Reply to Christopher Kaczor on Abortion
It’s often argued that abortion is usually
wrong on the basis of the premises that (1) biologically
human embryos and fetuses are innocent human beings or persons and (2) it’s usually wrong to kill innocent human
beings or persons. Let’s call this the
Standard Argument against abortion.
In our 2021 “Salon” magazine article, “Why the case against abortion is weak,
ethically speaking,” we argued that this argument fails.[1] Our
goal in that “public philosophy” essay was to get these common critiques before
a broader audience to help them better engage the fundamental questions of
whether the argument’s premises are true or false, reasonable to believe or
not.
In a recent article in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly,
Christopher Kaczor critiques our critiques.[2]
While we appreciate his engagement with our article, we wish to briefly explain
why his critiques do not succeed. Since our article is freely available online,
we will not summarize its discussion; we will assume that interested readers
will read it before reading what follows here.
1. Innocence
We want to begin by noting that Kaczor
surprisingly did not address our argument that embryos and fetuses are not “innocent” because they are neither innocent nor not innocent.
Innocence, in an ordinary sense of not
deserving punishment or ill-treatment, requires the potential for guilt. So
innocence requires (a) the ability to act—moral
agency or personhood—and (b) not acting wrongly. People sometimes say
that embryos and fetuses are innocent because “they haven’t done anything
wrong.” Yes, but rocks and plants haven’t
done anything wrong either, yet they are not considered “innocent,”
because, like embryos and fetuses, they can’t
do anything, especially anything
wrong, and so the concept of “innocence” just doesn’t apply.
Although we didn’t put it this way in the article, these observations alone undermine the Standard Argument.
Since its premises are about innocent beings,
it really has no application to, or implications for, beings like embryos and
fetuses that are neither innocent nor not and so the Standard Argument fails.
It’s worth reflecting here on the fact that
there’s no good reason to think that a
being must be innocent for there to be moral obligations to or concerning it,
or that a person must be innocent to
have, say, the right to life. For example, on the understanding of
innocence presented here, babies are neither innocent nor not, but they have
the right to life. No influential theory of rights proposes that anyone has
rights because they are “innocent,”
and no theory even entails that someone loses all their rights if they are guilty of anything either. All and
all, the emphasis on “innocence” here is a distraction: it’s not like anyone
seriously thinks abortions are justified because
fetuses are “guilty” and so deserving of being killed or whatever.
(As an aside, some may wonder if the
doctrine of “original sin,” implies that embryos and fetuses are not innocent, contrary to the Standard
Argument’s premise, and if and how that matters to the issues).
2. Persons
In our article we argue, in a variety of
ways, that persons or human beings—understood as human persons—are a type of conscious
being: what makes a being a being a
person is mental characteristics: e.g., consciousness, sentience, emotions,
etc. This type of view—following Descartes, Locke, Warren, Parfit, and many
others—understands our “essence” or essential properties in terms of being
minded beings.[3]
Would you like to take a nap . . and never wake up . . even if your body remained biologically alive? Many who wouldn’t
would understand this happening as the end of their existence: the person they
are would end.
Since embryos and beginning fetuses lack conscious-making brains, and so lack any mental characteristics, they are not
persons on this broad theory about what persons are. Kaczor, however, objects
to this theory of personhood. His objections, however, all fail.
First, he says that such a theory of
personhood would justify the “infanticide of premature newborns.”[4]
It is unclear whether he is thinking of premature newborns who are conscious or
premature newborns who have never been conscious. Either way:
●
if such newborns are conscious, then a broad
psychological theory of personhood can apply to them since they have some kind
of minds;
●
if such newborns are not, and never have been conscious,
then Kaczor has “begged the question” or just assumed that killing such premature newborns would be wrong, since
he gives no reason to believe it would be. But the case is perhaps moot since
this is a born baby, and so no longer
intimately dependent on a particular person’s body; if (and how) that makes a
difference, and whether (and why) someone (who?!) would be obligated to care
for this newborn is not discussed by Kaczor.
It should be recognized, however, that our
article did not aim to defend all
abortions, or all possible abortions. We observed that later-term abortions
raise unique issues due to the potential for fetal consciousness and so our
discussion concerned only early abortions, which are most abortions.
Second, Kaczor argues that such a theory
implies that “dogs, cats, and even rats are persons with rights to live, since
they, too, have brains enabling consciousness.”[5] This
too is begging the question, assuming
with no argument whatsoever that animals don’t have rights and that all the
many philosophers (Singer, Regan, Rowlands, Korgaard, Halteman and many more[6])
and other thinkers (Adams, Francione, Wise, Camosy, and many more[7])
who have argued animals do have rights are mistaken and their arguments
unsound. This dismissal of animal rights is likely even offensive to people who
have pet dogs, cats, and rats (“even rats”!), see them as friends, and would
understand that we can be “friends” only with beings who are persons, or are at
least personlike.[8]
The online parody-business “Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat” gets lots of hate-mail
from people concerned that dogs’ rights to life are being violated; and outed
“big game trophy hunters” are often threatened for doing what many people
understand to be violating animals’ rights.[9] So,
in sum, to dismiss the idea of animal rights, without argument, is
irresponsible: it defies arguably the best philosophical thinking and a
burgeoning common sense about the matters, all with no reasons given at all.
Kaczor proposes that the implication that animals have rights can be
avoided by requiring “human self-aware consciousness,”[10] and
observes the repugnant implications of that theoretical modification for
conscious but not self-aware human beings. But he overlooks other theoretical
options here, such as that being a conscious
human being or that being a conscious
being who is the “kind” of being that’s a rational being is what’s
sufficient for having rights and
having rights that are generally stronger than rights animals have (which is
the typical view of most animal rights advocates anyway). Kaczor doesn’t
consider the many possible ways to (a) accept a broad psychological theory of
personhood and (b) think that all
conscious human beings usually have some ethical priority over animals.
Finally, Kaczor writes this:
another problem with [psychological theories of personhood is] that if
someone has been knocked out, her brain is not (at that time) capable of
consciousness. But surely the right to life doesn’t come into existence and go
out of existence each time a boxer is knocked out.[11]
Yes, and this should ring a bell, suggesting that a wrong turn has been
made. Consider this: the right to one’s material possessions is presumably
“weaker” than the right to life. If someone took a nap, and woke up to see all
their stuff gone, it would be totally implausible for their housemate to react,
“Since you weren’t conscious, I thought you
no longer existed and so would no longer need your stuff, so I took it and
sold it, and that was fine!” Anyone
basing these actions on their supposed understanding of psychological theories
of personhood has grossly misunderstood the view: being a conscious being does not require being conscious at all times.
This is obvious, given that people sleep, yet they are conscious beings on any ordinary or refined understanding of
that concept.
Kaczor adds, “Again, you can shore up the argument by noting that the
individual may become conscious later, but this is also true of the typical
human fetus.”[12]
If he’s saying that, typically, the napping person
will awake as a person—indeed, the same (numerically identical) person who
existed before the nap—then, no, that is not
true of beginning fetuses, if they are not persons and so they, or their
bodies, are not numerically identical to any future person. To suggest that an
embryo is relevantly similar to a sleeping person who clearly was a person
prior to their nap is, again, begging the question, assuming things that cannot
be assumed, such as that an embryo is a person.
Finally, perhaps Kaczor intends his
discussion of “interests”[13]
to be an objection to a psychological theory of personhood, since persons have
interests and we argue that nothing can be in the interest of a being that’s
never been conscious. He discusses a potential ambiguity in the concept of
“interest,” but nothing in our discussion suggests that we think that for any interest, a being can have that
interest only if they conceptualize or understand that interest: we say and
suggest nothing like that: indeed we
deny that. And from nothing about that does it follow, as Kaczor writes, that,
e.g., embryos “have an objective interest in their physical well-being, which
is destroyed when they are killed.”[14]
Arguments are needed to support that claim, which weren’t given.
3. Killing and Letting Die
Kaczor argues while letting an anencephalic
baby die can be morally permissible, it doesn’t follow that actively killing such a baby would be
morally permissible, and so it especially doesn’t follow that killing an embryo
or early fetus would be permissible, even though all these beings lack
conscious-producing brains. He writes such reasoning “obfuscates the difference
between killing and letting die.”[15]
But why think any killing / letting die
distinction is always morally
important, or important with these issues? Kaczor says that US law recognizes
it, but we all understand that laws can be unjust: furthermore, some countries’
laws reject this distinction and allow the active killing of some people.
Kaczor says this distinction is accepted by Catholics, but non-Catholics will
surely want good reasons to agree and think that it would nearly always be
wrong to actively kill an anencephalic baby (if there happened to be some
pressing need to do so) and why, in general, other forms of “active” euthanasia
are always wrong and should be
illegal.[16]
4. Human Beings
Finally, our article began with the argument that if it’s (usually) wrong to kill innocent human
beings, as the Standard Argument claims, then typical organ transplant
procedures—which involve killing living human bodies—are wrong; but they’re not
(and almost nobody thinks they are)
so the Argument’s principle is false. At
least, common claims that all living
human organisms are (usually) wrong to
kill need to be made more specific to identify which exact types of human
organisms.
Kaczor’s response does not appear to undermine our main point: indeed,
it might support it.
First, again, recall that these living human beings (or bodies) are neither innocent nor not innocent, and
so any principle against killing innocent human beings really has no
application here. Kaczor did not discuss that.
Kaczor claims that it’s a “minority opinion” among scholars that
current organ donation procedures are wrong.[17]
Even if that’s true and ignoring the question of whether they are correct,
however, what we wrote remains true: “Pro-life organizations have not mobilized
against [organ donation procedures] or even signaled disapproval.”
Kaczor writes, “. . if brain death is in fact death, then the human
being in question has already died prior to the organs being removed. .. if the
human being in question has died, removing his organs cannot kill him.”[18]
Now, we agree that the “human being,” in the sense of the human person, has died: that’s the core reason why it’s not wrong
to take the organs.
Kaczor next asks a rhetorical question: “Is it fair to say that [such a
body] is still alive?” and apparently answers, “. . if brain death is death,
then the body is no longer a living body but rather a corpse.”[19]
Earlier he wrote, “A corpse cannot be killed.”
While people are free to call what very much seem to be living bodies “corpses,” that results in
a need for an odd distinction between something like “real corpses”—corpses in
the ordinary sense that are “all dead,” as Miracle Max in The Princess Bride put it[20]—and
what we might surprisingly call “living corpses,” which contain living tissues
but are not living organisms, Kaczor
claims. He claims “what makes an organism to be an organism is not the
functioning of parts of the organism,
but the functioning of the whole
organism.”[21]
While Kaczor does not explain what this means—in particular what the
“whole” organism is and what “functioning” is—this perhaps was just our point:
embryos and beginning fetuses are also not “functioning whole organisms” since there is no consciousness-producing
brain. Four times Kaczor uses the phrase “if brain death is death . .” but
does not engage our suggested proposal that if
“brain birth”—the onset of consciousness—is “life” in the morally relevant
sense, then . . .
If such a proposal is correct, then the Standard Argument against
abortion is again unsound. Helping general readers understand that and why that
is so was our goal for our article. It does not appear that Kaczor has given
any good reason to think we did anything other than succeed at that.
[1] Nathan Nobis and Jonathan Dudley, “Why the
Case against Abortion Is Weak, Ethically Speaking,” Salon, April 11, 2021: salon.com/2021/04/11/why-the-case
-against-abortion-is-weak-ethically-speaking The main
argument of this article is also made in Nathan Nobis and Kristina Grob, Thinking Critically About Abortion (Open
Philosophy Press, 2019), AbortionArguments.com and Nathan Nobis, “Early and Later Abortions: Ethics
and Law,” in Bob Fischer, ed., Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues
that Divide Us (Oxford University Press, 2019).
[2] Christopher Kaczor, “Philosophy and
Theology,” The
National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Volume 25, Issue 1, Spring 2025:
145-151. (Email
for a copy if you lack access).
[3] For an introduction to these issues, see Eric
Olson. “Personal Identity”, The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri
Nodelman (eds.), plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/identity-personal and Kristin Seemeth Whaley, “Psychological
Approaches to Personal Identity: Do Memories and Consciousness Make Us Who We
Are?” 1000‑Word Philosophy: An
Introductory Anthology, February 3, 2022, 1000wordphilosophy.com/2022/02/03/psychological-approaches-to-personal-identity.
[4] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 150.
[5] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 150.
[6] See, e.g., Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed (New York:
HarperCollins, 2023); Tom Regan, The Case
for Animal Rights: Updated with a New Preface (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2023); Mark Rowlands, Animal
Rights (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025);
Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow
Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018); Matthew C. Halteman, Hungry Beautiful Animals (New York: Basic Books, 2024).
[7] Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory,
30th Anniversary Edition (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Gary L.
Francione, Animals as Persons: Essays on
the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008); Steven M. Wise, Drawing the Line:
Science and the Case for Animal Rights (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003);
Charles Camosy, For Love of Animals:
Christian Ethics, Consistent Action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016).
[8] See Jeff Jordan. “Why Friends Shouldn’t Let
Friends be Eaten: An Argument for Vegetarianism.” Social Theory and Practice 27, no. 2 (2001): 309-322.
[9] See ElwoodDogMeat.com and their social media channels for
their sharing of objections and threats
they often receive. For one set of reports on threats to hunters, see CBS News.
“Georgia Hunter Threatened over Photos with Dead Elephant Speaks Out,” CBS News, January 21, 2019, cbsnews.com/news/mike-jines-georgia-hunter-threatened-over-elephant-kill-speaks-out/
[10] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 150.
[11] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 150.
[12] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 150.
[13] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 150.
[14] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 150.
[15] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 149.
[16] People interested in these issues are
encouraged to not think about them in
the abstract. This article can be helpful for that: Gary Comstock “You Should
Not Have Let Your Baby Die.” The New York
Times, July 12, 2017, nytimes.com/2017/07/12/opinion/you-should-not-have-let-your-baby-die.html Also see Nathan Nobis, “Euthansia or Mercy
Killing,” 1000-Word Philosophy: An
Introductory Anthology, March 5, 2019, 1000wordphilosophy.com/2019/03/05/euthanasia-or-mercy-killing/
[17] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 148.
[18] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 148.
[19] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 148.
[20] On Miracle Max, see princessbride.fandom.com/wiki/Miracle_Max
[21] Kaczor, “Philosophy and Theology,” 149.
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