Debates about abortion quickly reduce to debates about personhood. That is, the question typically shifts from ‘Is abortion wrong?’ to, ‘Is a foetus a person such that it warrants ethical treatment?’. The answer to the first is assumed to follow logically from the answer given to the second.
Onora O’Neill, an important contemporary philosopher, suggests why debates over abortion seem to go back and forth with little hope of fruitful conclusions being reached, and then has some surprising words to say about the place of religious voices in this debate:
Yet it is all too plain that universalist discussions of ethical standing in bioethics and beyond during the last twenty-five years have lead mainly to interminable and inconclusive controversy. The protagonists hunt endlessly for some definitive, essential characteristic that will distinguish who is an agent, so might be entitled (for example) to autonomy and self-determination, and who is, whether or not an agent, still at least a ‘moral patient’ or ‘subject’ and entitled to care or at least to ‘moral consideration’. The answers given range widely, even wildly. There are still many who take possession of an immortal soul as the key criteria of ethical standing, and there are some tough-minded secular thinkers who substitute having a sense of oneself as a continuing subject of mental states for having a soul (e.g. Michael Tooley). Others follow Bentham in championing sentience as the criterion of ethical standing (e.g. Peter Singer)…
There seems little prospect of resolving these debates about ‘ethical standing’ within the terms in which they are usually conducted. Without a more explicit vindication of some background perfectionism, or more generally of the necessary metaphysics, it may quite simply be impossible to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for qualifying as an agent (or person), or as a subject (or holder of rights)…
The long-running public and philosophical debates on abortion illustrate these impasses vividly. Most parties to these debates have aimed to identify essential criteria…criteria that would fix the ethical status of the foetus once and for all. This may be why theologians and religious believers, who often accept a perfectionist view of man and matching metaphysical claims, seem comfortable with the terrain on which the debate is conducted, if manifestly distressed by their opponents’ views.”
– Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (1996), p. 94-96.
What first struck me about this passage was the remarkable clarity with which O’Neill sums up the abortion debates. In philosophical papers and the opinion section of the Sydney Morning Herald, the debates quickly turn to why one conception of personhood ought to be rejected, or why another conception is preposterous. Ad hoc scientific data is wheeled in, some philosophical arguments are deployed, name calling is exchanged, and the debate quickly turns cold, with no prospect of resolution. It can be summarized like this: Step 1) adopt certain position, Step 2) said position is reduced to a fundamental claim about personhood, Step 3) squabble interminably about personhood.
The second thing that struck me was how O’Neill locates the religious perspective. O’Neill seems to say that religious believers are comfortable in these debates because the vocabulary of universals and metaphysics which they have at their disposal is able to give the most coherent and defensible position. To paraphrase O’Neill: If identifying essentialist characteristics is the name of the game, than the Christians will always have the upper hand, since their essentialist characteristics are full-throated and unashamedly essentialist and metaphysical, whereas secularists have kept the project of trying to articulate what makes a person a person through theories which just don’t fit the criteria as well. They are searching for something like the possession of an immortal soul to latch onto as the essence of personhood.
Most secular philosophers, particularly in the analytic tradition, have a suspicious attitude toward metaphysics and universal claims, like ‘God exists’ or ‘stealing is always bad.’ However, O’Neill helpfully points out that the issue of determining personhood requires a universal claim, ‘all people are people because they possess x’, and it is probably going to need some background metaphysical story – that is, some larger story about the world and humankind’s place in the world – to lend weight to why this particular property x is the specific characteristic which conveys personhood. To generalize and claim that all persons are persons since they necessarily possess quality x is a task more suited to philosophies which have certain metaphysical entailments, rather than philosophies that want to avoid metaphysics. That is, it seems to make more sense to say that persons are persons since they are created by God, then persons are persons because they have the natural ability to feel pain. The question, well why does that characteristic rather than this characteristic make a person a person seems t
o arise much quicker for the secular response.
To my lights, O’Neill’s observation seems to describe the debates clearly. So long as debates about abortion are reducible to debates about whether the foetus is a person and so worthy of ethical consideration, and so long as theories about personhood locate and recommend ‘some definitive, essential characteristic that will distinguish who is an agent’, Christians will always have a more plausible case to argue – they are accustomed to using universal language, and their claims mesh naturally with their consistent metaphysical story, whereas secular philosophers may use universal language from time to time, but certainly not all the time, and their metaphysical story will probably be half-hearted due to the fact that they are none too happy that they have been bullied into doing metaphysics when they just wanted to do ethics.
To me, O’Neill draws attention to the fact that the deep question, ‘what makes a person a person?’ is one to which Christianity is ready to give a rich, consistent, and morally pointy answer.
Do you agree? If it is the case that Christians genuinely have the upper hand in this dialogue, how should it affect the way Christians communicate about this important issue to those who disagree? Is vitriolic dancing and flag waving in order, or invitation to further dialogue and review, or something in-between?
