Six years ago, I asked, “Where are the pro-life utilitarians?” Recently I received this response, reproduced anonymously at the author’s request.
Hey Bryan,
You wanted to ask “where are the pro-life utilitarians”. Well, I think I’d say I’m one of them. Why you’ve not heard of them is simple in my opinion: it’s kind of progressive to talk about non-human animal rights, say, but it is seen as very regressive to be pro-life.
Let me start by saying that I am not totally sure I am a utilitarian, it’s just what makes the most sense to me, and I agree that being full utilitarian would probably mean having lots of children. I think both that that’s probably the case, but also a weird conclusion. But even if I have some moral uncertainty, I think utilitarianism is the most correct moral theory. The historical reason for me being pro-life is that I was born in a Catholic family, even if Catholics in Europe are not as conservative as in the US, I think. In any case, I am not totally sure that abortion is super bad, it just makes me very uncomfortable, especially knowing that it’s mostly a social construct on the basis that “people will look at you as deeply irresponsible if you have an unwanted baby” and they feel ashamed. That is, when we discuss this issue we’re talking not about 9 months or physical discomfort: we are talking about the social cost in your personal and professional life of this decision. I’m male and have not gone through it, but I’m still young enough to be able to understand it feels deeply terrifying, even from the male side, and I think that societal pressure is the most important factor here (“now you have to tell your entire family, friends and perhaps even peers at the job/university that you were very irresponsible, and be heavily judged accordingly”). I don’t know, I would really like to have society change here and stop seeing getting pregnant as something bad even if unexpected (in the same way I’d like them to stop eating animals that suffer). From my point of view, there are alternatives that are much better than abortion.
But you know, it’s even seen as reactionary to speak in this way (“you’re taking away basic women’s rights!”). This is not the way I see it though: I think every woman has the right to have a happy, free, and fulfilling life, but I don’t think abortion is the only or best way to get freedom from that criticism, and the 9-month freedom seems much smaller than the 75-year freedom of the baby.
I’ve seen other utilitarians in the comments in your blog post but some of the comments, especially those mentioning animal welfare or climate change, seem motivated reasoning. Let me clarify: I think it is unfair to kill someone because statistically speaking he would cause a lot of animal suffering. I do not subscribe to this way of thinking, humans have agency, and if they eat meat that’s a totally different subject and something they (not you) are responsible for. It is exactly the same as when some people argue that if we help poor people they will pollute more: it’s deeply unfair, and I think deep inside everyone, they know it.
With respect to your stronger objection: a pure utilitarian would not mind much if you kill someone and then compensate it having a baby, but feels wrong, so probably being a pure utilitarian is not perfect: that’s why I have moral uncertainty, and I acknowledge this feels in the limit of validity of utilitarianism. As such, I prefer to add some additional restrictions on what the ideal is: you should maximize total welfare, but it is bad to take away significant welfare from someone to give it to another person. Some may argue that you’re taking away a lot of welfare out of the woman, but to me, it seems much larger the future welfare from the concrete baby. In other words, I prefer to put the line further down: the baby is a very specific one, not just an abstract project. This feels a bit shaky, but I prefer to default to a more strict ethical theory when it comes to things as important as human life, instead of ignoring it altogether because you cannot articulate a bullet-proof theory, especially when the alternative is mostly “societal shame” (plus some pain and discomfort, but I think this is not the main reason). I think the stakes are high enough to do so.
The takeaway from all of this is that I hoped society would be much more understanding and supportive of these women, instead of just handing them out quick patches and judging them. I also agree that my solution is not 100% perfect, but it’s the best I can think of. Also, I’m not claiming that my moral theory is the best possible, but rather the one that feels the most correct one I can think of.
I write you here because I don’t want to get identified on the internet saying these things, but perhaps it helps you see what I believe and also why you will have a hard time finding people who say the same in public.
Does this help?
READER COMMENTS
Steve S
Sep 7 2021 at 11:37am
“I think every woman has the right to have a happy, free, and fulfilling life, but I don’t think abortion is the only or best way to get freedom from that criticism, and the 9-month freedom seems much smaller than the 75-year freedom of the baby.”
The framework of this argument seems to be comparing “9 months of discomfort plus some societal shaming” vs an entire, normal human life. I reject that notion.
If the mother is forced to keep a child, there are 18+ years of further emotional and monetary cost. If the child is put up for adoption, you have to account for the marginal child being placed in some terrible foster care situation and growing up to be a miserable adult.
This utilitarian argument obviously comes from someone who has never had their own child, and does not take into account suffering of the mother and/or child after an unwanted birth.
Parrhesia
Sep 7 2021 at 11:45am
If a single mother learned that she was going to die from cancer before her toddler grows up and the child was going to be placed in a foster home and become a miserable adult, would the mother killing her toddler be ethically acceptable?
Jeff S
Sep 7 2021 at 8:27pm
I guess I’m surprised anyone finds this argument convincing. The value of human life, on average, far exceeds event 18+ years of paying for a child or giving that child up for foster care.
Parrhesia
Sep 7 2021 at 11:41am
I think that utilitarian in combination with population ethics and animal ethics leads to very absurd conclusions. If you also add the idea of Heaven and Hell, then things become even more absurd. I have pointed this out to utilitarians a number of times. I find the responses very unsatisifying.
Obviously, many utilitarians have different responses but this is a general trend to me. If I point out that utilitarianism is extremely morally demanding and they should donate as much income as possible to saving starving children, they will do away with moral obligation or they will say that pointing this out is not a good way to advertise the idea. If I point out that people who do not save the lives of starving children by giving to effective charities are morally equivalent to murders and should be evaluated as such under their framework, they reject moral blameworthiness or deny the equivalence due to moral hazard concerns.
I have pointed out that if there is even a chance of heaven being real, then all human time should be devoted toward getting into heaven, The objection to this seems to be that you shouldn’t dedicate all your time to getting people into heaven because then your utility function is exploitable. Or they will say we can assign probability 0 to heaven existing. Or that we don’t know which God to worship.
For animal ethics, some consider the utility of animals, fish, bugs or nemotodes. If we start doing an ethical calculation with these considerations, then the result will ultimately be extremely demanding even if we are unsure in what way. Humans kill a lot of animals, so arguably humans are imposing a ton of suffering on animals. So, through one calculation, you could say we should hope for the demise of all human life. Animal life might be worth living and a net increase in utility, in which case we should create the conditions for as many animals as possible. I think animal ethics in combination with utilitarianism probably almost always ends with something like humans dedicating all their time to taking care of rabbits or fish and giving millions of them a wonderful experience.
Utilitarianism applied to humans, if humans aren’t causing too much suffering, would probably result in producing as many humans as possible but especially from happy people and preventing unhappy people from having children but maybe letting them adopt. I have argued before that everyone in effective altruist movement should have a bunch of babies but get rid of them via adoption and dedicate all their money to saving lives. This seems highly unethical due to parental responsibility intuitions.
The pro-life utilitarian above does what a lot of utilitarians do and adds an epicycle to his ethical theory. He does this because of his ethical intuition being so strong that taking a bunch from one to give to another is not okay. Many utilitarians seem to grant 1 intuition and sometimes 2 like the pro-life utilitarian above. But if add this epicycle, then you have to explain why without using intuition, otherwise other intuitions seem to be just as valid because they were derived by the same tool.
I think carrying a fetus to term or facing punishment is very repugnant to utilitarians with high harm foundation considerations and so they will justify their intuition with whatever reason. I think that a utilitarian should probably be forcing at least some people to have children in order to truly be utilitarian. That is even more repugnant but I don’t think it’s too objectionable if we are just talking utility. Imagine if we made Eistein, von Nuemann, Newton, etc to have 100 children. I think the world would be a better place in utility terms. The further back you go, the more warranted the argument becomes. Of course, I reject making people have children but I don’t see how a utilitarian can’t see the benefit of making at least some people have children.
Mark Z
Sep 7 2021 at 6:58pm
There are an infinite number of possible heavens and an infinite number of possible criteria for getting into them, and what will get you into heaven by one set of criteria may (generally does, in most actual religions) get you sent to hell by every other set of criteria, so Paschal’s wager type reasoning isn’t very compelling.
Jonathan S
Sep 14 2021 at 5:07pm
Contemporary philosophers like Liz Jackson have salvaged Pascal’s Wager by considering all possible religions as well as the relative (dis)utility of a particular afterlife. Utilizing decision theory, her conclusion is, roughly, that you should follow the religion with infinite expected utility that you find most probable.
Evan Sherman
Sep 7 2021 at 12:50pm
Two major (and related) limitations to understanding either the moral philosophy or the politics on abortion issue from an utilitarian perspective:
(1) Utilitarianism always begs the question ‘how do we define utility?’ – or, by extension ‘what has value, and how do we know it has value?’ E.g. Do we assess the value of a would-be adult that never was simply by the value of their experiences and societal outputs? Or is not killing people inherently valuable? Is all life sacred, and how to we assess that sacred-ness in a pluralistisc society / secular state? Utilitarianism is fine if we can start with the same value premises, but that’s basically never the case.
(2) Related to (1): Framing the issue in terms of utilitarianism seems to convey an unwillingless or inability to take seriously the idea that pro-lifers actually believe in their stated thesis: That a new human life (seperate from the mother) begins in the womb, and that, therefore, abortion kills a person. Imagine if instead we proposed that we assess the Holocaust in utilitarian terms: all of the material experiences taken away from the killed Jews, the lost productivity and other outputs from 6 million less people, etc. That utilitarian assessment would feel out of place not because it wouldn’t yield useful information (e.g. I bet the lost economic outputs of 6 million people is substantial) but rather because there are obvious moral reasons to view the killings of that many people as inherently monstrous regardless of the materialist utility angle. Likewise, the median pro-life advocate sees the killing of millions of infant people over the decades (which is what the median pro-lifer thinks is happening) as inherently monstrous. Sure, there are marginal pro-lifers who don’t care as much about the infanticide question and instead focus on controlling women’s bodies as an end unto itself. But these are mostly fringe weirdos – and pretending otherwise exposes many pro-choice activists to a weak-man fallacy (cue scene of Handmaid’s Tale cosplay).
Now, taking pro-lifers seriously does not mean agreeing with thtat thesis. And really, I am fairly certain that most pro-choice folks sincerely believe that the fetus is not a person because I don’t think most pro-choice folks are monsters. (There may be a few zealots who don’t care about mass murder in pursuit of their specific women’s empowerment vision, but these are surely fringe weirdos too). But it does mean that any cogent pro-choice position has to reckon with that idea- and at least acknowledge that pro-lifers sincerely think that the act is montrous because an innocent and helpless person is being killed.
Framing the issue in utilitarian terms, given that fundemantal ‘is it mass murder or not?’ question, seems weird, then. That’s why I think it makes sense that there are not a lot of ‘utilitarian’ pro-lifers, anyway.
Alan Goldhammer
Sep 7 2021 at 2:38pm
This immediately disqualifies him from discussing what happens to a woman when she gets pregant and a decision that she may want to make for her own utilitarian approach. When women are surveyed on abortion issues they give vastly different and more compelling reasons than men do. Male legislators should disqualify themselves from voting on such restrictions.
Mark Z
Sep 7 2021 at 6:49pm
This is a ridiculous position. That women have a vested personal interest is just as much a reason why they would discount the utility of the fetus or future child. Should I alone decide what my tax rate is since my utility is what’s most directly at stake in that question?
Additionally, opinions on abortion are only modestly different between men and women: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245618/abortion-trends-gender.aspx
steve
Sep 7 2021 at 8:07pm
Most women having an abortion have already had a child. I am thinking that for a lot of these they are not worried about the shame of being pregnant or an uncomfortable 9 months but maybe knowing they are going to have trouble caring for an extra child either because of financial problems or lack of help.
How would a utilitarian approach apply to a woman with significant morbidities so that a pregnancy entails significant risk? How about if the child has a severe congenital anomaly?
Steve
Maniel
Sep 8 2021 at 12:31am
Prof. Caplan,
Viewing abortion in utilitarian terms appears to me to set aside the very question that led me to become a registered libertarian: whose freedoms do we want our politicians to trample on next? Our founders had some good ideas – such as protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority – and some awful ideas – such as not honoring the good ideas.
The minorities in this case appear to be 1) women and girls who are pregnant but wish to terminate their pregnancies and 2) some, mostly men, who believe that abortion is murder. The two views, referred to as pro-choice and pro-life, are not easily reconciled. Most Americans, by luck, choice, or both, are not in situations where they must confront the issue directly. And in fact, most members of the second group are not affected directly either.
I believe that bringing the problem to politicians is moral surrender because it takes the human out of the decision-making process and shields most of us from most of the consequences. So, how does this ever get reconciled?
As a Libertarian, I would like to preserve the freedoms of both minority groups to the extent possible. However, I would like to do this by persuasion rather than legislation and litigation. To accomplish this, I need to put myself in each group respectively, to articulate my position, and then to understand whether I can envision any common ground.
If I am from group 1, there are several reasons I might lean toward abortion, among them a rape, a diagnosis of personal health risk or a genetic defect risk (to the baby), inability to care for a new baby, etc. However, if I am from group 1, I will almost certainly fear an abortion because of the emotional and physical trauma involved in the process. As a member of group 2, are there any reasons to sympathize with the plight of a member of group 1? What options can I envision for that person and can I offer empathy and help rather than condemnation?
Likewise, if I am from group 2, I might feel honor bound to protect the lives of the unborn. As a member of group 1, can I respect the idea that this is a powerful moral issue? Moreover, would I be receptive to offers from group 2 relative to adoption, support for disabled children, and financial support?
In my view, legislation and litigation in the area of abortion nurture feelings of mistrust, victimization, and anger, and prolong divisions and misery. This hardly strikes me as utilitarian. A little civility might be more useful.
Evan Sherman
Sep 9 2021 at 7:53am
Regardging “2) some, mostly men, who believe that abortion is murder.”
It is not at all clear that this is true – a fact that may complicate your categorization scheme throughout the post.
All single issue polling sucks, but that caveat aside, poll after poll shows about 50% of men and about 50% of women, +/- 5%, identify as pro-life. And even if a very narrow (few percentage point) plurality of women identify as pro-choice, that plurality aligns with (or even falls below) the plurality of women who identify as ‘lean Democratic’. Given abortion’s role as a political wedge issue, and thus symbolic of one’s larger affiliations, it’s hard not to read between the lines there.
vincent
Sep 8 2021 at 4:01am
Interesting article. I would say im pro choice: This has nudged me a bit towards pro life by using utilitarian logic
Henri Hein
Sep 8 2021 at 12:20pm
In order to arrive at the pro-life position as a Utilitarian, it seems you would have to know the answer to these questions:
What percentage of unwanted children turn into criminals? I really mean how much more likely is the chance that an unwanted child turn into an adult criminal as compared to a wanted child. I don’t think we know the exact numbers, but the evidence is clear the chance is higher for the unwanted children.
What’s the negative utility of the crimes those criminals commit?
What percentage of unwanted children lead miserable lives that they terminate early? Again, as compared to the wanted children.
Is the value of a miserable life terminated early positive or negative?
I don’t think anyone knows the answers to those questions, so I don’t see how Utilitarianism can lead to a pro-life position.
BC
Sep 10 2021 at 2:02am
I’m not sure about a utilitarian argument against abortion. However, if one believes that abortion rights are utilitarian, then I think it follows that mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and almost any other restrictions on bodily autonomy are not utilitarian.
Setting aside the question of whether a fetus has any utilitarian value, an abortion undoubtedly results with high probability in a reduction of *future* (within 9 months) human life compared to the counterfactual of no abortion. Without an abortion, the probability of miscarriage is about 10% at 6-12 weeks of pregnancy, about 5% after week 12. So, an abortion reduces future human life with at least 90% probability. If abortion is utilitarian, then that means a woman’s bodily autonomy is worth more than 90% of a future human life.
Now, consider a woman that refuses to vaccinate against Covid. Non-vaccination, of course, won’t kill anyone instantaneously but, like abortion, could result in a reduction of human life at some point in the future compared to the counterfactual of vaccination. We’ve had about 650k Covid deaths in the US. Even if vaccinating all 330M Americans at the start of the pandemic could have prevented all 650k deaths — e.g., no breakthrough infections, no infections from non-vaccinated foreigners, etc. — then that means that each of the 330M vaccinations could have prevented at most an average of 650k/330M = 0.2% of a Covid death, several orders of magnitude less than abortion. So, if a woman’s bodily autonomy is worth more than the reduction of future human life from abortion, then her bodily autonomy must be worth *far* more than the reduction of future human life from non-vaccination.
In short, the externalities associated with vaccination, masks, and the like are all orders of magnitude less than abortion. That’s not necessarily an argument against abortion — I’m mildly pro-choice myself — but that does seem to argue against being pro-choice on abortion but anti-choice on just about anything else.
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