Posted: Jul 16, 2019 1:07 pm
Mononoke wrote:…..
This rearranges the pro-life argument in an interesting way. Instead of the argument that all life is precious, the argument becomes contractual almost. Much like guardianship obligations of the parents. …
I think for those of us who accept that we are almost certainly mechanisms which follow the laws of physics and chemistry, moral arguments have to cash out in the end as contractual?
Morality is about relationships between persons, and there is no clear scientific definition of a person. As far as I can tell, the scientific consensus is that the judgment as to whether an individual being is or is not sentient, or a person, depends on the evolved social brain of the human observer, and this leaves room for intractable differences of opinion which cannot be resolved by science. If some people think a late term foetus is a person and other people think it is not, any resolution of the argument will have to be, in the end, political and contractual rather than scientific. Science can provide relevant data, for example, a late foetus apparently has a full complement of pain receptors, but is anaesthetized while it remains in the womb and not breathing, as discussed here, but this cannot in itself settle the question as to whether the foetus has or should have the rights of a person.
Humans are unique in the extent to which we cooperate closely with other individuals who are not close relatives. As discussed, for example, in a 2018 paper here, cooperation within a species has to evolve at first through relatedness, but can become less dependent on relatedness as the individuals become cleverer. With high intelligence, we can agree to specialise, or we can take each other’s perspective and set up rules that benefit everyone, while also, perhaps, tweaking them as far as we can to our own advantage, and noticing and punishing cheats. I imagine that our ancestors were getting into heated arguments about moral questions since well before our subspecies evolved. Who counts as a person would probably have been among those arguments; for example, infanticide has been practised in many societies, before abortion was feasible, as discussed in the Wikipedia article here, and presumably those babies were not regarded as having the full rights of persons? Quoting from the article:
Infanticide (or infant homicide) is the intentional killing of infants.
Parental infanticide researchers have found that mothers are far more likely than fathers to be the perpetrators of neonaticide[1] and slightly more likely to commit infanticide in general.[2]
Anthropologist Laila Williamson notes that "Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule."[3]:61
In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible.
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Many Neolithic groups routinely resorted to infanticide in order to control their numbers so that their lands could support them. Joseph Birdsell believed that infanticide rates in prehistoric times were between 15% and 50% of the total number of births,[7] while Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15% to 20%.[3]:66 Both anthropologists believed that these high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution.
In the context of modern technology, I feel happiest giving a late foetus some of the rights of a person, but as Thommo has been pointing out, even if this is generally accepted it certainly doesn't end the arguments.