Don Marquis: A Non-Religious Anti-Abortion Argument

The debate about abortion often centers around premises about the nature and moral status of the fetus. This can lead to enormous frustration and seemingly irresolvable disagreement. For some people, it is obvious that the fetus is a full-fledged human being, in the richest moral sense, from the moment of conception. For others this is more or less unintelligible; that is, for some people, the idea that a newly conceived embryo is a person makes no sense at all.

Don Marquis makes a very distinctive contribution to the abortion debate. He argues for a strong pro-life position without appeal to the notion of personhood. And he also does without appeal to religious premises.

Marquis makes a very strong claim: "abortion is, except possibly in rare cases, seriously immoral...it is in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being."

This is not to say that abortion is always wrong; Marquis simply sets certain hard cases to one side. He does not discuss abortion before implantation, abortion to save mother's life, abortion in case of rape.

In spite of the fact that Marquis does not rely on the notion of personhood, he shares a major assumption with those who do: whether or not abortion is wrong, in his view, depends on something about the fetus; it depends on "whether a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously wrong to end." He believes the fetus is such a being, and he offers an analysis of why.

Framed in its usual terms, Marquis believes that the abortion debate results in a stand-off between the two sides. In section I, he attempts to demonstrate this by reviewing certain typical features of the debate. At the most general level:

Pro-choicers point to facts that seem to count in favor of the non-personhood of the fetus, and go on to conclude that abortion is acceptable.

As Marquis points out, neither side can rest on such facts alone. Moral conclusions require moral premises. And indeed, each side can add plausible sounding premises.

Pro-lifers offer: it is always prima facie wrong to take a human life.

Pro-choicers offer: personhood is what matters for moral worth; killing a person is what's prima facie wrong.

Each side misses the mark. The pro-life principle is too broad. It might well show that killing a cancer-cell culture is immoral, or so Marquis claims. (Here we might note: the pro-lifer means that it is wrong to kill a human being; not a human cell. But if a newly-fertilized ovum counts as a human being, then the distinction is not so clear after all.) On the other hand, the pro-choice argument is too narrow. It doesn't show that killing infants or retarded individuals is wrong.

Again, each side can add to its position. The pro-lifer can shift to talk of human beings. But then it isn't clear that a fetus is a human being; "human being" doesn't mean "is human and is alive." "Human being" means something like "full-fledged human person." But then the pro-lifer is begging the question -- is assuming a premise that the pro-choicer would simply deny.

Pro-choicers, on the other hand, have to find a way of broadening their conclusion to deal with the cases of infants, children and the mentally retarded. These beings don't count as persons by typical pro-choice criteria. The pro-choice advocate can appeal to considerations of the consequences, but this will make the argument rest on delicate calculations that might not turn out the way the pro-choicer thinks they will. Most of us who think killing infants and retarded people is wrong would still think so even if it turned out that there are some overall "benefits" to such practices.

More generally, Marquis points out, the pro-lifer tends to rely on a biological category: something like "genetically human" or "conceived by human parents." This leaves us with the problem of explaining the moral relevance of the biological facts.

Here I would add a side note that Marquis does not add. Some pro-lifers appeal to religious premises: to the premises, for example, that the fetus has a soul from the moment of conception. But it isn't obvious that this helps. If all we mean by saying that the fetus has a soul is that it has full moral status, talking about the soul doesn't explain anything; it sneaks the conclusion in without argument. On the other hand, if the soul is a sort of non-physical entity, then we can ask: why does possessing this entity, even if thought and sensation are completely absent, confer a right to life? The answer isn't obvious.

The pro-choicer avoids biology and typically appeals to psychological characteristics. This, again, creates a need to explain why these are morally relevant. The philosopher Joel Feinberg offers an explanation. The psychological characteristics are what make moral responsibility and moral reasoning possible. They also explain why we can value certain things, make plans, and care about our own futures. They "make sense out of rights and duties." But Marquis points out: the psychological characteristics that pro-choicers appeal to may be necessary conditions for having duties; it is much less clear that they are necessary for having rights -- especially such basic rights as the right to life.

Now a being who never will have these characteristics might well have no rights. (Thus, unconscious people get rights, since they once were conscious and may well be again.) But this won't help the pro-choicer, since the fetus typically will be conscious if it's allowqed to develop. And if we insist that someone must already have had these characteristics to get rights, this may seem like a cheap trick tailor-made for ruling out fetuses.

II Marquis proposes a different way of approaching the problem. His strategy: examine what it is that makes killing wrong in the first place. Then look at abortion in light of that more general discussion

He begins with two wrong answers:

killing is wrong because it brutalizes the killer
Killing is wrong because of the effects on the people left behind.

The first answer gets things the wrong way around. People who kill are brutes because killing is a terrible thing. The second doesn't deal with the case of people who live in isolation or whose friends are superficial and won't miss them. It is still wrong to kill such people. A better answer is this: killing is wrong because it deprives the victim of all possible future experience. "When I die," says Marquis, "I am deprived of all the value of my future."

Marquis offers two bits of intuitive evidence for this:

It explains why we regard killing as an especially evil crime: it deprives the victim of more than virtually any other crime.
It explains the regret and sense of loss felt by people who know they are dying.

He also points to four implications of this analysis that help make it plausible.

It allows that other -- even alien -- creatures may have a right to life as strong as ours; it doesn't rest on a merely biological basis.
It doesn't prejudge the animal rights debate; some animals might be sufficiently like us that it is wrong as things stand to kill them.
It doesn't prejudge the euthanasia debate; it allows that for some people, death may not be an evil compared to continued life.
It straightforwardly deals with the case of infants and children.

Notice that potential personhood isn't the issue. A fetus is the sort of being whose life it is normally wrong to end. But the reason for this is that it has the capacity for a valuable future like ours. If this amounts to saying it is a potential person, so be it. The point is that Marquis does not rely on an unanalyzed notion of "potential person." He spells out exactly what it is about the being that is morally relevant.

Marquis uses another case as a sort of test for this general approach. We believe it is wrong to inflict pain on other people wantonly. He suggests that there are strong parallels between what he -- and, he thinks, we -- would say about this and what he has to say about abortion. We believe it is wrong not because of some extrinsic considerations, such as what it does to the character of the person inflicting the pain, but because of its effects on the victim -- because the suffering of the victim is an evil. This is like what he has to say about killing; killing is wrong not because of its effects on the killer, but because of its effects on the victim -- the loss of all potential for value in his or her future.

Marquis ofers an analogy. Humans are not the only creatures who can suffer. The suffering of other animals is an evil, and so we conclude that it is wrong to inflict pain for no reason on non-human animals. Similarly, the wrong of killing extends beyond humans already born to other creatures -- at least certain other creatures -- and in particular to fetuses. A fetus that is killed has all potential for value in its future wiped out.

The argument about killing and the argument about inflicting pain have the same general form: begin with a widely-held intuition about the wrongness of a certain act, look for what makes the act wrong in its effects on the victim, and then note that the conclusion can be extended beyond the original intuition. If the case against inflicting pain on animals turns out to be flawed, this would cast doubt on the reasoning in the case of abortion. So Marquis considers the alternative view about animals, which he takes to be Kant's view. Kant's view is that animals are not entitled to any moral consideration on their own; they are not rational creatures and so are not members of the moral community. Kant agrees that it is wrong to inflict pain on them, but not because it is intrinsically wrong. It is wrong because people who are cruel to animals are likely to be cruel to persons. Marquis replies that this is implausible. If the difference between humans and animals really is as Kant says -- if animals are different enough from us so as not to be owed any more moral consideration than plants of stones -- then we should have no trouble making the distinction in our actions. In other words, Marquis doubts that being cruel to animals would lead people to be cruel to other persons if Kant were right.

I think there is plenty of room to disagree with Marquis, for the sorts of reasons that philosopher Jane English suggested in an article from several years ago. Our moral psychology is not determined simply by our metaphysical beliefs about who is or isn't a person. Certain resemblances between people and animals are psychologically powerful, whether or not they have any other moral significance. It might indeed be very hard to treat people well if one developed the habit of treating animals badly. But it is also probably not important to settle the question. Whether or not Kant has the psychology right, he seems pretty clearly to have the morality wrong. The suffering of animals does matter, we all agree, and it matters because suffering -- whether ours or another creature's -- is an evil.

One potential problem with the argument Marquis gives is that it might seem to rule out contraception: in preventing the conception of a being, one is cutting off a possible future. The essence of Marquis' reply is that contraception is different from abortion: in the case of contraception there is no particular being whose future is being cut off. He reasons as follows: there are four potential candidate "beings":

the sperm cell
the ovum
the sperm-ovum pair considered separately
the sperm-ovum combination

Neither 1) not 2) is satisfactory. A sperm alone does not determine a being. Neither does an ovum. 3) counts too many beings. This sounds a bit od, but in fact, we can strengthen point here. On any given occasion of intercourse, there are typically millions of sperm. There is no one of them in particular that should be counted as the one whose future is being cut off. And this ties in with Marquis's point about 4). There is no determinate combination either.

In a moment we will see this that isn't quite adequate. Before we do, let us ask at a general level what we should make of Marquis's argument. We can ask two sorts of questions: (1) is it weaker than it seems, and (2) is it stronger than it seems -- perhaps unacceptably strong.

On the first point, recall that Thomson argues that even if the fetus is a person, it may still be acceptable to perform abortions in certain cases: at least (Thomson) in the cases of rape and threat to the mother's life. but also in the case in which the mother's future prospects are severely threatened, even if her life itself is not. Now Thomson talks of personhood rather than valuable futures. But persons are paradigms of the sort of being that has a potentially valuable future of the kind that Marquis is considering. And in any case, there is no reason to think that Thomson would disagree with Marquis about why killing is an evil. But she would probably insist nonetheless: abortion is still justified in some cases. If her arguments are good, they bear on Marquis notwithstanding.

Turning to the second point, just how rich must a being's potential future be before Marquis's argument kicks in? Marquis himself points out that it may apply to some higher mammals. But consider the family cat. In the normal course of things, a cat has the capacity for a life filled with its own brand of happiness and pleasure. And just as the pain of an animal is an evil, other things being equal, so is its happiness and pleasure a good. So Marquis would seem to give us a strong reason for not killing animals with the capacities of cats or even cows. Marquis, in other words, may make a case for a rather extensive vegetarianism without having meant to.

While this might be so, it is not exactly a criticism of Marquis to point it out. After all, many people believe that we should, indeed, not kill animals except for very good reasons. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps Marquis provides a means of saying why.

Another problem is more difficult. Return to birth control. Marquis clearly had barrier methods in mind. But think abut the IUD. The IUD prevents pregnancy not by preventing conception but by preventing implantation. Does Marquis's view imply that the use of the IUD is immoral?

Many of us would find that hard to accept. A newly-fertilized ovum simply seems too unlike the sort of being from which Marquis's argument starts: a full-fledged human. (Remember: Marquis begins by asking what is wrong with killing in the "typical" case.) And in fact, in what looks like a throw-away line, Marquis allows that this point might be correct,. He says that "morally permissible abortions will be rare indeed unless, perhaps, they occur so early in pregnancy that a fetus is not yet definitely an individual." Many people would think that the stage at which the IUD does its work is a good example. At that stage of pregnancy, it might be thought, we really don't have something that should be thought of as an individual in the sense of a definite being. But if this is right, then we have to ask: at what stage do we have a definite individual -- a definite being?

I don't know what Marquis would say, nor what the right answer is. But the question seems a perfectly good one. And depending on what we decide, it may turn out that to prevent his argument from showing more than it should, Marquis will have to agree that actually has shown much less than it seems.

There is a related issue. Marquis tells us that abortion is almost always a very serious wrong -- as serious as killing you or me. But interestingly enough, very few people's intuitions agree -- even those who are firmly against abortion. Most of us are not inclined to see the death of an early-term fetus as a tragedy in the way that we think of the death of an infant as a tragedy. In fact, nature itself is rather profligate with early embryos. The rate of spontaneous abortion early in pregnancy is actually much higher than most people realize: perhaps as high as 20 to 30 percent. Nonetheless, this isn't shocking in the way that an infant mortality rate of 20 to 30 percent would be.

Another indication that we don't fully share Marquis' intuitions is that if he were right, it is hard to see how we could resist the conclusion that the penalty for abortion ought to be the same as the penalty for murder. But while some anti-abortionists describe abortion as murder, I suspect that few of them are literally prepared to call for the death sentence or life imprisonment for those who have or perform abortions.

The issues here are muddy, of course. Even if we became convinced that abortion is equivalent to murder, there might be very good reasons of social policy for not treating the two cases identically. Still, I think these considerations give us pause. Marquis gives a very powerful argument. But are we quite prepared to acept the full implications of the argument? If so, some of our more ground-level intuitions will have to give way. Perhaps they should. But as we have noted before, intuitions need not always bow to theoretical argument.

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