Non sequitur

I suspect you mean for the last word to be “why,” rather than “way.”

For me degrading the world so that no future generations can ever be born is not the same thing as aborting an equivalent number of individual human fetusses and preventing them from being born. And diminishing the world of future actual people is not the same as preventing other potential people from becoming actual. I don’t think that environmental ethics is grounded on relationships of obligation between a present group of individuals and not-yet extant groups of future individuals.

I also don’t think that the obligations of present day individuals toward the future need to be expressed in terms of obligations of an overlapping series of contemporaries into the future (me to my younger contemporaries and they to their younger contemporaries whom I will never know). There’s nothing terribly wrong with that but I don’t think it’s right to insist on it. I don’t have an obligation to some particular group of unborn fetuses even though I do have an abligation to the future human race as a whole.

I think questions of totalization are very important; we’re not talking about some specific group, but of all humans indefinitely into the future, the very possibility of continued humanity. The difference between killing a certain number of animals (individual victims) as opposed to exterminating a species, or of confining the whole species to an impoverished and hostile habitat.

So I’d just translate it into three basic primitives or axioms:

1. One of the worst of possible crimes would be to permanently diminish, impoverish, or destroy the whole human race.

2. This principle is to be regarded as more certain than any metaethical justification we can build under it.

3. #1 is true even though it does not necessarily tell you exactly how to satisfy it; that is, it’s a criterion for results that doesn’t include much help on methods and specifics.

The present discussion would be fitted under dealing with the consequences of #3. But I don’t see how the zero-discount discounting framework (which sounds to me like zero-cabbage cabbage soup) helps much.

The mandate of utilitarianism toward population growth greatly depends on whether the nigh-inevitable extinction of humanity will be hastened by increased population or not.

If increased population means that we will run out of resources, or choke on our own waste, then utilitarianism demands zero population growth, once we get beyond some sustainable number.

But if there’s no such danger, then utilitarianism mandates increased population, to maximize total utility before everyone is killed by a huge meteor strike, or the eventual heat-death of the sun.

It’s a very big unknown: big enough for me to square my utilitarian philosophy with my pro-choice politics, at least until I have more information.

John Emerson wrote:

“And diminishing the world of future actual people is not the same as preventing other potential people from becoming actual.”

But this is precisely the inconsistency that the Economist blogger is concerned with. Because there are no “future actual people” in any sense that is distinguishable from the “future actual fetuses delivered to term” that would exist if abortion were banned. Barring the odd centegenarian that has just been born, the people of the 100 year out future aren’t actual at all – they are potential. And, as the blogger points out, a helluva a lot further from being realized potential than the fetus in the womb today.

Think of it this way. In the year 2106 there will be 100 river delta dwelling Bangladeshis if we put no more carbon into the air, and 80 if we do put more carbon in the air. Let us stipulate that all else being equal, we would indeed love to put more carbon in the air.

In the year 2007 there will be 100 babies born if abortion were illegal, but only 80 if abortion were legal. Let us stipulate that 20 pregnant women would prefer not to deliver their fetuses to term.

If we have an obligation to interfere in the exercise of the basic liberty of drivers today because of the interests of the 20 Bangladeshis who would not be born if we continue to allow unfettered carbon emissions, then it at least raises the question of why we don’t have an obligation to interfere in the exercise of the basic liberty of women because of the interests of the 20 babies who would not be born if we allow abortion.

Reducing carbon emissions today has costs. Real costs that will cause pain and suffering for real people who are alive today. The Stern report implies that this is right and good because if we do not reduce emissions we will impose costs on potential people who are not yet alive. And those future people (and their interests) are worth just as much as current people (and their interests). Fair enough.

But banning abortion would result in the birth of more babies. These babies will generally be born into tough circumstances, but the lack of massive suicide on the part of the poor and disadvantaged is a pretty good clue to the fact that people living in tough circumstances prefer to do so than not to live at all. So why would we not impose costs – real costs that will cause pain and suffering for pregnent women today – in order to provide on balance a greater benefit to those babies.

sd: You seem to have made a bizarre argument even more bizarre. Please clarify if I have completely missed your point.

Perhaps you made a poor generalization from an odd example and will slap yourself in the morning when you read what you wrote. But interpreting what you wrote literally, you think that defenders of the Stern Report tacitly believe that there is a completely invariant GDP per capita. Thus, we ought to mitigate the widespread damage that global warming will cause because, although GDP per capita will remain constant, in a world in which global warming has been mitigated there will be *more people* than otherwise.

Does anyone believe this? That the goal of the Kyoto Protocol, etc., is to increase the human population in the year 2100? I suspect that you don’t really think this, because that would be distinctly odd.

My next guess would be that you have been lured into an equivocation by multiple possible uses of the word “potential.” There is one sense in which we look at an acorn and say “that acorn is potentially an oak.” We are making a statement about what we understand to be a physical possibility for a particular entity. An orange is potentially an orange tree; it is also potentially my breakfast; it is also potentally a mouldy orange. There is also a sense in which we can look at a young oak forest and say “Today, there are only 100 oak trees here, but ecology tells us that in 200 years there will be 1000 oak trees. The 900 trees that aren’t here now will actually exist one day, but right now they only exist potentially.”

I am pretty sure this confusion is the only way you could get from “caring, at least somewhat, about people who will be alive in a century” to “caring, at least somewhat, about blastocysts.”

Have you made this mistake? Have you confused the sense in which an acorn is “potentially” an oak tree with the sense in which each oak tree which will actually exist in 200 years is “only potential” now? If you made this sort of equivocation, you could make an argument like this: “You think that we shouldn’t wantonly do things that will kill this oak forest in a century? But this must mean that you care about potential oak trees, since most of the trees that will exist then don’t exist now. But if you care about ‘potential oak trees,’ why don’t you kill all the squirrels to stop them from eating acorns, huh? Acorns are potential oak trees too!” If you don’t understand what’s wrong with this argument, sd, re-read.

For the purposes of the illustrative bad argument in the preceding paragraph, please ignore the fact that squirrels are part of the oak life cycle.

uiop wrote:

“I am pretty sure this confusion is the only way you could get from “caring, at least somewhat, about people who will be alive in a century” to “caring, at least somewhat, about blastocysts.””

And I’m pretty sure that I’m not the one confused here. One needn’t care about a blastocyst per se. One can simply observe that if public policy protects blastocysts from harm there will be more people born, and that these people have rights and interests which we should take into account under a moral and analytical scheme in which we take into account the rights and interests of people who will be alive in 2106 – to the extent that our public policies today impact those rights and interests.

Your point about total population vs. average GDP per capita is fine. I was merely setting up a hypothetical to illustrate that the Economist blogger was not batty – that any concern for far-future human beings who will exist 100 years from now seems a little odd if we don’t have equal or greater concern for near-future human beings who will exist 7 months from now. The latter after all being much closer to realized potential than the former.

If we have an obligation to interfere in the exercise of the basic liberty of drivers today because of the interests of the 20 Bangladeshis who would not be born if we continue to allow unfettered carbon emissions, then it at least raises the question of why we don’t have an obligation to interfere in the exercise of the basic liberty of women because of the interests of the 20 babies who would not be born if we allow abortion.

But it’s not the interests of the 20 never-existing Bangladeshis that we’re worried about so much. It’s all the other not-yet-existing-but-will-be-someday and currently-existing-and-will-still-be-then Bangladeshis who are going to end up as refugees when their country floods.

Bangladeshis who would not be born if we continue to allow unfettered carbon emissions

Agree with what was said by brock, bernard etc.

And in any case, it’s not a philosophical problem of reducing the numbers of people ‘who would not be born’ – in any future there are infinite numbers of people who will not be born – it’s about avoiding a future where people die in pain and misery. And it’s ultimately about avoiding our species dying out altogether.

No rights doesn’t equal worthless. My computer has no rights, but it’s definitely not worthless!

And Peter Singer’s utilitarianism seems to deal with many of these questions in a relatively intuitive way. (Though many people disagree with his thoughts about disabilities.) Basically, it’s unclear whether never having existed (as a conscious person) at all is actually a harm to anyone. Early enough abortion just prevents a person from ever having existed as a person. Global warming may well either kill conscious people, or make their ordinary lives harder.

My computer has no rights,

Come the revolution, you’ll talk different.

Paul, it’s not a substandard response at all. The point is that the question of abortion has nothing to do with discount rates. Adopting a different social rate of pure time preference isn’t going to give you a different answer to the question of whether abortion is morally justifiable or not.

Daniel,
A very high rate of time preference is consistent with placing a low value on the future wellbeing of potential humans not presently in existence and visa versa. The value we place on the future wellbeing of humans not presently in existence is one of the questions that ought to influence our position on abortion. It may not be determinative, because we may decide on the basis of the mother’s right to bodily autonomy for instance, but it’s certainly part of the conversation.

There are a few dozen posts scattered across various threads, including this one, engaging with that relationship, which provides further evidence that it does, in fact, exist. JQ’s post tries to sidestep that question, and as such isn’t a sufficient response, and certainly doesn’t justify the snarky tone he choses to adopt.

Engels, I broadly agree with your analysis of the distinction between potential humans who will exist and those whose existence is at question. That’s the basis on which I’d exclude potentially aborted foetuses from the utilitarian calculus. But I think you actually need to make that argument, and be willing to defend it. It certainly doesn’t follow automatically or axiomatically that the unborn(yet) are morally different from the unborn(maybe)- you have to actually justify the distinction, which some people above do, and which JQ emphatically doesn’t. That’s my beef with his post.

I think you’re wrong if you’re suggesting that the relationship between discount rates (value placed on the potential members of future generations)and abortion (value placed on potential members of this generation) isn’t worth discussing, it seems clear that they’re related but (in my view nad yours) distinguishable issues. And, again, “that’s nothing to do with economics, you fool” failed to draw such a distinction.

You do in fact quote a post from that thread though don’t you John? Just not any of the ones that make the argument on which you’d like to rely. That, to me, smacks of arguing in bad faith. I’d add that there’s a difference between issues which are distinguishable from each other and those which are mutually irrelevent. Engels’ argument gets you the first, but not the second, because nothing in his post explains the reason why the two different case ought, morally, to be treated differently. There’s no axiom at play here, just arguments. You’d have been better of making one of them.

It seems to me that another (and possibly more precise) way of illuminating this issue is to realize that fetal life, at whatever level of concern or rights one does or does not afford it, does not affect the discounting issue because it appears to an equal extent on both the present and the future sides of the equation. There are fetuses currently in being, gestating, and waiting to be born, and there will at any particular time in the future be future fetuses who are then gestating and waiting to be born. There doesn’t seem to me to be any reason why one would discount the value of future generations of fetuses at a rate any different than one would otherwise apply to generations of people already born.

Paul, since a foetus is here right now and will turn into a person in a minimum of ten months unless action is taken, there is no sensible discount rate at all (and certainly no “market consistent” one) which will make it OK to abort that foetus if it wasn’t OK anyway. The problem doesn’t have anything specific to do with abortion and isn’t solved by making a different assumption about discount rates.

Or, Paul, to put Engels and Daniel’s point more succinctly: there is not so much a “distinction” between the “potential” humans who will exist in hundred of years and the “potential” humans who are fetuses now, but rather a confusion between two uses of the the language associated with the word “potential.”

uiop,
That’s fine, and obviously, as Daniel points out, there’s a distinction (or “confusion” if you think it does anything to clarify the point) between people who will be alive in 9 months and people who will be alive in 100 years.
From the point of view of this debate, what matters is if that difference is morally significant. Daniels, based on time, wasn’t. You’ve done no more than assert that yours is, and Engels, Conchi and apparently JQ have done the same (“There’s a perfectly reasonable strand of thought” you’ll recall). As it happens that asserted distinction makes sense to me, not least because of the consequences of holding the opposite view, as Brad Delong outlines above. But for you to argue “by asking for equal consideration to be given to these two classes you are confusing them” is a question begging argument; you’re assuming that the difference you’ve outlined in morally significant, and then helpfully provided the conclusion that, if it is, then they need to be treated differently. That’s not a substitute for demonstrating the reason why that difference matters any more than, say, timing.

Paul – As far as I know, people don’t think abortion wrong because it harms a non-existent person in the future (by causing “him” never to have existed). They think it is wrong because it harms the foetus. (The fact that the foetus can develop into a person might be a reason for caring about the foetus but that is not at all the same thing as saying that that person is being harmed.)

And people haven’t just “asserted” that the two cases are different, they’ve tried to explain to you why they are. You seem to agree, so I’m not sure what kind of “demonstration” you still think is called for.

Engels,
That’s a bold summary of the anti-abortion movement, but even were it not it doesn’t resolve the underlying ethical question – why do you weigh the interests of my daughter who will be born to those of my son who might be born contingent on how you weigh his interests. That’s a stand alone question, and doesn’t rest on the vocal support of abortion’s critics, however intimately you’re familiar with their arguments.

“And people haven’t just “asserted” that the two cases are different, they’ve tried to explain to you why they are. You seem to agree, so I’m not sure what kind of “demonstration” you still think is called for.”
You’re confusing two issues here Engels. I’m perfectly clear on how aborted foetuses are different from future generations – in fact I can add to your reasons by citing Daniel, who kindly points out that foetuses are only 9 months away from (maybe) existing, and that Stern’s future generations are tens of years or more away. I could also add that they’re different because aborted foetuses will be primarily the children of first world nations, while Stern’s future generations will existy disproportionately in the third world. All of these are clear differences between the two classes, but the second two are clearly morally irrelevant. The distinction you draw, which is similarly clear, may or may not be morally relevant, but one certainly wouldn’t be able to draw any conclusions either way from your post, which doesn’t address the issue. Hence “assertion”.

To recap, explaining that two things are different by some standard is not the same as demonstrating why they ought not to be treated alike.

John is right, the original Economist poster (sounds like a Megan McArdle special) is nutty, and so are her defenders on this thread. How we choose to discount what happens to an actually alive person in the future is completely logically unrelated to how we assess harm to a fetus. A fetus is not an actually alive person and will never be an actually alive person (when the actually alive person comes to be, the fetus will no longer exist). They are two totally different entities. There are causal linkages between them, but how we choose to morally assess those causal linkages has nothing to do with discounting.

McArdle basically puts her energies into trying to score rhetorical points off liberals, and she thinks she has found one here. But it’s rhetorical, and mists away under observation.

Mq, I think you miss the point, or at least manage to evade it by splitting hairs. Rewrite your post, ignoring the fetus and dealing only with the harm to the potentially existing person themselves. See how it reads before submitting it.