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Someone who sounds like Megan McArdle
If we cannot discount the interests of the fetus simply because it is not yet with us as a person, then how can one morally justify legal abortion as a coherent national policy?...I find it hard to construct a really compelling argument in favour of abortion which does not rest in some way on discounting the utility of the fetus-as-future-person.
There is much more at the link. This is a real ouch, her barbs are directed at left-liberals but they do not stop there. In my view we should subsidize births, keeping in mind that the long-run is the relevant time horizon. I also believe a free and wealthy society will, at some point, have many more people than the alternatives, and on an ongoing basis. As for what kind of restrictions on abortion are a good way to subsidize births, that is a very tricky question, especially keeping in mind I am not a pure utilitarian but rather a pluralist...I am not in Chicago to debate it with all the other economists as we are celebrating Yana's 17th birthday in Miami...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 7, 2007 at 10:15 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
I don't see the inconsistency here at all. Discounting is only relevant if you think that the utility of something already counts in the welfare calculus. There's a perfectly reasonable strand of thought on this that says we should treat non-existent individuals (which I’ll assume, arguendo, to include foetuses) as having no interest in existing. So, if we’re comparing a state of the world x in which a foetus is aborted, and y, in which it is not, the foetus’ utility is irrelevant, regardless of one’s attitude to discounting the utility of future lives. (This is a little simplified, but I think the point is robust.)
On the other had, if we are comparing two states of the world y and z where the foetus is not aborted, then one’s attitude to inherent discounting can affect which we prefer. The upshot of this is that there’s no necessary link between one’s attitude to discounting on the one hand, and one’s attitude to abortion on the other (at least unless one believes, as many do, that the foetus is a person.)
Posted by: conchis at Jan 7, 2007 11:49:46 AM
As someone who is a pure utilitarian I don't see any conflict here at all. The (primary) reason killing people is wrong isn't that it denies them life but that it reduces the happiness of the living via grief and fear that they will be killed. It is acceptable to abort fetuses because it causes orders of magnitude less grief and none of the fear that killing a full person would while avoiding a great amount of suffering that both the parent and child would experience from an unwanted birth.
Posted by: logicnazi at Jan 7, 2007 12:09:04 PM
All of the serious environmental ills that we now confront are exacerbated by the increasing population of our species. Our increasing numbers will, if left unchecked, result in the mass extinction of other species with which we share the planet, and whose complicated web of interactions provide the services we need to live comfortably. With the population at close to six and half billion
and on its way to nine or ten, to assert that births should be subsidized is hard to understand.
(I initially posted this under the wrong topic.)
Posted by: Jeffrey Miller at Jan 7, 2007 12:33:24 PM
logicnazi,
assuming that you could kill someone without anyone else ever finding out (and consequently without entailing any grief or fear costs) would it be ok to kill them? (if necessary, assume also you could do it by surprise, so that the victim feels no fear, and that perhaps you enjoy the feeling of doing it just a little.)
killing someone (typically) reduces their lifetime utility pretty substantially. on what grounds would you exclude that loss from the utilitarian calculus?
Posted by: conchis at Jan 7, 2007 12:37:42 PM
Subsidizing births seems like another potential consequence of a "basic income". If you don't want to subsidize births, you could, of course, directly penalize them with deductions from parental basic income.
In general, subsidizing births as an independent policy seems like the sort of policy that should count as "too utopian". One way of quantifying this is that the precedent value in terms of unlimited government exceeds the direct utility value of the policy.
Posted by: michael vassar at Jan 7, 2007 12:53:27 PM
logicnazi,
Did you just state that killing someone isn't an offense against the "victim" but only against society?
Wow.
Posted by: geardaddy at Jan 7, 2007 12:58:41 PM
As Tyler suggests, this is actually an argument against all forms of contraception or reproduction-prevention, equally, not against abortion in particular. The argument has two main parts: first, it asserts that we have a duty to increase the population, and then it considers the ways in which the government could legally enforce that duty. She only considers an abortion ban, not bans on contraceptives, various government provided incentives to encourage reproduction, bizarro-China quotas that mandate at least X offspring per person, government ad campaigns with messages like "Be a good person: make babies" or "Sex is fun!", or any other policy that might increase the birth rate.
Although some of these other policies may be unattractive, abortion bans are probably not a very effective population enhancement technique. One problem, if I'm remembering my Levitt correctly, is that it takes something like five legal abortions a year to lower the birthrate by one birth per year. This is largely because people get abortions in order to delay childbirth by a few years, a decision which is morally neutral according to a simple zero-discount calculation (giving equal value to each person). Increasing the population by forcing particular individuals to bear children also seems costly and inefficient, like other forms of conscription. The quality of life for the child, and for the rest of the family, is likely to be lower when the mother is an unwilling parent, and, Levitt's abortion research suggests that children born in these government-mandated childbirths tend to have a more negative (or less positive) impact on the lives of the rest of society (e.g. due to more criminal activity). So it's not clear whether trading off five of these births to women who couldn't get abortions for four births to women who got abortions earlier on is a good deal for society (or whatever the ratio is).
It is also an open question whether we want the population to be increasing more quickly right now, or how important that is. On a zero discount view, one extra person next year is equivalent to one extra person 1000 years from now (again, ignoring differences in their lives and their impact on others). Given that we're currently using up resources that we don't know how to renew or replace at a rapid rate, it's not clear what the long-term effect on the population and quality of life of future generations is from each added birth right now. Having fewer babies now might allow us to support a larger population a few hundred years in the future, once our technology has advanced so that we can use resources much more efficiently.
Posted by: Blar at Jan 7, 2007 1:42:04 PM
I have always found arguments for abortion to spare the baby from growing up as an unwanted child incredibly weak on both moral and utilitarian grounds. Growing up unwanted is tragic, but it's a far better option than not growing up at all. Likewise for population control. If population growth truly is a problem, wouldn't suicide be a far more noble solution? I am by no means advocating this position, but you get the point.
Posted by: Brian Hollar at Jan 7, 2007 1:58:19 PM
What's so magic about the moment the sperm actually meets the egg? Doesn't this argument apply equally well to birth control?
If we cannot discount the interests of the egg and sperm simply because it is not yet with us as a person, then how can one morally justify legal birth control as a coherent national policy?...I find it hard to construct a really compelling argument in favour of birth control which does not rest in some way on discounting the utility of the egg-and-sperm-as-future-person.
In fact, going further, doesn't this argument apply equally well to every baby you could have had, but did not because you abstained?
If we cannot discount the interests of the possible-egg-and-sperm-had-we-had-sex simply because it is not yet with us as a person, then how can one morally justify legal abstaining as a coherent national policy?...I find it hard to construct a really compelling argument in favour of abstaining which does not rest in some way on discounting the utility of the possible-egg-and-sperm-had-we-had-sex-as-future-person.
Posted by: Emmett at Jan 7, 2007 2:09:47 PM
Conchis: There are all sorts of ways to formulate a logical reason that abortion is all right, some stronger than others. But your formulation does not seem to be to be consistent with protecting the well being of generations who do not yet exist; after all, one of Stern's explanations for radical discounting is the risk of an extinction event. If those generations don't exist at all, why should we worry about their welfare?
Posted by: Jane Galt at Jan 7, 2007 2:13:09 PM
Think of it as a "state's rights" kind of argument. Each and everyone one of us is the sovereign rulers of our own bodies.
While me may morally oppose, for example, the death penalty, we may also think it unwise to
impose that morallity on all other countries.
Likewise, you can consistently believe for yourself that abortion is wrong while still wanting others to have the right to do so. (For reasons of sovereignty or utilitarian its-better-than-the-alternatives grounds.)
Posted by: Macneil at Jan 7, 2007 2:20:29 PM
Again, a possibly consistent position--but I don't see any way to say that the state should be able to interfere in your personal choice to heat your home in order to protect future generations, but not in your choice to abort. There are a number of potential equilibria, but I don't think that Stern yes/abortion ban no is one of them.
Posted by: Jane Galt at Jan 7, 2007 2:24:08 PM
Studies in the U.S. show that women who get legal abortions tend to be better organized and more future-oriented than women of similar backgrounds who don't. That's why Levitt and Donohue only cited European studies to support their theory that abortion-cuts-crime by improving the qualities of mothering -- because in America the opposite is true.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jan 7, 2007 3:29:44 PM
No, Jane is exactly on the money. Some left-liberals want to say that in deciding on *current* policy, we should value the experiences and lives of hypothetical people who may or may not live hundreds of years from now -- people who, if they exist at all, are not even fetuses yet (and whose parents might not even be fetuses yet). Not only that, we should value these future hypothetical person at the same value as ourselves.
But when it comes to abortion, there is a real live fetus right there, already in existence. Even on the most extremist pro-abortion assumption, that fetus will become a "person" within a maximum of 9 months (most people would draw the line earlier, at viability), not in hundreds of years. But do liberals propose that we treat fetuses as having interests that are exactly equivalent to our own? Not by a long shot. A fetus's interest -- not just in having more income but in getting to live at all -- is discounted practically to zero, or by however much it takes to justify abortion.
Posted by: John Doe at Jan 7, 2007 3:34:43 PM
Abortion deals with the welfare of potential individuals. Stern deals with the welfare of the entire species.
I don't care which of the nearly infinite permutations of the human genome are actually realized at any point in the population. If embryo
X is aborted in the first trimester because the mother is 14 years old and embryo Y is never conceived because the parents used birth control, it doesn't matter. The species will continue and there will be lots of people who are brought to term who will enjoy the experience of living - as long as we don't screw up their world. (I don't want to sound flippant; I'd much rather people used birth control methods other than abortion).
I do care very much that conditions on earth remain such as to support a high and sustainable quality of life for those who are born now and in the future which requires that pay attention to Stern-like warnings and also limit our numbers.
Posted by: Jeffrey Miller at Jan 7, 2007 3:46:26 PM
That's a possible response, but I sincerely doubt that you or anyone else actually endorses the logical implications of saying that the survival of the species matters but the individual doesn't.
Posted by: Jane Galt at Jan 7, 2007 4:01:07 PM
Megan, everybody, I need some help in understanding this. I may not be an economist, but I really cannot see the contradiction between not discounting the interests of future persons who will actually be brought to life (as the first commenter in free exchange explains very well) and considering we should have the right to decide whether we bring to life another person or not. Could you help me understand how these two are connected to each other?
Posted by: vassilis at Jan 7, 2007 4:21:42 PM
How would you allocate insufficient supplies of a vaccine the next time a deadly influenza pandemic starts racing around the world? A medical team in Britain proposed that (after first responders) vaccines should be given first to twenty-somethings and then to those somewhat younger and somewhat older and so on with the very young next to last and the very old last of all. The reasons are obvious and I agree with them (and I'm not twenty something!). The value of a life peaks sometime around twenty, because the value of a life is a combination of quality and expected quantity of life remaining as well as the societal investment in the individual. In the vaccine rationing question, society has invested a lot in the very old, but they have a short expected life; the very young have long expected lives, but society has invested little in them and they can do little for society, young adults have both reasonably long expected lives, and have can be expected over this period to return society's investment in them by investing in the next generation.
I do care about individuals. Once someone becomes one - which is certainly in any reasonable sense well after the first trimester - I want him or her to have a good life which requires lots of things but at start an earth that is not despoiled.
And I think if we take care of that, we'll have many many generations of individuals
who have the possibility of enjoying life.
Posted by: Jeffrey Miller at Jan 7, 2007 4:41:24 PM
I, like, many others here, don't see the contradiction. The opposition to a ban on abortion rests on a simple assertion: until a fetus can survive outside the womb, it is not a person. Therefore our ethical obligations to a fetus are different from those we owe to a person.
In the case of the Stern Report, we are talking about what we owe to people who will be walking around on earth, surviving outside the womb, in the future. Our obligations to them do not start until they are no longer fetuses, but once that condition is met, we should treat their utility as roughly equivalent to our own.
Now, it is true that there is a very slight -- in my view, vanishingly small -- chance that humanity will become extinct, in which case it will have made no sense to make changes in order to protect the interests of those future people. So we can increase the discount rate, as Stern does, to take that into account. But that doesn't affect the ethical question that you think raises such a contradiction.
Posted by: K. Williams at Jan 7, 2007 4:55:34 PM
From K. Williams "I, like, many others here, don't see the contradiction. The opposition to a ban on abortion rests on a simple assertion: until a fetus can survive outside the womb, it is not a person. Therefore our ethical obligations to a fetus are different from those we owe to a person."
Why is viability outside the womb prerequisite for being a human? The fetus is in the power of the woman, it can not live without the mother to some number of weeks, so? A seriously enough mentally retarded individual is completely incapable of life outside serious and nearly constant attention. A baby of 10 months is also incapable of long term survival without significant outside help. People of a certain age, with diseases, various disabilities, terrible dementia, etc. may not be viable without outside help. So, in short, unless you think a whole lot of people are not actually people, the viability claim is inconsistent.
Another word on viability and its role in abortion policy. Even if we assume that for some yet unexplained reaosn, viability is a reasonable standard, it is not at all clear that this will long justify abortion or at what pregnancy stage it now justifies. My mom is a long term high risk neonatal nurse. In the 1970's she worked at what was then one of the top hospitals in the country. Today she works at a mid level not highly distinguished facility. In the 1970's it was common practice for doctors to choose not to aggressively pursue treating babies born at or below 32 weeks. My mom saw this first hand. It wasn't negligence, it was simply the state of medicine at the time. Today my mom's mid level hospital has no trouble dealing with babies born at 30 weeks. More serious facilities have good results with babies a few weeks younger. If viability is the standard, then at what age/what likelihood of survival do we set the standard? Is is not conceivable that in the distant future a fetus of a few weeks, or even a few hours, might well be able to be in effect grown outside the womb? As fetuses are able to survive at younger and younger ages, what happens to abortion policy?
Now, viewing a fetus as a human does not necessarily ordain eliminating abortion. There are the interests of both the mother and the fetus to consider. Nonetheless, if you see fetuses as the babies they are, there must be a fairly high bar for abortion. Taking one life to save another might be justifiable, but taking one life to liberate another sexually just doesn't pass.
Posted by: miller at Jan 7, 2007 5:45:10 PM
I, like, many others here, don't see the contradiction. The opposition to a ban on abortion rests on a simple assertion: until a fetus can survive outside the womb, it is not a person. Therefore our ethical obligations to a fetus are different from those we owe to a person.
In the case of the Stern Report, we are talking about what we owe to people who will be walking around on earth, surviving outside the womb, in the future. Our obligations to them do not start until they are no longer fetuses, but once that condition is met, we should treat their utility as roughly equivalent to our own.
That's the rub. Our obligations to them do not start until they are no longer fetuses, under the liberal framework. People who will exist, if at all, only in the year 2200 cannot in any sense be described as "no longer fetuses." As of today, they do not exist. Therefore, by your logic, we do not have any obligations to them whatsoever. Far from treating these hypothetical future individuals as having interests equal to our own, we should treat them as having zero interests in anything.
Posted by: John Doe at Jan 7, 2007 6:52:13 PM
For some reason, I'm imaging an organization called the Future Fetuses of America. For some related reaon, I find that hilarious.
Posted by: Keith at Jan 7, 2007 7:19:47 PM
Jane,
I'm dreadfully sorry, but I'm afraid I don't understand either your claim of inconsistency, or the relevance of Stern's radical discounting to said claim. I'll try to respond as best I can, but please excuse me if I miss the mark. Perhaps you could clarify your objection?
My formulation is consistent with protecting the welfare of future generations, on the assumption that they're going to exist regardless of what we choose to do about global warming. What it claims is that the potential utility of people whose existence we *can* affect is not relevant to determining whether we should prefer a state where they exist from one where they don't. (So in that sense, we would have no obligation to take into account the lost utility of people who might not be born because of global warming. But we would be obliged to take their utility into account in weighing up two alternative states in which they are born.)
The point of the radical discounting Stern advocates is indeed that we shouldn't be willing to sacrifice anything today for the sake of people who don't and will never exist in the future. Extending that probabilistically, if we're only 90% sure that a given population is going to exist in 100 years, their utility should count for 90% of what it would have otherwise. Hence the discounting.
Posted by: conchis at Jan 7, 2007 8:11:01 PM
This ties in with the classic conflict within utilitarianism: should our objective be maximizing the sum total of utility (leaving aside problems of interpersonal utility comparisons) or maximizing the average level of utility?
If you take the latter, entirely sensible option, you are left with a theory that tells you that you should care about future generations' utility appropriately discounted. On the other hand, you should only care about a fetus to the extent that it is capable of experiencing utility and can be said to attach a certain utility to continued existence. Additionally, bringing a child into the world that will experience misery for most of his or her life would bring down the average level of utility therefore lending support to legalized abortion.
Posted by: Ricardo at Jan 7, 2007 8:48:33 PM
Just as an additional thought, it is worth noting that most Americans take very different views of a woman who gets an abortion and a woman who drinks or uses illegal drugs during pregnancy but allows the pregnancy to go to term.
The reason, again, is that damaging a fetus but allowing it to be born is cruelly undermining the future utility of a human being who will actually exist. Abortion, on the other hand, is cutting the lifespan of a fetus short, before it is capable of feeling happiness or pain.
Posted by: Ricardo at Jan 7, 2007 8:52:56 PM
