Why pro-life arguments still are not convincing: A reply to my critics.

I argued in 'Pro-life arguments against infanticide and why they are not convincing' that arguments presented by pro-life philosophers are mistaken and cannot show infanticide to be immoral. Several scholars have offered responses to my arguments. In this paper, I reply to my critics: Daniel Rodger, Bruce P. Blackshaw and Clinton Wilcox. I also reply to Christopher Kaczor. I argue that pro-life arguments still are not convincing.

Beyond Infanticide: How Psychological Accounts of Persons Can Justify Harming Infants.

It is commonly argued that a serious right to life is grounded only in actual, relatively advanced psychological capacities a being has acquired. The moral permissibility of abortion is frequently argued for on these grounds. Increasingly it is being argued that such accounts also entail the permissibility of infanticide, with several proponents of these theories accepting this consequence. We show, however, that these accounts imply the permissibility of even more unpalatable acts than infanticide performed on infants: organ harvesting, live experimentation, sexual interference, and discriminatory killing. The stronger intuitions against the permissibility of these 'pre-personal acts' allow us to re-establish a comprehensive and persuasive reductio against psychological accounts of persons.

If Abortion, then Infanticide.

Our contention is that all of the major arguments for abortion are also arguments for permitting infanticide. One cannot distinguish the fetus from the infant in terms of a morally significant intrinsic property, nor are they morally discernible in terms of standing in different relationships to others. The logic of our position is that if such arguments justify abortion, then they also justify infanticide. If we are right that infanticide is not justified, then such arguments will fail to justify abortion. We respond to those philosophers who accept infanticide by putting forth a novel account of how the mindless can be wronged which serves to distinguish morally significant potential from morally irrelevant potential. This allows our account to avoid the standard objection that many entities possess a potential for personhood which we are intuitively under no obligation to further or protect.

Clashes of consensus: on the problem of both justifying abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome and rejecting infanticide.

Although the abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has become commonplace, infanticide is still widely rejected. Generally, there are three ways of justifying the differentiation between abortion and infanticide: by referring to the differences between the moral status of the fetus versus the infant, by referring to the differences of the moral status of the act of abortion versus the act of infanticide, or by separating the way the permissibility of abortion is justified from the way the impermissibility of infanticide is justified. My argument is that none of these ways justifies the abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome while simultaneously rejecting infanticide. Either the justification for abortion is consistent with infanticide, or it is implausible to justify abortion while rejecting infanticide. I conclude the article by making some preliminary remarks about how one might manage the situation posed by my argument.

Pro-Life Arguments Against Infanticide and Why they are Not Convincing.

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva's controversial article 'After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?' has received a lot of criticism since its publishing. Part of the recent criticism has been made by pro-life philosopher Christopher Kaczor, who argues against infanticide in his updated book 'Ethics of Abortion'. Kaczor makes four arguments to show where Giubilini and Minerva's argument for permitting infanticide goes wrong. In this article I argue that Kaczor's arguments, and some similar arguments presented by other philosophers, are mistaken and cannot show Giubilini and Minerva's view to be flawed. I claim that if one wants to reject the permissibility of infanticide, one must find better arguments for doing so.

Strange Bedfellows? Common Ground on the Moral Status Question.

When does a developing human being acquire moral status? I outline three different positions based on substance ontology that attempt to solve the question by locating some morally salient event in the process of human development question. In the second section, I consider some specific empirical objections to one of these positions, refute them, and then show how similar objections and responses would generalize to the other substance-based positions on the question. The crucial finding is that all the attempts to answer the question that involve substance ontology need to appeal to dispositions.

The Viable Violinist.

In the aftermath of the Kermit Gosnell trial and Giubilini and Minerva's article 'After-birth abortion', abortion-rights advocates have been pressured to provide an account of the moral difference between abortion, particularly late-term abortion, and infanticide. In response, some scholars have defended a moral distinction by appealing to an argument developed by Judith Jarvis Thomson in A defense of abortion. However, once Thomson's analogy is refined to account for the morally relevant features of late-term pregnancy, rather than distinguishing between late-term abortion and infanticide, it reinforces their moral similarity. This is because late-term abortion requires more than detachment - it requires an act of feticide to ensure the death of the viable fetus. As such, a Thomsonian account cannot be deployed successfully as a response to Giubilini and Minerva. Those wishing to defend late-term abortion while rejecting the permissibility of infanticide will need to provide an alternative account of the difference, or else accept Giubilini and Minerva's conclusion.

Failures of Imagination: Disability and the Ethics of Selective Reproduction.

The article addresses the problem of disability in the context of reproductive decisions based on genetic information. It poses the question of whether selective procreation should be considered as a moral obligation of prospective parents. To answer this question, a number of different ethical approaches to the problem are presented and critically analysed: the utilitarian; Julian Savulescu's principle of procreative beneficence; the rights-based. The main thesis of the article is that these approaches fail to provide any appealing principles on which reproductive decisions should be based. They constitute failures of imagination which may result in counter-intuitive moral judgments about both life with disability and genetic selection. A full appreciation of the ethical significance of recognition in procreative decisions leads to a more nuanced and morally satisfying view than other leading alternatives presented in the article.

The grand leap of the whale up the Niagara Falls: converting philosophical conclusions into policy prescriptions.

This article analyzes a neat conjuring trick employed in bioethics, that is, the immediate conversion of a philosophical conclusion into a policy prescription, and compares it to the "grand leap of the whale up the Niagara Falls" mentioned by Benjamin Franklin. It is shown that there is no simple and easy way to achieve the conversion, by considering arguments falling under four headings: (1) reasonable disagreement about values and theories, (2) general jurisprudential arguments, (3) the differences between policymaking and philosophy, and (4) the messy world of implementation. The particular issue used to illustrate the difficulties in moving from philosophical conclusion to policy description is infanticide of healthy infants, but the analysis is general, and the conclusion that the immediate move to policy is illegitimate is quite general.

What exactly did you claim?

Philosophers should express their ideas clearly. They should do this in any field of specialization, but especially when they address issues of practical consequence, as they do in bioethics. This article dissects a recent and much-debated contribution to philosophical bioethics by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, examines how exactly it fails to meet the requirement of clarity, and maps a way forward by outlining the ways in which philosophical argumentation could validly and soundly proceed in bioethics.

Beyond pragmatism: defending the 'bright line' of birth.

It is usually accepted by ethicists that birth does not alter moral status. Rather, it is thought that the rule according full legal rights at birth is pragmatic. Pragmatic reasoning is vulnerable to competing practical concerns and stronger moral principles. This 'bright line' has therefore been criticised both by those who believe personhood begins before birth and those who believe it begins afterward. In particular, a recent article by Giubilini and Minerva puts forward both pragmatic and moral arguments in favour of permitting infanticide, and the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal has suggested there is a strong case for abandoning the bright line (R v Iby (2005) 63 NSWLR 278). If we desire to defend current legal doctrine against such criticism, a medical and philosophical basis for the law should be articulated. This article suggests such a medical and philosophical basis. It argues that both the multiplicity of biological changes occurring in the neonate at birth and the extrauterine context (the world) provide a justification for the distinction drawn at law between abortion and infanticide. With reference to Robert Nozick's 'experience machine' thought-experiment and elements of phenomenological philosophy, it advances two propositions to explain the status-changing nature of the neonate's emergence out of the womb. First, that expressing sentience in the world is essential for the attainment of personhood. Second, that having become a person, the harm in killing is disruption of this engagement with the world and the reduction from personhood to non-existence. This is the distinction between a neonate's death and the termination of a foetus, underscoring the qualitative difference between the two sides of the bright line drawn in law.

Silences and moral narratives: infanticide as reproductive disruption.

Infanticide is a widespread practice, yet few ethnographic and theoretical works examine this. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Indian Himalayas, I argue that infanticide is a form of reproductive disruption that elicits both public moral judgments and private silences. In this Himalayan context, the stigmas of abortion and premarital sex prevent community acknowledgement of infanticide and baby abandonment. Unmarried women hide their pregnancies, deliver and abandon their babies, and later are rushed to the hospital with postdelivery complications. While biomedical doctors deal with the debris of infanticide (postpartum hemorrhage), there is no formal accounting of the practice. I argue that by regarding infanticide as a form of reproductive disruption, we can open up women's narratives of pain and suffering that are silenced because of moral repugnance.

How to insure against utilitarian overconfidence.

This paper addresses two examples of overconfident presentations of utilitarian moral conclusions. First, there is Peter Singer's widely discussed claim that if the consequences of a medical experiment are sufficiently good to justify the use of animals, then we should be prepared to perform the experiment on human beings with equivalent mental capacities. Second, I consider defences of infanticide or after-birth abortion. I do not challenge the soundness of these arguments. Rather, I accuse those who seek to translate these conclusions into moral advice of a dangerous overconfidence. This paper offers an insurance policy that protects against some of the costs of mistaken moral reasoning. An interest in moral insurance is motivated by the recognition that, in the event that overconfident ethicists have reasoned incorrectly, some actions recommended by their conclusions are not just bad, but very bad. We should reject suggestions that we conduct medical experiments on humans or kill newborns.

The Italian reaction to the Giubilini and Minerva paper.

From 28 February to the end of March 2012, the Italian media reacted fiercely to the Giubilini and Minerva paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics a few days earlier. The first article viewed the proposal as analogous to 'barbaric invasions', but in a first stage of the debate it could be seen as a case of the usual controversy between Catholics and secularists. Then emotive reactions prevailed and a flood of papers expressed strong opposition to 'infanticide'. The authors were even deemed insane; the fact that both are Italian certainly increased interest in the subject as well as surprise at their proposal, which some reckoned to be an insult to their 'national identity'. Even freedom of academic research and discussion was put in question, and defenders of free debate were accused of being supporters of the theory of infanticide.

The moral significance of being born.

This paper is a response to Giubilini and Minerva's defence of infanticide. I argue that any account of moral worth or moral rights that depends on the intrinsic properties of individuals alone is committed to agreeing with Giubilini and Minerva that birth cannot by itself make a moral difference to the moral worth of the infant. However, I argue that moral worth need not depend on intrinsic properties alone. It might also depend on relational and social properties. I claim that the in principle availability of neonates to participate in scaffolded interactions with carers might plausibly be seen as contributing to their moral worth.