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Infanticide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2007

JEFF MCMAHAN
JEFF MCMAHAN*
Affiliation:
Rutgers [email protected]
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Abstract

It is sometimes suggested that if a moral theory implies that infanticide can sometimes be permissible, that is sufficient to discredit the theory. I argue in this article that the common-sense belief that infanticide is wrong, and perhaps even worse than the killing of an adult, is challenged not so much by theoretical considerations as by common-sense beliefs about abortion, the killing of non-human animals, and so on. Because there are no intrinsic differences between premature infants and viable fetuses, it is difficult to accept that an abortion performed after the point of viability can be permissible while denying that infanticide can be permissible for a comparably important reason. This and other challenges to the consistency of our intuitions exert pressure on us either to accept the occasional permissibility of infanticide or to reject liberal beliefs about abortion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 131 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33 (1958), reprinted in her Ethics, Religion, and Politics, Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 40Google Scholar.

2 Stephen, Mulhall, ‘Fearful Thoughts’, London Review of Books 24 (22 August 2002), p. 16Google Scholar. This is a review of Jeff, McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Sylvia Nasar, ‘Princeton Philosopher Draws a Stir’, New York Times, 10 April 1999; Jeff Sharlet, ‘Why Are We Afraid of Peter Singer?’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 March 2000; and Michael Specter, ‘The Dangerous Philosopher’, The New Yorker, 6 September 1999.

4 See Sjef, Gevers, ‘Third Trimester Abortion for Fetal Abnormality’, Bioethics 13 (1999), pp. 306–13Google Scholar.

5 Peter, Singer, Rethinking Life and Death (New York: St. Martin's Press: 1995), pp. 83–4 and 214–17Google Scholar. For other arguments, see Helga, Kuhse and Peter, Singer, Should the Baby Live? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

6 Rethinking Life and Death, pp. 115–31. For information on the prevalence of selective non-treatment and national policies regulating it in the US, the UK, Israel and Denmark, see Michael, L. Gross, ‘Abortion and Neonaticide: Ethics, Practice, and Policy in Four Nations’, Bioethics 16 (2002), pp. 202–30.Google Scholar

7 This assumption is challenged by Elizabeth, Harman in ‘Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 28 (1999), pp. 310–24Google Scholar. Harman argues that an early fetus that has no intrinsic properties that confer moral status may nevertheless have some moral status by virtue of the extrinsic fact (when it is a fact) that it will later exist as a person. This is plausible only if the early fetus would be numerically identical with the later person, something that Harman appears to assume but that I would deny. An early fetus is the early phase in the life of a human organism but I believe that you and I are not human organisms. You are not an entire human organism or human animal but only the part of it that non-derivatively has the capacity for consciousness, and you may therefore come into existence after the organism of which you are a part does. (This view of our identity is defended at length in The Ethics of Killing, ch. 1.) But suppose that I am wrong about this and the early fetus would be identical with the later person. There are two ways of accommodating our moral intuitions about the fetus that do not require the assumption that extrinsic properties can be a basis of moral status. One is to claim that the basis of the early fetus's moral status is its being the kind of entity that will be identical with a person if it survives. This is not a property that it has only if it will survive. The second option, which I favor, is to claim that the moral reasons governing our treatment of the early fetus are reasons that derive from a concern for the person (where ‘person’ is understood as a phase sortal) that the fetus will become if it survives. On this view, the moral reason not to damage the fetus derives from the interests and status it will later have if it becomes a person. This reason is the same as the reason one had not to damage the gametes from which it was formed. For a discussion of the morality of prenatal injury, see Jeff, McMahan, ‘Paradoxes of Abortion and Prenatal Injury’, Ethics 116 (2006), pp. 625–55Google Scholar.

8 For a challenge to this assumption, see José Luis, Bermúdez, ‘The Moral Significance of Birth’, Ethics 106 (1996), pp. 378–403Google Scholar.

9 See The Ethics of Killing, ch. 4, sect. 10.1, and the references cited there. For a more detailed discussion of liability to defensive killing, see Jeff, McMahan, ‘The Basis of Moral Liability to Defensive Killing’, Philosophical Issues 15 (2005), pp. 386–405Google Scholar.

10 Other reasons are advanced in The Ethics of Killing, ch. 4, sect. 10.2.

11 See Warren, S. Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1989), pp. 317–33Google Scholar.

12 Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences’, p. 344.

13 Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences’, p. 344.

14 Harming someone as a means is not the same as treating someone merely as a means. For an exploration and analysis of the latter notion see chapter 7 (‘Merely as a Means’) of Derek Parfit's Climbing the Mountain (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

15 A similar view has been advanced by Matthew Liao in ‘Virtually All Human Beings as Rightholders’, unpublished manuscript.

16 I have argued against this view at length in ‘Challenges to Human Equality’, Journal of Ethics (forthcoming 2008).

17 This argument is developed in more detail in The Ethics of Killing, pp. 315–16. For those who believe that a severely retarded fetus has the potential for higher cognitive capacities, we might pose a different thought-experiment in which it is discovered that all dogs possess the genetic basis for the development of rationality but that the action of the relevant genes is always systematically blocked by another component of the canine genome.

18 I have, however, discussed the soul in more detail in The Ethics of Killing, pp. 7–24.

19 The argument in the following two paragraphs is a slightly condensed statement of an argument in The Ethics of Killing, p. 213.

20 This last assumption breaks down in instances in which a person could live only a very short time even if he were not killed. For powerful challenges to the equal wrongness thesis, see Kasper, Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Two Puzzles for Deontologists: Life-Prolonging Killings and the Moral Symmetry between Killing and Causing a Person to be Unconscious’, The Journal of Ethics 5 (2001), pp. 385–410Google Scholar; and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People is More Seriously Wrong than Killing Others', Ethics (forthcoming).

21 Mulhall, ‘Fearful Thoughts’, p. 16.

22 This argument was first advanced in a justly celebrated article by Judith, Jarvis Thomson called ‘A Defense of Abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971), pp. 47–66.Google Scholar

23 I have argued for this claim at tedious length in The Ethics of Killing, pp. 362–98. More recently I have argued that a fatal defect of the argument is that if it were to succeed in justifying abortion, it would also succeed in justifying the infliction of prenatal injury in similar circumstances and for the same reasons. But prenatal injury is not justifiable in most circumstances in which abortion can be. See McMahan, ‘Paradoxes of Abortion and Prenatal Injury’, p. 634.

24 I have been helped in writing this article by comments from Gabriella Carone, Alice Crary, Roger Crisp, Nils Holtug, Agnieszka Jaworska, Frances Kamm, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Derek Parfit, Peter Singer, and Alec Walen.