Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Racism, Slavery and Abortion

Critics of abortion sometimes claim that their position on abortion is similar to what they claim is their position on racism and slavery: all are wrongful discrimination and so all are profoundly wrong.

The claim is also sometimes presented in terms of "equality": just as advocates of racism and slavery deny the equality of human beings, people who think abortion is not wrong also reject "equality" for human fetuses.

So the suggestion is that people who are willing to routinely allow abortions would, and—if they were consistent, should—support racism and slavery: anyone OK with abortions might as well be OK with racism and slavery since they are all the same type of wrongdoing, discrimination, and denial of equality, they claim.

Here I want to briefly respond to this type of claim or argument. I don't have a whole lot to say about it other than this, which is a profound understatement: the comparison here is absurd.

To begin, we should notice that there are many reasons or explanations of why racism is wrong:

racism and its consequences, such as slavery, negatively affects, in profound ways, the experience of living, experiencing people;
racism negatively affects people by displaying profound disrespect that impacts the victims' lived, experienced world, in many ways;
racism makes people's lives and quality of life and sense of self profoundly worse, in so many ways.

We must also recall that one of the most influential arguments in favor of the permissibility of abortion relates to bodily autonomy and the right to one's own body: racism and slavery, of course, involve denying people's rights to their lives and bodies.

And, finally, in terms of "equality," equality is often understood in the abstract ways of as equal consideration or respect for similar interests, or equal respect of rights from harm or rights to certain benefits; these considerations clearly explain why racism is wrong, but they do not seem to apply to non-conscious fetuses, who arguably lack interests and so things can't take a turn for the worse for them, and so they can't be harmed.

All this says too little and in too limited of ways. Here is a song with video footage that can help convey the evil and wrongness of racism better than my words here can:

Now, do any of the best reasons to think that racism is profoundly wrong apply to non-conscious, non-experiencing fetuses? (Most abortions affect early fetuses that are not developed enough for consciousness and feeling).

No.

None of the good reasons to object to racism apply to early fetuses: they can't experience anything, they can't feel anything, they can't experience any kind of disrespect. There's just no relevant comparison to be made.

(For rare, later abortions of potentially conscious fetuses, there are not the kinds of negative attitudes towards and about those fetuses that are present in racism, and there are other important differences also).

Some would respond, "But they are all human beings, and so they are all the same!"

What this response fails to engage, however, is the question of why human beings are wrong to treat disrespectfully, why human beings are wrong to harm in ways like how racism harms people.

My experience is that many people who oppose abortion (as well as many who support abortion) don't realize that this is a "live" and relevant question: they've never thought about why it's typically wrong to kill someone or harm someone: they haven't surveyed the range of answers here and evaluated them.

One set of answers to these "why?" questions here relate to lived experience: obligations to human beings (and anyone else) depends on their being conscious, their having feelings, and their having a subjective point of view which can go well for them, from their own point of view, or go poorly for them, from their own point of view. Someone can be disrespected also only when they have a point of view, a perspective, that can be denigrated and its value denied. Racism is, of course disrespectful, and it makes someone's life go worse, for them, which contributes to its wrongness.

In sum, to compare abortion to racism is just a bad analogy: they are not relevantly similar. The best reasons to think that racism are wrong, the best explanations why racism is wrong, just don't apply to fetuses: it's as simple as that.

(If you know of any attempts to rigorously make the argument here that I am critiquing, instead of just throwing it out as a soundbite or an undeveloped idea [such as here or here], please let me know).

A relevant ad hominem observation—that is, an observation about the personalities and characters of the people who make these comparisons, not the comparison or argument itself—is that it seems that people who tend to enthusiastically oppose abortion tend to not vigorously oppose racism and racist social and legal practices. Of course, there are some exceptions to this rule, but, in general, it appears that most people who strongly oppose abortion do not also present themselves as committed anti-racists or are strongly supportive of anti-racist efforts and policies. If this is correct, why is that?

Update: see Imani Gandy's "Abortion Is Not Like Slavery, So Stop Comparing the Two," Nov 12, 2013.

Update again:

Thursday, June 1, 2023

Dehumanization

Many anti- #abortion (" #prolife") people claim that (biologically human!) embryos and fetuses can be "#dehumanized." They should search here on Amazon, and this author's earlier book on dehumanization, for the term "abortion" and review the explanation for why that term usually doesn't apply:

#prochoice #dehumanization

Making Monsters:

The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization

by David Livingstone Smith (Author)

A leading scholar explores what it means to dehumanize others―and how and why we do it.

“I wouldn’t have accepted that they were human beings. You would see an infant who’s just learning to smile, and it smiles at you, but you still kill it.” So a Hutu man explained to an incredulous researcher, when asked to recall how he felt slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Such statements are shocking, yet we recognize them; we hear their echoes in accounts of genocides, massacres, and pogroms throughout history. How do some people come to believe that their enemies are monsters, and therefore easy to kill?

In Making Monsters David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn’t. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: we believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human. To call someone a monster, then, is not merely a resort to metaphor―dehumanization really does happen in our minds. Turning to an abundance of historical examples, Smith explores the relationship between dehumanization and racism, the psychology of hierarchy, what it means to regard others as human beings, and why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed.

Meticulous but highly readable, Making Monsters suggests that the process of dehumanization is deeply seated in our psychology. It is precisely because we are all human that we are vulnerable to the manipulations of those trading in the politics of demonization and violence.

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Monsters-Uncanny-Power-Dehumanization/dp/0674545567/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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David Livingstone Smith

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Monday, July 27, 2020

"Abortion Is Difficult" by Michael Huemer

If you haven't done so, you should read "Abortion Is Difficult" by Michael Huemer [UPDATE: THIS IS NOW HERE; his old webpage is no longer working: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/abortion-is-difficult ). It begins like this:

There is one thing that the extreme pro- and anti-abortion people can agree upon: that the issue is intellectually trivial, the correct answer blindingly obvious. They just disagree about which position is blindingly obvious and which stupidly evil.

I disagree, though. I think the issue of abortion is difficult. In fact, if you think the issue is easy, then I would say you’re irrational. Anyway, here are some of the reasons it’s difficult. . .

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Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Is Your Opinion on Abortion Wrong? Critical Thinking and Abortion

Also posted at Science and Philosophy, Medium’s centre for scientifically-informed content.

For the past few years in the United States, almost daily there’s a headline about new proposed abortions restrictions. Conservatives cheer, liberals despair.

But who is right here? Should abortion be generally legal or should it be banned? Is it usually immoral or is it usually not wrong at all? These same questions, of course, are asked in other countries.

To many people, answers to these questions seem obvious, and people with different or contrary answers are, well, just wrong.

But how can we know? In particular, could anyone know that abortion is not wrong and should be legal? If so, how? And how would anyone effectively, persuasively, communicate that knowledge?

One important set of answers depends on this idea: critical thinking. Critical thinking can help people know, not merely believe or feel, that their perspectives on issues are true or correct, and it can help them persuade others to understand and accept that knowledge.

We are philosophy professors who teach courses in critical thinking and its applications to ethical, political, scientific, and legal issues. In our 2019 open-access book, Thinking Critically About Abortion: Why Most Abortions Aren’t Wrong & Why All Abortions Should be Legal, we apply well-confirmed methods of critical thinking to the most discussed arguments about abortion.

"Thinking Critically About Abortion" book cover.

Critical thinking can be operationalized as skills. Three key critical thinking skills involve defining words, identifying the structures of arguments, and evaluating explanations. Understanding these and other critical thinking skills can only help improve conversations and advocacy about abortion. Let’s see them in action.

Definitions

Philosophers going back as far as Plato in Ancient Greece have taught that people can think critically about a topic only if they define their terms well.

Good definitions are, first, informative.

Many pro-choice people define abortion as the “termination of a pregnancy.” But what is a “termination” and how is it achieved? This definition doesn’t explain that. Defining abortion as “killing a fetus to end a pregnancy by medical means” is better because it explains more. While some people react to this definition with the thought that it implies that abortion is wrong, critical thinking shows that it doesn’t, as we’ll see below.

Good definitions also are not biased.

Many pro-life advocates define abortion as the “murder of a fetus.” This definition is bad because “murder” often means “illegal killing,” and so where abortion is legal, it cannot be murder: that fact at least complicates many pro-life claims.

“Murder” also often means “wrongful killing,” which assumes that abortion is wrong and that you can just look up the word to know this. But nobody can responsibly just assume their position on this debated issue. And nobody can “prove” they are right with just the dictionary: arguments are needed.

Definitions can be better and worse in many ways. Critical thinking helps us understand this, which improves communication, discussion, and debate.

Arguments

Everyone has reasons for their opinions, even if they are only their feelings. But critical thinkers want good arguments, so how can anyone tell whether an argument is good or bad? We care about this in science and medicine, and we should care about this here also. How can anyone tell if their beliefs are supported by good reasons?

Logic — the study of arguments — helps. Logic shows the steps in anyone’s reasoning. It reveals any assumed premises that are essential to an argument but aren’t stated outright. This is important since assumptions, like overtly stated premises, are sometimes not true.

For example, many argue that abortion is wrong simply because fetuses are “human.” The assumed premise is that “it is wrong to kill anything human.” But how is “human” defined? If “human” means biologically human then it would be wrong to kill human cells like skin or hair cells. But nobody thinks this is wrong.

So “human” must mean “human beings” or “humans,” not merely “biologically human,” and the premise is that “it’s wrong to kill humans or human beings,” not just anything merely human. But what are the differences among these very similar terms, and what difference does this make to the argument? (Answers: many! A lot!).

Critical thinking involves asking questions like these about the subtle meanings of terms — even those that initially seem painfully obvious — to ensure that everyone in the conversation is on the exact same issue. These questions are necessary to determine whether the premises of arguments are true or false, a core task when evaluating arguments.

Another valid pattern of reasoning involves seeing if a premise leads to a false claim: if it does, the premise is itself false.

Some pro-choice advocates sometimes are not careful and claim that “women have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies.” But if this exact premise were true, women would have the right to use their bodies to murder born people. Since women clearly lack that right, that premise can’t justify abortion. An improved, more-carefully stated premise could though, and critical thinking helps find that exact premise.

Pro-life advocates often argue that fetuses have “the right to life” and so abortion is wrong. But how is that right defined? Is it the right to everything needed for life? Does it include the right to someone else’s body, even if they don’t consent to that use?

These are questions that advocates of this argument usually don’t ask. If they are asked and answered, these answers are usually not supported with much in the way of developed reasons. But if the premise that “fetuses have the right to life” does not lead to believing that “fetuses have a right to the pregnant woman’s body,” that common argument against abortion is weak, and it’s important that this is common knowledge.

Many common arguments about abortion are mere soundbites and slogans: false and dubious claims are found on all sides of the debate. It’s nobody’s mere “opinion” that these are often bad arguments: critical thinking skills demonstrate that.

Explanations
One strategy for engaging the ethics of abortion is to start with an uncontroversial moral fact — that it’s wrong to kill children and adults. Critical thinkers then try to find the best explanation why this is so and see whether that explanation applies to fetuses, making abortion wrong also.

One common explanation of why it’s wrong to kill children and adults, or why human beings have human rights, is simply that they are human beings.

A critical thinker, however, will observe that saying it’s wrong to kill human beings because we’re human beings, or we have human rights because we are human, doesn’t explain anything: these are circular, uninformative explanations. Humans know they are human; the question is why that would give humans rights.

A better explanation is that killing children and adults is wrong because it prevents them from experiencing their futures.

Does this explanation apply to fetuses? To answer, fetuses must be compared with adults and children. One difference is that adults and children are aware of their futures — at least, they have been aware of something — whereas early fetuses have never been aware of anything.

Does this mean that fetuses don’t have futures like children’s and adults’ futures? Some argue they do not and so the best explanation why it’s wrong to kill born people doesn’t apply to fetuses. However, fetuses could be wrong to kill because of different explanations than what apply to born humans: what could these be?

Engaging these discussions requires thinking critically about many challenging, complex issues. Critical thinking often isn’t quick or easy! Beyond applying skills, people have to admit that their reasons might be bad and their opinions wrong, which is often difficult.

Applications

Many responses to abortion are not based on critical thinking: they involve bad definitions, false assumptions, inadequate explanations and sometimes worse. Recognizing this is a step toward holding better-informed opinions, which in turn promotes better arguments that should persuade and make a positive impact, in many ways.

The COVID crisis has, again, made clear the need for good evidence, careful analysis, and informed communication about important issues. These standards apply to our thinking, reasoning, and arguing about everything, including vitally important ethical and legal issues like abortion, and any advocacy concerning it.

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