Pro-abortion arguments based on non-sentience: Tooley, Singer, Benatar
Many authors defended the idea that aborting a fetus in the first moments of pregnancy is not morally imputable, because that which is aborted feels nothing, has no sensitivity, no conscience, does not suffer, has neither desires nor a future. If it is proven that what we abort has not really begun to exist, then abortion becomes close to abstention, it is a kind of late abstention, and abstention is a kind of early abortion. What is in the mother’s body is nothing morally relevant, and it can be eliminated without moral imputation.
Some authors who have defended a pro-abortion position based on the lack of sentience of the aborted include, among others, Michael Tooley, Peter Singer, and David Benatar, remembering that only the last is an antinatalist.
Michael Tooley says that something “has a right to life” “(…) if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity”.Footnote 1
He calls that “condition of self-consciousness.” Things that are not conscious, like machines, cannot have rights. If A has the capacity to desire to continue to exist as the subject of experiences and other mental states, and they must believe that they are such an entity, then others have a prima facie obligation not to prevent them from continuing to exist.
Peter Singer begins his own approach to abortion already assuming that a definitive answer to the problem is possible, and that he has provided it:
In contrast to the view that the moral problem of abortion is an unsolvable one, I will show that, at least within the bounds of a non-religious ethic, there is an unequivocal answer, and anyone who takes a different view is wrong.Footnote 2
In this same chapter, Singer states:
(…) we should choose the moment at which the brain is physically capable of receiving the signals necessary to make it conscious. It is suggested that the foetus begins to feel pain from the 18th week of gestation. (…) Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of abortions are performed long before 18 weeks (…) After 18 weeks of gestation, the interest of the foetus in not suffering must be taken into account (…).Footnote 3
Following their statements literally, it would seem that both Tooley and Singer defend that abortion is morally permissible but not obligatory, or that it is obligatory but permissible only when accompanied by other elements. Benatar, on the other hand, believes, considering antinatalist theses, that abortion in the first months is not only permissible, but obligatory, to spare the newborn the sufferings of the world.
In effect, Benatar sustains that the morally relevant interests are the conscious and reflective ones, and the entities that have these interests must know that they have them. A conscious interest is “(…) an interest that can only be had by those who are conscious.”Footnote 4 They are, therefore, rigorously first-person interests. “(…) conscious interests are the minimum kind of morally relevant interests”.Footnote 5 The next step is to say that fetuses only become conscious (and therefore have “morally relevant interests”) at a very late stage of the gestational process, and that does not arise all at once, but gradually.Footnote 6 The scientific result is that someone “comes into existence” in the “morally relevant sense” only around 28 or 30 days of gestation.Footnote 7 And assuming the antinatalist position, he completes:
Combining the view that foetuses lack moral standing in the earlier stages of pregnancy with the view that it is always a harm to come into existence turns the prevailing presumptions about abortion on their head.Footnote 8
This should make abortion mandatory, not a matter of choice. Choosing not to abort would be immoral, within pessimistic and antinatalist convictions.Footnote 9
In what follows, I will try to show, against these philosophers, that even when non-sentience is clearly verified, we certainly have the factual possibility of aborting when we know that what we are eliminating is not sentient, but that such an action cannot be morally justified, not even as a moral possibility, much less as a moral necessity, even accepting the antinatalist thesis that procreation is immoral. The fact that the one we abort does not have sentience and does not suffer is totally irrelevant.
Why non-sentience is not a sufficient moral condition for the justification of abortion, even assuming the antinatalist thesis
Before getting into the subject, a previous clarification is in order. We notice that there is an inaccuracy in the expression “non-sentient” and correlate expressions, in statements declaring that ethical protections are usually confined to beings with sentience or higher manifestations of consciousness. Because, taken literally, this would mean that we have no ethical obligations to people in a coma, semi-conscious or unconscious elderly people, babies or very young children, people who are sleeping, or people who have already died, since all of them lack consciousness or higher levels of consciousness.
Let us suppose the case of a merciful murderer, who takes pity on human suffering and kills his victims while they are sleeping and without any pain. In that case, the victims would feel absolutely nothing, and, from the antinatalist point of view, the merciful murderer would be freeing them from the sufferings of life. Nevertheless, we have a strong intuition that it is morally wrong to kill people in their sleep, especially if they have not previously agreed to be killed, even if they are not sentient and will not suffer in their deaths.
This kind of fantastic example has the virtue of forcing the pro-abortionists to leave the focus of sentience or non-sentience and use a qualified notion of non-sentience, something like sentience not yet constituted, or not-yet-sentience, to differentiate it from other forms of non-sentience. They could say that by aborting we only eliminate a being that has not yet properly begun to exist and feel, whereas in the case of heterocide we eliminate an actual being which is only provisionally insensible. The difference now lies elsewhere, through the already/not yet distinction, or through the definitive or provisional non-sentience divide.
This is an important temporal remark. In the specific case of abortion, what justifies the pro-abortion position is not strictly that what is eliminated does not have consciousness, but the fact that it does not yet acquire it. I am going to call fetuses not-yet-sentient beings, to differentiate them from the other cases. In what follows, I propose to present five arguments against the idea that we can eliminate a not-yet-conscious being without moral problems.
The formal paradox argument
The pro-abortion position based on non-sentience is formally paradoxical
In general, it is formally vicious to criticize X from a certain position or perspective A, for not having a property Y, or for not performing an action Y, if position A prevents X from acquiring the property Y whose absence is being criticized, or from performing the action Y whose omission is denounced. For example, a police officer cannot report a citizen for not correcting an irregular action if the officer keeps the person imprisoned and unable to correct the action whose irregularity is being criticized. This is like reporting someone’s orphanhood after having killed their parents or reporting someone for not reading books after having burned their library.
I sustain that the pro-abortion position based on non-sentience is formally vitiated by this type of paradox. For that position claims that the fetus does not have the property of sentience and so has no moral relevance and can be eliminated, since it is precisely the act of abortion that prevents the fetus from acquiring the property it is criticized for lacking. The aborters are, at the same time, the judge who condemns the fetus to death for not being sentient and the person who prevents the accused from having that for whose lack they are condemned.
The same can be said of identity. The pro-abortion position based on the element of non-sentience claims that the fetus can be aborted because it does not have a definite identity—it is not someone in particular—but it is precisely the act of abortion that prevents that fetus from acquiring the identity it is criticized for lacking and allowing its elimination.
The third-person argument
Even without having first-person consciousness, the fetus has a being-for-another to which a third-person moral relevance can be socially recognized.
Now I go from the formal domain to the material one. As we have seen, pro-abortionists insist a lot, in this line of reasoning, on the fact that the fetus has no consciousness or self-awareness, that it has no knowledge of itself in the first person. All this is so obvious and indisputable that it seems clear that it is not what is in dispute. What is in dispute is whether something that does not have a first person can still have moral relevance for others in the third person. That which we are about to abort does not need to be a moral agent to be preserved; it is enough to know that it is a moral patient for others in the third person.
Let us develop this better. What is in the woman’s body is a passive, receptive element. As has been widely discussed by contemporary philosophies of existence (notably Jean-Paul Sartre’s), we can say that we have a being for oneself, and also a being-for-another, as we see ourselves in the first person and as we are seen by others.Footnote 10 In analytical philosophy, Thomas Nagel has distinguished an internal point of view about us, and an external point of view from which we are observed.Footnote 11 John Searle argues that the subjective intentionality of consciousness cannot be reduced to the objective point of view.Footnote 12 And David Benatar has pointed out the contrast between the value we subjectively attribute to our lives and the value we have from an external point of view.Footnote 13
This distinction seems relevant when we address the issue of abortion, and specifically the idea that we can abort without moral problems something just because it does not have (because it does not yet have) a being-for-themselves, of which they are aware. It is precisely the others who will recognize or not this something in the mother’s body as morally relevant and place them within the human community or not. Moral relevance is not an intrinsic property of a being, but something that is or is not recognized by others. And in the case of the fetus, this need for recognition is absolute, since it has no first person at all and is totally dependent on others.
We can always make a moral imputation in the third person of an act, even if those who are being targeted by the immoral act are not affected by it in the first person. Here, the question of the social character of the imputation is decisive. There is among antinatalists, in general, a certain insensitivity toward the social factors of the moral recognition of the newborn, as if the hard sciences (biology, physics, chemistry, medicine) were going to determine everything that is relevant concerning this recognition. But what was generated is only a material body, which others will decide whether it is a subject or a member of a human community or not. Quoting the Brazilian psychoanalyst Vera Iaconelli:
The baby does not appear to us as a fact given by the materiality of the organism, since we are the ones who define what a baby is, that is, we determine who deserves to receive the status of a fellow human being, with the right to life and care" (…) As beings of language, we are the ones who define whether the organic mass that grows in the body of the pregnant woman is a baby that deserves to live or if it is an embryo to be aborted.Footnote 14
The name we will give to the one born – son, hindrance, residue – will define her status, her chances of survival, her entry into the human world and who will be responsible for it.Footnote 15
This something in the woman’s body has been thrown into a situation, a country, a family, a social class that has not been chosen. That which is “there” is pure exteriority, but it is already a presence in the world that challenges and demands attitudes from living conscious people. It had received a factual being that will still have to be developed later through projects, resisting the being that others imposed on them in the first years of life. According to this line of argumentation, when one aborts, the process of constitution of an existing being is cut in half. Abortion prevents a pure being-for-others from ever acquiring a being-for-themselves. The fact that the aborted person does not have first-person sentience is totally irrelevant.
Frequently, pro-abortionists suggest that sciences can support a pro-abortion position with greater empirical evidence, defeating antiabortion positions, which would still adhere to religious or metaphysical references. But it can be argued that abortion is not a problem that science can resolve in favor of or against one of the two positions, even though scientific data can certainly be useful in some moments of reflection on abortion. Even if we accept that the sciences can, for example, determine precisely at what moment in gestation the fetus is conscious, from that premise, the statement: “It is morally permissible to abort an entity that does not yet have conscious interests” is not inferred. The data provided by science are not directly applied to a problem without significant social intermediation.
The aborters’ status argument
The morally relevant sentience of the aborters can be put in question.
In the issue of abortion, in addition to asking about the ontological and moral status of the possible aborted, we can legitimately also ask about the ontological and moral status of the person or persons who intend to perform an abortion. The possibility of questioning the moral status of the aborters, since they are the ones who will decide for the preservation or elimination of the fetus (see the previous argument number 2.2), seems perfectly legitimate. If we are totally sure that the fetus lacks sentience and consciousness, we are also totally sure that aborters possess both. But is this as obvious as it seems?
When addressing the question of when a human being begins to live, Benatar and antinatalists in general say that what matters is not the physical or biological beginning, but the moment at which something morally relevant arises. By the same logic, we should not ask whether abortionists are physically and biologically equipped with sentience and consciousness, because they obviously are, but at what moment and under what conditions they use that sentience and consciousness in a morally relevant way.
Aborters certainly have a first person, and even though their moral relevance seems much less dubious than that of a fetus, they too must be socially recognized by others in order to count. In the end, even as adults, we continue to have a being-for-another, an external point of view according to which we are constantly evaluated and judged by others. Therefore, we must ask not only whether the person who is going to be aborted has or does not have the so-called “right to live,” but also whether the person who performs an abortion has or does not have the right to stop another’s life.
It is one thing to possess consciousness in the physical and biological sense, the consciousness whose emergence science can determine with a fair degree of precision; another is to possess consciousness in the sense of discernment, of reasonable use of physical–biological equipment. In the Kantian tradition, this is called judgment; the faculty of judgment refers not to the possession of a theoretical or practical reason, but to the capacity, which may or may not be lacking, to use that reason in a reasonable or rationally defensible way.
All humans who do not have some serious injury have consciousness in the first sense, which we can call the semantic sense of consciousness; but not all humans are always conscious all the time and in all circumstances in the second sense, which we can call the pragmatic sense of consciousness. In such important bioethical problems as procreation, abortion, the death penalty, or suicide, it is important to inquire both into the semantic possession of consciousness and into the pragmatic use that is made of it. Every normal human being is conscious, in the sense of having an opening to the world while awake, but not every normal human being acts consciously, with full insight into what they are doing.
We must consider that the circumstances of abortion are always painful and, many times, simply terrible. It is not difficult to perceive that the state of consciousness in which people find themselves in abortion situations is not one of full discernment, or of emotional balance and full rational control. And, no doubt, criminalizing abortion increases the chances that abortions will be performed in the most terrible conditions, where the consciousness of those involved is seriously affected.
The requirement of sentience must, therefore, be placed on both the aborted and the aborters, not merely in physical–biological terms, but in a morally relevant sense. And just as the merely physical–biological non-sentience of the fetus is not sufficient to decree its elimination, the merely physical–biological sentience of the aborters is not sufficient to enable them to be legitimate eliminators.
The implicit premise argument
The supposition that the aborted wants certainly to be aborted to avoid the sufferings of life is acritical, unless the antinatalist theses are dogmatically imposed.
I said before that this being in the woman’s body is not a moral agent, but they can already be considered as moral patients. They do not execute moral actions in the first person, but they can already be the object of moral actions by others. This is of the greatest relevance because, upon reaching the abortive situation, we are forced—if we want to behave morally—to assume, in the second or third person, what the “interests” of the person we are thinking of aborting could be and try to respect them.
Certainly, the one to be aborted can be counterfactually imagined as someone who wants to be aborted to avoid the sufferings of life. But the aborted could also want to be represented in the second or third person as having an interest in continuing to exist despite the sufferings. The antinatalist assumes that this second option does not exist, that it is impossible if we imagine the aborted person as a rational being. But if we imagine them as human beings as we know them, it is not impossible—and it is the most frequent—that the possible aborted person prefers not to be aborted, even if this decision is not entirely rational. The antinatalist accepts acritically the following presupposition, which I call the Implicit Premise:
(IP) The “potential interests” of what is in the woman’s body, if conceived as a future rational being, are interests in being aborted to avoid being thrown into a life full of suffering. Taking these “potential interests” into account, and not the interests of the parents and other people, consists of doing everything possible so that that being is aborted.
By aborting, we uncritically assume that it would, with all certainty, want to be aborted (that is to say, assuming (IP)). The implicit premise is acceptable only if the antinatalist thesis is dogmatically imposed. But this cannot be done. Benatar himself recognizes this in his book by granting that, despite assuming the antinatalist theses, there is a legal right to reproduce, as well as a legal right not to be killed. And in one of his texts after the 2006 book, he writes:
We also need to consider the fact that there is disagreement about whether coming into existence is a harm. Although I think it is, it does not follow that I must forcibly impose my view on others by killing them without their permission.Footnote 16
But if there is reasonable disagreement about whether coming into existence is a serious harm, this has an impact not only on the question of killing existing beings, but also on the issue of abortion. Benatar cannot know with certainty that he is really defending the “potential interests” of the possible aborted by assuming the (IP).
This fourth argument shows that even if the fetus is factually non-sentient, it can be counterfactually represented as someone with feelings and reason enough to express their preference to be born despite everything, and, consequently, as disapproving of their own abortion. The antinatalists cannot reject this kind of counterfactual consideration of the interests of the possible aborted, because they have already made a similar consideration when assuming the (IP): if this counterfactual consideration can be made in the antinatalist sense, it can also be made in the natalist sense, or it cannot be made in either case. The antinatalists’ mistake is to suppose that the (IP) is the only and fatal option available. This line of argumentation is entirely developed at the counterfactual level; so, the factual non-sentience of the aborted becomes totally irrelevant to the question of the moral evaluation of abortion.
The manipulation argument
The abortion is a manipulative act, treating the aborted as a means, even when the aborted person does not feel this manipulation in the first person.
To uncritically accept the (IP) is to assume that the aborted will be an antinatalist who, if we do not abort, will criticize us in the future for not having done so. But what happens is that, by following this noble tendency to free others from suffering, we may have to manipulate them, to use the other as a means. If we preserve the ethical point of view, we not only have to try not to harm others, but we also must fulfil the requirement of not manipulating them, and of not deciding for another, taking them as a means.
The same manipulation that is done in procreation when we are interested in the newborn is implemented in abortion when we are not interested in them. Procreation, in antinatalist texts, is often morally condemned for being the imposition of life on beings who are not in a condition to express their preference or give their consent. But abortion can be morally condemned for being the imposition of death on beings who are not in a condition to express their preference or give their consent. It is not possible to simply shrug our shoulders and say: well, so what? We are antinatalists and know that life is a very bad place, so by aborting, we free someone from it. But that implies imposing our antinatalist ideology (that is to say, the (IP)) on the aborted person, just as, in procreation, the natalist ideology is imposed on them.
The situations of abstention and abortion are ethically and logically different. In the case of abstention, we decided to give primacy to the Not harm Principle (NH) over the Not Manipulate Principle (NM). We consider that life is so bad in its structure that we decide not to give life to anyone, not to get a woman pregnant, or to use any reproductive resource. But in the situation of abortion, when procreation has already occurred, when the product of the act has already been thrown into the world, we decide to let the process continue, giving primacy to the NM principle over the NH one. Because now we have something that will have sentience someday and the opportunity to decide. In contraception, we deal only with a possible being, where there is nothing to manipulate. In abortion, we deal with a being which is already in the woman’s body, generating moral problems that abstention did not pose.
There is no reason to exclude from antinatalism someone who assigns equal importance to the two principles, NH and NM, without absolute primacy of either of them. The moral principle of not manipulating, of not using others as a means, is widely used within antinatalism when the question of the morality of procreation is approached. See, for example, François Tremblay’s book, A New Approach to Procreative Ethics. The author is a fervent pro-abortion antinatalist who makes extensive use of NM in his antinatalist argument.Footnote 17 And at the end of chapter 4 of his book, Benatar expressively mentions the second formulation of the Kantian categorical imperative—not to take others only as means—to condemn the attitude of parents toward their offspring.Footnote 18
Manipulation is independent of sentience. It does not matter that the aborted do not feel that they are being manipulated for the benefit of others. The others, who are in principle sentient beings, know that the aborted are being manipulated (see argument number 2.2). The antinatalist accepts that, even when the persons born do not feel that they are being generated for the benefit of third parties (their parents and other people), that does not diminish their manipulation in any way. The same can be said of abortion. The antinatalist tries to break the tie by dogmatically accepting the (IP): the manipulation of abortion is acceptable because it saves the aborted person from suffering. But this tiebreaker is only achieved by absolutizing the antinatalist thesis, in a way that Benatar himself has disavowed.
The argument of non-sentience, within the question of abortion, seems to be a pragmatic attenuating element more than a strictly moral argument. It tries to show that the person who is aborted will not feel anything in the first person. This suggests that even the pro-abortion is not sure that the aborters are performing a real moral act, and the only thing they intend is to attenuate its morally dubious character. This can be perceived in the sobriety of their evaluative vocabulary when referring to abortion. They use expressions like: “it is not immoral,” “It is not wrong,” “It is advisable,” “it does not harm anyone,” “it can be practiced,” and similar. They do not say that abortion is a marvelous act, or even a good act, or a virtuous or moral act.
Epilogue: Open argumentation
Whenever we begin a philosophical discussion, we must remind the participants of an obvious fact that is, however, generally not accepted by any of the parties: that everything we sustain about any subject (such as birth, procreation, abortion, death penalty, or suicide) represents only one possible line of argument among others. If we raise our heads and do not allow ourselves to be blinded by our involvement with our own view of things, and we look around, what we see is a multitude of postures in the middle of which is our own. The privilege of our own viewpoint is that of the first person, but seen in the third person, our ideas about the subject (about abortion in our case) are only one among many.
I call focal view that type of view which concentrates on our own posture as a fixed reference point for the other postures, and panoramic view that view which opens the possibility that we have of seeing our posture from the outside, as one among many. Of course, a panoramic view is not easy to assume, and we can never assume it completely. It is not possible to totally get out of one’s own position, in a kind of absolute depersonalization. But we can all experience our ability to see ourselves as one among many, even if the force of the first person leads us to consider ourselves privileged or the absolute referential. We are capable of that relative objectivity.
This, as obvious as it may seem, is not generally accepted. Everyone thinks they are defending the only correct position against a bunch of false positions. The more frequent use of the panoramic view can contribute to creating an environment of pluralism of perspectives, where no position has the final word. All we can do is contribute to an endless dialogue. And practical decisions, at the political and legal level, must arise from this plurality of perspectives, not from the imposition of just one of them.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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