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Emily comments on An Abortion Dialogue - Less Wrong Discussion
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I just ran across this and clicked through to the discussion; sorry for being a year out of date, but I hope you don't mind the comment anyway!
I enjoyed reading the piece but I felt like it was missing any reference to what (to me) is the most germane point in the abortion debate: any reference to the person who wants the abortion. To my mind, the personhood or lack thereof of the foetus really doesn't matter very much, because it's growing in a person whose personhood is indisputable and who doesn't want it to be doing that. I think the piece would be much improved if the Apologist made something of the point that even if the "personhood" bullet is bitten, the Contrarian is still left forcing someone to provide physical life support for another person against their will.
In many situations, we are happy to make one person suffer or die - even if they don't want to - for the good of others. Child support, taxes, any form of imprisonment or execution or corporal punishment, the draft... And as well, those are all cases where the probability of saving a life are all vastly lower than in abortion where you know for certain that the fetus will die.
I don't agree that any of your examples quite work. Imprisonment, execution and corporal punishment follow some behaviour that we agree is wrong, unlike pregnancy. (Personally I disagree with capital punishment and most forms of corporal punishment anyway.) And as for child support and taxes, I think there's a relevant distinction between bodily autonomy and financial autonomy.
The retributive aspect is not important to the many people who hold the deterrence view of punishment, and no one holds that, say, the draft or taxation is punishment of people for wrong behavior.
Why would you think that? Financial wealth for most people is just their labor in another form, and labor is just their bodily autonomy. A job is a way of trading time for money. The connection between money and bodily autonomy is ancient - consider the countless forms of slavery, debt slavery, and debtor prison or work houses throughout history.
I'm also in the camp that's not focused on the retributive aspect of punishment; I'm not disputing that its main purpose is for the good of others. My argument is that the people being punished in this way have in some sense forfeited part of their right not to have their autonomy violated, by demonstrating inability to stick to a social contract that has been agreed on as reasonable. Views can differ on whether that's reasonable or not, but it's firmly distinguishable from someone forfeiting their autonomy because they got pregnant.
I don't agree that financial wealth is "just" labour in another form. Of course that's true in a sense, but the difference in form is an important one. I guess I can appreciate that others might not agree with that --- but I still don't see that that puts them in opposition to abortion. Society tries to minimise the extent to which one's bodily autonomy is limited to by the need to earn financial wealth --- for instance, I think we can agree that slavery, debt slavery, debtor prisons and workhouses are Bad Things. So under this view of autonomy, abortion belongs in the same category.
I don't see why you would elevate the social contract in any extreme way like that; you mean abortion is OK, and execution not OK, solely because the latter is imposed (hopefully) on those who have violated the social contract in some way? This seems rather relativistic. So what if we have a social contract, like in Catholic countries, which says abortion is not OK?
Also doesn't deal with the draft or taxation examples, or additional examples like duty to rescue.
Or goes quite the other way: what loss of a woman's autonomy for 9 months could possibly compare to losing an entire life of autonomy, which is what the fetus's loss will be? Bioethics calls this the violinist thought experiment.
I agree that the merits of any given social contract can be debated and shouldn't be taken as intrinsically ok, so I don't think I want to be relativistic in that sense. But if there is to exist a social contract at all (which I do think is a good thing), there has to be a way of removing people from it who can't uphold it, and perhaps helping them to get to a position where they can, if possible. (Ideally I think incarceration etc would be more about rehabilitation than anything else; in practice I don't think this is true at all, at least not where I live. That's somewhat beside the point, though.) And if the social contract includes capital punishment (which I don't support), then maybe that's not a good social contract, but it provides you with some rationale at least for executing people. Not for banning abortion, though, unless you see getting pregnant as a violation of the social contract --- which we don't. So I don't think you can regard them as equivalent.
I intended to cover taxation in my second paragraph, but the draft and duty to rescue are certainly more interesting examples in this context. I'm not that fond of the draft, either, but that may be an unsustainably idealistic position. As for duty to rescue, doesn't that have a clause about not having to endanger oneself? If so, it's not a particularly heavy imposition on autonomy.
I'm familiar with the violinist scenario but I definitely perceive it as supporting abortion; I'd find it morally abhorrent to argue that the kidnapped person should be forced to continue providing lifesupport. Do you think they should?
(Thanks for the discussion, incidentally!)
But where is this claim 'it is not a violation of the social contract' coming from? You say the social contract does not define what is moral, so presumably the social contract here matters as reflecting a consensus that something is moral or immoral - so now we need to justify the consensus. Buck-passing has to stop somewhere, and in abortion debates that's usually going to come back to personhood.
Particular legal versions may or may not, I don't know. The listing of examples makes it sound like not-endangering oneself may be irrelevant (do many firefighters run into situations where they can rescue someone at no risk to themselves?).
Yes, but recall that my own position is closer to Apologist in the dialogue. So my reaction to the violinist scenario is to say that yes you should save the violinist in much the same way you should donate a lot of money to the charities which save the most lives; but that I reject any subsequent claim that the violinist scenario is identical to pregnancy, because the fetus has far less personhood and hence far less value than the violinist, and the disparity is great enough to flip my belief.
Something I find interesting about these analogies is the introduction of exciting new emotionally significant detail — a famous violinist, a firefighter — while the emotional detail of the situation being supposedly discussed (a woman seeking an abortion) is not discussed. As Emily put it above, "the most germane point in the abortion debate: any reference to the person who wants the abortion" seems to get wiped out in the analogy.
You know that framing it like that is already presupposing a great deal about what conclusions one wants. In a taxation or draft frame, no one talks about whether the draftee or the combatant nation or tax-payers wants to be coerced; in a discussion of crime like mugging or murdering, no one talks about whether the murderer wants to murder.
The response to a frame like 'think of the woman's preferences' is to frame it another way, 'think of the famous violinist'. If the frames differ and the introduction of an 'exciting new emotionally significant detail' could possibly change your appraisal, well, you've learned something very important about your appraisal...