Abortion and the Golden Rule

[polytropos]

The Golden Rule is pretty broadly recognized, among those religious and nonreligious, as a foundation for morality. A number of different religions and philosophers have stated it variously. I’ve pulled this formulation from a secular blog:
Treat others as we would like others to treat us
While it can sometimes run into applicability issues (what if others don’t want to be treated as I would like to be treated?), it functions at least as a common ground between people who may not agree on other moral principles. If such issues arise in my use of the Golden Rule, please let me know and we’ll discuss them.

My argument:

I was once a fetus. My present existence is continuous with my previously being a fetus. I appreciate the fact that I am alive. If I were killed as a fetus, I would not be alive. By the Golden Rule, I am morally obliged to oppose abortion.

I have anticipated a few objections:

Objection: A woman could concede that she would have respected their mother’s right to abortion, even if it meant her death.
Counterobjections: The platinum rule alternatively states: Treat others as one thinks they would like to be treated. Therefore the woman’s support for her parents’ right to abortion does not bear on her own right to abort per se. She can only abort if she thinks her fetus would like to be aborted. The fact that the suicide rate is not much, much higher than it currently is prevents her from making this assumption. Furthermore, if there is any right to abortion, then it would be a consequence of the actualizing of one’s life; you cannot have an abortion unless you survive long enough to do so, so supporting her mother’s right to abortion self-defeatingly rejects her own right to abortion.

Objection: A fetus, before developing a brain, does not express a preference for life or death. OR The Golden Rule only applies to persons, and fetuses are not persons.
Counterobjections: The Golden Rule has as its object not the fetus but the woman. Every person’s existence is continuous with being a fetus; every person would stand to have nothing if they were aborted. The argument is not appealing to rights of the fetus but to the moral obligation, by the Golden Rule, to oppose actions towards others that one would not want to have performed towards oneself. Anyone who is grateful not to have been aborted cannot conscionably endorse the abortion of someone else.

Objection: But by the Golden Rule, I would want the right to abortion if I were a woman (or if I had the desire to abort), so I am morally obligated to support abortion.
Counterobjections: This objection only shifts the issue away temporarily and unsubstantially. The point is that the Golden Rule more primarily precludes support of abortion. By the Golden Rule, one cannot coherently support other’s right to abortion and one’s own right to abortion, because if one were aborted, one could not have any right to abortion anyway.

Objection: A child may live a bad life, and I (and others) would not want to live a bad life.
Counterobjection: For this to be a valid objection, one would have to demonstrate that it is reasonable to assume that the child would not want to live. This is never a reasonable assumption, and it is never acceptable to kill people who we think are leading bad lives.

Objection: Since I would not be alive if I were killed as a fetus, I would never be able to object to abortion.
Counterobjection: One would not be alive now if one were killed previously under any circumstances, and one would therefore not be able to object to being killed. This objection is no more valid in the case of abortion than it is in the case of any other form of murder.

Objection: The Golden Rule is not a valid basis for law.
Counterobjections: This particular argument is about an individual’s justification in having an abortion or endorsing abortion. It is not necessarily meant to be a basis for a law. It is meant to express that no one who appreciates having life can conscionably support abortion.

Objection: I don’t care. The Golden Rule doesn’t matter.
Counterobjections: That is fine. You have only demonstrated my argument’s conclusion: that support of abortion follows from a lack of empathy and is always morally reprehensible.

I am sure that there are more that I have not thought of, so let’s hear them.

 

[vlf7973]

I see a problem:

1. I was once conceived.
2. My present existence is continuous with my previously being conceived.
3. I appreciate the fact that I am alive.
4. If I were never conceived, I would not be alive.
5. By the Golden Rule, I am morally obliged to oppose allowing people to remain chaste.

I have no idea what the counter argument would be. Your logic assumes that personhood is irrelevent, but when personhood is irrelevent then chastity isn’t much different from murder.

 

[polytropos]

I see a problem:

1. I was once conceived.
2. My present existence is continuous with my previously being conceived.
3. I appreciate the fact that I am alive.
4. If I were never conceived, I would not be alive.
5. By the Golden Rule, I am morally obliged to oppose allowing people to remain chaste.

This was the objection I considered but forgot to include: would this make constant procreation a moral imperative? I think there are a couple reasons why it would not.

The first is that before you were conceived, there was not a you. One of your father’s sperm and one of your mothers eggs would eventually become you, but you were not yet an individual entity whose existence is continuous with your current personhood. If either of those gametes were to meet with a separate gamete, there would result a different individual. The particular matching of gametes is beyond our control. Hence, the existence of a human adult is not continuous with the pre-conception stage, making (2) false. (I suppose it could be argued that the existence of a human adult is continuous with the particular sex act that led to his conception, but that seems to stretch the argument in my opinion. If so, this could be adapted as an argument against contraception, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

The second reason is that abortion is a positive action meant to prevent the existence of an individual. Because we appreciate that such an action was not performed on us, we cannot support such an action being performed on other individuals. On the other hand, not having constant sex is an omission rather than an action directed to prevent the existence of a particular individual. This distinction is relevant because the Golden Rule really tends to apply most strongly in the negative sense, ie. don’t treat others the way you do not want to be treated. In the positive sense, it can become a little dicey: I would, perhaps, like the first person who sees me to give me all of the money in his wallet, but it doesn’t follow that I should give the first person I see all of mine. Here is a related wikipedia quote:

Marcus George Singer observed that there are two importantly different ways of looking at the golden rule: as requiring (1) that you perform specific actions that you want others to do to you or (2) that you guide your behavior in the same general ways that you want others to. Counter-examples to the golden rule typically are more forceful against the first than the second.

The last reason (which is kind of an admixture of the previous two) is that, to phrase the issue in terms of the Golden Rule, it is reasonable for us to prefer that our parents do not abort us, whereas it is not reasonable to prefer that our parents procreate every 9 months. I appreciate that my parents did not abort me, and it was reasonable for them to not have aborted me. On the other hand, while I do appreciate that my parents chose to have sex at the time I was conceived, it would not be reasonable for them to procreate at every possible instance to make sure that as many individuals come into existence as possible. (This last reason is more pertinent for the issue of constant procreation, rather than chastity, which you brought up.)

Your logic assumes that personhood is irrelevent, but when personhood is irrelevent then chastity isn’t much different from murder.

I think personhood does become irrelevant in circumstances when our empathy ought to apply, ie. when there is a stage of an individual’s development, regardless of whether that entity is a person, that we can concretely identify with and at which point we appreciate not being violated. Every person in fact owes everything to the fact that he or she was not aborted. This argument does not claim that abortion is murder, just that it would be immoral for anyone to support abortion.

 

[zro_x]

Objection: embryoes and fetuses likely go to heaven when they die, as they have committed no actual sin. Though I am happy to be alive, I would much prefer to be in heaven. However, I am not allowed to end my own life due to God’s laws, and at this point in my life, I do not want to die because there is no guarantee that I will end up where I want to go. This guarantee is absent for all people who have reached an age where sin is possible, though it is present for fetuses and perhaps even for infants. Aborting a Baby ensures that they go to heaven, and as quickly as possible, Therefore, I am morally obligated by the golden rule to end the life of every fetus and embryo (and infant) I reasonably can, in order to prevent them from commiting sin in the future and potentially going to hell after death.

 

[polytropos]

Objection: embryoes and fetuses likely go to heaven when they die, as they have committed no actual sin. Though I am happy to be alive, I would much prefer to be in heaven. However, I am not allowed to end my own life due to God’s laws, and at this point in my life, I do not want to die because there is no guarantee that I will end up where I want to go. This guarantee is absent for all people who have reached an age where sin is possible, though it is present for fetuses and perhaps even for infants. Aborting a Baby ensures that they go to heaven, and as quickly as possible, Therefore, I am morally obligated by the golden rule to end the life of every fetus and embryo (and infant) I reasonably can, in order to prevent them from commiting sin in the future and potentially going to hell after death.

I am trying to advance a secular argument, using the golden rule as a common ground. If we are operating under religious assumptions, then I wouldn’t bother taking this route to argue that abortion is wrong.

But to speak from within the Catholic moral system, I don’t think this works for a number of reasons. Catholicism does not have a definitive teaching on what happens to unbaptized children, whether they be embryos, fetuses, or infants, so I think it would be imprudent to think that we could send them to heaven by killing them. Furthermore, I disagree that those who are old enough to sin would have a less certain destination if they were to die; those who have been baptized and make a consistent effort to remain in a state of grace through the sacraments have a reason to hope to go to heaven. Since a person who is in a state of grace is at least as certain of attaining heaven as an unbaptized fetus, your objection would lead to a moral imperative of killing those in a state of grace… but that is surely getting a bit paradoxical.