Jeff McMahan - Infanticide, Teksty - filozofia&etyka
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Infanticide
JEFF MCMAHAN
Rutgers University
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.
1. THINKING ABOUT THE UNTHINKABLE
Elizabeth Anscombe once wrote that ‘if someone really thinks,
in
advance
, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring
the judicial execution of the innocent should quite be excluded from
consideration – I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt
mind.’
1
On this view, there are certain moral questions that a decent
person simply will not ask. Thus when, in a recently published book,
I asked whether infanticide could ever be permissible, I was cited by
a reviewer as among those who reveal a corrupt mind by raising an
unthinkable question – and, worse still, giving the wrong answer, as
I had to concede that the claims I made about the moral status of the
fetus committed me to the conclusion that infanticide could in principle
be justified in certain cases. According to the reviewer, even to entertain
the possibility that infanticide could be permissible is to harbor ‘evil
thoughts’. And if a moral theory prompts us to have such thoughts, the
obvious remedy is ‘to reject the theory’.
2
Yet, as I will try to show in
this essay, the idea that infanticide can be permissible in certain cases
is not just an implication of my theory or indeed any other
theory
,but
is implied by beliefs that are both widely held and difficult to reject
without becoming committed other indefensible claims.
Most people are unaware that there is any pressure to consider
infanticide at all. In part this is because we tend to treat infanticide the
1
G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’,
Philosophy
33 (1958), reprinted in
her
Ethics, Religion, and Politics
, Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1981), p. 40.
2
Stephen Mulhall, ‘Fearful Thoughts’,
LondonReviewofBooks
24 (22 August 2002),
p. 16. This is a review of Jeff McMahan,
The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins
of Life
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
© 2007 Cambridge University Press
Utilitas
Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2007
doi:10.1017/S0953820807002440
Printed in the United Kingdom
2
Jeff McMahan
way most people treat the issue of our moral relation to animals: we
simply do not discuss it. Challenges to moral beliefs about animals
and infants tend to make people uncomfortable in a way that, for
example, a challenge to their beliefs about slavery would not; for
such challenges may force people to confront an obscure sense that
their complacency about harms inflicted on animals and their intuitive
horror of infanticide may be considerably more difficult to justify than
they would like to believe.
Although philosophers have conducted a wide-ranging debate about
the morality of abortion for more than thirty years, generating in the
process an extensive literature on the topic, they have, with very few
exceptions, shrunk from extending the debate to include a discussion
of infanticide. I know from discussions with prominent writers on
ethics that some have been deterred from writing on the subject by
fear of possible consequences for their reputations, careers and even
physicalsecurity–afearthatappears well-grounded in view of the
public vilification and physical threats endured by Peter Singer, largely
because of his endorsement of the permissibility of infanticide in the
case of certain severely ill or deformed infants.
3
My own experience is
much more limited, but tends to confirm that discussing infanticide is
not the best way to win friends or secure admiring book reviews.
It may well be that a careful and honest examination of the morality
of infanticide will in the end reaffirm and even strengthen the sense
that most people have that the practice is immoral, an abomination.
If so, this should prompt a reassessment of certain common beliefs
about abortion. We should follow the argument where it leads. But
what we must not accept is the contention that infanticide is morally
unthinkable
, that it is evil even to raise the question of its permissi-
bility. While I accept that there are some moral convictions that
are genuinely beyond reasonable doubt or question, the belief that
infanticide can never be permissible is not among them. For, as I will
try to show, too much pressure is exerted on this belief by some of our
other moral beliefs to make it conscionable for us simply to dismiss
the possibility that our intuitions about infanticide may be wrong.
2. KILLING, LETTING DIE, AND THE INTRINSIC
NATURES OF INFANTS AND FETUSES
The position that has earned Peter Singer a singular notoriety among
contemporary philosophers is defended in his writings by a simple
3
See, for example, Sylvia Nasar, ‘Princeton Philosopher Draws a Stir’,
NewYork 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
Yo rke r
, 6 September 1999.
Infanticide
3
challenge to the consistency of common-sense beliefs. He observes that
all Western societies, and a great many non-western ones as well,
permit prenatal screening for fetal defects, followed by abortion in the
event that a defect is discovered, even if the defect is comparatively
minor. And we permit these practices even quite late in pregnancy –
for example, when the test cannot be performed or is inaccurate until
comparatively late in fetal development.
4
In some instances, however,
defects are not or cannot be detected until birth. In many such cases,
the infant is born prematurely and so may be chronologically younger
than a fetus that could permissibly be aborted. And the infant’s
defect may be far more severe than that which would be regarded
as a sufficient justification for an abortion. But even if the infant is
younger and less developed and its defect more severe, infanticide is
prohibited. Why, Singer asks, is infanticide different? Why should it
matter morally whether an individual has been delivered or remains
within the womb?
5
Singer has also noted that, despite the pervasive belief that
infanticide is immoral, our intuitions about the moral status of infants
are mixed. He observes, for example, that it is a common practice
deliberately to allow certain defective infants to die when they could be
saved and that this practice, known as ‘selective non-treatment’, enjoys
widespread support and approval.
6
It is often suggested that selective non-treatment is a form of
passive
euthanasia
. Yet this is very seldom true. Intentionally to allow an
individual to die is not euthanasia unless death would be better
for
that individual
than continued life (or, perhaps, unless it is reasonable
to believe that it would be). Yet it is comparatively rare for congenital
defects or disabilities to make an individual’s life ‘worth not living’,
or on balance bad for the individual whose life it is. Most people with
even the severest disabilities compatible with continued life do not
find life intolerable. And in any case the practice of selective non-
treatment is not limited only to infants with the severest disabilities.
As Singer points out, treatment for easily remediable defects has often
been withheld from infants with Down syndrome, a condition that is
certainly compatible with a life that is worth living. It seems, therefore,
4
See Sjef Gevers, ‘Third Trimester Abortion for Fetal Abnormality’,
Bioethics
13
(1999), pp. 306–13.
5
Peter Singer,
Rethinking Life and Death
(New York: St. Martin’s Press: 1995),
pp. 83–4 and 214–17. For other arguments, see Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer,
Should
the Baby Live?
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
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.
4
Jeff McMahan
that the common perception that selective non-treatment is a form of
euthanasia is an instance of self-deception. The operative motive in
these cases, even if it is sometimes not allowed to rise to the level of
consciousness, seems to be to avoid the burden the diseased or disabled
child would impose on the parents and the health care system.
If we accept that it can be permissible intentionally to allow certain
infants to die, why should we not also accept that it can be permissible
to kill them when similar conditions obtain? The obvious suggestion is
that the distinction between killing and letting die makes a significant
difference in this kind of case. Yet we do not accept that this distinction
makes a significant difference in our treatment of
fetuses
. As I noted,
many people, perhaps most, accept that abortion can be permissible
when prenatal testing reveals a significant fetal abnormality. Even
most people who generally oppose abortion on moral grounds recognize
certain exceptions, and fetal abnormality is one of the most commonly
acknowledged exceptions. In some instances of fetal abnormality,
however, there is a significant probability that the defect will itself
cause a spontaneous abortion. Yet I know of no one who suggests that
in such cases one ought to postpone having an abortion in the hope that
the fetus will die on its own, on the ground that it would be morally
better to allow the fetus to die than to kill it. For killing it seems no
worse than allowing it to die once it has been decided that it is better,
all things considered, that it should not live.
The distinction between killing and letting die also seems to have
little moral significance in parallel cases involving older children. One
form that selective non-treatment has taken involves allowing an infant
with Down syndrome to die by withholding treatment for some readily
curable but otherwise fatal condition. Suppose that a child of six with
Down syndrome develops such a condition and that it is not possible,
for whatever reason, for the care of the child to devolve to anyone other
than the mother. Just as in the case of an infant, no one accepts that
it would be permissible for the mother to
kill
the six-year-old because
she found it excessively burdensome to care for him. But neither would
anyone think that it would be permissible for her to allow the child to
die by denying him a simple life-saving treatment.
In short, if we consider a fetus, an infant and an older child, all
of which have (for example) Down syndrome as well as a different,
potentially fatal but treatable condition, we find that common intui-
tions about killing and letting die differ in each case. Many people
believe that it would be permissible to allow the fetus to die but also
permissible to kill it via abortion. Many people also accept that it would
be permissible to allow the infant to die via selective non-treatment,
but most believe that it would not be permissible to kill it. Finally, most
believe that it would not be permissible either to allow the six-year-old
Infanticide
5
to die or to kill him. In the latter case, to kill the child would generally
be regarded as worse than refusing to save him, but not significantly
worse. So, while the distinction between killing and letting die seems
significant in the case of the infant, it seems much less significant, or
hardly significant at all, in the cases of the six-year-old and the fetus.
One inference we might draw from the common intuitions about
these cases is that most people intuitively sense that the moral status
of newborn infants is intermediate between that of fetuses and that
of older children. Yet there
cannot
be significant differences of moral
status between newborn infants and
viable
fetuses. Let us make the
usual, plausible assumption that moral
status
is a function of
intrinsic
properties only.
7
And let us also assume, again plausibly, that birth
alone does not affect an individual’s properties in morally significant
ways.
8
The reason why there cannot be intrinsic differences between
newborn infants generally and viable fetuses is simply that viable
fetuses could
be
newborn infants if they were delivered prematurely. A
fetus can now be viable – that is, can be delivered alive and survive – at
about five months. And a fetus’s birth is sometimes delayed beyond
nine months. So there is an approximate four-month chronological
overlap between fetuses and infants. This leaves it open, of course,
that there may be significant intrinsic differences in a particular case –
for example, in the comparison between a 51/2-month-old fetus and a
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. 310–24. 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 fromwhich it was formed. For a discussion of themorality of prenatal
injury, see Jeff McMahan, ‘Paradoxes of Abortion and Prenatal Injury’,
Ethics
116 (2006),
pp. 625–55.
8
For a challenge to this assumption, see Jos´eLuisBermudez, ‘The Moral Significance
of Birth’,
Ethics
106 (1996), pp. 378–403.
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