One from Tyler Cowen:

I am myself more libertarian than conservative but at the same time I am on Douthat’s side in questioning the common presuppositions behind modern opinion.  There is a presumption that liberal, tolerant people should have certain views on abortion, stem cell research, and other matters and I am happy to see Douthat breaking the mold.  On these issues, the derivation of current liberal policy views from underlying liberal principles is in fact extremely tenuous, even if one views those conclusions as ultimately correct.  I view the current alignment of stances on social policy as more of a sociological regularity (“look at how rotten are the people on the other side“) then [sic] an intellectual necessity.

Take abortion.  Let’s say that the mainstream modern liberal understanding of when life begins is correct with p = 0.92.  That’s a pretty high p on a matter where so many intelligent people disagree so vehemently.  Does such a “p” provide enough reason to follow through with modern liberal policy conclusions?  That’s far from obvious.  In this debate you’ll find lots of fury and very little willingness to apply stochastic reasoning to ethics.  There are far too many smart people who offer lip service to the toughness of these questions and then simply go ahead and take sides.

And another from Lee McCracken, discussing the work of Bonnie Steinbock:

Even if embryos don’t have moral standing, she says, they can still have “symbolic value,” somewhat in the way a dead human body does. We treat human bodies with a certain reverence because of their symbolic value, not because we’re concerned about not harming or wronging the dead person (they can’t be harmed). Likewise with embryos: being non-sentient, they don’t have interests that can be thwarted and so don’t meet the minimum criteria of moral standing. However, because of their symbolic value, they do deserve a certain amount of respect.

I suppose I think that talk of mere “symbolic” value – pictures of loved ones and childhood trinkets have that as well, after all – is a bit too thin, but the broader point behind what Lee is saying seems quite important: there is certainly a lot to the intuition that the concept of personhood can’t legitimately be applied to human organisms at very early stages of physical, cognitive, and sensorimotor development, but that alone doesn’t show that there’s no morally weighty category (like that of being deserving of our reverence, say) under which such beings might fall; asking whether they are persons (or: humans, etc.) is certainly an important thing to do, but it’s not the only thing to do, and the fact that we find it so difficult to do our moral theorizing in anything other than the terms that define our legal system seems to me a clear indication that something has gone quite wrong in the way we conceive of morality in general.

Filed under: abortion, morality, philosophy