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A sharp and amusing recent book review from NDPR

Brian Leiter

This bit made me laugh: 

Greasley's thought here is straightforward: if people would save one infant over five embryos, then they simply cannot believe that those embryos are "morally considerable persons." Of course, even if this is what the respondents believe, that doesn't by itself show that the belief is true. To be fair, Greasley does somewhat concede this point, noting that historically many have (falsely) denied the moral status of certain groups. Nonetheless, she largely dismisses the possibility that this is just a mistaken belief and seems to think the only truly plausible explanation for the near universal intuition is a (warranted) belief that the infant is a person and the embryos are not.

I do not have much confidence in the philosophical helpfulness of these sorts of cases in general, but if we are forced to play this game some reflection will show that the [embryo rescue case] doesn't have nearly the force Greasley want to gives it. Consider a parallel case in which we have to choose between saving five fully conscious nonagenarians and one baby. Perhaps I am unusual, but my intuitions are almost entirely in favor of the baby, "even though this would mean saving the one over the many." This is obviously not because I think the elderly are not persons. In fact, forced to choose, I wouldn't hesitate much between saving, say, one mother with small children over five childless, middle-aged tenured philosophy professors. Again, this is not because I deny the personhood of my colleagues (certain faculty meetings notwithstanding), but for the simple reason that I genuinely believe that it would very likely be worse for several small children to lose their mother than for five childless adults to die tragically (though, of course, there are possible circumstances that might cause me to reconsider). In short, a decided preference for one over many does not by itself entail, or even strongly suggest, a clear denial of the personhood of the many.

UPDATE:    I'm opening comments, since I've heard from some readers who wanted to contest the reviewer's argument (if not the humor of the second paragraph).  Signed comments will be strongly preferred here.

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22 responses to “A sharp and amusing recent book review from NDPR”

  1. David Zimmerman

    I too find amusing the passage from the NDRB review of the recent book about abortion debates.

    However, I do not find the author's argument by analogy against Greasley's version of the rescue argument very convincing, for the following reason.

    The rescue argument assumes, quite rightly, I think, that a proponent of foetal personhood holds that a human foetus has precisely the same moral standing as an already-born human infant, that all things are equal as far as the right to be rescued is concerned. The rescue argument is meant to shake that moral intuition.

    The author then advances a couple of saving-one vs saving-five cases which favour saving-one, but which manifestly do not turn on the matter of basic personhood. He concludes [I guess] that no saving-one vs saving-five case ever really turns on the matter of basic personhood. But that doesn't follow. His two cases obviously do not, but that doesn't show that the original rescue case does not.

    Maybe that's all that needs to be said….. But FWIW:

    To be sure, the author's two counterexamples against the original rescue argument do involve cases in which sensible moral intuitions can be advanced for preferring the one over the five, without any hint of a doubt about the personhood of the five. But that is quite beside the point, since the two cases turn on morally relevant factors obviously other than basic personhood, which one might plausibly argue are not at all equal across the cases:
    The one baby arguably has more life ahead of him or her than do the five octogenarians
    The one mother with small children arguably has in her charge more probable life prospects than will be enjoyed by the five tenured professors.
    I say "arguably" to indicate that these assumptions might well be disputed on factual and/or evaluative grounds. But never mind that…. Let's just accept the assumptions and the plausibility of the intuitions they ground about the two cases.

    The point of doubt about the effectiveness of the counterexamples is this:
    The original rescue argument is directed against the claim that human foetuses and already-born infants have the same moral status… that all things are considered equal with respect to the right to be rescued. Lots of opponents of abortion believe that.
    The counterexamples would be apt as counterexamples to the original rescue case, but only when directed against claims that all things are considered equal when it comes to babies/octogenarians and mothers/tenured professors… note: only against those claims.
    But who would want to make those claims in the first place? For, there are obviously lots of different moral factors at play in these saving-the-one vs saving-the-five cases.
    These cases should be taken as a reasonable way to start a discussion about what these morally relevant factors are and how they play out in these rescue scenarios.
    They do not purport to end a discussion about the basic moral standing [in this instance the right to be rescued] of any of the potential victims.
    So, I am not at all convinced that the author has effectively argued by analogy against the original rescue argument.

    He has shown that not all saving-the-one vs saving-the-five cases turn on the question of personhood or basic moral standing. But who ever thought that they did? No one, that' s who.

    Or, am I taking all this too seriously?

    Reply
  2. Clayton

    I agree with Lu that you don't learn much about moral status by thinking about which individuals to save. And I don't quite understand why someone would think that these intuitions about which individuals we should rescue would have much bearing on questions about whether the individuals in question had certain rights that we typically think persons would have. Having said that, I also think it's pretty clear that the better cases to focus on for probing our intuitions about the moral status of embryos would be Frances Kamm's examples in which we have to decide whether to create embryos that we plan on treating as mere means for the purpose of creating and/or saving life. I'm never surprised to discover that most people I talk to, whether they self-describe as 'pro-life' or 'pro-choice', share Kamm's intuitions about these cases–it would be permissible to create an embryo with the intention to harvest materials from it but the same doesn't hold true for infants. I thought Kamm's work on status would have been a mandatory topic of discussion, but it looks like neither author engages with it in the book. I haven't had a chance to read the book to see if considerations like those that Kamm offers gets any discussion, but it would be a shame if they didn't. (I don't think these intuitions about cases settle anything, but they serve as good starting points for discussion. I can see why someone would be led to believe that embryos have some special moral status that requires us to treat them as ends unto themselves, but I don't think you'd get there by thinking about Kamm's thought experiment or test the proposal by means of intuitions about permissible rescue.)

    Reply
  3. Clayton

    One quick follow up, if that's alright with you, Brian. I do think that Greasley is right to appeal to Warren's work here on status. I just thought that rescue cases weren't an optimal way to defend the pro-choice position for pretty much the reasons that Lu mentioned. (And is Greasley really 'pro-abortion' as Lu said? That seems unlikely. I'm sort of surprised that made it into the review.)

    It turns out that Kaczor does rely on some Kantianish or Kantianesque arguments that Kamm critically discusses in the course of discussing her thought experiments concerning whether it is permissible to treat embryos as mere means, so I think the larger failure here (which Lu doesn't mention) is that Kaczor didn't address an important line of objection to one of his arguments. (At least, it appears that way going by the free preview on Amazon.)

    Reply
  4. V. Alan White

    Robert Veatch has argued that appeal to concepts that have objective reference in some descriptive sense–persons, humans, and so on–almost invariably confuses the real issue–moral standing–with plausible properties that might be associated with it. So he says just cut to the chase and denote what descriptively has moral standing, but also discriminate between what may be claimed to have partial and full moral standing. As he also argues, clearly we allow e.g. that cadavers have some moral standing, but surely not full moral standing. Likewise it may be that prenatally embryos through near-full-term fetuses have moral standing, but possibly wildly different degrees of such standing. That might easily explain the saving embryos versus babies case. But that kind of case should carefully be distinguished from other closer cases of moral standing, such as the mom-versus-childless-profs case, which turns on finer points relevant to making utilitarian calculations about greatest goods. My point is that I concur with Veatch that the issues here turn crucially on what has moral standing in terms of descriptive properties of reference, and the degrees of moral standing claimed for those references. While this analysis cannot resolve disagreements between parties making divergent claims about moral standing, it clarifies what we should be attending to in making them.

    Reply
  5. Jeff McMahan

    This comment strikes me as exactly right but perhaps I can offer further elucidation. First, eliciting intuitive judgments is not a game. Second, the two cases that the reviewer cites are not, as Zimmerman notes, "parallel" to the example that Greasley gives. In the choice between saving a baby and saving five nonagenarians, there is a factor that is not present in Greasley's example, which is that the baby has much more good life in prospect than any of the nonagenarians, and indeed more than all five together. I think this is actually misleading and I reject the reviewer's judgment about this case, but that judgment must, it seems, be explained in this way. In the choice between a mother of several small children and five middle-aged but childless adults, the reviewer's judgment is explicitly based on the side-effects of allowing the mother to die. Again I reject the this judgment, as I think it exaggerates the harm involved in losing a parent at an early age (particularly if the "small children" are too young to understand the nature of death, in which case the loss of a mother through death is no worse than the mother's abandonment of her family). In Greasley's case, by contrast, there is no obvious factor that could explain the common judgment that one ought to save an infant rather than five embryos other than a difference in moral status. An infant and an embryo have roughly the same amount of good life in prospect. And Greasley could stipulate that the infant is an orphan with no people specially related to it, thereby eliminating the sort of side-effects that account for the reviewer's judgment in his second case. So, to repeat, I think that Zimmerman is entirely right and that humor offered at Greasley's expense is no substitute for careful argument.

    Reply
  6. Dan Johnson

    It is just a review, not a paper response, and so doesn't go in depth into examining all the similarities and differences as to whether they are relevant. The reviewer was just pointing out that the discussion in the book was underdeveloped as it stands, not providing a full-blown refutation of it.

    Here's one "obvious factor," as you put it: the infant doesn't have to be implanted in anyone's womb (a difficult and unreliable procedure) to have the shot at a future life. The embryos do. So their prospects for life are a lot more dicey than the infant's. That makes them more like the nonagenarians, doesn't it?

    Again, I have no doubt that the reviewer would say that this sort of discussion is relevant. The problem with the book, from the reviewer's perspective, is that it presents the one-and-five argument without discussion of such nuances. That is a real problem with the book, if true.

    Reply
  7. Tyron

    I have read the book. I think that it is excellent: wide-ranging and presenting powerful arguments on each side. The review does not convey this. As for the point about Thomson’s view, Kaczor treats it at enough length. As for the last point about the purpose of the book, professional philosophers will benefit from the book, but it is also of use for students. I assigned the book as one of the texts for my contemporary moral problems class, and the students learned a lot from it, and enjoyed the style of the debate too.

    Reply
  8. Alen

    I find the force of the claim that “the baby has much more good life in prospect than any of the nonagenarians” quite problematic. What if we know for certain that for whatever reason the baby will not have more good life, and in fact those last years in each nonagenarian’s life will be filled with tremendous joy. Would that change the intuition?

    Reply
  9. David Zimmerman

    Thank you for the further elucidation of the two alleged counterexamples. Nicely done.

    Reply
  10. David Zimmerman

    Nice comment.
    One further point about what the reviewer takes to be Kaczor's argument against abortion:
    There seems to be an Aristotelian element in K's account of moral standing as based upon some notion of "enduring substance" between the stages of human foetus in utero and born-infant.
    Unlike the reviewer, I find this idea bafflingly obscure…. and, like you, far prefer a Warren-style functionalist approach to moral standing.

    Reply
  11. Kate Greasley

    I’ll start with a comment about the substantive issue raised by the quote. I may make a more general comment about the review as a whole later, if I have the energy. In the quote, the reviewer says:

    ‘Nonetheless, she largely dismisses the possibility that this is just a mistaken belief and seems to think the only truly plausible explanation for the near universal intuition is a (warranted) belief that the infant is a person and the embryos are not.’

    Since the ERC thought-experiment took hold, there have been a wide array of arguments offered by pro-life scholars that seek to provide counter-explanations for the widespread intuition which don’t invoke any judgement about the relative moral status of embryos and babies. By now, these debunking arguments are about as well worn as the original example itself. I deal with a selection of them in that part of the book, and explain why I think they miss the point of the thought-experiment and fail to engage with the real force of the intuition. So, when I suggest that the most plausible explanation for the intuition is that we simply don’t attribute the same moral status to embryos and babies, it is very much not without considering some other mooted contenders. While the passage quoted above may be amusing to some, then (although I require at least a dose of wit to ever be amused ☺), it is quite misleading about the discussion in that part of the book, as indeed it is in many other respects, in my opinion.

    Many of the counter-explanations for the ERC intuition that have been proudly pedalled by pro-life scholars for a while now as kind of “gotcha” answers misfire in very obvious ways, and I’d direct anyone who is interested to read that part of the book (it’s not too long). The answer quoted above is different in that it isn’t really a counter-explanation for the intuition, but a counter-consideration that is meant to show that judgements like this in whom to save cases don’t necessarily entail that the unsaved creatures who count more in number are below the threshold of moral respect. My response to that point in particular would be reflective of some of the points that David Zimmerman has made above, and which Jeff McMahan elaborates. The thrust of the critique is that all sorts of variables can make it the case that saving the one over the many is a more reasonable thing to do, without bearing on the basic personhood status of anyone. Well sure, I guess. What if we knew for a fact that the baby was going to grow up to cure cancer? That might be pretty good reason for saving her over the five embryos, even if it were true that all of them meet the threshold of personhood status. As David says at the end there, though, I don’t think anyone trying to get mileage out of ERC needs to deny the possible impact of all kinds of variables. The question is what is driving the intuition in this case, and the case is usually constructed (or can just be amended) to control for factors other than our beliefs about comparative moral status. The counter-explanations that are typically offered for the driving intuition (e.g. maybe we think the baby should be saved because more people would be upset by its death than that of the embryos) are actually more to the point, because they attempt to show that something other than comparative moral status judgements really are behind the intuition. As I explain in the book, I think these attempts fall down because the variables can be controlled out whilst keeping the intuition (as Jeff says above, just make the child an orphan to control for the variable just mentioned). Because of these things, and for other reasons, it strikes me that the debunking explanations often relied on just aren’t the most plausible explanation for the intuition. And as my critic rightly does note, we should spend some time thinking about what the most plausible explanation for a near-universal intuition really is.

    On thought-experiments more generally:

    I certainly don’t think of the ERC as nearly ‘dispositive’, as my critic thinks I think. I wouldn’t imagine that just one thought could carry so much weight in such a complex and multi-faceted debate. But I think it’s revealing and worth reflecting on nonetheless. And abortion opponents who turn to methodological attacks about these argumentative strategies can be stunningly unaware of the extent to which the arguments they launch amount to the same thing. When an opponent of abortion rights criticises a concept of personhood because he thinks it entails the permissibility of infanticide, which cannot be right and which almost no-one would accept, this is an application of the intuition pump in much the same way that the ERC is. It relies on nothing more than the sheer force of a near-universal intuition and its incompatibility with a certain view of moral status. Such intuition-pumping will always have its limits, most of all where people’s intuitions about the cases simply conflict. If it comes to it, a pro-life scholar could always just double down and claim that we should actually save the embryos, and that most people are wrong in believing otherwise, and there isn’t going to be much left to say to that. But the fact that the debate can become intractable in this very particular way by no means entails that everything leading up to that point is profitless and unhelpful. Or if it were, this would disqualify a vast amount of moral reasoning from being philosophically salient.

    Reply
  12. Kate Greasley

    "… presents the one-and-five argument without discussion of such nuances".

    I would really encourage you to actually read that section of the book and determine for yourself whether you think that's true.

    Reply
  13. David Zimmerman

    Nice expansion on the point of contention with your reviewer, Kate.

    Two further comments:

    Yes, one can manufacture alleged counterexamples to the original ERC until the proverbial bovines come home…. One Martin Luther King vs five George Wallaces… One Nelson Mandela vs five Pik Bothas…One [yawn]….
    But that doesn't make the reviewer's argument against the intuitive force of the original ERC any stronger, for just the reasons you stress.

    And by the way, I don't really understand the animus that trolley cases and variations like the ERC have been inspiring of late. As you note, these thought-experiments have a limited purpose, i.e. to invite moral intuitions in a fashion that controls for relevant factual variables, and thus helps us to discern, as best we can, just what the intuitions are about. Why critics think that there is anything methodologically wrong with that, I cannot figure out. Perhaps it's just a general animus toward what they take to be "pulp philosophy." Alright, but steady on.

    Anyway, I am glad that the comments on the OP have served to clarify your contribution to the book [and perhaps even your collaborator's, though I suspect not in a way that he would much like].

    Reply
  14. Dan Johnson

    Fair enough! I'll try to do that. 🙂

    Reply
  15. Joseph Zepeda

    Kate Greasley writes: "When an opponent of abortion rights criticises a concept of personhood because he thinks it entails the permissibility of infanticide, which cannot be right and which almost no-one would accept, this is an application of the intuition pump in much the same way that the ERC is. It relies on nothing more than the sheer force of a near-universal intuition and its incompatibility with a certain view of moral status."

    I doubt there is such a thing as an "intuition pump" that is identifiably the same kind of human judgment in the two cases. The term "intuition" seems unhelpfully vague here, anyway: a judgment about "is infanticide permissible?" seems on its face not to be of the same type as an answer to "Imagine yourself in a burning building and you can only take one of two life-saving actions: one saves a jar with a bunch of human embryos in it, and one infant – what would you do?" But even if we want to talk about both cases in terms of intuitions, I've never even heard anyone describe a question like the former as an "intuition pump." The point of "pump", I take it, is that without such a device we wouldn't be able to bring our intuitions out into the open with sufficient precision to make the kind of arguments we want to make. There is no "pump" in "is infanticide permissible." One's mileage will vary on whether that matters, but it begs all the methodological questions to assimilate the two, it seems to me.

    Reply
  16. Laurence B McCullough

    The reviewer writes: "the simple reason that I genuinely believe that it would very likely be worse for several small children to lose their mother than for five childless adults to die tragically …" This argument style fails for the simple reason that "I genuinely believe that p" allows p to be any genuinely held belief. This is intellectual dreck, not philosophical reasoning.

    BL COMMENT: Isn't it just a way of making clear that this is a strong intuition the author has, so no different in kind from the whole style of argument in this domain.

    Reply
  17. Kate Greasley

    Hello Joseph. Yes, I think I see what you mean here. There are clearly some important differences between situational-type thought-experiments, such as the ERC, and a more straightforward claim that a view is unacceptable because one of more of its entailments is unacceptable, which is the driving point of the infanticide worry in many of its iterations. The way in which they seek to gain argumentative ground is somewhat different, such that one could have methodological reservations about the former that don’t apply to the latter. The zanier a thought-experiment becomes, for instance, the less sure we might be about what we really think one ought to do in the hypothetical situation. And this could take away much of its usefulness in testing or refining the claims or principles to which we are committed. (I don’t think this worry applies to the ERC, though, because it isn’t so completely outlandish.)

    Depending on how they are deployed, however, the strategies can closely resemble each other inasmuch as they both, ultimately, underscore the fact that an implication of the target view is incompatible with very widespread and settled judgments that the author is confident the reader will share. “X cannot be right because it entails infanticide is permissible, and we cannot accept that” is not a million miles away from “X cannot be right because it tells us to save the embryos in ERC, and we cannot accept that”. When the infanticide problem is harnessed in this way, as a kind of bookend for a line of thought, then they are both highly reliant, at bottom, on which judgments audiences will agree are beyond the pale, and methodologically alike to that extent. A lot will obviously depend here, though, on the reasons why the author derides thought-experiments like the ERC, which to me don’t come out clearly.

    Reply
  18. Laurence B McCullough

    Brian: As Robert Audi (my former teacher at UT) pointed out in the inaugural number of the new APA journal, 'intuition' is a word without fixed meaning. Absent specification of meaning (and Audi's paper indicates that this is a demanding philosophical task), invoking one's intuitions, however strong, is meaningless, not to mention being at unmanaged risk of bias. Or, philosophical dreck.

    Reply
  19. Brian Leiter

    I'm not unsympathetic to the verdict that intuition-based philosophy is dreck, though I know Audi, like many commenters here, think some of the intuitions have more than sociological interest!

    Reply
  20. V. Alan White

    Just to vouch for Veatch once more. His whole perspective is that people from different cultures, interest groups, etc. are going to have different claims about the full and partial moral status of different beings or things, and particularly at the starts and stops of full moral standing. It is important to focus on those claims directly in order to measure the degrees of disagreement, the numbers of people disagreeing, and to place such disagreements into context of how public policy might most justly and reasonably address them. So, for example, he advocates for the legality of the individual to declare what criterion of death should be applied to one in advance-directive fashion. When it comes to the margins of moral standing–beginning or ending of life–Veatch advocates for latitude for divergent beliefs. That does not seem unreasonable.

    Reply
  21. Kate Greasley

    One further summative comment, if I may…

    The review as a whole effectively questions my competence in the subject matter to a significant degree. The author goes to some trouble to convince readers that I simply don’t understand what I’m criticising, in the pro-life arguments. If true, that is fairly damning. The author’s attempts to substantiate these claims involve such distortions of the material that I would think they were mendacious were it not for my strong inclination to give fellow academics the benefit of the doubt, at least when it comes to intellectual integrity.

    There is a limit on how far I wish to expand here on exactly why I say that. It requires some care and detail, and it’s also a mite undignified to come to my own defence in such a way. But let me give just one example to show what I mean.

    One of the key arguments that the author claims I misunderstand is the endowment view of personhood, according to which all human beings from conception have full moral standing because they are the kind of beings that are rational by nature, whether or not they ever realise that innate capacity. The author’s claim that I just don’t understand this view is backed up by a quote taken from a section of the book where I consider the view that moral status can attach to creatures in virtue of their potential valuable lives, an idea that was made prominent by Don Marquis’s ‘future-like-ours’ argument. The quote is this: "…if we award [the young] equal moral status, this can only be on the basis of their potential to exercise those capacities in the future" (50). This, the reviewer notes, does not reflect the ‘endowment view’, according to which it is irrelevant whether a ‘rational by nature’ creature ever actually realises its ‘radical’ potential (in the pro-life parlance). Quite so, and I by no means assimilate the two. This is why the endowment view as defined by the author is treated on pages 180-184, under the section ‘Endowment and Substance’. There, I specifically target the claim that all human beings are ‘substantially and essentiality’ persons in virtue of possessing a ‘rational nature’, whether or not they ever exercise any rational capacities.

    Now, I am aware that when some pro-life scholars write about the ‘potentiality’ principle, they really have something more like the endowment view in mind, or that their defences of the potentiality argument often revert back into something much more like the endowment view once they are amended to account for all sorts of issues. When this line of defence is followed (that is, when pro-life scholars predictably start bleating that they never meant ‘actual’ potential future, only the ‘radical’ potential that all ‘rational by nature’ creatures have), I think it loses the clout that Marquis originally gave it in the future-like-ours argument. Since that argument really did rely on the independent moral value of having an actual future ‘like ours’, and the wrongness of depriving someone of it, it makes sense to treat the two arguments – the potentiality argument and the endowment view – independently. From reading Lu, you would imagine that neither are treated at all. I introduce some criticisms of the potentiality argument by noting a very obvious starting problem. Lu writes: “Given that obvious problem, one would think Greasley should give more thought to why pro-life writers, Kaczor included, have continued to insist on the point.” Well, see the rest of that section, which Lu gives the impression does not exist, the rest of the book, and the rest of my work on this topic, if you really must. (And a digression: just the fact that a group of pro-life writers have continued to insist on an idea is not, in my estimation, a reason to assume that it must be intellectually meritorious).

    Lu’s charges that I fail, also, to understand (even *understand*) the substance view involve similar manipulations of the material (or perhaps he just doesn’t understand it (bless him!)). But I won’t bore everyone with anymore of that here. (The misunderstandings which my own co-author attributes to me, and which Lu references, are equally baseless, although in his case I am sure it was in good faith). It is dispiriting to me that something quite this defamatory can get cited approvingly without any cross-checking for veracity, and it also demonstrates just how easy it is to undermine someone if one only has the motivation.

    Reply
  22. Jörg Schroth

    I still don't know what to make of the embryo rescue case and how it supports Greasley's case against the anti-abortionists:

    That we ought to rescue the baby is supposed to show that embryos and babies differ in moral status. Anti-abortionists who hold that both embryos and babies are persons and therefore have the same moral status cannot, according to Greasley, explain why we ought to rescue the baby.

    But isn't Greasley confronted with the same problem? According to her account of persons neither embryos nor babies are persons and therefore both have the same moral status (or, rather, both have no moral status). How, then, can Greasley accept that the embryo rescue case shows that embryos and babies differ in moral status? How can she explain our intuition that we ought to rescue the baby?

    Does the embryo rescue case perhaps show that personhood is not the relevant issue, since neither view (embryos and babies are persons / are not persons) can explain our intuition to rescue the baby?

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