Blues, Greens and abortion

Seeing this makes me happy because I had a similar revelation a few years ago and it always makes me mad to see people use the glaringly bad justification for being pro-choice which you've overcome. On the other hand, after thinking about the matter quite a bit I still am pro-choice. You say:

On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life

I think the key word is "represents".

A lot of bad reasoning seems to come from proving a controversial idea can be fit into a category of things that are mostly bad, and then concluding that the controversial idea, too, must be mostly bad.

For example, some people are opposed to a project to genetically engineer diseases like cystic fibrosis out of the human genome, because that's a form of "eugenics". I think this is supposed to cash out as saying that the CF project shares some surface features with what the Nazis did and what those American Southerners who tried to force-sterilize black people did, and those two things are definitely bad, so the CF project must also be bad.

The counterargument is that the features it shares with the Nazi project and the Southern project are not the features that made those two programs bad. Those two programs were bad because they involved hurting people, either through death or through force-sterilization, without their consent. The CF elimination project hopefully would be voluntary and would not damage the people involved. Therefore, although it shares some similarities with the Nazi project and the Southern project (it's about genetics, it's intended to improve the species, etc), those aren't relevant to this moral question and the argument "But it's eugenics" is flawed.

(If you haven't read the 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong sequence, I suggest that now. Think of a person taking a blue egg that contains vanadium, pointing to a bin full of blue eggs that contain palladium, and saying "But this is a blegg, and we all know bleggs contain palladium!" Well, no.)

The "human life" issue strikes me as very similar. "Taking a human life" is a large category mostly full of bad things. It contains things like stabbing a teenager with a knife, poisoning a senator, strangling an old person in a nursing home, starving a toddler, et cetera. All of these are really bad. They're really bad for various reasons including that they cause the person pain, that they disrupt society, that they violate the person's preference not to be killed, et cetera.

Abortion possibly does fit into the category of "taking a human life." But although it shares the surface features of that category, it isn't clear whether or not it shares the interesting moral feature which is exactly what the whole argument is about. Killing you or me is bad because we understand death and have preferences against it and don't want to die. Whether or not killing a fetus is bad depends on whether or not the fetus also satisfies those conditions - not on whether from a certain angle the problem looks like other cases that satisfy those conditions.

The question isn't whether or not we want to stick the fetus into an artificial category called "human", it's whether it has the specific features that make that category relevant to this particular problem in the first place.

See Leaky Generalizations and Replace The Symbol With The Substance

I reject treating human life, or preservation of the human life, as a "terminal goal" that outweighs the "intermediate goal" of human freedom.

More generally, I don't believe there's any simple relationship between my valuation of the two that can be expressed without reference to other parameters.

That is, there are many contexts in which I endorse trading actual human life for human freedom. Still more so, potential human life. And there are many contexts in which I endorse trading human freedom for human life.

Elsewhere, I've posted that I believe abortion is sad. And I do. But the question of whether or not abortion should be legal is an entirely different question than whether or not abortion is sad.

Which shows, if you haven't seen it before, the nastiness of politics: people are forced to cut away beliefs that might give their enemies a foothold. Several of my liberal friends think that abortion jokes are funny, but dead kitten jokes are beyond the pale. It could be because they're so misanthropic that they think infant cats are more valuable than infant humans, but I think it's much more likely that it's because they've trained themselves that abortions are non-valuable. It's a lot easier to Other something that suffers from your policy preferences than it is to defend a stance based on careful consideration of the numbers.

Legalizing abortion has several positive effects. It has several negative effects. It's not clear to me whether it's better to legalize it or not, but it seems likely that legalization is better than criminalization.

Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged

It may be in the US and many religious countries, but it isn't a big issue in France - I haven't heard of any politician talk about abortion here, and it's not subject to much debate in the media either. My wife says "Yes, there is some debate, some hospitals are even refusing to perform abortions, you just don't pay attention because you're a man", so OK, it may be a bit of an issue, but not a very polarizing one.

(And of course, it's not a big issue in China, where abortion is sometimes encouraged by the state.)

I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is much more important than another human's right to live.

I think this is backwards?

If you haven't already, consider reading Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion", the core thread of which intuition-pumps the reader to the following effect: even if a fetus were granted the full moral status of a conscious, innocent, adult human, it would not be impermissible for an unwilling incubator to kill it to get it out of her.

For the op and others here who consider preservation of human life a terminal goal: do you also consider the creation of human life a terminal goal of the same magnitude? If not, why not?

I find it very unintuitive that something's creation could be unwarranted but its preservation vital, terminally, independent of any other considerations.

So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.

For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well.

This is primarily about policy decisions rather than beliefs. While they are related in that beliefs about the outcomes of available decisions inform the decision, policy decisions are harder in that any decision you might support will have downsides while other decisions you oppose can have upsides. Examining your position on policy debates is a more advanced skill that examining your beliefs.

See Why abortion looks more okay to us than killing babies, from November.

The abortion debate is something I've been thinking a lot about because I'm anxious that I will need to declare 'my colors' at some moment in an awkward social context and I want to prepare something to say that will not offend. This is tricky because in certain social groups I think a weak or an uncertain stance could still be considered offensive. I am leaning towards something that seems potentially sympathetic but that is actually too vague to infer a stance such as, 'There is so much wrong in the world today, I feel overwhelmed and don't know where to begin with fixing it'.

In actuality, I don't feel very strongly about the abortion issue and I spend time wondering if I lack a morality that other humans have -- if I'm actually less "moral" than whatever human morality would be.

My sense of morality (determining whether something is right or wrong) is that a person thinks about a situation and if they feel dismay, then they decide that situation is morally wrong. They then try to decide what is the source of their dismay -- what is so awful about it and, if possible, who is to blame? In some types of morally gray areas, we feel dismay but we're not sure who is to blame. 'It's just a bad situation.'

I think this is how a lot of pro-choice people feel about abortion?

However, when I interrogate my feeling about abortion, I don't feel any dismay for the sake of the baby. I happen to be someone who easily feels dismay in other contexts. For example, if I think about a young soldier dying in combat, I feel dismay at lots of different levels. But when I think of an aborted baby or a miscarriage alike, my moral apparatus just shrugs. (Is this immoral?)

I do feel dismay from other sources. I feel dismay if other people are saddened (a mother, the father, a grandparent, even a pro-life advocate) and I also worry about what effects a disregard for the life of a fetus for its own sake (e.g., like the one I have) could have on family and society. (For example, it would be awful if employers thought pregnancies were so disposable they could choose one more convenient for their schedules, and less romantic if timid but otherwise capable and loving couples never felt any pressure to work together to face the challenge of raising a baby they hadn't expected.)

So my question is, is the main thing going on in the abortion debate this sense of dismay that I lack? (I realize that many to most pro-choicers may also feel dismay, but weigh this differently against the freedom of the mother.)

The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point).

The trouble is that pretty much all decisions that get punted far enough upstairs that they are handled by people whose job description is "politician" are trolley problems - lose-lose hypotheticals. More people die or live worse versus less people dying or living worse - which people, where, when, to what degree?

So your refusal to countenance such doesn't stop such decisions existing - it just means you won't be the one personally deciding. But as long as you benefit from the decision (e.g. live in society), I don't think this actually makes you a morally purer person.

I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point).

So I assume you also oppose the death penalty, then?

One of the reasons this post is interesting is because I don't expect it to raise any sort of debate at all - I expect pretty much everyone who posts on LW to be pro-choice. Is this because LW people are part of the "Correct Contrarian Cluster" (although it isn't so contrarian in this context). Or does this mean that LW is massively biased towards a certain political point of view? If the latter, should we be actively aiming to encourage more pro-Lifers to give us useful counterpoints in our debates?

I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point).

Be careful about statements like this due to scope insensitivity. Can you really understand the collective mental effects of the desires of 100 000? Unless you have used some math in coming to this conclusion, your opinion is unlikely to be correlated with reality.

I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom.

Uh, wow. That's exactly backwards for me. Otherwise, With Folded Hands would be a utopia rather than the dystopia most agree it is.

Likewise, your stance appears to rate slave rebellions as worse than the slaves obeying quietly -- you have to go to secondary assertions such as "slave societies will undervalue their slaves and waste their lives", which is not entirely self-evident.

I find anti-abortion values inconsistent. If you favor life then if each prevented abortion costs $500+ you could have saved more lives by investing that money elsewhere. This money then goes to save real people, with personalities and everything.

I see no reason why the costs of enforcing anti-abortion would be low.

I think this is a worthless debate.

I've run into far too many bloggers whose content I enjoy who then feel compelled one day to write about abortion. This inevitably pisses everyone off.

The core of the abortion debate - on both sides - is squick factor, not logic. There are compelling arguments on either side, but no one ever gives the opposition any heed. It's ultimately about whether or not abortion makes you feel funny. My own stance, and the reasons I have for holding it, are not going to convince anyone for more than five minutes before they find a counter argument that supports their gut feeling.

Also, you're wrong about gun control; there is mounting evidence that banning guns results in higher crime, while legalizing them causes crime to decrease. I don't think this argument suffers the same squick factor; while many people knee-jerk to gun control because they're afraid of firearms (and because government legislation feels like 'doing something', no matter how ineffective it is), I've successfully argued many people into changing their stance by presenting evidence.

Abortion? I don't even trust my own rationality to be completely valid, despite holding a stance which goes against what I would like to believe. It's a black hole of rationality fail.

Such an interesting discussion. I lurk on LW, don't really post because to be honest, there's not much I have to contribute that isn't already said by others.

But I just wanted to say how interesting it is to compare how this community discusses the subject is in such contrast to almost every other forum, despite the variety of opinions on the matter.

As for the issue, I remember when I was young (really young) I saw a doco on a third world country, where the mothers would kill their babies if they were female, as they weren't considered an asset in the way that males were, (post birth abortion??) and in my very young mind, it just made striaght forward sense, that a family that can barely survive shouldn't burden themselves further unnecessarily. which probably means when I was young I didn't value human life that much. Now I'm really not sure what to think. I see babies as almost pure potential, so there is that element of wastefulness, but then again, most of the time that potential is just wasted. Makes discussions on a place like this all the more interesting though. I also think it depends a lot on what you think of identity. I view myself more as a malleable collection of memes and ideas as opposed to a physical set of atoms, does that mean me as a baby I don't really identify with as ....me? Are babies anyone yet? (these are non-rhetorical questions btw)

But good show everyone

I figure death is instrumentally bad. It's impossible to be happy when you're dead. The thing is, it's just as impossible if you're dead because you haven't been conceived, and if you're dead because you died. As such, having an abortion is no worse than not conceiving (unless the baby is in fact conscious, and doesn't like being stuck in a womb for nine months).

That said, I consider the fact that it's legal a bad sign. If you're pro-choice, you think preventing abortions are forcing someone to be uncomfortable for nine months. If you're pro-life, you think an abortion is murder. Shouldn't they easily be able to pass a law making abortion illegal, but otherwise doing everything for the pro-choice crowd?

I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is much more important than another human's right to live.

Wait... that sounds off.

It does sound off for the reason you wanted to imply, but it also confused me for another reason. I don't think you meant to write "against", I think you probably meant "for" or "in favor of".

Also, I'm not entirely sure that Less Wrong wants to be used as a forum for politics. From the Less Wrong Wiki:

For all of these reasons, Less Wrong tries to avoid particular political disputes. Of course, discussing conflict reduction skills in the abstract is appropriate and encouraged! In fact, it is the best way of preserving our deliberative, rationalist focus in the face of small-scale disputes and conflicts.

I don't know what the Less Wrong community's general response to political discussion is (I'm fairly new here). I do know that I don't mind discussing it, as long as people are going to try to stay calm about it. I am pro-choice, in general. Fetuses do not seem to have much intelligence, or an awareness of life. I don't think it's a stretch to say that they aren't sentient. If that's true, they certainly still are valuable; as a general rule I would try to avoid personally killing a dolphin or a chimpanzee, and I consider fetuses to be more valuable than that. However, I don't think that they fully qualify as human, so it's not necessarily murder. It's still bad, but it's a small enough bad that abortion may be justified if carrying a pregnancy to term will be problematic.

I recognize that (a) I'm extremely late to the party on this and (b) you say in the comments below that at some point after posting this you reversed your position and became pro-choice.  That said, I have a question:  

Your argument as I understand it is that preserving one person's(a) life is worth placing enormous burden on another person's.  Do you then believe that this obligation continues after birth?  

If so, then it seems to me that in order to be consistent you should be supporting raising taxes (slightly inconveniencing some people) in order to provide funding for various social programs that prevent unnecessary loss of life by guaranteeing everyone has access to food and health care.  You should also be against the death penalty in all cases and for sensible gun laws and free mental health care that reduce school shootings.

It is my (limited, biased) experience that in America most forced-birth conservatives(b) are not consistent on this.  They vote to prevent abortion in order to preserve the life of a pre-birth person but they also vote for other policies that cause death among post-birth people, such as by blocking universal health care and/or controls on the price of insulin or prescription drugs, blocking any gun control laws whatsoever, and defunding programs such as WIC that provide food to poor children.  I would sincerely like an explanation about how these people square the circle.

(a) For the sake of argument, we'll grant that a fetus is a person.

(b) I use the term 'forced-birth conservative' because the term 'pro-life conservative' is not appropriate for the political group I'm discussing, since my specific point is that they are only pro-life for people who have not been born yet.

painless euthenasia is a parental right up until the child is old enough to object IMO. I don't really grasp what sort of pragmatic approach pro-lifers propose. people are going to get abortions whether they are legal or not.

For those of us with a libertarian bent (or an interest in libertarian views), I recently encountered a compelling argument based on the non-aggression principle which both (1) presumes that abortion is categorically the killing of a human being, and (2) endorses a pro-choice position. Block and Whitehead, "Compromising the Uncompromisable: A Private Property Rights Approach to Resolving the Abortion Controversy" (PDF).

Essentially, the argument goes:

• A woman's womb is her property
• An unwanted fetus is therefore a trespasser on her property (even if an unwilling one)
• Therefore, the woman is justified in killing the fetus if that is the only viable way to remove it from her property, just as a landowner would be justified in using violent force to remove a trespasser if and only if all nonviolent attempts had failed.

I've noticed that a lot of people (outside of LW) seem to claim that the bodily autonomy of women is some kind of hyper-value, and often seem to brag about how important they consider it by using counterfactuals, while also claiming that Counterfactuals Are Evil. That's a bit odd because these types of liberals tend not to fall into such seemingly un-utilitarian traps that easily.

I haven't read the entire thread very carefully, but one obvious-to-me argument that I haven't seen raised is:

People will get abortions whether they are legal or not. If they are illegal, they will be much more dangerous; that means more deaths from "back-alley" abortions. More people will be criminals and that means higher law enforcement costs, jail costs, and/or crime rates, which makes your (city, state, not so much in the case of a nation) less desirable and hurts economic activity.

I believe similar arguments have been made on Less Wrong about the "war on drugs." Prostitution and gambling come to mind as other key examples.

I can imagine a time in the future when technology allows us to live in a world where abortions are unnecessary, since birth control of various types (plan B is a huge step in this direction) and simple laboratory fetus nurturing environments will displace it, but that time is certainly not here right now.

How far are you willing to go in this protection of "human life"? Are you willing to have a pregnant woman confined against her will to force her to carry to term, as was done recently in Florida? Isn't that a case of valuing a potential life over mere freedom?

What sort of penalty should a woman who has an abortion be subjected to? Is a few years in prison enough for pre-meditated taking of human life?

On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom.

Well, I suppose the question is if it count as a human being. It's not conscious on the level of an adult human at all. I don't have much knowledge of the science of it, but it's below the level of an animal for a good amount of time. Perhaps after birth as well so far as I know, but that's a whole different can of worms. It grows into becoming a human being, but there's a definite stretch of time where it isn't.

Humans find reasons to kill each other all the time. How is an abortion different from a Fundamentalist Muslim living in the US murdering his daughter because she expressed her personal freedom?

I raise you this question: If a fetus was somehow aware of all the suffering of the world and had the ability to appreciate it, why would it NOT strangle itself with its umbilicus?