Ethical Egoism and Abortion

Ethical Egoism & Abortion

Ethical egoism, as a philosophical position, holds that it is an ethical obligation for people to act in their own self-interest. How does this philosophical position deal with the debate over the morality of abortion? It is necessary, before beginning a closer analysis, to define our terms. Abortion is a hotly contested issue, but our sense of ethics here needs to be understood first as distinct from religion or law, both of which often bring with them a sense of ethical obligation. It is true that abortion can violate a religious prohibition -- although this view is most often associated in the United States with Christian religious groups, it is not limited to them. We might note, for example, that the traditional Hippocratic Oath administered to physicians contains a solemn promise never to perform no abortion, sworn to a whole pantheon of non-Christian polytheistic pagan gods. It is likewise true that abortion can be against the law or not, depending on where and how it takes place. In the United States, the legality of abortion was established in 1973 under the contentious legal decision of Roe v. Wade. By becoming legal in 1973, abortion did not suddenly become ethical as well. The question of ethics hinges upon the moral behavior of the individual. Therefore it seems promising to approach the abortion question from a philosophical position which seeks to maximize the individual's self-interest. Kalin (1981) notes that one of the advantages of the position is that it offers a private morality (based on the question of "what should the individual do?") rather than a collective or public morality (based on the question of "what should we do as a society?"). Kalin writes:

Universalization in this strong sense is not a rational requirement....I personally think that it makes sense to speak of egoism as a morality, since I think it makes sense to speak of a 'private morality' and of its being superior to public moralities….This question seems to me a moral question through and through, and any coherent answer to it thereby deserves to be regarded as a moral theory. What is central here is the rational justification of a certain course of behavior. Such behavior will be justified in the sense that its reasonableness follows from a coherent and plausible set of premises. (Kalin 1981, 106-7).

By Kalin's terms, ethical egoism seems like the obvious position to approach the question of abortion simply because the post-1973 debates over legal abortion in America generally hinge on discussion of a "right to privacy" -- Kalin's defense of a "private morality" seems to situate the ethical decision about abortion in a place that matches its legality. However I hope to demonstrate in this paper, however, that ethical egoism is a deeply flawed philosophical position -- despite Kalin's claims, it may not even be possible to call ethical egoism a consistent moral or ethical position, philosophically speaking. By examining more closely the logic which ethical egoism would apply to the abortion debate, we may get a better sense of the limitations of this philosophical school in terms of establishing viable ethical principles.

We must begin by establishing what is popularly viewed as the ethical problem inherent in abortion. The chief question would appear to be whether or not this is, in some way, a justified form of murder. The term "murder" itself carries a large amount of polarizing emotional weight, and it tends to drag the debate into questions of law or religion, as distinct from ethics. After all, we tend to suspend legal or religious judgment in cases of "killing in self-defense" and as a result we tend not to use the word "murder" to describe it. The issue of whether or not abortion constitutes a form of killing is additionally complicated: to terminate a two-week pregnancy through medical means is not like shooting a burglar. The burglar is, after all, another individual capable of moral action -- a two-week-old fetus is not capable of life, or moral choice, outside the context of the womb. When we talk about "killing in self-defense" we are talking about one individual moral agent killing another individual moral agent. In the case of abortion, we are frequently (but not always) talking about ending the possibility of life for a future individual: this leads to the various legal contentions about whether abortion is ethically different when performed in the first trimester (when it is a guarantee that the fetus would not be capable of survival outside the womb) or the last trimester (when, under different circumstances, one might or might not use the word "fetus" or "premature baby" to describe what precisely is being aborted). But the different ethical stances applied to ending adult life are applied to abortion as well: when we talk about a justified killing in the case of self-defense, the underlying logical justification can be applied to the permissibility of abortion in cases where the woman's life is threatened somehow by the pregnancy. In reality, however, the debate over whether or not abortion qualifies as murder seems to be a red herring. Saletan (2009) has noted something very interesting about the way the abortion debate is conducted in practice, while discussing the murder of a Kansas doctor, George Tiller, who performed abortions, by a self-described "pro-life" activist. The tangled ethical logic here obviously depends upon the equation of abortion with murder: if indeed the doctor was performing mass-murder with no penalty, then it might have seemed an ethical necessity to stop him. If, on the other hand, one claims a universal commitment to some ethical stance popularly described as "pro-life," it hardly seems that one more murder added to a perceived mass-murder can do any ethical good. Saletan (2009) offers a key observation, though, that managed to cut through the tangled logic to point something out about the anti-abortion position:

[Pro-life organizations opposing Tiller's murder] don't square with what these organizations purport to espouse: a strict moral equation between the unborn and the born. If a doctor in Kansas were butchering hundreds of old or disabled people, and legal authorities failed to intervene, I doubt most members of the National Right to Life Committee would stand by waiting for "educational and legislative activities" to stop him. Somebody would use force. The reason & #8230; is that they don't really equate fetuses with old or disabled people. They oppose abortion, as most of us do. But they don't treat abortionists the way they'd treat mass murderers of the old or disabled. And this self-restraint can't simply be chalked up to nonviolence or respect for the law. Look up the bills these organizations have written, pushed, or passed to restrict abortions. I challenge you to find a single bill that treats a woman who procures an abortion as a murderer. They don't even propose that she go to jail. (Saletan 2009)

In other words, there already seems to be an agreement on both sides of the abortion debate that, even if abortion is in some way equivalent to killing, it is already a qualitatively different type of killing from assassinating a doctor with a handgun. If even anti-abortion partisans are not keen to view "a woman who procures an abortion as a murderer," then it seems like, in practice, the two sides are in agreement about something.

In terms of regarding the abortion question from a standpoint of ethical egoism, however, it is worth noting that the ethical ramifications of whether to have an abortion are circumscribed in various ways. To state the most obvious aspect, roughly half of the world's population will never be in a position to ask the question "Is it ethical for me to have an abortion?" because they are male. For men, the ethics of abortion are largely theoretical: this does not mean that men are incapable of taking a position on the ethics of abortion, but they are incapable of taking one from the standpoint of ethical egoism. For a man to maximize his own self-interest as regards the question of abortion, the decision would involve not impregnating a woman, or attempting to stop a woman he has impregnated from procuring an abortion, or refusing to perform an abortion. But medical science has yet to discover a man who is capable of getting pregnant, and thus being in a position to ask if he should have an abortion. This is perhaps the chief reason why the stance of ethical egoism is a tempting one to take in philosophically considering the ethics of abortion. Ethical egoism to a certain extent defines itself against what Kalin calls "universalization." The Kantian view of ethics, for example, is a universalist one: Kant's categorical imperative suggests that the ethical value of a given action must be understood in terms of whether or not the action would be ethical if everyone were to perform it. Denis (2007) has noted that the Kantian categorical imperative is a tempting philosophical stance to adopt in considering the abortion question:

Universalization tests promise a relatively clear and straightforward way to discern the morality of actions. The formula of universal law seems to offer a method for evaluating maxims of abortion that eschews the contentious question of whether the fetus is a person. This method also appears to render unnecessary the task of locating one duty in relation to which to understand abortion. (Dennis 2007, 547-8)

In other words, the Kantian ethical school -- against which ethical egoism tends to define itself -- is concerned with defining the ethics of abortion in terms of whether or not it would be morally good if the act of abortion were universal. Denis notes that Kantian approaches to finding abortion unethical can be formulated in different ways, and restricts herself to examining two different stances. The first suggests a thought experiment: if one is a person who is happy to be alive, then one must imagine being able to return to the past when one's mother was pregnant and considering having an abortion. In this time-travel scenario, one's own right to exist would seemingly outweigh the mother's right to have an abortion -- therefore a universalization of this scenario would hold that abortion is unethical. A subtler statement of the universalist approach to abortion ethics, involves a version of the golden rule, and a requirement of consistency: ethical action involves a form of reciprocity whereby, if a person thinks an action is ethical to perform upon someone else, then that person cannot object is the action is performed upon himself or herself. The formulation of this argument regarding abortion, as stated by Gensler and summarized by Denis, holds that 'If you are consistent and think that abortion is normally morally permissible, then you will consent to the idea of your having been aborted in normal circumstances.' (Denis 2007, 550). In this formulation, it is seen that nobody would consent to the universal ethical rule as stated, and therefore abortion must be unethical.

Ethical egoism, as I have noted, defines itself largely against the Kantian or universalist school. This is not to say that ethical egoism lacks the impulse to universal statements of rules -- if anything, the ethical egoist is more given to insisting upon the universality of self-interest. The difference is that ethical egoists are opposed to any kind of moral or ethical proscriptions which do not have their foundation in self-interest. The advantage of this is that it manages to sidestep the largest problem in stating a universalist principle regarding abortion, which is the fact that half the human race is not in any position to make a meaningful ethical decision over whether to seek to have an abortion. Ethical egoism would couch the debate more appealingly in the direction of "let those who are opposed to abortion never have an abortion," and letting that be an end to it. But in terms of ethics, it is of course not an end to the question of abortion. In fact, ethical egoism opens up a larger set of problems as to what could meaningfully constitute "self-interest" in terms of abortion ethics. Again, we are faced with the consideration of different specific cases. As noted, it is hard (although not perhaps impossible) to find a person who considers killing in self-defense to be unethical behavior. Likewise, from the standpoint of ethical egoism, the idea of procuring an abortion to save one's own life -- in the case of, say, an ectopic pregnancy -- is easily justified. What becomes difficult is where to draw the line at what constitutes "self-interest." From an economic standpoint, it is possible to imagine a person who desires an abortion because it would not be economically feasible to have one more child in a family than already exists. Ethical egoism, which delights in economic views on ethical matters, would have no problem with seeing the woman who seeks an abortion in this case as justified. Indeed, Gordon (1982) in a history of the abortion debate, notes that the motivations of abortion opponents are, to a large degree, based on resisting the economic reductionism associated with ethical egoism, and in this case may share common ground with those who believe abortion should be legal; Gordon writes that abortion opponents

..fear a completely individualized society with all services based on cash nexus relationships, without the influence of nurturing women counteracting the completely egoistic principles of the economy, and without any forms in which children can learn about lasting human commitments to other people. Many feminists have the same fear. (Gordon 1982, 51)

This is a fairly accurate statement about the way in which ethical egoism, at its most reductionist, can come down to a statement about maximizing not ethical goods, but marketable goods. The strong ideology of "individualism" inherent in Kalin's position carries more than a whiff of free-market idolization of social Darwinism, and reminds us that the greatest popularizer of ethical egoist philosophy was probably Ayn Rand. The question of whether or not something is good in the larger sense is banished, and the only question is what is good for the individual. But if that is the case, where then can the line be drawn? It puts too great a pressure on the word "rational" in defining "rational self-interest" since casuistry can be used to apply to pretty much any ethical decision and make it seem like a good one by the standards of an ethical egoist. To use a somewhat outrageous example that actually took place in New Jersey in 1997, there is probably no school of ethics whatsoever that could justify the case of a pregnant eighteen-year-old who attends her senior prom, gives birth in the bathroom and leaves the baby in a trashcan, and then returns to the prom. This is infanticide, and whatever notion of self-interest could be invoked to suggest that having a good time at the prom somehow outweighs the obligation not to kill infants is unlikely to be endorsed even by the most zealous fans of Ayn Rand. But the difficulty here then becomes where ethical egoism would render the act permissible. Is "having a good time at the prom" a sufficient justification for terminating a pregnancy? In the simplistic economic analysis frequently favored by ethical egoism, it might be possible to construct a case in which this is actually justifiable. We could hypothesize the case of a young woman for whom it seems an ethical necessity to look good in a prom dress -- looking good in a prom dress will help this young woman to a later career as a beauty pageant winner, which would help later in being elected Governor of Alaska. This may sound preposterous, but from the definition of "rational self-interest" suggested by ethical egoism, personal ambition is a perfectly valid rationale for having an abortion. The allusion to Sarah Palin is intentional, since Palin received much publicity for the fact that she considered having an abortion once "for a fleeting moment" (Sweet 2009). Indeed, one could argue that Sarah Palin's much-publicized decision not to have an abortion under circumstances in which many women would have one -- during pregnancy as an older woman, while carrying a fetus with trisomy -- was ultimately put to the purpose of appealing to the large demographic of voters who identify as "pro-life." From the standpoint of ethical egoism, therefore, Sarah Palin's decision not to have an abortion -- a decision later used to publicize her political career -- is no different from the decision of a girl who actually has an abortion because pregnancy might negatively affect her future political career.