Abortion

If Abortion, then Infanticide

David B. Hershenov1 • Rose J. Hershenov2

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

Abstract 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.

Keywords Abortion � Infanticide � Potential � Harm � Moral status

Introduction

It is frequently claimed that there is no common ground between abortion defenders

and opponents. One side may believe that the existence of a divinely created soul

bestows value upon its possessor, or that mere membership in the human species

warrants special protection, or that fetuses are persons from conception and so forth,

& David B. Hershenov [email protected]

Rose J. Hershenov

[email protected]

1 Philosophy Department, University at Buffalo, 135 Park Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA

2 Niagara University, 5795 Lewiston Road, Lewiston, NY 14109, USA

123

Theor Med Bioeth

DOI 10.1007/s11017-017-9419-7

while the other side denies these. The result is deadlock. Nonetheless, there is

common ground—virtually everyone on both sides of the debate is opposed to

infanticide. However, the unwelcome news for abortion defenders is that all of the

major defenses of abortion draw upon principles that also permit infanticide. It is

well-known that defenses of abortion based upon the grounds that the fetus is not a

(neo-Lockean) self-conscious person would allow infanticide as well. But though

less well known, infanticide would also be allowed by abortion defenses that rely on

Judith Thomson’s [1] appeal to a woman’s control of her body, Elizabeth Harman’s

[2] and David Boonin’s [3] reliance on the moral significance of consciousness,

Agnieszka Jaworska and Julia Tannenbaum’s [4] stress on the absence of a rearing

relationship, Elselijn Kingma’s [5] claim that the fetus is literally a part of the

mother, or the American Supreme Court’s resort to viability.

We contend that there is no way to distinguish an infant from a fetus in terms of

an intrinsic morally relevant feature that the former has and the latter lacks—neither

one is rational, morally responsible, self-conscious, concerned about the future, etc.

They both lack the cognitive abilities of most household pets. There have been

attempts to distinguish healthy fetuses from newborns, but they are no more

successful in securing considerable moral status for infants than pointing out that

rabbits and dogs differ in their mental abilities can bestow any significant moral

status upon the more mentally advanced dog. For instance, Jose Bermudez [6]

appeals to a minimal sense of self that newborns acquire through imitation. But the

sense of self in the newborn is far less than that possessed by the dog that misses its

departed owner and anxiously awaits his return, so it is surely too rudimentary to

matter morally. Likewise for Regina Rini’s point that when a fetus becomes

biologically independent of its mother, it has aims that it did not before as it

responds to needs for warmth and food and other needs by ‘‘playing the tiniest role

in their accomplishment through its grasping, suckling and crying…. [N]ewborn infants have aims, but fetuses do not … if the vulnerability of such aims to frustration is morally significant, then there is a morally relevant difference between

a fetus and a newborn’’ [7, p. 356]. 1 Not only are these aims limited to healthy

infants, not to premature or ill infants, but they do not distinguish the infants’ moral

status from that of any household pet or backyard animal. Other philosophers like

Mary Anne Warren write of the bombardment of stimuli that distinguishes birth

from prenatal existence and that the birth of the infant ‘‘marks the beginning of the

infant’s existence as a socially responsive member of a human community’’ [8,

p. 62]. Not only is this not true for premature or ill newborns, but even if it did

distinguish the infant from the fetus, it could not justify any moral status of any

significance since countless non-human young have equivalent abilities but are

accorded little moral status in virtue of them.

That the newborn has not reached a stage of development that bestows intrinsic

value and warrants protection can be more clearly seen if one eliminates any subtle

influence of the potentiality of the infant on one’s thought by imagining another

1 Warren, in her paper on the moral significance of birth, provides counterexamples to Rini’s claims that

‘‘Newborn infants have aims but fetuses do not.’’ Warren points out that late term fetuses, like infants,

turn away from bright lights, respond to loud noises, voices, or others sounds, and are also responsive to

touch, taste, and motion [8, pp. 49–50].

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

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species that normally develops mental states comparable to that of the human infant

but then naturally stagnates, i.e., stays alive but undergoes no further cognitive

development. Such creatures would have very little moral status and we would seem

to be obliged to do little, if anything, to save them, and would not have to take on

much more in the way of burdens to avoid killing them. 2

In addition to rejecting intrinsic bases for distinguishing infants and fetuses, we

will also show that it is unsatisfactory to attempt a distinction on an extrinsic basis,

for it is not always the case that infants can survive independently of their mother’s

bodily support, are less of a burden on their mothers than fetuses, or are in a morally

significant relationship that the fetus is not.

The logic of our position is that if the standard arguments for abortion justify the

practice, then they also justify infanticide. In this article, we will consider the

following five well-known arguments for abortion and show not only that they

justify infanticide but also that the principles they rely upon are not morally

compelling. 3 (1) The inequity of imposing burdens only upon women, but not men,

justifies a right to abort. (2) The fetus does not warrant protection until viable. (3)

The bodily burdens of pregnancy are too great to deny women an autonomy right to

abort throughout their entire pregnancy. (4) Non-sentient fetuses can be aborted

because they lack moral status prior to the onset of consciousness. (5) Fetuses are

parts of the mother, newborns are not. Following this critique, we will then help

ourselves to modus tollens and argue that since infanticide is widely rejected,

abortion should be as well.

Alas, we cannot today just assume that our readers will accept that infanticide is

beyond the pale. 4 Some readers will admit that we have shown that abortion and

infanticide are morally the same, but opt to permit both rather than prohibit both. So,

we will further argue that when potential is properly understood, abortion and

infanticide can be seen to be a considerable harm and evil. We contend that both the

defenders and critics of potentiality arguments in the abortion debate have failed to

appreciate that the potential of mindless or minimally minded creatures that matters

morally is their potential for healthy development. We argue that crucial for

understanding the moral significance of potentiality is the fact that mindless

organisms have interests but only in their healthy development. When they are

mindless, they are without interests in other potential futures. Unlike most kinds of

organisms that develop minds, the operations of a healthy human mind are of a

sophistication and range that bestows them with great value and enables their

possessors to obtain unrivaled levels of well-being. Thus, the frustration of those

interests in healthy mental development is a great harm. Since the healthy

development that is in the fetus’s interest can require all sorts of extrinsic

2 We assume killing is morally worse than letting die, and the evidence for that belief is that one must

take on more burdens to avoid killing someone than to allow an individual to die. For support, see Frances

Myrna Kamm [9]. 3 We are not aware of any other principled defenses of abortion that do not also generalize to allow

infanticide. For example, just stipulating that birth bestows the moral status required for protection

against being killed does not provide a principled distinction between abortion and infanticide. 4 Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva recently defended ‘‘after-birth abortion’’ [10]. Michael Too-

ley [11], Peter Singer [12], Jeff McMahan [13], and John Harris [14] earlier argued for infanticide.

If Abortion, then Infanticide

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interventions, the morally relevant potential is not limited to that which is intrinsic,

active, normal, or probable. And given that those real or hypothesized non-human

beings who are supposed to show the absurdity of protecting potential are not

unhealthy if the mere possibility of their personhood is not actualized, then it

follows that they do not have any interests frustrated by that potential going

untapped. So, potentiality properly construed in terms of healthy development is not

susceptible to reductio ad absurdum, unlike understandings of potentiality as

metaphysical or physical possibility.

Ours is not the only theory to maintain that moral status does not depend upon

sophisticated mental faculties that have already been manifested. So, we finish with

a discussion revealing that our appeal to non-intrinsic developmental features is

successful where an appeal to person-rearing relationships of Jaworska and

Tannenbaum [4] is not. We also show that the latter, like all the other discussed

cutoff points alleged to permit early abortion but not the killing of more developed

human beings, would have to tolerate infanticide.

An abortion ban violates a woman’s right to equal treatment

Since only women get pregnant, they suffer unequally because of their biology. Men

are free from the physical burdens and dangers of pregnancy, as well as the loss of

employment, educational and social opportunities due to unwanted pregnancies, and

child raising. If women are not allowed to choose to be free from a pregnancy that

men naturally avoid, they will bear unequal burdens and be permanently relegated

to second class citizenship. 5 Therefore, some conclude that women are entitled to

abort unwanted pregnancies.

We suspect that few abortion defenders will, upon reflection, insist that abortion

is unjust because it involves an unequal distribution of burdens that falls only on

women. While it is true that only women can get pregnant and no comparable

burden is imposed upon men, 6 we suspect that equality is really beside the point.

This suspicion is partially based upon our belief that if men could also get pregnant

and consequently experienced equal limitations, those using this argument to defend

abortion would still endorse a right to abortion. Egalitarian abortion defenders

would not want abortion rights to go away if motherhood increases a woman’s

standing above that of men. Imagine that more respect and power came with more

children [16, p. 98]. Nor would they want abortion rights to vanish if men were

5 Variations of the equality defense can be found in Catherine McKinnon [15], Martha Nussbaum [16,

pp. 342–343], Melinda Roberts [17, pp. 162–164], Alison Jaggar [18, pp. 147–149], Cass Sunstein [19,

pp. 29–44], and Sally Markowtiz [20, pp. 12]. Even Thomson [21] expresses some sympathy for this

position, though she is better known for appealing to a bodily control defense [1]. 6 Perhaps wars were once fought in such a physically demanding manner that the armies had to be

drafted from only the ranks of men. More likely, the nature of battle only required wars to be fought by

the conscription of men or women of sufficient strength. Perhaps then the physically strong were

disadvantaged by their biology but not wronged. However, the benefits and burdens of fighting may be

too disanalogous to child bearing to be used in an analogical argument.

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

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legally required to take on more childcare burdens after birth so that the mothers did

not lose out on social-economic opportunities.

This inequality argument provides a defense of infanticide. If we modify a

Frances Myrna Kamm example, imagine that women so bond with their children

around a week after childbirth that they cannot give them up for adoption or let

anyone else provide for their day care. Our society surely would not let them

commit infanticide in the week before the unbreakable bonds set in. If such changed

desires are too farfetched, then imagine a woman giving birth in an isolated

community where there is not any digestible formula, breast pumps to fill up bottles,

available wet nurses, or other substitutes for her nursing. Thus, the mother must

breastfeed around the clock. Assume this is painful as well as exhausting, and limits

her social, educational, and professional opportunities more than it limits the

father’s opportunities. Nevertheless, the mother surely cannot kill or let die the

nursing child despite these considerable burdens being unequally distributed. 7

Whatever one thinks about the need for more equality, it is typically maintained

that one cannot kill to remove barriers to equality, especially when those killed are

not blameworthy. So, if inequality arguments do not justify infanticide, then why

would they justify abortion? We have already mentioned that there is not any

intrinsic morally significant difference between fetuses and newborns. The isolation

in the second infanticide thought experiment removes the typical extrinsic

difference between fetuses and infants: the burden of the infant being transferable

to others. The limits of the equality approach support our suspicion that avoiding

inequities is providing a reason to have an abortion that ultimately must be justified

independently from social inequalities. 8 So, if the inequality presently plays any role

here, it is just intensifying the existing grievance of having one’s bodily freedom

restricted in a society where women have historically been denied the opportunities

of men. We think that what is far more likely to be doing the real moral work in this

defense of abortion is a belief that a woman’s autonomy allows her to refuse to take

on the immense physical burdens involved in pregnancy, regardless of whether the

burdens are universally shared. Unequal treatment is really beside the point, for such

an exercise of autonomy would be deemed legitimate for men as well if they could

become pregnant or faced equal burdens and opportunities. 9

7 Any concerns that such unequal burdens are not considerable enough—thus, that infanticide is unjust

while abortion is not because nursing is not as difficult as carrying a fetus to term—will be met by our

response below to the fourth argument. 8 Our view is shared by Kamm [22, p. 98].

9 We should qualify our claim and recognize the case of Sally Markowitz, brought to our attention by an

anonymous referee, who would seem to accept the inequality defense of abortion even if that means

abortion could be banned in a truly egalitarian society. The conclusion of Markowitz’s 1990 article is,

‘‘Let feminists insist that the condition for refraining from having abortions is a sexually egalitarian

solution’’ [20, p. 12]. So, that remark and earlier comments that are somewhat dismissive of the autonomy

defense of abortion may indeed mean that Markowitz would prefer the equality justification to the

autonomy defense of abortion. Markowitz writes, ‘‘Autonomy arguments though are not much of an

improvement. They take into account the well-being of individual women but they manage to skirt the

issue of woman’s status, as a group, in a sexist society’’ [20, p. 3]. Nevertheless, we still suspect that most

of those who appeal to the equality defense will fall back on the autonomy defense given that it could

mean abortion rights would lose that justification in an egalitarian society.

If Abortion, then Infanticide

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Abortion is permissible until the fetus becomes viable

We will first consider viability to mean that the fetal individual can live

independently of the gestational mother and then subsequently understand it to

mean that an individual can live independently of any particular person’s bodily

support or mechanical substitute for an immature or failing biology. On either

construal, if the principle of viability truly forms the basis of the abortion

defender’s position, then it will allow for infanticide. Consider a woman giving

birth in an isolated community where adoption services are absent or she is unable

to put the child up for adoption for months. Assume, as before, that there is no

alternative to around-the-clock breastfeeding because there is no formula available

or the baby cannot digest it. The infant is not viable because she cannot live

without being sustained by internal products of the mother’s body. If the reader

insists that the newborn who needs her mother to produce milk is just generically

dependent upon the mother’s body, unlike the gestating embryo whose needs

cannot be met by anyone else, then we can just stipulate that the mother’s milk is

unique and no wet nurse can be substituted. Surely the mother cannot legitimately

bring about the death of her dependent newborn even though the child is not

viable, i.e., cannot live without the support of the nourishment provided by her

body. 10

So, independence from one’s mother cannot be the basis of the moral

status that protects one’s life.

We can also easily show that viability is not a morally significant principle if the

term just means that one can live independently of the biological support of others,

not just the mother. Consider conjoined twins. There is not a lack of moral status if

one or both are unable to survive separation surgery and live independently of the

other. Or imagine someone’s failing body resulting in their needing medical

equipment to stay alive. Such people would not lose any moral status during the

time they lack viability.

We suspect that most of those who defend abortion by appeal to viability do not

really believe viability is morally significant. Their lack of a deep commitment to

the principle of viability can be revealed when they are asked to imagine

hypothetical scenarios where the timing of the onset of viability is changed.

Consider first a scenario in which viability does not occur until late in the ninth

month of pregnancy, though all other development continues normally. Abortion

would be permitted virtually up to birth. But few abortion proponents would be

comfortable with this, even though they should not be disconcerted if viability truly

mattered morally. Next, assume that the onset of viability occurs just a few days

after conception. Most women would discover they are pregnant after the embryo

becomes viable and thus virtually no abortions would be justified. 11

But if viability

is held to be a morally legitimate cut off point for abortion, then whenever it occurs,

10 If one objects that the mother would just be letting the child die by not feeding it, then imagine a

hungry infant aided by a relentless adult who continually places the newborn upon the woman’s breast.

The only way to stop such imposed feedings is to kill the infant. 11

To meet the objection that such women could still avoid the pregnancy by giving birth prematurely, we

stipulate that some pregnant women are too frail to safely induce labor, though they could safely abort.

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

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that threshold should be morally acceptable. 12

But the discomfort with viability as a

cut-off point, if it were to occur much sooner or much later, suggests to us that what

really accounts for the appeal of viability is not the actual principle of total

independence from the mother but just the current time at which our existing

biotechnology enables the fetus to become capable of living outside the womb. We

surmise that the attraction of the current onset of viability at roughly six months

after conception is because it gives women a grace period to reflect upon such a

weighty decision and still allows abortion defenders to admit the nearly-born fetus

has some value and deserves a modicum of respect and protection without forcing a

woman to provide an unwanted nine months of bodily support.

Consciousness distinguishes abortion from infanticide

Some philosophers defend the position that consciousness is a morally significant

threshold that can distinguish earlier permissible abortions from later impermissible

abortions. Our response is that they are overestimating the importance of their own

thoughts—and everyone else’s. They need to explain why consciousness is

important for immunity from being killed. 13

Is it because the conscious person

would then undergo a painful death? It would seem not. An infant (or anyone) could

be painlessly killed while asleep, but surely that is wrong. Is it that consciousness

brings a morally significant cutoff point for permissible abortions because only the

conscious can have certain interests that warrant protection? Again, the answer

seems to be no. Consider a newborn unaware that she needs some high tech life-

saving procedure to avoid a painless disease and death. Surely, it is in the infant’s

interest to have her health maintained even though she is not conscious of that

interest.

The existence of interests that one is unaware of is what makes it so hard to

believe Harman’s claim that while mindless embryos have an interest in continued

life and are greatly harmed by their death, such interests do not have moral

significance since the embryos are not conscious [2, p. 185]. It is very difficult to see

why consciousness would make such harm a morally significant harm if the

conscious newborn is not conscious of its longstanding interest in its life being

preserved. So, if consciously conceptualizing that interest is not required for that

interest to belong to the infant and to matter morally, why would that interest not

exist earlier and be morally significant in the embryo before there is any

consciousness at all? Alternatively, if the mindless embryo is not protected from

abortion because it does not have an interest in more life in the absence of a

conscious concern with living on into the future, then it is difficult to see why the

12 Contrast viability with the onset of an obviously morally significant trait like having a mind like ours.

If a mutation resulted in such a mental life arising in the fetus before viability, many who previously

accepted abortion at that stage would find it nearly impossible to do so anymore. At best, they would have

to rely upon Thomson-like arguments that refer to features extrinsic to the fetus, such as it being an unjust

burden upon the unwilling mother. 13

Harman surprisingly declares that she ‘‘will not offer any independent argument for’’ the claim that ‘‘a

being has moral status at t just in case it is ever conscious and it is not dead at t’’ [2, p. 184].

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fact that the infant is already conscious protects it against infanticide, if it has not

consciously entertained a concern with surviving into the future.

Boonin claims that the newborn should be accorded an idealized desire in staying

alive [3]. He argues that the newborn’s desires for warmth and food etc. gives her an

idealized desire to live so as to fulfill those conscious desires. He compares the

newborn’s desire for more life to the idealized desire of a hiker to go left at a fork

because he is unaware of a bomb planted on the path forking to the right. The hiker

has desires in avoiding injury, pain, etc. that would give her an idealized desire to

avoid the bomb on the right fork even though she is unaware of its presence. We

argue that Boonin’s account is insufficient because the newborn has interests that

cannot be explained by idealization. The newborn can have a non-conceptualized

interest in surgery that will ensure reproductive capacities or a certain kind of

intellectual growth that does not serve any of her present desires in warmth, food,

etc. We even hypothesize that the newborn can outgrow its existing desires but still

retain an interest in future life that it does not conceptualize. For example, the

interest in food is really just a desire to remove a feeling of discomfort, at least

before the first breastfeeding. We take perhaps some liberties, but harmless ones, to

make our point by imagining that the baby’s qualia and desire for the first liquid

meal is unlike the qualia and desire later for solids. The newborn surely has an

interest in living and a right to life that she cannot conceptualize which is not

captured by an idealization ensuring existing desires are satisfied. If not, infanticide

is acceptable. So if an infant has interests that she is unaware of that are not

idealizations from given existent desires, the same is true for the non-conscious

fetus.

It cannot be that the onset of consciousness by itself so increases a creature’s

value that it becomes wrong to kill it. There are countless types of nonhuman

animals that are conscious but have very little moral status. So consciousness per se

seems to bestow little value. It is really the potential for a certain type of

consciousness that matters morally. But Harman, perhaps influenced by Shelly Ka-

gan’s [23] discussion of the additive fallacy, is sympathetic to the idea that it is

consciousness and potentiality that together bestow moral significance. Kagan

diagnosed an additive fallacy where the reduction of value due to the removal of one

feature wrongly led to a belief that the value of the whole was to be determined by

adding the value of the components. An analogous mistake would be removing an

ingredient from a recipe that resulted in it tasting half as good as it did before and

thus thinking that the removed ingredient provided half of the good taste. If the meal

scored a six on a taste scale, the removed ingredient would then be ranked a three

according to the fallacious additive inference. But that ingredient may have been

rather bland by itself, so its contribution with other ingredients to the fine taste of the

meal is better captured by a multiplier than an additive effect.

However, we can show the unimportance of multiplying consciousness with

potentiality if we imagine a scarce life-saving drug that one can either give to a five-

month-old fetus that just became minimally conscious a day earlier or to a fetus that

will become minimally conscious in a day. Consciousness, in this case, seems to

hold little value; it appears to be a coin toss to decide who gets the drug. Such

reactions suggest that we are not guilty of an additive fallacy and overlooking how

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potentiality and its partner properties produce value via multiplication. Such

responses to the scarce drug choice scenario perfectly cohere with our claim that it

is the potential for personhood of the embryo at any stage that matters rather than

the potential for personhood only of the conscious.

A perennial challenge for the abortion proponent is to defend abortion without

offering a justification of infanticide as well. Some abortion defenders argue that

consciousness is what provides moral status and what makes late abortion and

infanticide wrong, but not early abortion. It is standardly thought that consciousness

emerges around five months after conception. So, one feature that appeals to many

is that early fetuses can be killed but that consciousness protects the infant.

However, unhealthy newborns might lack consciousness such that infanticide is not

ruled out in their case. Perhaps some people will accept the killing of the mindless.

Even so, we doubt they would if the lack of infant consciousness was temporary.

But then it is hard to see why the temporary unconsciousness of the fetus fails to

protect it.

We suspect that most abortion defenders are, unbeknownst to themselves, not

really committed to the moral significance of consciousness. We will mention two

possibilities to support this. The first has to do with panpsychism and the second is

akin to our argument against viability that involved changing the onset of the

allegedly morally significant cutoff point. First, if panpsychism is true, then

consciousness or experience is not going to be a morally significant divide since

everything has some sort of experience. Panpsychism strikes us as a live possibility,

that is, for all we know, it is true. 14

The epistemic possibility of panpsychism suggests that the abortion cut off

position would then have to be reconstrued as a type of consciousness that brainless

embryos lack. This seems to be, morally, a less significant ontological divide.

Distinguishing those with experiences from those without has some plausibility as a

moral demarcation. Even making a moral distinction between those with self-

consciousness and those with mere consciousness seems somewhat plausible. But

distinguishing brainless experiences hypothesized by the panpsychic from mere

14 Galen Strawson claims that consciousness can no more arise from non-consciousness than the

extended from the non-extended, the spatial from the non-spatial, or the abstract from the concrete.

Strawson believes brute generation ‘‘is actually incoherent and that emergence has acquired an air of

plausibility (or at least possibility) for some simply because it has been appealed to many times in the face

of seeming mystery’’ [24, p. 12]. He contrasts the brute emergentist relation of the mental from the

physical with that of the liquidity from water molecules. The molecules of water have properties and obey

laws, so that liquidity can be seen to consist in nothing else but their lawful interactions. It is not at all

mysterious how their movement gives rise to liquidity. To put it in David Chalmers’s language [25], the

facts of liquidity are fully determined by the lower level physical facts, assuming one has the upper level

concept of liquidity. But the emergence of consciousness from the non-conscious physical is not like that.

And there is little hope that a future science will enable us to discover an entailment from the physical to

the experiential because future physics will just be more of the same structural and functional

explanations. We only know of the fundamental physical entities by their relations—i.e., how they affect

other objects. For example, what it is for something to have mass is to accelerate when encountering

certain forces and the like. But conscious experience is not functional. Any future physical functional

story of causal inputs and outputs could operate in the absence of experience, i.e., in Chalmers’s zombie

world. The problem is that conscious experience involves something it is to be like and this is not a

functional conception.

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consciousness of those fetuses and newborns with very limited brains seems less

significant metaphysically and morally. So the epistemic possibility of panpsychism

can help readers see that they are not really committed to the moral significance of

mere consciousness. They would not consider it wrong to destroy the many

brainless entities with minimal experiences in a panpsychic world.

A second reason to doubt those readers’ commitment to the moral significance of

consciousness is that the real moral ‘‘heavy lifting’’ may be being done by the timing

of the onset of consciousness rather than the mere presence of consciousness. Our

suspicion is that the emergence of a mind at five months is appealing because it

provides women with a grace period to make such momentous decisions. Banning

abortion from that point onward serves to recognize the value of the fetus. To ensure

that it is consciousness itself that is solely significant, we suggest altering the onset

of consciousness. Imagine the fetus becomes minimally conscious a week after

fertilization. If consciousness were a morally significant cut off point, then abortion

would be impermissible before most women even knew they were pregnant. Most

pro-choice advocates would not find that an appealing cut off. Next, imagine fetuses

do not become conscious until late in the ninth month of pregnancy, just days before

birth. Would abortion be acceptable nearly right up to delivery? We very much

doubt it.

A right to be free of considerable bodily burdens

We believe that the autonomy right to control one’s body is the most common

defense of abortion and probably what is really doing all of the justificatory work for

those who appeal to the first and third of the above arguments, and doing much of

the moral heavy lifting in the case of viability. 15

More precisely, this right to control

one’s body is the right only to reject immense burdens since many abortion

defenders believe that late abortion can be banned and thus a woman compelled to

use her body to support another for a few months. In Thomson’s language, the right

would only entitle women to refrain from being a Good Samaritan for ‘‘there may

well be cases in which carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent

Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a standard we must not fall below’’ [1,

p. 65]. However, our contention is that if there is such a right that justifies abortion,

then it will also justify infanticide.

Imagine a tornado throws a newborn (a potential person in the Neo-Lockean

conception of ‘‘person’’) and an unrelated adult onto the roof of an extremely

damaged building. The newborn is on that adult’s lap and wiggling. Her wiggling

will cause the roof to collapse and both the adult and newborn to fall. If the newborn

had remained still, both would have been fine. Given the adult’s current position, he

will hit the ground first and will thus cushion the infant who will emerge unscathed.

The position the adult is in when he hits the ground will make the impact as painful

as an actual delivery that ends a pregnancy. In addition, it will cause him nine

15 The current technologically dependent onset of viability means a woman’s body can at most be used

for about three months against her wishes.

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

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months of back pain, abdominal swelling, nausea, frequent urination and bodily

discomfort comparable to that endured in a pregnancy. If he rotates before the roof

gives way, then he will cause the child to hit the ground first and the impact will

fatally crush his skull but the adult will be able to land on his feet and walk away

unharmed.

Is the adult morally permitted to rotate and kill the infant to avoid nine months of

physical pain? It would seem not. And that is true even though the newborn has no

right to be on the adult’s body 16

and his wiggling will be the cause of his burdens

just as the fetus is a hardship for the pregnant woman. Why then would the mother’s

right to control her body justify killing a fetus, which, like the infant, is just a

potential person? We noted in the introduction that there is not a morally relevant

(intrinsic) developmental difference between fetuses and infants. And we have just

shown that they cannot be distinguished morally on the (extrinsic) basis of fetuses

being more burdensome than infants.

Why then is the intuition in Thomson’s violinist scenario that the kidnapped

reader can disconnect and bring about the death of the violinist? Drawing upon Peter

Unger’s work, we would venture that the psychologically efficacious factors

determining our divergent responses in the two thought experiments are those he

calls ‘‘projective separation’’ and ‘‘projective grouping’’ [26, pp. 96–101]. The

psychological phenomenon of projective grouping is illustrated in our rooftop case.

The two individuals, neither of whom are responsible for his or the other’s

predicament, are both understood by the reader to be in the same bad situation

facing a threat. Our psychological makeup is such that we projectively group the

entangled people together in the same unfortunate scenario, and then, once we view

their plights as interconnected, we feel compelled to minimize the harm in such a

scenario, and this amounts to letting the larger person shield the smaller.

Projective separation can be illustrated by Thomson’s famous thought experi-

ment. The healthy person and the violinist who ends up supported by him are not

viewed as being in the same bad situation. The ailing violinist is understood as

having his harm ‘‘transferred’’ to a completely unrelated person. 17

The healthy

person in the violinist scenario is not like the larger person entangled in the ropes.

Instead, the healthy person is viewed as an uninvolved person, whose relationship

with the violinist begins only after the latter becomes ill and even then is

accomplished through a kidnapping which in our minds serves to highlight the

distance that existed between the two men. In Unger’s language, we do not

projectively group him with the violinist in the same bad situation, instead we

projectively separate him from the violinist. Because of this projective separation it

16 Someone lacking a right to be on or in one’s body means they can be removed even if they do not want

to be. But they can be removed only if that can be done safely. To better appreciate this, imagine that

someone who is bird watching and absent mindedly trespassing on one’s private property trips and breaks

his neck. That person has no right to remain there. But if moving the person would be fatal, then his right

to life permits him to stay where he otherwise does not have a right to be. So, our position about the

wrongness of abortion and infanticide can be maintained even if we admit that the fetus has no right to be

in someone’s body and the newborn has no right to be on it. 17

Patrick Lee speculates that it may also be that the violinist is tainted by the kidnappers and so is

experienced as inheriting some of their evil [27, p. 127].

If Abortion, then Infanticide

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appears wrong for the violinist’s misfortune to be transferred to the man with the

healthy kidney. 18

Thomson’s Henry Fonda case can be seen as further evidence for our Unger-

inspired thesis about the morally irrelevant but psychologically efficacious

projective grouping and separation of people in harm. Our intuition is that Fonda

does not have to travel across the country to save someone’s life by magically

touching the latter’s brow. But contrast this refusal and our lenient attitude towards

such inaction with a case in which, throughout his career, Fonda never spends a cent

of his earnings except for the minimum necessary for room and board. Then, at the

age of sixty-five, he takes all his life’s savings with him onto a boat to travel abroad

to finally enjoy his earnings in a luxurious retirement. But his boat collides with

another ship and both go down. Fonda is alone on a life boat with all of his earnings

in the uninsurable form of gold coins, jewels, and suitcases of cash. He sees

someone from the other boat drowning, but he can only pull him on board if he

throws all his savings overboard where they will be irretrievably lost. Our dominant

reaction is that he must give up all his money which means he basically worked his

whole life for free. Now if he must do this, then he surely must fly across the country

to save a life in Thomson’s scenario because that is far less demanding. We believe

projective grouping explains the different reactions people may have to the two

cases. Both shipwrecked men are basically in the same dangerous maritime

situation, while in the Thomson scenario, one does not group far away and

uninvolved men together, which does not seem to give the ill person a right that

another man, Fonda, who is far away and uninvolved, come to his aid.

We can further see the psychological phenomena of projective separation and

grouping at work in a case in which a runaway trolley is made to jump its tracks by a

person who knows that it will roll for five miles until it comes to a stop and kills an

old woman in her home watching television. This person who derails the trolley

does so in order to prevent it from killing two people who have been trapped on the

tracks. We imagine that many readers would not be psychologically able to redirect

the trolley in the just mentioned way. Even if the reader could ‘‘stomach’’ making

the trolley leave its tracks in such a situation, she or he would likely find that it is

much harder to bring about the distant death of the elderly woman while she is

relaxing on her sofa in front of her television than if there is a heavy fellow on a

second fork of a looped track on to which one could switch the trolley in order to

save the lives of two other track-bound innocents. 19

Moreover, if the trolley has

been switched by someone else, fewer people will help the hefty man get off the

tracks. But we expect that most people will be much more willing, as well as

consider themselves much more justified, to help someone disconnect the violinist.

Now, while projective grouping should be seen as psychologically efficacious, it

should not be interpreted as morally relevant. We are assuming that the reader will

18 The bearing of projective separation and projective grouping on abortion is explored in more detail in

Hershenov [28]. 19

Thomson herself says it would be permissible to switch the trolley and thus to use the hefty person as a

means to saving the track-bound persons [29, p. 102]. That the person on the looped track is used as a

means to the others’ survival makes the example more analogous to the violinist using someone for

support than the standard trolley example.

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

123

find this obvious now that the operations of projective grouping and separation have

been pointed out. When all the parties involved are innocent in the relevant sense, 20

one should just minimize harms. Their location does not matter morally. Projective

grouping and separation merely explain why it is difficult to always minimize harm

amongst innocent victims. 21

Embryos are parts of the mother, newborns are not

There are a number of philosophers who believe that it is significant that the fetus is

a part of the mother [30–33]. Kingma [5] may be the most metaphysically

sophisticated and she contrasts her view with Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard’s

[34], who claim that the fetus instead stands to the mother in an occupant or niche

relationship roughly analogous to the astronaut in the spaceship [5, p. 33]. Kingma

provides good reasons to think that the fetus is actually not an occupant of a

maternal niche but is rather a literal part of the mother. The fetus seems bound to the

mother much in the way the stalks of other organs are connected to the rest of the

body. We do not quibble here with Kingma’s metaphysics of fetal parthood, but just

show that morally, it offers abortion defenders little help. 22

We suspect that there are no moral differences if the fetus is a part of the mother

rather than an independent substance. Autonomy, privacy, and non-interference do

not hinge on the question of the fetus’s parthood. If the fetus does not undergo

substantial change with birth, then we do not see much moral significance in its

parthood status. In fact, we think that if anything, it hurts the pro-choice position for

two abortion defenses are no longer available. The first is that abortion must be

accepted for the fetus violates the bodily integrity of the mother. But if the fetus is a

part of the mother, then it cannot violate her bodily integrity. Only something that is

not a part of her body can violate her bodily integrity. It could be that it violates her

autonomy, but that is a different matter. The second loss for a pro-choice position is

that the fetus cannot be a trespasser if it is part of the mother. One’s part cannot

trespass upon oneself. Thus it cannot be claimed that the fetus is a trespasser who as

20 This ‘‘relevant sense’’ is that they are not responsible for the harm or have any greater duty to risk such

harms as perhaps soldiers and police and maybe even trolley track workmen have on certain occasions. 21

It is worth pointing out that we have taken on the strongest version of Thomson’s position, one whose

appeal is strengthened because it lacks certain analogies with abortion and assumes the rejection of

certain common sense moral assumptions. If the violinist, a stranger whose predicament one is not

responsible for, must be saved, then many would grant that there is an even stronger case for supporting

the fetus that is one’s own child and who is in need because of the mother’s choice, in non-rape induced

pregnancies, and can only be removed by being killed. (1) It is commonly held that we have special

obligations to our children that are not consent based. (2) It is also widely held that being responsible for

another’s predicament provides some obligation to ameliorate the situation. (3) Finally, it is typically

maintained that killing is worse than letting die. We have not helped ourselves to any of these claims in

contesting Thomson’s violinist thought experiment. Adding them to the mix just strengthens our pro-life

position. 22

If Kingma is right about the fetus being a part of the mother, there is only a morally significant impact

if this is accompanied by the successful defense of the claim that the fetus is not a human being but

undergoes substantial change and is replaced by a human being that comes into existence with the

separation of birth. Reasons to doubt this claim are presented below in the main text.

If Abortion, then Infanticide

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such has no right to be in the mother’s body if literally a part of the mother’s body.

It is, on the other hand, conceptually coherent to claim that the mother has the right

to remove the fetus, as she does with other unwanted parts, but that is just an

autonomy right and is independent of the parthood relationship. Thomson,

incidentally, recognized this. She concludes her famous paper with what seems to

be a recognition of fetal parthood, claiming, ‘‘A woman may be utterly devastated

by the thought of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adoption and never seen or

heard of again’’ [1]. So, she relies upon bodily control or autonomy considerations

despite apparently accepting the feminist position that the fetus is a part of the

mother.

If autonomy is taken to the extreme, then that will allow a woman to control her

body as it supports another, even if that other is not a part of her but just lies within

or on top of her. Of course, we do not believe that autonomy rights justify abortion.

Nor do we see any reason to believe why the autonomy right is made any stronger

by the fetus being a part of the mother rather than being inside her body without

being a part of it. It does not matter if the fetus is a part of the mother’s body rather

than an occupant within her body putting great strain on it. This is especially clear in

the case of conjoined twins, who share parts that are essential to the life of each.

Neither twin will be able to control that shared part and take it with her upon

surgical separation, even though it is a part. 23

So parthood per se does not matter

morally. What matters morally is due to other factors like the value of the conjoined

twins and their capacity to be harmed and benefited.

Kingma thinks that the fetus’s mereological status as a part of the mother

produces a dilemma—either the fetus is a part and thus there can be human beings

within larger human beings, which would violate the maximality principle that

entities of the same kind cannot be parts of each other, or the fetus is a part and does

not become a human being until birth when it is separated. Kingma prefers to accept

the second horn. We do not think the first horn is very sharp. 24

The second horn

would render abortion more akin to contraception in that it keeps a human being

from coming into existence. And this would apparently provide a principled way to

distinguish abortion from infanticide.

It might be thought that treating the fetus as a part that undergoes substantial

change at birth will provide a way to distinguish abortion from infanticide. Abortion

does not kill a human being but just a precursor to a human being. It is more like

contraception in that sense. It is only infanticide that terminates a human being.

However, the background metaphysics will turn out to make it the case that

infanticide has already been occurring and could occur in the future in cases that

23 Likewise, imagine that only part of the fetus is a part of the mother. The mother could not do what she

wants with that part because it is also a part of her. We do not see why a different treatment would be

called for if the fetus were completely a part of the mother or one twin were completely embedded within

another. 24

It is counterintuitive to have adult organisms within adult organisms but it does not strike us as that

odd to think of fetuses as parts. They are special parts in that they are designed to separate and grow and

flourish (unlike other parts that are designed only to separate—sperm, baby teeth, etc.) Human beings

within human beings certainly does not strike us as more counterintuitive than the recognition that male

fetuses are parts of their mothers, such that the mother has a penis, four eyes, and four legs. The sting can

be taken off if this is understood to be just a temporary situation of a young human being within another.

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

123

will surely be objectionable. To illustrate the latter, imagine the newborn has not yet

had its umbilical cord cut. Technically, it is still a part of the mother even though it

has passed through the birth canal and is in the arms of the doctor or nurse. To kill it

would be infanticide. One might insist that it is not yet a newborn or infant for it is

still attached. But we doubt that would convince many ordinary English users.

Anyway, we can also imagine the nursing newborn, after the umbilical cord is cut,

secreting a bonding solution that temporarily attaches her to the mother’s breast in

such a way as to meet the parthood criterion. Few readers would accept that

attachment is infanticide because a part to whole relation is established, or that the

attached could be killed, or that anything would cease to exist once the nursing

newborn is later detached.

If separation from the mother’s body is what transforms a fetus into an infant,

then if the fetus breaks loose from the uterine wall or the mother’s placenta, then

it would be an infant for it is no longer part of her body, even if it is still inside

her. 25

Ironically, surgery to repair the connection would be infanticide, or the

killing of a human being, for that would render the human being a part of the

mother again. Moreover, if any abortion proceeded by first removing the fetus

from the uterine wall before it died, that would end as infanticide as the parthood

relation would be severed. 26

So if coming through the birth canal is not what

makes one an infant but the loss of parthood status, then the detached embryo is

an infant within the mother’s body though not a part of the body. The infant is an

occupant in her womb akin to the way the present reader is an occupant in his or

her office.

The second horn of Kingma’s dilemma introduces a very bizarre metaphysics of

organisms that pops in and out of existence. If organisms cannot be parts of another

substance, then does the premature newborn go out of existence when connected to

the incubator in certain ways (connected in whatever way is required for parthood)

and pop back into existence when removed? That strikes us as preposterous. We do

not see why it would matter that the ‘‘incubator’’ is one of the same kind, another

human being, especially if the parthood bond is structurally the same. Anyway, the

secretion that temporarily bonds the nursing baby to the mother will be a case of an

entity in another of the same kind. If it is claimed in response that the nursing baby

and the mother would just share a part, we would reply that the same can be said

about the embryo when it is in the mother’s womb.

25 Did the embryo go out of existence when it became embedded in the uterine wall? That is hard to

believe. We doubt that there is a principled distinction that can be made between before and after

implantation, where it was one kind of substance during the first 5–7 days post-fertilization, then another

at implantation, then another at birth. 26

Any drug that prevents the early embryo from embedding in the uterine wall would also be infanticide

unless being an infant entailed having been born. We doubt this is a conceptual truth as it appears not to

be a mistaken use of the word infant to describe motherless very young children created by God or made

in a lab as ‘‘infants.’’

If Abortion, then Infanticide

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Why infanticide is wrong

Some readers might admit that abortion defenses are also defenses of infanticide but

also accept that infants as well as fetuses can be killed. We are skeptical of the

claims of Jeff McMahan [13] and others (e.g., Peter Singer [12], Michael Tooley

[11]) that newborns and the unborn lack the interests necessary for a right to life.

We think that they fail to distinguish something being in an individual’s interest

from that individual taking an interest in something. 27

It is in the embryo and

neonate’s interest to live on even though they have not taken an interest (i.e., desire)

to live further into the future. Analogously, vegetables are in a child’s interest but he

is not interested in them. All living things have an interest in healthy development.

We can ascribe interests to potential persons, even mindless ones, to live and

develop in a healthy fashion by which they will flourish. It may even be that

consciousness evolved to promote a well-being that organisms had previously

furthered without awareness of doing so. If one does not accept that non-sentient

beings can have welfare, then one will be unable to explain the harm of a person

lapsing into a coma or the benefit of someone coming out of a coma, for harms and

benefits involve changes from one level of well-being to another, not a move to or

from the absence of any well-being. There is a difference between the absence of or

no well-being on the one hand and zero or low-level well-being on the other. We

were all devoid of any level of well-being (even zero) before we existed and that

explains why coming into existence is not a benefit. The comatose have zero or low

well-being, unlike nonexistent artifacts, mountains, and so on, which have no well-

being.

Our contention is that all living entities are capable of well-being and have an

interest in their own good. 28

Even blades of grass can be said to literally thrive and

thus have an intrinsic well-being and a nonmetaphorical interest in sun and nutrient-

rich soil. Despite having interests, however, a blade of grass has a future that is not

very valuable, so its interests are given far less moral weight than those of human

beings. Assuming that the degree of the harm of an entity’s death depends, in part,

upon the value and extent of the well-being that it loses out on, the grass is harmed

very little. The same is true for most non-human animals. 29

A healthy human fetus,

on the other hand, has the potential to realize mental capacities of considerable

value that will enable it to flourish to a considerable extent.

We think it is revealing to note the structural similarities between health and

well-being. We speak of the diseased as doing poorly, the recovering as doing

better, and the healthy as flourishing. We likewise describe those who undergo

significant drops in well-being as doing poorly, who undergo increases in well-being

as doing better, and who experience an abundance of well-being as flourishing. It is

27 This distinction is found more often in the environmental than bioethical literature. See Tom Regan

[35] and Paul Taylor [36]. 28

We are not denying that there could be non-living but conscious entities which have interests and well-

being. 29

So, our theory of interests and harms does not provide any additional reason to be a vegetarian or to

treat animals better.

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

123

not metaphorical to claim that the healthy are thriving or that those with

considerable well-being are also. It is good for a plant or fetus to thrive. The causes

and constituents of their flourishing are in their interest.

We maintain that the morally relevant sense of potential is determined by the

healthy development of the kind of organism in question. 30

Every living entity has

an interest in its own healthy development. What is healthy development is not

determined by active or intrinsic potential. Those with congenital disabilities, even

the anencephalic, have the potential to be healthy members of their kind (though

intervention is needed) and have an interest in a cure. This is why those with severe

cognitive impairments should receive the only dose of a person-producing serum

rather than say a normal feline fetus. The latter is not unhealthy and its interests, like

that of all mindless creatures, are limited to its healthy development. This explains

why we reject McMahan [39, p. 354] and James Rachels’s [40, p. 173] defense of

moral individualism, which is the doctrine that the treatment of an individual ought

to be determined not by any group membership but by respecting the individual’s

own particular characteristics. If readers think that healthy development cannot be

morally significant and be a basis for interests relevant to our well-being because

these interests are not determined by intrinsic properties, then they should reflect

upon the lessons of semantic externalism. The beliefs and desires we have are

determined and constituted, in part, by the external environment, not solely by what

is in our head. Yet, they are certainly relevant to the value of our interests and our

being harmed or benefited.

Mindless organisms only have interests in healthy development or proper

functioning and the flourishing that involves. So, an embryo has an interest in

growing a healthy, properly functioning brain but no interest, then, in becoming a

football player, even if it later dreams of Super Bowl fame as an adolescent. It is not

enough for a mindless entity to be identical to a later being for it presently to have

an interest in that later being’s welfare. The future good must be in the mindless

being’s interest when it is mindless. And the only basis we can see for ascribing

interests to the mindless is by appealing to the good realized by their proper

functioning, i.e., healthy development for entities of that kind. Health is a necessary

condition for flourishing and constitutive of a good deal of valuable well-being in a

healthy person. The living will always have an interest in health-produced

flourishing. All flourishing depends upon health being present (to some) degree and

every living being has an interest in health at every stage of its life, including its

embryonic stages. When it is mindless, there is probably nothing else to its good

than its health, i.e., its proper functioning is constitutive of its flourishing. But that is

still very valuable and is why infanticide is a great wrong.

30 We have argued elsewhere that this conception of potential avoids all the reductios of potential

[37, 38]. It does not matter that the cells of the early embryo are totipotent, human somatic cells can be

cloned, gametes can have their development induced parthenogenetically, oysters can become persons on

alien environments, or kittens can be injected with a serum that produces personhood, etc. None of these

developments are such that the cell or multicellular creature would be unhealthy if they did not transpire,

so they are not in the interests of such creatures. The mindless (and for the most part, the minimally

minded) only have interests in their healthy development.

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The reason a reader’s death is worse for her than the fetus or infant’s death is for

the fetus or infant is that the reader has acquired many interests that she did not have

earlier. Her environmental interactions give her interests in, say, football, or

interests to engage in particular projects with friends and lovers. The embryo just

has an interest in healthy development, which involves becoming able to reason,

care, empathize, love, exercise self-restraint, and so on. But the embryo or infant is

without the detailed and contingent interests that will arise from doing things with

families and friends in certain environments. So, death does not frustrate as many

interests and harm the embryo or infant to the degree that it does the reader or, say,

her mother. But as long as one’s attitude is that infanticide is a great harm and

wrong, even if it is not as bad as killing the reader, then abortion too is a great harm

and wrong. 31

Potential versus rearing relationships

We believe it is the human potential for healthy development that distinguishes

human infants and fetuses from other non-human animals that then are intrinsically

similar in terms of intrinsically manifested mental abilities. But our appeal to the

norms of healthy development is not the only theory that claims that manifested

mental traits are not the key to understanding the moral status of the very young or

undeveloped human being. Jaworska and Tannenbaum explain the moral difference

between, say, a dog and a human baby based on the latter’s participation in what

they call ‘‘person-rearing relationships,’’ which can ‘‘transform metaphysically and

evaluatively the baby’s activities’’ [4, p. 242].

Jaworska and Tannenbaum draw on ideas in action theory to suggest that

potential persons can acquire considerable moral status from their extrinsic

relationship to those who are rearing them. The end to which some action is geared

can determine that action’s nature and value. One of their examples is that there is

little value in a youngster acquiring abilities to be sensitized to feel what others do

31 It should not be thought that our claim that embryos, fetuses, and infants have interests in healthy

development is what makes any argument for abortion into an argument for infanticide. This was a charge

of an anonymous referee. We certainly do not claim or assume that the principle of our positive view

about death harming mindless human beings by depriving them of a healthy and valuable development is

why certain abortion defenses also apply to infanticide. We just aim to show that the features lacking in

fetuses that appear to justify abortion according to its defenders are also lacking in infants and so would

‘‘justify’’ killing them. People have the intuition that infanticide is wrong independently of anything we

believe or stated. We are offering a theory explaining why they may hold that infanticide is wrong, which

also explains why abortion is wrong. Our theory explaining the harm to the mindless need not be accepted

to see why viability, consciousness, and inequality are not morally significant justifications for granting

older fetuses and infants immunity from killing. Readers do not need to agree with our theory of what

makes killing wrong to see that consciousness and viability fail to pick out morally significant features or

that, deep down, they really are not committed to viability and the onset of consciousness as abortion cut

off points but instead attracted to the timing of their instantiation. Our anti-Thomson view that morality is

very demanding can be appreciated independently of our accepting our principle about the potentiality of

the mindless. Equality too can be seen as insufficient to justify a right to abortion independently of our

view about interests in healthy development for it permits infanticide where there is inequality and it does

not protect abortion rights where there is equality.

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

123

so he can manipulate them, but considerable value in training an intrinsically similar

youngster to learn how others feel so he will be able to provide them assistance and

respect. The different ends of the parents (‘‘rearers’’), of which the children

(‘‘rearees’’) are unaware, render the children respectively proto or incomplete

realizations of viciousness or virtuousness. So, Jaworska and Tannenbaum argue

that it is the rearing relationship of potential people like nine-month-old infants that

imbues them with a moral status that mentally equivalent dogs do not have. This

would seem to distinguish fetuses who cannot stand in a rearing relationship with

those infants who can [4, pp. 250–251]. 32

The latter have moral status that

approaches that of self-standing persons 33

because they are on their way to

becoming persons in virtue of the nurturing rearing relationships [4, p. 256]. 34

Even

if they are abandoned or neglected, the authors claim that the potential of someone

to stand in a rearing relationship bestows value and distinguishes early abortion

from infanticide.

It seems to us that Jaworska and Tannenbaum’s account of moral status cannot

prevent infanticide since a newborn cannot, any more than an advanced fetus, be in

a person-rearing relationship. They toy with the idea that caring is sufficient for

moral status, writing, ‘‘emotional attachment is present in unimpaired neonates’’ [4,

p. 269]. That might allow newborns to be involved in ‘‘incomplete realizations of

self-standing person activities’’ [4, p. 254]. Nevertheless, Jaworska and Tan-

nebaum’s paper fails to protect against the infanticide of those born prematurely or

with a temporary developmental impairment that prevents emotional attachment.

What is especially revealing is that their account fails to protect hypothetical

creatures that are potential persons very much like us but who become persons due

to their being hardwired to develop on their own rather than through undergoing a

rearing relationship.

We argue that any appeal of Jaworska and Tannenbaum’s argument is due to an

accidental generalization. A potential for healthy development like that described in

the previous section, not the person-rearing relationship, is doing all the moral work.

We contend that Jaworska and Tannenbaum have not found even a sufficient

condition for moral status. This can be seen by attending to the following imaginary

scenarios.

First, imagine a species whose young are mentally comparable to our own very

young children, that is, with abilities that do not surpass a puppy’s. These children

32 They write, ‘‘Anencephalic infants and early fetuses are certainly incapable of engaging in activities

modeled after SSP (self-standing person) activities, and so would not gain a high moral status via our

account, but this we think is an advantage’’ [4, p. 269, fn. 48]. We wonder why the ends of the mother to

gestate her child and who behaves with an eye towards developing that child into a healthy person

(exercises, eats, and drinks appropriately, takes prenatal vitamins, visits the obstetrician) do not bestow

great value on her fetus by her actions. Why must the entity she acts for and upon be a conscious

participant in the telos? Jaworska and Tannenbaum admit that the rearee does not have to be aware of the

rearer’s ends. 33

‘‘Self-standing person’’ is Jaworska and Tannenbaum’s name for the individual who has the relevant

sophisticated cognitive capacities that bring higher moral status. They are neutral about whether this is the

capacity to reason, to be self-conscious, capable of caring, etc. 34

‘‘For all we know, the infant’s moral status may be the same as the status of the self-standing person’’

[4, p. 256].

If Abortion, then Infanticide

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naturally develop from such dog-like states on their own to self-standing persons

without the interaction of rearers. Do they have the same moral status (at this

stage) as a dog, or less than an incomplete self-standing person? Surely, they do

not. It thus seems that rearing is just a form of potential, such that the potential

does all the real work in our moral attitudes. That is why the moral status of the

hypothetical species of persons with dog-like young would be the same as that of

our own infants involved in rearing relationships. They both would be protected

against infanticide much as a person is protected against being killed. Of course,

Jaworska and Tannenbaum can argue that since they are only providing a

sufficient condition [4, p. 245, fn. 11], something else governs the moral status of

our conjectured species. But that strikes us as a desperate move akin to admitting

that rearing is not doing any moral heavy lifting, for then, everywhere there is a

rearing relationship there is potentiality as we conceive of it. They are better off

denying that they have this intuition or arguing that those of us who do have it are

misguided in believing the young of such a ‘‘self-rearing’’ species would have

considerable moral status.

Secondly, imagine that an inept and non-caring rearer is unintentionally rearing a

person though trying to do something else. Perhaps the rearer wants a cognitively

disabled child for mean-spirited reasons and should be condemned just like the

parent in the authors’ example who taught his kid to be emotionally sensitive to

others in order to manipulate them. Would that incomplete self-standing person not

have greater moral status than the cognitively equivalent dog, even though the end

of personhood is not being aimed at by the rearer? Again, it seems that Jaworska and

Tannenbaum could not protect such infants. However, they do write elsewhere that

‘‘while the rearee’s special moral status can be traced to the context of a caring

relationship, it is not being cared about that grounds this status but rather being able

to engage in activities transformed by the context of a caring (person-rearing)

relationship’’ [4, p. 257]. So, they could claim that although the child of the inept

rearer is not in the right rearing relationship, the potentiality to be so reared is what

conveys moral status. But by attending to the next three examples, we show that this

is not a sufficient condition because the rearees there do not have moral status. That

should make readers suspicious of the claim that the rearing-rearee relationship is

doing any moral work in the above cases.

Jaworska and Tannenbaum admit that if a newborn is abandoned, he would have

moral status not because he is actually in a rearing relationship but due to the

weaker condition that he could be. They write that it is not ‘‘required that someone

in the vicinity exists who can adopt this end’’ but ‘‘only that such a person will, or

perhaps, even could exist.’’ The weaker condition, they believe, ‘‘is warranted’’ [4,

pp. 268–269]. But the weaker condition produces implausible duties in a modified

version of Uriah Kriegel and Nicole Hassoun’s [41] case of hypothetical earth

oysters that develop into persons if brought to a Martian atmosphere. Imagine if our

pigs could develop into persons in response to rearers on Mars. Since we would

have no duty to treat them as having a special moral status, it seems evident to us

that the rearing relationship is not sufficient for moral status.

Imagine also Tooley’s famous kitten, prior to the injection of the person-

producing serum, being reared to become a person with the end of later injecting

D. B. Hershenov, R. J. Hershenov

123

it. 35

Surely it does not have greater moral status than a normal kitten or a normal

nine-month-old human. And surely we do not have any duty to inject it despite it

standing in a rearee relationship with a possible end of enhancement. Why not?

Becoming a person is not part of a healthy development for kittens, so the kitten

does not have an interest in such enhancement.

Moreover, most of us share McMahan’s intuition that we do not have a moral

duty to develop dogs if they should turn out to have the unusual ability to learn

language, pace Jaworska and Tannenbaum’s claim suggesting we do. 36

McMahan

imagines that there is a type of dog that if we spent nearly every waking hour

training in speech, could realize a formerly unknown potential ability for such dogs

to speak. Why do we not have a duty to enable them to so develop, while we do

have a duty to spend almost comparable hours training human children to speak?

We explain this by claiming that language learning is not part of a healthy

development and flourishing for dogs. The dogs did not evolve or were not designed

for such development. They are not pathological if they do not so develop. So they

do not, before or after birth, have an interest in becoming speakers. Our view, of

course, allows that once they are speaking persons, they will enjoy that state and

want to retain their personhood. The same is true for Tooley’s kitten. Nevertheless,

they are not harmed if they do not undergo such development for they have no

interest in such development. It is not their healthy or proper functioning in their

design environment. It is important to realize that we can always conjecture a

hypothetical environment where the simple-minded will become geniuses. That

environment, which is not the creatures’ design environment, might even be a very

changed pattern of species interaction or the presence of some new chemical in our

own geographical region. 37

Finally, the person-rearing relationship account of moral status cannot account

for why people would feel more obliged to give scarce person-producing medicine

to the congenitally disabled human fetus or anencephalic human infant, who are

mindless or minimally minded [4, p. 255, fn. 25], than to the ordinary dog fetus, the

ordinary dog, McMahan’s special dogs, or Kriegel and Houssain’s oysters. If one of

those unusual dogs or oysters were missing a chemical that they needed to learn

language or become a person in Mars, respectively, then the issue of who receives

the scarce medicine certainly would not be a matter of a coin toss. We would give

the human child the medicine, and we would do it not because of special obligations

or harms to those to whom the child stands in relationship but for his or her own

sake. The child has an interest in such healthy development.

35 Jaworska and Tannenbaum rule out the fact that a primitive culture’s belief that dogs can become

persons can bestow moral status on their actions towards the dogs for there is a failure of a feasibility

requirement on the ends of actions affecting their nature and value. But we can make Tooley’s felines

require some rearing in order for the person-producing serum to be effective. 36

The authors write that those dogs ‘‘are paradigmatic rearees’’ [4, p. 255, fn. 27]. We share McMahan’s

belief that they are not owed such development and can appeal to our account of interests in healthy

development to justify and explain such intuitions. 37

The non-design environment could involve a presence of chemicals—like that found in the Mars

atmosphere imagined by Kriegel and Houssain—three miles below or above the reader.

If Abortion, then Infanticide

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Conclusion

We have shown that six well-known arguments for abortion are also arguments for

infanticide. If infanticide is beyond the pale, then such arguments cannot justify

abortion. Defenders of abortion have overlooked the fact that the mindless can have

interests in their own healthy development. We suspect that the acceptance of

infanticide is based on a similar failure to distinguish between something being in

an individual’s interests and that individual taking an interest in something. It is in

the interest of both fetuses and infants to undergo healthy development: they are

benefitted when they do and harmed when they do not. 38

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