why the levellers were able to petition for a property right on oneself. There were already "moral agent". But muslim women, infants, fetuses, animals are not able to petition for their property right on one self. They are not "yet" able to petition for their freedom or to behave like animals or slaves. For this reason all of them are on a guardianship of somebody else : the husband, the parents, the mother and the owner ( through contract, first occupant or natural possession) . Somebody else is taking a decision in "lieu et place " of the being not able to petition for his liberty. The guardianship is recognized by others to protect the life of the being ( it applies also to things like furniture) not to destroy it. Not on the basis of a social construct but on a spontaneous rule of possession or appropriation. The fetus be it a thing, an animal or a potential being is clearly in a similar position. The guardianship is not given to destroy the life of this being or of this thing. At the same time this guardianship can be exchange such that it goes in the hands of those who will think to use it in the best way for the being ( or the thing) concerned. The destruction of the thing or of the being will be an exception . It could happen when the thing or the being becomes a danger for the person who held the guardianship and he has no time to exchange the right ( self defense) or it has no potential value ( defective thing or being) ie nobody demand the guardianship. The right to expulse the fetus is given to the mother but not to expulse to death. The mother can expulse the fetus when he is becoming viable, she can sell or abandon the guardianship. Unfortunately a lot of abortions are the result of two regulations : 1) it is forbidden ( at least in France) to sell the guardianship ( you can donate it to a public institution) and to abandon your child; 2) the abortion is subsidized by the state. That means the only route for a woman not to raise an unwanted child is to kill him. Assume we have removed these set of legislations and after trying to buy the guardianship in vain, the pro-life activist has no other way to enforce the guardianship than by force. Then we can use the A. Sen's example in the following way : A person A (the mother) is violating in a serious way some right of B ( the guardianship on the fetus) , eg expulsing him knowing he will die, does person C ( the pro-life activist) have a duty to help prevent this? Further, would C be justified in making some minor violation of some right of person D ( the doctor clinic) to help prevent the more important violation of B's rights by A? Could C, for example, infringe -let us say by force- the property of D who forbids entry to C, to rush and rescue B from being expulsed and so condemned to death by A? The state is supposed to protect beings or things under the guardianship. If the state fails to provide the service ( to enforce the guardianship ) then does any citizen has a right to take any action to enforce the guardianship ? Is the contract between the mother and the doctor who will expulse the fetus to death valid ? Can we order a "crime" ? Why fetuses are treated more badly than things, human beings ( for example tenants who does not pay their rent and have a right not to be expulse during winter for six months the time a fetus become viable) and animals ? Except that fetuses do not vote. Bertrand Lemennicier Professor of economics University of Paris Pantheon-Assas ============================================================================ >From: "Aeon Skoble" >Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 08:05:23 +0000 > " To every Individual in nature, is given an individual property by > nature , not to be invaded or usurped by any : for every one as he is himself, > so he hath a selfe propriety, else he not be himselfe." Although I like the sound of that as regards humans, ot persons, or something like that, it's manifestly false regarding most things - what sense does it make to say that the gazelle has a right not to be usurped by a lion? That a worm has a right not to be usurped by the early bird? If it is true of humans, or persons, than of course that would include muslim women. But that won't by itself settle the abortion question. ============================================================================ >Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 09:55:07 -0400 >From: holcombe@coss.fsu.edu (Randall Holcombe) I see the question of whether a fetus is a person to be only peripherally related to the issue of abortion. People have an obligation to refrain from violating the rights of others, but do not have an obligation to be forced to contribute to the well-being of others. Thus, if a pregnant woman does not want to contribute to the well-being of the fetus, and there is nobody else who can do so, the fetus has no claim to be protected against being aborted. Similarly, children have no right to be taken care of by adults. If no adult wants to take care of a child who cannot fend for himself or herself, then the child, like the aborted fetus, will not survive. Parents, and pregnant women, may have an obligation if they have entered into an agreement to take care of their dependents. Thus, the argument that parents are obligated to actively support their children must be based on the notion that, as parents, they have taken on something akin to a conractual obligation. Similarly, the argument against abortion must be that the pregnant woman has taken on an obligation to care for the fetus. (It does not matter whether the fetus is a person. A kennel can take on such an obligation to take care of your dog, and a garage can take on such an obligation to take care of your car.) The question then becomes whether the act of becoming pregnant implies the taking of a responsibility to the fetus. Looked at in this way, pregnancy as a result of rape would have a weak claim to imposing such an obligation on the woman, because her pregnancy would be the result of a forceable violation of her rights, and the woman in no way agreed to anything. How about pregnancy resulting from consensual sex, when precautions against pregnancy were being taken? Accidents happen, and the question then becomes what are the responsibilities of those who were involved in accidents. A fetus, whether or not the fetus is a person, can have no right to obligate another to take care of it. However, the pregnant woman, as a result of her past actions, might have incurred an obligation to care for the fetus, in a manner similar to the way that a kennel can incur an obligation to care for your dog. The question as I see it, is whether the woman has incurred such an obligation, which is not closely related to whether the fetus is a person. Randy Holcombe ============================================================================ >Date: Fri, 30 Aug 96 10:50:40 EDT >From: Eleftheria Maratos-Flier >Subject: Fetuses and rights Robert Sade writes: >>>Some of these questions might be answered by a rights-based approach to political order: that legislation (the legitimate use of physical force) should be aimed only at protecting rights, not violating them; that rights are possessed only by living entities capable of volitional choice at some (fuzzy) level; and that fetuses and newborns have no such capability (nonfuzzy).<<< Well by extension of this arguement infanticide of newborns in the interval between birth and their acquision of volition choice (which only starts to happen after age 18 months) would be OK. Indeed since humans at these age have no concept of death and no ability to make choices such an arguement would suggest that death by some painless mechanism such as lethal injection would be acceptable if the parents made the decision. There are societies such as China where infantacide occurs -- baby girls are much less desirable than baby boys and it is very easy to kill a newborn through neglect -- inadequate feeding, poor care or exposure. Do you think that these practices are acceptable? >>>>If these are true, then fetuses are not entitled to protection by the state, and the choices of the women bearing them are; and in vitro embryos and fetuses could be terminated arbitrarily by their creators. Abortion may or may not be a MORAL choice (some say it never is, I would say it depends on context), but the law has no role to play in regulating it, since no rights are violated.<<< Well if it's based on volitional choice neither fetuses nor newborns nor very young children have any entitlement to the protection of the state. In such a case not only would killing be allowed, there would be no restraints in terms of the methodology used. Exposure would be as good as a blow to the head or disemberment. Certainly in partial birth late term abortions some consider it OK to insert a cannula into the brain of a living, unanesthetized fetus and to such out the brain contents. If you base personhood and the entitlement to state protection on the capacity for volitional choice such procedures could also be performed in newborns. What particularly bothers me about certain procedures for ending pregnancy and any procedure used for infantacide is that I could not perform these procedures on the animals that I work with. No animal research committee would allow me to insert a catheter into a conscious mouse and suck out the contents. (I know this raises another host of issues regarding animal rights but since I work with animals I do find the paradox that lab animals may have more rights than fetuses bothersome.) >>> The Alzheimer patient is a special kind of tragedy, different from the fetus in that this patient has a history of personhood. This history, including relationships purposefully developed, contracts and agreements entered into, etc.-- the web of connectedness of human life-- justifies a level of respect not due a fetus.<<< Well you if you consider the Alzheimers patient at the declining end of the spectrum of human life, why not consider a fetus as being at the ascending end of the spectrum of human life? If life is interconnected don't they both deserve some degree of respect? >>>There is no question they are human, but they are certainly NOT infants, and they are also not persons. My emotional response to fetuses is similar to yours-- mother nature is awe-inspiring-- but can such feelings justify laws that violate the right of women to control their own bodies when those women are not harming another person?<<< Well she is harming something. She is harming a fetus which will become baby. If she really wants to terminate the pregancy she can but why should her right to terminate her pregancy give her a right to kill a viable fetus? I'm trying to understand the moral difference between terminating a pregnancy at 32 weeks and the decision by a mother of lets say a three day old that decides she didn't want the child anyway. The 3 day old and the 32 week old fetus are remarkably similar entities; neither one bears much resemblance to the original material from which it derived -- a fertilized ovum, not do they bear much resemblance to the blastulas or gastrulas that they once were. Indeed the only significant difference between a 32 week old fetus and a 3 day old baby that was born at term is size. About the only relevant physiologic processes that occurs in the last 10 or so weeks of pregnancy is growth -- the baby gains weight and reaches a size that increases it's odds of survival. We wouldn't let the mother of the three day old child kill that entity So it seems to be remarkably inconsistent to allow a mother of a 32 week old fetus to kill that entity. There is a distinction between killing the child and aborting the pregnancy and delivering the child and ending the pregnancy. Abortion isn't a single thing. There is a difference between suctioning out the few mostly undifferentiated cells of an embryo that hasn't yet undergone organogenesis and the in utero killing of an entity that has the full complement of organs necessary to sustain itself in the manner of a newborn. Best, EMF ============================================================================ >Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 09:33:26 -0800 >From: Jim Chesher >Subject: Fetal rights I think that E. Maratos-Fleir is correct in distinguishing between a woman" right (assuming that such a right exists) to an abortion meaning her right to terminate the biological connection between herself and the fetus, and the same woman's right that the fetus be killed. It just so happens that, at present, we cannot have the former without the other, but this is essentially a technological shortcoming soon to be overcome. Then we'll face the question directly: What are we to do with the living fetus that has been disconnected from the uterus? Does the "mother" have a say here? On another point, Maratos-Flier suggests that, if the fetus does not have rights, then we can basically do whatever we wish with it. I don't think that this is so. There may be other good reasons for us to protect the fetus and infants that do not rely upon our ascribing rights to them. --Jim Chesher ============================================================================ >From: "Eleftheria Maratos-Flier" >Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 14:39:30 EST Randall Holcombe writes: >>I see the question of whether a fetus is a person to be only peripherally related to the issue of abortion. People have an obligation to refrain from violating the rights of others, but do not have an obligation to be forced to contribute to the well-being of others. Thus, if a pregnant woman does not want to contribute to the well-being of the fetus, and there is nobody else who can do so, the fetus has no claim to be protected against being aborted.<< But does it have a claim to being aborted without being killed.? >>Similarly, children have no right to be taken care of by adults. If no adult wants to take care of a child who cannot fend for himself or herself, then the child, like the aborted fetus, will not survive.<< Is this true even for a child abandoned by well to do parents? Does the child have no claim on the assetts of the parents? The child did not will itself here, it is here because of the actions of adults. >>Parents, and pregnant women, may have an obligation if they have entered into an agreement to take care of their dependents. Thus, the argument that parents are obligated to actively support their children must be based on the notion that, as parents, they have taken on something akin to a conractual obligation. Similarly, the argument against abortion must be that the pregnant woman has taken on an obligation to care for the fetus.<< Focusing simply on rights narrows this arguement to the point where not much can be learned by arguing it. There is more to parent child relationships than the potential contractual obligations that a parent may have taken on to care for a child. Children certainly have classical rights not to be killed and not to have force initiated against them. But the parent-child relationship goes beyond the issue of rights. Parents have moral obligations as well. >>The question then becomes whether the act of becoming pregnant implies the taking of a responsibility to the fetus. Looked at in this way, pregnancy as a result of rape would have a weak claim to imposing such an obligation on the woman, because her pregnancy would be the result of a forceable violation of her rights, and the woman in no way agreed to anything. How about pregnancy resulting from consensual sex, when precautions against pregnancy were being taken? Accidents happen, and the question then becomes what are the responsibilities of those who were involved in accidents.<< Well one simple answer is to say that any pregancy can be terminated up until time X -- e.g. 20 weeks but that a woman who continues a pregnancy beyond 20 weeks has in effect made a "contractual arrangement" with her fetus. I guess this would be akin to "common law" marriage wherein a couple that lives together as man and wife for seven years is in effect considered married. Eleftheria Maratos-Flier ============================================================================ >From: "Eleftheria Maratos-Flier" >Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 14:45:18 EST Jim Chesher writes: >>I think that E. Maratos-Fleir is correct in distinguishing between a woman" right (assuming that such a right exists) to an abortion meaning her right to terminate the biological connection between herself and the fetus, and the same woman's right that the fetus be killed. It just so happens that, at present, we cannot have the former without the other, but this is essentially a technological shortcoming soon to be overcome. Then we'll face the question directly: What are we to do with the living fetus that has been disconnected from the uterus? Does the "mother" have a say here?<< Actually these days most fetuses are viable at 30-32 weeks. Most babies born this premature survive, without heroic technological intervention. Survival is not only possible but likely. >>On another point, Maratos-Flier suggests that, if the fetus does not have rights, then we can basically do whatever we wish with it. I don't think that this is so. There may be other good reasons for us to protect the fetus and infants that do not rely upon our ascribing rights to them.<< I'm not making this as an arguement I'm just trying to see if it is consistent with other arguements. Even if newborns have no rights I think I have a moral obligation to find a way to help care for abandoned newborns. Eleftheria Maratos-Flier ============================================================================ >Date: 31 Aug 1996 09:32:58 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" EM-F writes: *Well by extension of this arguement infanticide of newborns in the interval between birth and their acquision of volition choice (which only starts to happen after age 18 months) would be OK. Indeed since humans at these age have no concept of death and no ability to make choices such an arguement would suggest that death by some painless mechanism such as lethal injection would be acceptable if the parents made the decision. There are societies such as China where infantacide occurs -- baby girls are much less desirable than baby boys and it is very easy to kill a newborn through neglect -- inadequate feeding, poor care or exposure. Do you think that these practices are acceptable?* The age of volition is not clearcut, but for legal purposes, I would set it not at 18 months, but at, say, 3 months, rather than 1 week or 4 years (just as, for legal purposes, we set the driving age at 16 years rather than 10 [clearly too young for that responsibility] or 25 [clearly older than it needs to be]). I find infanticide, for sex selection or most other reasons to be morally abhorrent--the parents or parent who made the choice to create a new life should not abandon it or destroy it; such acts are in many ways a form of self-destruction. But it should not be illegal, because no rights were violated. I do not find allowing a severely deformed newborn to die or killing by lethal injection with morphine morally abhorrent (though I could not and would not do it myself), nor should it be illegal. *Certainly in partial birth late term abortions some consider it OK to insert a cannula into the brain of a living, unanesthetized fetus and to such out the brain contents. If you base personhood and the entitlement to state protection on the capacity for volitional choice such procedures could also be performed in newborns.* Such acts are offensive to me and degrading of the person doing them. I might even applaud those who carry placards near such clinics declaring those who kill newborns by such means to be beneath contempt. But the acts should not be illegal. *What particularly bothers me about certain procedures for ending pregnancy and any procedure used for infantacide is that I could not perform these procedures on the animals that I work with. No animal research committee would allow me to insert a catheter into a conscious mouse and suck out the contents. (I know this raises another host of issues regarding animal rights but since I work with animals I do find the paradox that lab animals may have more rights than fetuses bothersome.)* Laboratory animals don't have rights. I would not allow anyone who mistreats animals to work in my hospital nor in my laboratory, and I would hope most others would not, either. Mistreating animals is disrespectful of life: it is immoral and should be condemned, through words spoken, written, and displayed. But it should not be illegal. *Well you if you consider the Alzheimers patient at the declining end of the spectrum of human life, why not consider a fetus as being at the ascending end of the spectrum of human life? If life is interconnected don't they both deserve some degree of respect?* Of course they deserve respect; respect, and even reverence (certainly, they both get that from me). But neither the fetus nor the end-stage Alzheimer's disease patient (not merely profoundly confused, but actually vegetative), both totally incapable of volition, should have protection by laws that legitimately can only protect rights. The protection they have is provided by those who are responsible for them. *We wouldn't let the mother of the three day old child kill that entity So it seems to be remarkably inconsistent to allow a mother of a 32 week old fetus to kill that entity. There is a distinction between killing the child and aborting the pregnancy and delivering the child and ending the pregnancy.* The mother you describe (assuming an otherwise healthy newborn) is morally depraved and stupid, because she destroys a marvelous, irreplacable, and invaluable extension of herself. How low can a human being sink? But the act should not be illegal. *Abortion isn't a single thing. There is a difference between suctioning out the few mostly undifferentiated cells of an embryo that hasn't yet undergone organogenesis and the in utero killing of an entity that has the full complement of organs necessary to sustain itself in the manner of a newborn.* How does organogenesis make a collection of cells a person? Which organs need to form? Is an anencephalic fetus without a brain less of a person than a phocomelic fetus without an arm, or a Down syndrome fetus without a pyloris? If so, why? Is it because the mind (for people, the capacity for volitional thought) is critical to being a person? Why is a child different from a calf on its way to becoming veal cutlets? Could it be the same capacity? Best regards. --Bob ============================================================================ >Date: 31 Aug 1996 09:38:42 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" Eleftheria Maratos-Flier writes: *Even if newborns have no rights I think I have a moral obligation to find a way to help care for abandoned newborns.* Right on!! So do I. But I should not have a legal obligation to do so. Best regards. --Bob ============================================================================ ============================================================================ >Date: 8/30/96 2:50 PM >To: Robert Sade >From: Eleftheria Maratos-Flier Jim Chesher writes: >>I think that E. Maratos-Fleir is correct in distinguishing between a woman" right (assuming that such a right exists) to an abortion meaning her right to terminate the biological connection between herself and the fetus, and the same woman's right that the fetus be killed. It just so happens that, at present, we cannot have the former without the other, but this is essentially a technological shortcoming soon to be overcome. Then we'll face the question directly: What are we to do with the living fetus that has been disconnected from the uterus? Does the "mother" have a say here?<< Actually these days most fetuses are viable at 30-32 weeks. Most babies born this premature survive, without heroic technological intervention. Survival is not only possible but likely. >>On another point, Maratos-Flier suggests that, if the fetus does not have rights, then we can basically do whatever we wish with it. I don't think that this is so. There may be other good reasons for us to protect the fetus and infants that do not rely upon our ascribing rights to them.<< I'm not making this as an arguement I'm just trying to see if it is consistent with other arguements. Even if newborns have no rights I think I have a moral obligation to find a way to help care for abandoned newborns. Eleftheria Maratos-Flier ============================================================================ >Date: 31 Aug 1996 09:42:35 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" Randy Holcombe writes: *Thus, if a pregnant woman does not want to contribute to the well-being of the fetus, and there is nobody else who can do so, the fetus has no claim to be protected against being aborted. Similarly, children have no right to be taken care of by adults. If no adult wants to take care of a child who cannot fend for himself or herself, then the child, like the aborted fetus, will not survive.* Actually, I have a good deal of sympathy for this view. The problem with it is that children cannot take care of themselves IN PRINCIPLE. This is the one place where the right to life means more than the the right to be left alone (a negative right), it includes the positive to be cared for. Positive rights arise from contracts and agreements (I have a positive right to my house because I bought it), but children are not in principle capable of contracting or agreeing. Because of their natural incapacity, their right to life must include a positive one, the obligation to support it being that of the parent (and only of the parent--no one else has that responsibility) who voluntarily chose to conceive, bear, and raise through the early newborn period the future person who is now a person. If the parent dies or (immorally and illegally) deserts the child, then what you said is true. *Parents, and pregnant women, may have an obligation if they have entered into an agreement to take care of their dependents. Thus, the argument that parents are obligated to actively support their children must be based on the notion that, as parents, they have taken on something akin to a conractual obligation. Similarly, the argument against abortion must be that the pregnant woman has taken on an obligation to care for the fetus. (It does not matter whether the fetus is a person. A kennel can take on such an obligation to take care of your dog, and a garage can take on such an obligation to take care of your car.)* The kennel has an actual two-sided contract (between dog-owner and kennel staff). The obligation to care for a child is necessarily one-sided (between parent and child), and arises from the right to life. But only persons can have rights, and fetuses are not persons. The woman should have no LEGAL obligation to maintain the life of her fetus, though she may have strong MORAL obligations to do so. *A fetus, whether or not the fetus is a person, can have no right to obligate another to take care of it. However, the pregnant woman, as a result of her past actions, might have incurred an obligation to care for the fetus, in a manner similar to the way that a kennel can incur an obligation to care for your dog. The question as I see it, is whether the woman has incurred such an obligation, which is not closely related to whether the fetus is a person.* Without a rights-based approach, there is no objective way to separate what is desirable, preferable, or moral from what is legal. Whether arising from rape, pleasure, accident, or plan, a woman has no legal obligation to her fetus, because a fetus is not a person (or so I have argued), so has no rights, negative or positive. The woman certainly does have (in my view) moral obligations to that The question of what is a person is critical to the legal status of rocks, trees, frogs, and human beings (an ovum is not an embryo is not a fetus is not a newborn is not a child is not an adult). The emotionally difficult point to accept is that, as Maratos-Flier has pointed out, a fetus is essentially the same as a newborn, and should be treated the same. Best regards. --Bob ============================================================================ >Date: 31 Aug 1996 09:45:33 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" Jim Chesher says: *On another point, Maratos-Flier suggests that, if the fetus does not have rights, then we can basically do whatever we wish with it. I don't think that this is so. There may be other good reasons for us to protect the fetus and infants that do not rely upon our ascribing rights to them. * What are those other good reasons? Best regards. Bob ============================================================================ ============================================================================ >Date: 8/30/96 1:00 PM >To: Robert Sade >From: Jim Chesher I think that E. Maratos-Fleir is correct in distinguishing between a woman" right (assuming that such a right exists) to an abortion meaning her right to terminate the biological connection between herself and the fetus, and the same woman's right that the fetus be killed. It just so happens that, at present, we cannot have the former without the other, but this is essentially a technological shortcoming soon to be overcome. Then we'll face the question directly: What are we to do with the living fetus that has been disconnected from the uterus? Does the "mother" have a say here? On another point, Maratos-Flier suggests that, if the fetus does not have rights, then we can basically do whatever we wish with it. I don't think that this is so. There may be other good reasons for us to protect the fetus and infants that do not rely upon our ascribing rights to them. --Jim Chesher ============================================================================ >Date: 31 Aug 1996 09:32:58 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" Robert Sade writes: >>>>The age of volition is not clearcut, but for legal purposes, I would set it not at 18 months, but at, say, 3 months, rather than 1 week or 4 years (just as, for legal purposes, we set the driving age at 16 years rather than 10 [clearly too young for that responsibility] or 25 [clearly older than it needs to be]). I find infanticide, for sex selection or most other reasons to be morally abhorrent--the parents or parent who made the choice to create a new life should not abandon it or destroy it; such acts are in many ways a form of self-destruction. But it should not be illegal, because no rights were violated. I do not find allowing a severely deformed newborn to die or killing by lethal injection with morphine morally abhorrent (though I could not and would not do it myself), nor should it be illegal.<<<< I see a distinction between rights that require volitional ability -- freedom of choice and pursuit of happiness are quite different from the right of a human being not to have force initiated against them. Personhood doesn't matter. My sense is that human beings, whether they have volition or not, have the right to be left alone. I don't argue that a demented Alzheimer's patient needs to be sustained by technology but I do believe that he has a right to his life to whatever extent he can sustain it. If he can't figure out how to eat he may have no right to be fed but he does have the right to be protected from a lethal injection. What happens to an Alzheimer's patient should depend on whatever arrangements she made while competent, but no one other than herself should be able to force death. Making the right to non-interference dependent on volition puts one on a slippery slope. How non-volitional and for how long before one loses the right? Does a person perpetually stoned on LSD have it? What about a heroin addict in the middle of a high? What about addicts enganged in "non-volitional" self-destructive behavior. I don't think that in the case of infants one can simply isolate the status of the infant from that of the parents. Rights are associated with responsibilities -- eg. being a good citizen and not initiating force against others. I think that for parents, not initiating force against others is extended to include caring for their newborn children. If they in fact cannot care for their children they have an absolute obligation to try and find someone who can. Infants are a special case and they can't be analyzed as simply "smaller, non-volitional" human beings. >>Laboratory animals don't have rights. I would not allow anyone who mistreats animals to work in my hospital nor in my laboratory, and I would hope most others would not, either. Mistreating animals is disrespectful of life: it is immoral and should be condemned, through words spoken, written, and displayed. But it should not be illegal.<<< I'm not sure. Animals in nature certainly have no rights. But perhaps they have some rights vis a vis humans who are capable of moral choices. >>>>How does organogenesis make a collection of cells a person? Which organs need to form? Is an anencephalic fetus without a brain less of a person than a phocomelic fetus without an arm, or a Down syndrome fetus without a pyloris? If so, why? Is it because the mind (for people, the capacity for volitional thought) is critical to being a person? Why is a child different from a calf on its way to becoming veal cutlets? Could it be the same capacity?<< Well personhood does require a brain. If there's enough additional anatomy to sustain the brain then it's like that the brain is going to be a person. In one case of two headed siamese twins on body sustains two people. In some cases of phocomelia brains are sustained on bodies with neither arms or legs. But in considering the brain should one consider it at one point in time, the point that it has volition, or is it important to define personhood by looking at the continuum that the brain experiences -- it starts without volition, gets then and then perhaps loses it. Regards, EMF ============================================================================ >Date: Sat, 31 Aug 1996 15:11:44 -0800 >From: Jim Chesher In an earlier posting I had suggested that, even if fetuses (and infants) are not the kind of entities to which we can reasonably ascribe rights, there may be other reasons to protect them. One argument I had in mind comes from the philospher Jane English, who argued that person-like non-persons ought to be treated in peson-like ways (within limits, of course). Her reasoning was that the psychological, emotional underpinning of morality is strengthened to the extent that we abide by this principle. This of course does not support the claim that the state ought to impose itself since, on hypothesis, we are assuming that the fetus/new born does not yet have rights. I think that the "psychological" appeal here has some merit, and raises the question of the emotional, caring aspect of morality. I think that Robert Sade would be sympathetic to this line of thought, as suggested by his recent posting, where he agreed that " The emotionally difficult point to accept is that, as Maratos-Flier has pointed out, a fetus is essentially the same as a newborn, and should be treated the same." --Jim Chesher ============================================================================ >Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 09:05:58 -0700 (PDT) >From: Fred Foldvary On Fri, 30 Aug 1996, Randall Holcombe wrote: > A fetus, whether or not the fetus is a person, can have no right to obligate > another to take care of it. However, the pregnant woman, as a result of her > past actions, might have incurred an obligation to care for the fetus, in a > manner similar to the way that a kennel can incur an obligation to care for > your dog. The question as I see it, is whether the woman has incurred such > an obligation, which is not closely related to whether the fetus is a person. Suppose we have a law permitting abortion within the first trimester and prohibiting it afterwards. Since most women discover their pregnancy during the first trimester (or could test for it if in doubt), a forced or accidental pregnancy could be terminated, with the implication that if there is no abortion by the fourth month, there is an implicit agreement and obligation by the woman to care for the fetus and child. Fred Foldvary ============================================================================ >Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 09:26:53 -0700 (PDT) >From: Fred Foldvary On Fri, 30 Aug 1996, Eleftheria Maratos-Flier wrote: > Even if newborns have no rights I think I have a moral obligation to find > a way to help care for abandoned newborns. If there is a moral obligation to care for newborns, then by definition, the newborns have the right to receive the care. Obligations imply rights, no? I note also that you made the case that continuation of a pregnancy beyond a certain time implies an agreement to care for it henceforth. (I am catching up with a week of messages). Fred Foldvary ============================================================================ >Date: Mon, 2 Sep 1996 15:28:36 -0400 >From: jnarveso@watarts.UWaterloo.ca (Jan Narveson) I've been away for a week on vacation and am facing preparations for a very full teaching term that starts soon. Accordingly, I just want to mention that I will be putting out pieces on abortion and the status of the fetus, and on liberalism, its meaning and implications, in a few days. This is to reassure some people that libprofs will remain, whatever else, a forum for discussing the basic ideas of liberty.... __________________________________________________________________________ Jan Narveson (Professor) Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1 (519) 888-4567-1-2780# (from touch-tone); or 885-1211, ext. 2780 (via switchboard); FAX (519) 746-3097 Home: (519) 886-1673 (answering machine) e-mail: jnarveso@watarts.UWaterloo.ca ============================================================================ >Date: Mon, 2 Sep 1996 14:59:34 -0700 (MST) >From: Max More At 09:26 AM 9/1/96 -0700, Fred Foldvary wrote: >On Fri, 30 Aug 1996, Eleftheria Maratos-Flier wrote: > >> Even if newborns have no rights I think I have a moral obligation to find >> a way to help care for abandoned newborns. >> >If there is a moral obligation to care for newborns, then by >definition, the newborns have the right to receive the care. >Obligations imply rights, no? No. Rights imply obligations, but obligations do not necessarily imply rights. I may have an obligation to tell the truth, but it doesn't follow that any specific person has a *right* to get the truth from me. I may have an obligation to be sensitive, but no one has a right to my sensitivity. That said, I see little place for obligations in a rational ethics, other than those voluntarily assumed. But, whatever your preferred ethical theory, obligations do not necessarily imply rights. Max More, Ph.D. maxmore@primenet.com http://www.primenet.com/~maxmore President Extropy Institute (ExI) Editor Extropy 310-398-0375 http://www.primenet.com/~maxmore/extropy.htm ============================================================================ >Date: Mon, 2 Sep 1996 20:36:27 -0700 (PDT) >From: Fred Foldvary On Mon, 2 Sep 1996, Max More wrote: > At 09:26 AM 9/1/96 -0700, Fred Foldvary wrote: > >Obligations imply rights, no? > No. Rights imply obligations, but obligations do not necessarily imply > rights. Do we have a semantical or definitional difference? I presume we both refer to moral rights. I define the statement "P has the right to do X" as equivalent to the statement "The negation of X by others is morally evil", negation being the use of force and fraud to take away X. Given the rule for evil by a rational, universal ethic: {All and only acts that coercively harm others are evil.}, the only moral obligation is the avoidance of evil, an obligation being a duty or moral imperative. Therefore, if one has a right to X, it implies by definition that the negation of X is morally evil, which implies also that others have the moral obligation to avoid negating X. So, with the above definitions, rights do imply obligations, and obligations imply rights, since both rights and obligations are derived from and are functions of the rule for evil in the universal ethic. > I may have an obligation to tell the truth, but it doesn't follow > that any specific person has a *right* to get the truth from me. By my definition above, it does follow. If fraud is a type of theft and thus morally evil, then there is both an obligation to avoid fraud and the right not be defrauded. > I may have > an obligation to be sensitive, but no one has a right to my sensitivity. What kind of obligation? If only a cultural one, then there is no universal-ethic right. But if the obligation derives from the universal ethic, so too does the correlative right. > That said, I see little place for obligations in a rational ethics, other > than those voluntarily assumed. But, whatever your preferred ethical theory, > obligations do not necessarily imply rights. > Are there no "negative" obligations, i.e. the obligation to avoid coercively harming others, or to avoid force & fraud? If an ethical theory has both rights and obligations being defined as functions of a rational ethic, how then can obligations not imply rights? The obligation would imply the ethic, and the ethic the right. Fred Foldvary ============================================================================ >Date: 3 Sep 1996 09:05:15 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" Jim Chesher said: *In an earlier posting I had suggested that, even if fetuses (and infants) are not the kind of entities to which we can reasonably ascribe rights, there may be other reasons to protect them. One argument I had in mind comes from the philospher Jane English, who argued that person-like non-persons ought to be treated in peson-like ways (within limits, of course). Her reasoning was that the psychological, emotional underpinning of morality is strengthened to the extent that we abide by this principle.* This addresses the question of why we treat human corpses (clearly non-persons) with a level of respect far above that with which we treat raccoon road-kills. The problem is, where do the limits belong? Is this an appropriate area for the law to address? I think not (except, perhaps, as a public health issue). *This of course does not support the claim that the state ought to impose itself since, on hypothesis, we are assuming that the fetus/new born does not yet have rights.* Correct. *I think that the "psychological" appeal here has some merit, and raises the question of the emotional, caring aspect of morality. I think that Robert Sade would be sympathetic to this line of thought, as suggested by his recent posting, where he agreed that " The emotionally difficult point to accept is that, as Maratos-Flier has pointed out, a fetus is essentially the same as a newborn, and should be treated the same."* I am sympathetic to it, but am leery of labeling emotions as `underpinnings for morality.' While emotional reactions may strengthen or weaken one's commitment to making moral choices, they don't contribute to their validity. My wife's intelligence and beauty reinforce my moral commitment to remain faithful to her. My hormonal emotional response to the beauty and verve of a spanish dancer may weaken my commitment to my wife, but does not morally justify my running off with the dancer. The fact that a fetus looks and moves like a baby does not make it a baby, nor does it make moral (or legal) obligations to a fetus the same as those to a child. Best regards. --Bob ============================================================================ >Date: 3 Sep 1996 09:03:57 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" Fred Foldvary says: *If there is a moral obligation to care for newborns, then by definition, the newborns have the right to receive the care. Obligations imply rights, no?* Well, no. Morality and law are not the same. Contractual obligations, voluntarily entered, imply positive rights (I bought the car, it is mine-- I have a right to it). Simply being a person confers certain negative rights (life, liberty, and property), which impose obligations on others not to violate them. Moral obligations (I should be honest with myself; I should support movements that advance the cause of liberty; I should donate money to my alma mater; I should care for abandoned newborns) imply no rights at all for the beneficiaries of my attention, nor can they impose obligations on anyone else. Best regards. --Bob ============================================================================ >Date: 2 Sep 1996 22:08:35 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" Jim Chesher said: *In an earlier posting I had suggested that, even if fetuses (and infants) are not the kind of entities to which we can reasonably ascribe rights, there may be other reasons to protect them. One argument I had in mind comes from the philospher Jane English, who argued that person-like non-persons ought to be treated in peson-like ways (within limits, of course). Her reasoning was that the psychological, emotional underpinning of morality is strengthened to the extent that we abide by this principle.* This addresses the question of why we treat human corpses (clearly non-persons) with a level of respect far above that with which we treat raccoon road-kills. The problem is, where do the limits belong? Is this an appropriate area for the law to address? I think not (except, perhaps, as a public health issue). *This of course does not support the claim that the state ought to impose itself since, on hypothesis, we are assuming that the fetus/new born does not yet have rights.* Correct. *I think that the "psychological" appeal here has some merit, and raises the question of the emotional, caring aspect of morality. I think that Robert Sade would be sympathetic to this line of thought, as suggested by his recent posting, where he agreed that " The emotionally difficult point to accept is that, as Maratos-Flier has pointed out, a fetus is essentially the same as a newborn, and should be treated the same."* I am sympathetic to it, but am leery of labeling emotions as `underpinnings for morality.' While emotional reactions may strengthen or weaken one's commitment to making moral choices, they don't contribute to their validity. My wife's intelligence and beauty reinforce my moral commitment to remain faithful to her. My hormonal emotional response to the beauty and verve of a spanish dancer may weaken my commitment to my wife, but does not morally justify my running off with the dancer. The fact that a fetus looks and moves like a baby does not make it a baby, nor does it make moral (or legal) obligations to a fetus the same as those to a child. Best regards. --Bob ============================================================================ >Date: 2 Sep 1996 22:19:26 -0500 >From: "Robert Sade" Fred Foldvary says: *If there is a moral obligation to care for newborns, then by definition, the newborns have the right to receive the care. Obligations imply rights, no?* Well, no. Morality and law are not the same. Contractual obligations, voluntarily entered, imply positive rights (I bought the car, it is mine-- I have a right to it). Simply being a person confers certain negative rights (life, liberty, and property), which impose obligations on others not to violate them. Moral obligations (I should be honest with myself; I should support movements that advance the cause of liberty; I should donate money to my alma mater; I should care for abandoned newborns) imply no rights at all for the beneficiaries of my attention, nor can they impose obligations on anyone else. ============================================================================ >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 06:55:06 -0700 (PDT) >From: Fred Foldvary On 3 Sep 1996, Robert Sade wrote: > Fred Foldvary says: > > *If there is a moral obligation to care for newborns, then by > definition, the newborns have the right to receive the care. > Obligations imply rights, no?* > > Well, no. Morality and law are not the same. True. But my statement still stands. Evidently I did not go into sufficient detail on which rights are involved. Moral obligations imply moral rights; legal obligations legal rights. > ... Moral obligations (I should be honest with myself; I should > support movements that advance the cause of liberty; I should donate money to > my alma mater; I should care for abandoned newborns) imply no rights at all > for the beneficiaries of my attention, nor can they impose obligations on > anyone else. Those examples do not derive from a universal ethic, but from one's personal ethics. If your personal ethic obliges you to support liberty, then by your own ethical standard, not to do so would be wrong, and the moral wrong (by your personal ethic) implies that the recipient has the right not to be so wronged. A right is a correlative of a moral wrong, as a function of an ethic. Universal-ethic obligations imply universal-ethic rights. These are social moral imperatives. Personal-ethic obligations imply personal-ethic rights. These rights may not properly be enforced by government. Fred Foldvary ============================================================================ >From: "Aeon Skoble" >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 09:28:58 +0000 > No. Rights imply obligations, but obligations do not necessarily imply > rights. Hold on. I thought they did. If I have an obigation to do X, does someone have right to X? Let's pick a non-controversial example so we can get clear on the relationship here. Say the university has an obligation to make copies of my evaluations available to me. Doesn't that mean I have the right to see them? Isn't that just a different way of saying it? To creep back into the moral area, if I have an obligation to, say, respect Smith's privacy, isn't that just the same thing as saying that Smith has a right to privacy? ============================================================================ >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 09:09:12 -0700 (MST) >From: Max More At 09:28 AM 9/3/96 +0000, Aeon Skoble wrote: >> No. Rights imply obligations, but obligations do not necessarily imply >> rights. > >Hold on. I thought they did. If I have an obigation to do X, does >someone have right to X? Let's pick a non-controversial example so we can >get clear on the relationship here. >Say the university has an obligation to make copies of my evaluations >available to me. Doesn't that mean I have the right to see them? >Isn't that just a different way of saying it? To creep back into the >moral area, if I have an obligation to, say, respect Smith's privacy, >isn't that just the same thing as saying that Smith has a right to >privacy? A distinction is usually made between perfect and imperfect obligations. In the case of perfect obligations, an obligation does indeed imply a right as well as a right implying an obligation. Your university example seems to be of this kind, since presumably you have a contractual relationship with the university that gives you this right, from which the obligation follows. An imperfect obligation is one owed to an unlimited number of persons, such as (maybe) an obligation to be truthful. No one has a *right* that you be truthful (rather: only those with whom you have certain special relationships might have such a right), but you may still have this obligation. Again, I'm defending a standard view of obligations which I think is basically correct. However, I don't normally use the language of "obligations" which I find unpleasantly Kantian. I would prefer to talk of it being virtuous for me to do various things, leaving "obligation" only for cases where I have made a specific contractual agreement. ============================================================================ >From: "Aeon Skoble" >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:24:59 +0000 > No one has a *right* that you be truthful (rather: only those with whom you have certain special > relationships might have such a right), but you may still have this obligation. I don't get it - what force does it have to say that I have that obligation, if no one may "call me on it" - i.e., if no one has a corresponding right. I agree with you that we need to be stingy about obligation-talk, but that's _because_ of the connection between rights and obligtions, isn't it? > I would prefer to talk of it being virtuous for me to do various things Me too. > leaving "obligation" only for cases where I have made a > specific contractual agreement. I which cases the corresponding rights _would_ obtain, no? ============================================================================ >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 10:32:59 -0700 (PDT) >From: Fred Foldvary >Subject: rights and obligations On Tue, 3 Sep 1996, Max More wrote: > An imperfect obligation is one owed to an unlimited number of persons, such > as (maybe) an obligation to be truthful. No one has a *right* that you be > truthful (rather: only those with whom you have certain special > relationships might have such a right), > but you may still have this obligation. Whether one has a moral right to truth depends on the context. If you buy a product and the seller claims X, but the product is actually Y, for which you would not have paid as much, then the deception is a type of theft; the buyer does have the right to a truthful presentation of the product qualities, so far as the seller knows them. On the other hand, if a thief wants to know if there is money in your other pocket and there is, but you lie and say no, the thief had no right to the truth, since he initiated coercion. Hence, whether one has a moral right to truth depends on the ethics of the situation. If fraud would harm others, others have the right not to be harmed, thus a right to truth. But if the truth is being demanded by an aggressor, the aggressor has no right to the truth. > Again, I'm defending a standard view of obligations which I think is > basically correct. However, I don't normally use the language of > "obligations" which I find unpleasantly Kantian. I would prefer to talk of > it being virtuous for me to do various things, leaving "obligation" only for > cases where I have made a specific contractual agreement. > But we can differentiate moral, legal, and contractual obligations, with corresponding rights. A contractual obligation implies a moral or legal obligation to abide by contracts, so the higher-level obligation is implied by the lower-level contractual one. Fred Foldvary ============================================================================ >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:21:56 -0700 >From: arhu032@uabdpo.dpo.uab.edu (Scott Arnold) I am reluctant to contribute to this discussion because I have some sense of the complexities of the issues involved and do not believe they can be decisively settled in this forum. BUT I cannot resist adding a few thoughts: Though truth is not settled by a show of hands, I think most philosophers would agree that rights imply duties but deny the proposition that duties imply rights (In other words, if A ought to do x, it does NOT logically follow that someone has a right against A that he or she do x). As Max More points out, imperfect obligations are of this sort. Consider charity. I may be morally obligated to give some of my income to charity without it being the case that anyone has a right against me that I give either to any particular charity or even to charity in general. (Whose rights am I violating if I fail to give?) For Randians who don't believe in charity, consider the following example that I often use with students: An adult (or teenaged) child ought to send his or her mother a Mother's Day card or at least give her a call on that special day (barring special explanation), but it does not follow that she has a right against her children that they do these things. (To say that you have a moral obligation just means that you act wrongly by failing to do it. As for 'acting wrongly,' well, . . . all the basic moral terms are interdefined--something has to be primitive.) Although people these days--especially Americans--seem to be bristling with an armoury of rights, I think it is important to see that not all morality is a matter of respecting people's rights. (An excellent discussion of why this is so can be found in Chapter 1 of Loren Lomasky's PERSONS, RIGHTS, AND THE MORAL COMMUNITY). This is especially true if one takes the view that the job of the state is to enforce rights but that there are spheres of morality which are beyond the purview of the state. By the way, this view does not presuppose that morality (or any part of it) is subjective in any philosophically potent sense. This distinction is important to the abortion debate because it implies that if one has settled the question about rights, one has not settled the moral question of abortion. Those of a pro-choice persuasion who argue that abortion violates no rights of the fetus and that prohibitions on abortion violate women's rights have not, even if their arguments succeed, settled the abortion debate, since abortion may be immoral even if it violates no one's rights. This, presumably is the view of the Mario Cuomos of the world who are "personally opposed" but believe it should be legal. I am not agreeing with their view, but it is a coherent one. --Scott Arnold Professor of Philosophy University of Alabama at Birmingham ============================================================================ >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 14:23:12 -0700 (PDT) >From: Fred Foldvary On Tue, 3 Sep 1996, Scott Arnold wrote: > ... Consider charity. I > may be morally obligated to give some of my income to charity without it > being the case that anyone has a right against me that I give either to any > particular charity or even to charity in general. (Whose rights am I > violating if I fail to give?) If a transfer of wealth is an obligation, is it truly charity? Aside from that, suppose that the creed of religion R obligates one to give contributions to the church. Then the failure to do so is evil, by the R creed. If a right is *defined* as the correlative of an evil (the right to have X means that the negation (failure to provide) X is evil), then the obligation and the right are just two ways of expressing the same thing. Each implies the other. The R church has a right to receive the contribution since the funds by the R creed rightfully belong to the church, and the failure to deliver is a wrong. > For Randians who don't believe in charity, > consider the following example that I often use with students: An adult (or > teenaged) child ought to send his or her mother a Mother's Day card or at > least give her a call on that special day (barring special explanation), but > it does not follow that she has a right against her children that they do > these things. As I see it, by the universal ethic (as the expression of natural moral law), charity is morally good, but not a moral obligation. As to the example, what ethic is the "ought to send a card" attached to? It's not an "ought" of the universal ethic. If by ethic E one ought to send a card, then the failure to send a card is evil, and rights being correlative of evil, the mother indeed has a right to the card or call, by ethic E. If there is no right, there is no evil and no ought. I think such examples unconsciously shift from ethic to ethic. There is some obligation by a personal or cultural ethic, and then there is a denial that there is any right, implicitly defining "rights" in a universal sense. If the ethic is defined from the beginning, the examples fall apart. > (To say that you have a moral obligation just means that you > act wrongly by failing to do it. As for 'acting wrongly,' well, . . . all > the basic moral terms are interdefined--something has to be primitive.) What is primitive is an ethic, a set of rules for judging acts as good, evil, and neutral. Rights and obligations are defined in terms of an ethic, as you indicate. Fred Foldvary ============================================================================ >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 17:50:42 -0700 >From: Barry or Michele Fagin >Subject: please take abortion discussion offline Could I ask the participants in the abortion discussion to take it offline, or to some other forum (such as libernet-d@listserv.rmii.com)? It has little to do with being a libertarian professor, it is being contributed to by the same few people, and yet over half my daily mail to this account is from librpfos concerning abortion. Thankfully, we had Robin Hanson's forwarded post about government spending and risk, which was fascinating. One libertarian professor's opinion. --BF Member of Families Against Internet Censorship: www.rmii.com/~fagin/faic, email faic@rmii.com ============================================================================ >Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 14:33:31 -0400 >From: holcombe@coss.fsu.edu (Randall Holcombe) Several people responded to my post last week on abortion. Eleftheria Maratos-Flier writes: "Children certainly have classical rights not to be killed and not to have force initiated against them. But the parent-child relationship goes beyond the issue of rights. Parents have moral obligations as well." I agree. Are you arguing that a moral obligation on the part of one person conveys a right to someone else? Do people have a right to the benefits that would come from others living up to their moral obligations? "Well one simple answer is to say that any pregancy can be terminated up until time X -- e.g. 20 weeks but that a woman who continues a pregnancy beyond 20 weeks has in effect made a "contractual arrangement" with her fetus. I guess this would be akin to "common law" marriage wherein a couple that lives together as man and wife for seven years is in effect considered married." Your answer is closely in line with my original comment that the abortion issue is really what obligation the pregnant woman has to the fetus, rather than what rights the fetus has. Following your suggestion, whether the fetus is a person or not is irrelevant, which was the point of my earlier post. Bob Sade writes: "...but children are not in principle capable of contracting or agreeing. Because of their natural incapacity, their right to life must include a positive one, the obligation to support it being that of the parent (and only of the parent--no one else has that responsibility) who voluntarily chose to conceive, bear, and raise through the early newborn period the future person who is now a person. If the parent dies or (immorally and illegally) deserts the child, then what you said is true." I do not agree that a child's right to life is a positive one. People do not have the right to claim the resources belonging to others. I do agree that at some point parents assume a responsibility to care for their children, and the point at which they assume this responsibility is the issue with regard to abortion. Is it at conception? Is it at birth? Is it 20 weeks after conception? The last sentence in Bob's quotation suggests to me that children do not have a positive right to life. How could a child lose this right simply because of the death of the child's parents? Are people's rights contingent upon the survival of other people? Fred Foldvary supports Eleftheria Maratos-Flier's idea: "Suppose we have a law permitting abortion within the first trimester and prohibiting it afterwards. Since most women discover their pregnancy during the first trimester (or could test for it if in doubt), a forced or accidental pregnancy could be terminated, with the implication that if there is no abortion by the fourth month, there is an implicit agreement and obligation by the woman to care for the fetus and child." I am not sure where the parental obligation to the fetus (or child) should begin, but this comment again focuses on the idea that the abortion question is really one about whether the woman has an obligation to the fetus, rather than on whether a fetus has rights. Many abortion opponents would allow abortions that result from rape, but if a fetus has rights, it is hard to see how a fetus conceived from rape would have fewer rights than a fetus conceived by consensual sex. Furthermore, it is hard for me to see that a fetus would get more rights as it develops, because its brain functions develop. Even at it's earliest stages, we know that (barring any problems) the fetus will become a child and then an adult if we let it. If lack of consciousness in its current state would allow aborting the fetus, would the same agrument apply to killing those in a coma, even if they are likely to recover? It makes little sense to me to think of a fetus gaining rights as it moves toward birth, but it does make sense to think of the pregnant woman becoming increasingly obligated to care for the fetus as the pregnancy progresses. Randy Holcombe ============================================================================ Date: Thu, 05 Sep 1996 13:28:43 -0500 (EST) From: llomask@OPIE.BGSU.EDU I am coming in late on this discussion, and perhaps people's attention has already turned elsewhere, but I wanted briefly to question one of the assumptions that both sides to the argument over fetus (and infants; and Alzheimer oldsters; etc.) rights share. Rights theorists have often conducted their inquiries as a search for the salient property, P, that elevates the status of all beings who have it to <>. Until and unless that being possesses P it does not enjoy rights, and once it no longer has P it is not a rights-bearer. What is P? Maybe rationality, or volitional choice-making or "personhood." I won't offer suggestions here concerning which might be the best choice. Rather, I want to issue a demural from the premise that there is such a univalent basis to elevated moral status. WE are rights-bearers. Is it simply a biological datum with no moral significance that each of us earlier in our careers was a young child, earlier than that an infant, earlier than that a fetus? I'm inclined to believe not. Since I and infant LL are self-identical, something that harmed or benefited Baby LL harmed or benefited me; something that counterfactually would have ended Baby LL's life is something that would have ended mine. So much discussion of the moral status of fetuses and infants proceeds exactly as it would if they were separate species - instead of young stages of us. To do so is implicitly to suppose that personal history is irrelevant to morals, that we may adequately be treated as separate (or separable) person-stages rather than beings who live *lives* (and who, for that matter have interests that post-date their own demise and so may well have post-mortem rights). The preceding is merely to note that one premise typically shared by opponents in the rights argument is not itself innocent. It isn't, I realize, to offer an account showing that it's wrong and what ought to be put in its place. I've tried elsewhere to do that (PERSONS, RIGHTS & THE MORAL COMMUNITY, Oxford, 1987) and will spare the list a reprise here! Loren Lomasky ============================================================================ Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 16:40:52 -0400 From: jnarveso@watarts.uwaterloo.ca (Jan Narveson) Subject: the forewarned essay on abortion and liberalism The following concerns the issue that has been broached again lately in this discussion group, as it often is in other libertarian discussion groups. My following thoughts about it are intended to settle the question, as the question it is for us, namely, a question of politics; in no way are they intended to settle the question whether you, some individual woman or some particular couple, should ever have an abortion. There has been some suggestion that abortion is not an appropriate subject for discussion in this group. I deny that, absolutely. We need reasonable answers to public issues, and it is only as a public issue that the following discussion deals with abortion. But in that aspect, it decidedly is a public issue, and one of the most important of our day and time - though not, certainly, of lots of other days and times, actual or possible.. No question is more fundamental in political theory than that of WHY we should be thought to have rights, or duties, etc. There are good and bad answers to this. Most of what are more or less billed as answers to it are bad answers, and they are so for a specific, ascertainable reason: they amount to the invocation of premises which the people to whom they are addressed have no reason to accept. That is true of all religious appeals, and most appeals to "natural rights"; and practically all appeals to "values", including all appeals to something or other's having "intrinsic value" (such as, say, Human Life). The above is something that has to sink in, though it is obvious enough in almost any theoretical discussion of anything that one comes by in our field. The case of abortion is quite especially interesting in this regard. Most of us are pretty regular-type folks. We like children, we have some ourselves, we sympathize when others can't have them, or when their own children go bad, and so on. And some will appeal outright to the intrinsic value of people. The view that something is intrinsically valuable is the view that it is valuable, but there is no further reason why it is: it just is, as it stands. To claim that x is intrinsically valuable is to go out on a limb, and the limb is easily cut off when the argument is *practical*, that is, with a view to determining what is actually to be done, especially done "by society", e.g., by government. (Please note the scare-quotes in the former; they are deliberate.) It's cut off as soon as somebody else just doesn't see it that way. Nothing you can say will persuade him that he's wrong, since by definition intrinsic values have no further premises to appeal to - either you see it or you don't. And this other bloke doesn't. Now, what? The standard answer to this is to write him off as not counting, on the ground that he's morally blind; and/or, what amounts in practice to the same thing, to count up the votes on you side and decide whether you can ignore him. But if we have some faint hope that public policy can be founded on reason, then such tactics simply mean that we've abandoned that hope. We shouldn't. It's too important. What IS a reasonable, a rational, social policy or program or principle? It is one such that *everybody* is such that he accepts certain premises such that one can deduce from *those* premises -- not the ones the theorist happens to like -- that p is indeed what we should act on. It has been rather too popular, but not wholly wrong, to assume that the premises that anybody will accept, in his own case, are in effect those of "self-interest". What's right about this is that they will be what that person is interested in: to accept a practical premise, a value premise, IS to show that one is interested in whatever it proposes, in some way or other. And it is pretty safe to say that at least virtually everybody is indeed self-interested in the more robust of the senses distinguished by Butler in the 18th Century: that is, interested in having his own stomach well-filled from time to time, in not having the parts of his body broken or slashed, in being alive tomorrow as well as today ... However, they are interested in any of these things only in company with a lot of other things, and those other things every now and then compete with the "strictly self-interested" bits, and then some individuals will readily sacrifice "self-interest" to these other things. You never can tell. But the social policy: All persons should do whatever conduces to the ends of Loren Lomasky, or Jan Narveson, or Jesus Christ, or any other particular person, is a policy that at most one person in the whole universe can be expected to be really enthusiastic about. For the rest, their appraisal of this policy proposal is that it's worth exactly nothing. Clearly, plausible policies invoking the support and active participation of all people are going to have do to better than that. Somehow, a social policy must be in *everyone's* interest. Since interests, of course, often enough conflict, that is a tall order. But it is only tall: it is the mark of shallowness to take that, just as it stands, as sufficient reason to abandon the whole idea - especially since there is, literally, nothing to replace it with. The last is meant, as I say, literally. A social policy proposal that is not in the interest, somehow, of those whose actions are to be governed by it is a non-starter, a fake. There are lots of fake policies around, especially because of the dominance, these last hundred years or so, of Democracy. Democracy is rule by a bunch of people who've managed to get enough votes to attain to power; those who voted for them need not know anything whatever about the issues, or even about the candidate; Democracy is, necessarily, rule by the mob, so far as reason is concerned. People who talk as though the fact that x is democratic is sufficient to establish the rightness of x cannot have thought what they are saying; and if they have, they have, again, one of those singular tastes that it is the misfortune of politics to be infested with persons who think that their taste is all that matters. Among the interests that people often have are interests in running other people's lives, in one way or another. If A hates B, it is in A's interest (so far as A is concerned) that B suffer or meet with misfortune in some way. If there are to be social rules with a rational basis, they cannot support to things like hatred, which, obviously, divide people rather than uniting them. This leaves interests which in principle can be satisfied without dissatisfying anyone else. There are, actually, lots of those, especially when we are careful to carve off the offending type. But for similar reasons, a social policy cannot enlist the aid of all in promoting the interests of some. For to do so is to sacrifice, to some degree, those interests of many in the interests of the others. This is absurd. What we are left with, then, is that society is not to interfere with the pursuit by individuals of any interests whose pursuit is costless to others. "Costless" sounds like a tall order, and would be if we were talking .000000000000001 risks of "harm". We could talk at length about what is sufficient to count as costless, but above all, whatever is such that individual would gladly bear that cost, in his own case, in return for anything he wanted, is below the line, sufficiently for these purposes. And if we ask when coercion is justified, it seems difficult to resist the libertarian's general conclusion: only when it is necessary to counter somebody else's coercion of some innocent person. 'Coercion', by the way, is a matter of re-arranging somebody's alternatives in such a way that his actions will necessarily, from his own point of view,, be expectably worse in result than they would have been had the coercer not intervened in the way he did. I prefer walking down the street, wallet in pocket, to limping down it, wallet gone. The question of abortion - THE question, the only question, for social purposes, is: supposing that someone really wants to have an abortion, do we, society, let her, or don't we? Do we get to impose restrictions, or not? For instance, to say, "No, never"; or "Yes, but only if you meet the following conditions...." - such as "if you'll die otherwise", or "if your health will otherwise be seriously adversely affected". Obviously there are prudential questions, and questions of life values, basic values, for the woman to contend with. But we must presume that every now and then, she will have decided, sufficiently deliberately, that on the whole, she still wants that abortion. It is not for society corporately to presume about these things; it is, of course, for individuals to try to make their cases to her, and it is not even for society to ensure that they can do so - the woman may simply not want to hear those cases. And so on. Meanwhile, our question must be: are there others whose "legitimate" interests - meaning that those of their interests which are not interests in the discomfiture or frustration or, in general, the worsening of anyone else's situation, are nevertheless worsened by her action? To this question, the only plausible answer in general is the fetus' interests. People who don't like abortion, of course, will be negatively affected, but they, as pointed out above, simply don't count, any more than my own intense dislike of most forms of popular music should count in favor of having a law against other people listening to it. It conceivably might be in some circumstances that if this woman doesn't have this baby, there will be a serious population shortage, etc. Such claims can be investigated, but in the general circumstances of life as we know it, there is nothing to be said for any such claims. Just as St. Thomas noted in regard to women who insisted on remaining virgins and being nuns, that there were plenty left over to get on with perpetuating the race, so it is with these. (The converse claim: that we should be encouraging and subsidizing abortion because there are too many people, is another eligible claim that, however, turns out to have nothing whatever to be said for it. It's the right *kind* of claim, but in fact inapplicable at present.) So we are back to the fetus. Now is where Professor Lomasky's latest entry becomes relevant. "Rights theorists have often conducted their inquiries as a search for the salient property, P, that elevates the status of all beings who have it to <>. Until and unless that being possesses P it does not enjoy rights, and once it no longer has P it is not a rights-bearer." A right-bearer is somebody who has rights. If there is no P, nor any assemblage of properties P, P', P'', etc., such that one has rights if and only if one has one of those, then political theory in anything remotely resembling the liberal tradition is impossible and we should all go home and just resume sabre-rattling or whatever. When Loren says - rather in the oratorical posture of Pontius Pilate shrugging his shoulders and asking, What is Truth? - "What is P? Maybe rationality, or volitional choice-making or "personhood." I won't offer suggestions here concerning which might be the best choice. Rather, I want to issue a demural from the premise that there is such a univalent basis to elevated moral status." " we must certainly wonder what's going on here. What I think probably is going on is that he has the idea that those who ask this have the idea that somehow having rights is a mysterious inner property, a bit like having polyps on one's larynx, say, and is something that we can just be "looking for", as if it were somehow "there", all by itself, shining away in the moral darkness. I take it that this is an absurd picture of moral and political theory. Morals and politics is a bunch of people interacting, and often having problems in the process, problems of a kind that maybe some fancier social software might be able to help us out with. One main such problem is the tendency of other people to bash our heads on if they happen to think that would be a good idea, or do any number of other things to us that we really don't want done, for the good reason that they make our lives, as we see and live them, worse. There is also the tendency to be insufficiently helpful, of course; but then, from the point of view of the people whom we think of that way, the seekers after their aid may well be a nuisance, or worse. All this needs to be, and can be, pretty well, ironed out. The great ironing board of us liberal is Rights. Why rights? Rights impose duties on other people, and other people's rights impose duties on us. So on the one hand we'd like to have lots of rights, ourselves, but on the other hand, we don't really want anybody else to have any. But this is stupid, of course: we only have rights, practically speaking, if other people do recognize them, and they won't extend them to us, recognize us as having them, unless we recognize them as having them as well. There is no way around this: or rather, there is no way around this if we stick within the ambit of software - that is, of trying to settle our (potential and actual) differences by reasonable means. Now, Loren's question can be broken down into two. (1) Who will insist on rights for himself? The answer to that is, certainly, (a) anybody who is n a position to do any "insisting", that is, can communicate well enough, AND who (b) is such that others will do well to take him seriously, because he can make life difficult for others if they do not. There will be those with plausible cases - virtually all adults, and many children down to the rather young; and implausible ones, such as tiny children and people in advanced stages of leukemia. Among these latter, however, will be people who used to be in class (1), and while there insisted, successfully, on being treated with respect, or even care, and so on, should they ever get into a state of total decrepitude; and then there may be (2) those whom the folks in class (1) found good reason for extending rights to anyway, even though they were in no position to insist on them and couldn't do much about it if they weren't given them. How do we make a case for candidates for this second class? The most obvious way is simple: anyone whom it is distinctively in the interest of anyone in class (1) that the individuals in question be left intact, and such that doing so would not impose significant costs on anyone else in class (1), gets extended these rights, just as a function of the general rights of those persons themselves. Like the case for private property, there is a case for your respecting my children. Actually, there's a very strong case, in a general sort of way, for as we all are aware, children are The Future; no children, no (or not much) future for us. Fair enough, and no problem. The case regarding children gets tricky at the margin, of course. Some parents may be inclined toward infanticide, conceivably; and those they want to kill have by this time aroused the sympathy of others, and their parents benefited from our good offices, and so forth. From the point of view of others, any *particular* proposed infanticide isn't a very big deal; but on the other hand, it is, now, a biggish deal to the infant himself, who by this time is out in the world, with mind more or less switched on; and that matters to lots of people. It's a tricky case, then, but the case is immensely simplified by one extremely important circumstance: once an organism emerges from the womb, it can be cared for by other people besides its mother. Those who purport to love her child better than she does can make her an offer. Can they make her an offer she can't refuse? It would not be reasonable to do this IF the woman also had had no choice but to bring the child into existence in the first place. Now, many women did not have, in a sufficiently robust way, a choice whether to conceive at all. They were raped, perhaps, or whatever. Most, however, have. And if in addition to that they had, at least, the option of abortion, then we can feel a lot more comfortable about saying to the prospective mother: "Either have an abortion, if that's how you feel about it, or else take reasonable care of the kid, especially since if you don't' do so, the kid is going to end up being a menace to us; or else, just let us take care of it and you can go your own way in peace." Now we return to the question of the "status of the fetus". At this point, we must respond to Loren's other argument. "Is it simply a biological datum with no moral significance that each of us earlier in our careers was a young child, earlier than that an infant, earlier than that a fetus? I'm inclined to believe not. Since I and infant LL are self-identical, something that harmed or benefited Baby LL harmed or benefited me; something that counterfactually would have ended Baby LL's life is something that would have ended mine." This is wrong, when generalized. It happens to be right in LL's case: he is, in that peculiar sense in which later phases of identifiable entities are said to be "identical with" their earlier phases, identical with the fetus that once was - though in no other sense, happily. (Real fetuses do not make good professors.). But in truth, if LL's mother had had an abortion instead of LL, there would be no LL to be unhappy about the fact. That fetus would NOT have been identical with the LL we all know and love; fetuses know nothing about anything like this, make no choices, think no thoughts, and only in late stages are capable, even, of any appreciable degree of pain or pleasure, so far as we have any reason to believe. This being so, it is also true that if there is an abortion, then the universe never contains any person who has a beef, a complaint. So far as the rest of the universe is concerned - and that includes the rest of us people, us onlookers - a to-be-aborted fetus is in exactly the same moral category as, say, the typical kitten or mouse (at most): that is, it isn't in on anything like the 'social contract", it isn't a "person", it's not one of the actors on the scene, but only an organism that's in somebody's way, though it might also have had the potential for any number of interesting things. Facts along the latter lines are ones that can be pressed on its mother who might perhaps be swayed by them. But if not, she can say, "What you're saying is, you wish it was YOUR fetus. Well, great 0- but it isn't; it's MINE, and, unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, it's a nuisance, not a benefit." This woman, unlike the fetus, IS in on the "social contract", IS a person, IS on of the people we are interacting with, who has articulate views and is capable of acting and has a life that she is living - rather than a potential life awaiting her in the future, should the future be so kind as to let her have that life. In short, there is a total asymmetry between an adult - a being who is in on transaction and interactions with others - who, of course, emerged from a fetus-level organism and for that matter a zygote; and the zygote or the embryo or the fetus itself. When we identify historically extended entities, history *matters*. The wars that weren't fought, the treaties that weren't signed, the symphonies that didn't get written - do not get into the history books. Nor do the aborted fetuses, nor the miscarriages, the contemplated-but-decided-not-to conceptions, and so on and so on. What we are talking in the abortion issue is fetuses, not grown-ups; and the history of a fetus can (not the right technical term, I think, for the very early stages, but anyway) can be exceedingly short, as when Mum Nature decides to terminate it - or when its mother does. In like manner, there is asymmetry between people in their sleep who have been awake and lived lives and done the sort of things that enmesh them in stuff like morals, and those who were born sleeping, perpetual vegetables. Rights for the former make sense because they are US; rights for the latter make no inherent sense, because they aren't "us", they aren't anybody - just veggies, unhappily in human shape and, tragically, emerging from the womb of someone who probably cared enormously about what might emerge. There are technical details to get into (I especially refer contemporary readers to some recent works by Anthony de Jasay, notably _Choice, Contract, Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism_ (published by IEA in London) or his still more recent _Before Resorting to Politics_ (Locke Institute, 1996). This is all set forth from the setting of sheer liberalism, which in some respects is a rather tough-minded doctrine. But it is what we must have, we humans, who are so pernickety and uppity as to be different from each other and have minds of our own. Concluding note: many people, I am sure, have profoundly aversive reactions to the whole idea of abortion. Those people, I trust, will never have one themselves, and have a perfect right not so to have. Our question, however, concerns society generally, not those particular people or their friends. People differ. One man's profoundly aversive reaction is another man's shrug. We must speak to all, not to some. If sheer discussion of the abortion issue bothers you, you probably won't have got this far; but if you have, then you are of one or the other of two sorts: (a) the people we are worried about, whose aversive reaction causes them to vote for restrictive measures against those who think differently, and (b) the people who, though worried and aversive, can see that it s one thing for them to be worried and another thing for them to presume to be able to tell other people what to do. Hooray for those in group (b). Which are *you* in?? (And can you really claim to be a libertarian if you are in (a)?? [Of course there is the perfectly legitimate question, What's so great about libertarianism? I claim to have implicitly answered that in the above, actually - but for those who do not see that, we have other days and other kilobytes to deal with the question. __________________________________________________________________________ Jan Narveson (Professor) Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1 (519) 888-4567-1-2780# (from touch-tone); or 885-1211, ext. 2780 (via switchboard); FAX (519) 746-3097 Home: (519) 886-1673 (answering machine) e-mail: jnarveso@watarts.UWaterloo.ca ============================================================================ Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 17:24:12 -0400 From: holcombe@coss.fsu.edu (Randall Holcombe) I have read Jan Narveson's essay on abortion, and, while I follow his logic on the rights of fetuses, do not see the relevance to abortion. Does anybody have the right to require that someone else take care of them? If the answer is no, then regardless of whether fetuses have the same rights as people, the fetus still does not have the right to prevent an abortion if the pregnant woman decides to have one. Thus, the abortion question must turn on the obligations of pregnant women, not the rights of fetuses. Randy Holcombe ============================================================================ Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 09:20:38 -0400 From: jnarveso@watarts.UWaterloo.ca (Jan Narveson) Subject: Abortion foonote Randy Holcombe says that "while I follow his logic on the rights of fetuses, do not see the relevance to abortion". The argument is that women, like everyone else, may not be prevented from doing as they like, subject only to the usual restriction that they, in doing so, impose no (uncompensated, agreed on) costs or "harms" to others. By and large, no other persons are relevantly harmed by abortions: the only possible rightholders who can generally be concerned would be the fetuses themselves - if they were indeed rightholders. But they aren't. Therefore, we have no business restricting abortions. (We also have no general obligation to provide them for free, of course; and I have set on one side any considerations of prior agreements by husbands or lovers, as being irrelevant to this central issue of whether society as such may forbid or restrict women in this regard.) My argument, then, IS an argument about "the obligations of pregnant women" but the argument is that they have no obligations that are generally relevant to the matter, and that is precisely because of the absence of rights of fetuses. The latter subject is obviously relevant to the former, so Randy's opposition is odd. (All questions about rights are questions about other people's obligations, inherently: that's all rights are: sources of obligation or duty to others.) An interesting approach to the topic, taken e.g. in the classic article by Judith Jarvis Thompson, is the one Randy recommends: "Does anybody have the right to require that someone else take care of them? If the answer is no, then regardless of whether fetuses have the same rights as people, the fetus still does not have the right to prevent an abortion if the pregnant woman decides to have one. Thus, the abortion question must turn on the obligations of pregnant women, not the rights of fetuses." I do not address that argument, especially because my essay was strictly a constructive argument about this subject, and not a general review of the literature, which is extremely extensive by now. The Thompson-Holcombe approach invites the response that pregnancy is often intentional, or a result of insufficient precaution, and in such cases it is a bit much to claim that the prior actions of the host entailed no obligation of care. That is: it's sticky, and it requires some hair-splitting. My argument bypasses all that. If fetuses have no rights, then women do *them* no wrong in aborting. If there are no other relevant persons concerned, as there usually are not, then she ought to be free to do as she wants in this respect as well as the innumerable others that a general right of liberty extends to everyone. ============================================================================