Introduction-Worth and Welfare in The Controversy Over Abortion-0333760182

Contents
Preface viii
Part 1: Introductory 1
Part 2: Worth 51
Part 3: Rights and Interests 163
Part 4: Arguing about Interests 231
Part 5: The Idea of a Right to Life 302
Index 335
vii
Part 1: Introductory
1.1 The academic problem and the unhappiness behind it
In September 1995 three pro-choice activists in Boston sat down with three
pro-life activists. They were answering a call from civic leaders, the state
Governor and the local Catholic bishop, for talks between the representa-
tives of choice and of life after a man had shot dead two receptionists at
clinics in the area. After more than 150 hours of conversations over the
next ve and a half years these six activists decided to reveal to the world
at large what they had achieved. And what was that? On the substance of
their disagreement: nothing. Since that rst fear-lled meeting, we have
experienced a paradox. While learning to treat each other with dignity and
respect, we have all become rmer in our views about abortion.
1
It is here, when all else fails, that our curious study philosophy has a part
to play. Philosophy is the art of the intractable. It is what we call upon when
we do not know what further information would be relevant. As so often,
we need to recognise that our difculties might have to do with under-
standing better the information we already have. We may need to retreat
a bit to consider more carefully our presuppositions. And we doubtless need
at least to recognise that there are several problems, not just one. Some of
these problems might be of our own making. But other problems must lie
deep in the nature of things. No one may yet know how to deal with this
or that aspect. We must think things out patiently and slowly. If we do so
we may hope to learn something not just about the immediate issue but
about moral philosophy and perhaps even about ourselves.
2
1
1 Anne Fowler, Nicki Nichols Gamble, Frances X. Hogan, Melissa Kogut, Madeline
McComish and Barbara Thorp, Boston Globe, 28 January 2001.
2 We do ourselves no good by misdescribing or mystifying our difculties. Kristin
Luker in her well known book, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984) gives an unfortunate account of the difculty
of agreement. The two sides, she says, share almost no common premises. But
2 Worth and Welfare in the Controversy over Abortion
The difculties faced by these patient negotiators were doubtless only in
part intellectual. Sometimes people simply want different things. The topic
is also quite difcult to face up to. There are questions which are hard to
raise, let alone discuss. One is not surprised to nd that a pro-life group in
England was prohibited from presenting its election broadcast on television
on the grounds of taste and decency. This is of course very striking in view
of what is otherwise thought tasteful and decent enough to be shown on
television. Perhaps the abortion issue threatens to undermine the security
we nd in being thought moderately decent.
3
I have wished in this book to remove certain hindrances that beset the
abortion debate, to look for partial progress, to examine some of the argu-
ments, and to narrow to some extent the area in which a solution may lie:
a difcult and disturbing enough task even in the space offered by a book.
These introductory chapters will provide some context to the enquiry, and
in particular explain how I have come to focus on worth and on welfare.
Arguments used which seem to support life and arguments which seem
to support choice can both be unsatisfactory as I hope in what follows to
show. In particular I have in mind bad thoughts about foetal worth in the
rst case, and about foetal welfare in the second. I do not claim that both
then, how would anyone know this? No one can survey their own beliefs for
one can be reminded of what one believes. Furthermore, no one can know in
advance which beliefs might turn out to be relevant. Argument can after all sur-
prise us. Quite apart from all that, people can come to agree starting from different
premises, for different valid arguments can of course share the same
conclusion.
3 The Pro-Life Alliance is a political party in the UK and it wished to air its pro-
gramme as part of its campaign in the 2001 general election. The High Court,
upholding the ban, said that broadcasters were merely protecting viewers from
offensive images which included graphic footage of aborted foetuses (BBC website,
24 May 2001). The Pro-Life Alliance then offered to blur the images, but this
was not considered sufcient. Perhaps there was blood in evidence, which would
still have looked distressingly red on a blurred image? But this would hardly be
relevant, for it is a matter of routine these days to show detailed pictures of opera-
tions, with plenty of red blood to be seen. The Pro-Life Alliance listed various
stressful images which have appeared on television screens in the UK and which
they say have been defended by the broadcasting standards authorities, rejecting
viewers complaints. These include explicit footage of bodies in a Kosovo mortuary,
graphic scenes of a postmortem, the stoning of two men found guilty of adultery,
other executions, a 15-year-old boy sodomised by a 29-year-old, various exotic
genital mutilations, a rock musician defecating on stage, footage of a Brazilian
boy whose face and penis had been chewed by a pig, etc. This raises the question:
what then is so special about abortion? Part of the story must be this: that abor-
tion is quite unlike execution or killing in a war, in that so very many of us are
personally involved, either directly or at one remove. This will of course include
the broadcasters and their technicians, the members of the broadcasting standards
authorities, lawyers, judges and ofcials of the High Court, etc.
Introductory 3
sides are equally confused, but that there is at least some confusion on both
sides seems undeniable. Doubtless too there is confusion and error in this
book. One can only set out in the spirit of Tartakower: the mistakes are all
there, waiting to be made.
Any discussion of this topic should start by thinking of the problems
faced by many pregnant women. This is admittedly an academic book. But
we cannot but be aware of the quite unacademic unhappiness beyond the
library and the lecture room. Very many women across the world face dif-
culties for which abortion is thought to offer the only way out, and often
this will be deeply troubling to them. More generally, we might speak of
the difculties faced by parents, or prospective parents. We only have to
think of the reassurance parents are now offered not to have a disabled
child. It seems inconceivable that we as a community would now throw
away this opportunity, especially when we add the usual comfort-clause
that no one with moral objections is obliged to avail themselves of it. This
opportunity will seem even more precious when we realise that most
would-be parents are only proposing to have one or two children. How
difcult it must be to stand aside from the crowd and refuse the benets.
If abortion is bad in the way its critics say it is, a woman who refuses to
have the tests on this ground displays a remarkable courage. It is not true
that heroism only concerns what is supererogatory. It may not happen very
often, but people can nd themselves in a situation where the demand of
justice, that is to say of what is owed, is the demand for pretty well every-
thing they hold dear.
4
We need then to meditate on these difculties faced by parents. Perhaps
our conventions and practices need to be reorganised in a way which would
give them better support. This is more a matter for us as citizens than as
academics.
5
It is obviously possible for people to help in ways which cause
no moral controversy. As someone whose life is spent in libraries I am con-
tinually impressed by, and grateful for, the patient work put in by so many
who show this practical concern, so often on a voluntary basis. It is easy
4 Perhaps I should add the obvious point that there is no reason to suppose that all
women who want an abortion are desperate and consider themselves in difculties
which drive them to abortion: the feminist writer Naomi Wolf has suggested not,
and she is in a better position to know this sort of thing than an academic phi-
losopher. Much of her article is devoted to the vigorous unmasking of various
pro-choice pretences (Naomi Wolf, Our Bodies, Our Souls, New Republic, 16
October 1995, reprinted in the UK, New Statesman and Society, 20 October 1995).
5 Politically, one might want to combine elements of what is conventionally right
and left. See Alasdair MacIntyres note explaining why he was not going to vote
in the 2004 presidential election, seeing that one party failed to respect the lives
of the unborn while the other failed to respect the needs of their mothers. The
Only Vote Worth Casting in November, www.nd.edu/~ndethics/macintyrevote.
shtml.
to forget that abortion might seem to be the only way out just because of
the poverty of what we bystanders, as individuals or as a community, have
to offer.
6
Sometimes indeed we fail to understand what is possible. Thus we
might take it for granted that continued pregnancy in a 14-year-old must
mean the end of her education and that abortion is therefore necessary. But
need this be so? Might it not be possible to turn things around? Might we
not make something good emerge from the difculty, a good which might
not have been achieved otherwise? As I write, just such a teenager, who had
been reluctant to attend school at all, was now showing herself determined
to sit for exams, supported and encouraged imaginatively by her local
authority.
7
Disagreements begin when we ask what kinds of solution to these difcul-
ties are permissible. If there is such a thing as moral obligation at all, there
will obviously be some limits to the kind of assistance which can be
demanded, or offered, or indeed to the legitimacy of self-help. Everyone,
whatever they think about abortion, will agree with that. This brings us
back to the academy. We say so casually that a doctor must do his best for his
patients, but only if we exclude all sorts of doings will this have a chance
of being true. In real life we hedge such a remark with tacit restrictions. A
physician might say I came into medicine to help people, and that sounds
ne, but it would not always be an honourable defence of his (or her)
conduct. It would all depend on what form the helping took. It is odd to
have to say this, but it turns out to be necessary.
8
What, in the case of those who are unhappy to be pregnant, are the
helping limits? We cannot ask this question without moving beyond
moral problems that are peculiar to abortion. For what is usually wanted is
that a certain developing human individual will cease to exist, the fact that
the individual is still in the womb providing the opportunity, in a society
which at present more or less forbids infanticide, to bring this about. If this
6 Those who think that there are abortion rights often like to say that abortion
should be safe, legal and rare. But this might easily in practice go along with
hostility towards those who help pregnant women to make it rarer, by offering
abortion alternatives. In 1997 Glasgows Cardinal Winning introduced a scheme
to provide nancial help to enable pregnant women to keep their babies. Oppo-
nents have described it as bribery. It has even been said to reduce choice (BBC
News, 11 October 1999).
7 BBC Today programme, 5 March 2001.
8 A plea of just this kind was recently made by a Colorado doctor, one of four plain-
tiffs in a lawsuit against anti-abortion activists, and the director of the Boulder
Abortion Clinic. My medical colleagues and I went into medicine to help people,
and we do. See Warren M. Hern, Free Speech that Threatens My Life, New York
Times, 31 March 2001. An ad for the lm Vera Drake reads: Vera sees herself as
simply helping women in need, and always does so with a smile and kind words
of encouragement. I think we are supposed to say: so thats all right then.
Introductory 5
were not at issue, we would be inclined to repeat the conventional formulae,
saying that what a pregnant woman does with her own body is up to her,
or that it is a matter between her and her doctor. We would certainly not
be saying that she would rst have to consider impartially the interests of all
sentient beings, in that comical phrase so solemnly invoked in the strange
realms of moral philosophy. We would go along with the spirit of these
ritual remarks about bodily autonomy. (I mean it would be pedantic to
insist that so much wronging, after all, involves the wrongdoer doing
something with his own body.)
If justice, in the sense of what is owed, lays a burden on someone, it is
not always a burden which it is entirely that individuals own affair to carry.
Here the very language of owing, with its suggestion of dollars and pounds,
can be misleading for in monetary matters we do think that it is an indi-
viduals private responsibility to pay up. Others are not expected to bail
him out. Most debts are voluntarily acquired, after all. But some of the
owings under justice are simply visited upon us, and may be severe. A
child, let us say, suddenly demands care quite beyond what is usual on
account of its unexpectedly acquired disabilities. Justice suddenly demands
that one changes ones whole life. One has to take on a different role,
become a different person, lay aside cherished prospects. Could it not also
be a requirement of justice that others rally round either as individuals
directly or through public institutions?
Sometimes, though much less commonly, a pregnant woman will face a
very different problem. She will want the protection of the moral law and
of the law of the land against someone who might threaten to kill her
unborn offspring and a particular kind of protection at that. She will want
such an action to be classied as murder (as legally it is classied in certain
American states
9
) rather than as the theft of a body-part, let us say, or
battery, as if there were no third party involved. In so doing, she will
demand that the developing individual within her be acknowledged and
respected by the community, not necessarily as a citizen, but as a vulnerable
9 See the Californian Supreme Court ruling in People v. Davis, 872 P. 2d 591 (Calif.
1994), holding that third party killing with malice aforethought of a foetus is
murder . . . as long as the state can show that the foetus has progressed beyond
the embryonic stage of seven to eight weeks. It rejected the claim that the foetus
would have to be viable. The judgment also refers to and discusses similar statutes
in Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Dakota and Utah, commenting
that in these cases, unlike in California, the murder statutes do not require that
the unborn have reached a particular stage of development. Injuring the unborn
can have legal consequences in England too. A man who stabbed his pregnant
girlfriend, wounding their unborn child, was given two life sentences yesterday
(The Times, 23 November 1999). A useful review of the law as it stands in the
various American states can be found in Foetal Homicide at <www.ncsl.org/
programs/health/fethom.htm>.
human being, and that there be no pretence in the law that it somehow
isnt there.
10
Recognition, she will insist, should be accorded not just when
its life is threatened by design, but also let us say when this life is taken in
a road accident, perhaps caused by a reckless driver. This problem can even
affect women whose unborn babies die naturally:
If your baby died before birth, you will not receive an ofcial death cer-
ticate. This can feel disappointing because it somehow denies the fact
that your baby was alive inside you! As an alternative, some hospitals
provide a baby certicate, which lists the babys name, date of birth
and other life afrming information. You can also design your own cer-
ticate or nd a print shop to make one for you.
11
Is an unborn offspring entitled to this recognition and protection? Must
this recognition be denied simply in order that those who perform abor-
tions can feel less anxious about what they do? This is a very real question
for some women.
1.2 Questions and their context
The arguments we shall be considering in this book will proceed as if we
are just concerned with pregnancy. It is in the main a book about the abor-
tion controversy. However, it is important at the outset of our discussion
to see the broader picture, for very often similar questions will arise where
there is no pregnancy at all, no question of abortion, nor of a battery upon
pregnant women. We do well to remind ourselves that there is a range of
cases which seem to raise similar issues. An appreciation of this context
will remove certain distractions which make thinking difcult.
What, for example, are we to say about a proposal to destroy embryos
which have resulted from fertilisation in a glass dish, embryos which have
never been inside a womans womb? It might prove very useful to have this
freedom. At the present time the pro-life movement seems to be preoccu-
pied not so much with abortion as with the destructive use of human
embryos to provide tissue with which to treat diseases. Again, if articial
wombs are eventually possible, a controversy is bound to arise whether we
may (painlessly) dispose of the human individuals inside them, or use
them for testing drugs, or harvest them for their body-parts. We might
10 Phillips, J, in de Martell v. Merton and Sutton Health Authority, [1992] 3 All ER 820,
at 831, talks here of the ction . . . which denies the living creature which
became the plaintiff a persona in the period prior to birth, a ction which the
law in this case had to nd a way around.
11 Deborah L. Davis, Empty Cradle, Broken Heart: Surviving the Death of Your Baby,
Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1991, p. 71.
Introductory 7
not think it appropriate to refer to such destruction as abortion. Lastly, a
number of well-regarded philosophers have in recent decades been defend-
ing infanticide while admitting perhaps that one must be duly cautious
about side-effects. Such a defence, at one time rather daring, is by now quite
usual, and the case for it is carefully and non-directively presented in nearly
every anthology of practical ethics. What might once have been the gasp
of astonishment has become the yawn of familiarity.
Where we are concerned with pregnancy, it is not always the termination
of pregnancy standardly abbreviated as TOP
12
which will concern us. Let
us leave aside the fact that the mere induction of birth early, a common
enough practice, is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy and conne
ourselves to lethal procedures.

The lethal procedures involved in so-called
pregnancy reduction employed where a woman is expecting several
children tend in practice to keep the pregnancy going. I do not know of
anyone writing about these matters who seems to have noticed this point.
And where we are concerned with lethal termination, it is not always the
womans own pregnancy which is at issue. A woman who wants there to
be an abortion might not herself be pregnant, for she may have rented a
womb and be hoping, because of her changed circumstances, to have a
surrogate abortion. Anyone paying all that money will probably contract
to receive a perfect child no missing ngers, etc and will want imperfect
specimens selected out. Or again she will want just one child to be born,
and will insist that a twin should not also survive.
13
All of these cases
involve homicide in the early stages of life, or at least what is said to be
such. It is this, in the main, which is our topic.
We should not even assume that when we are concerned with pregnancy,
and are discussing allegations of homicide, that we are necessarily con-
cerned with women, since it is presumably only a contingent fact that
only women can be pregnant. A womb is not stricly necessary. A baby can
develop in the abdominal cavity outside the womb and survive. It might
soon be possible for a male to be pregnant in this way. Male seahorses seem
to be able to cope with pregnancy. A report at a scientic gathering that
male pregnancy was now a fact might be met with some scepticism, yet
it would not reasonably be dismissed as a barely intelligible fairy story or
12 It could be that this remarkable abbreviation is conned to the UK, where we
may nd it even in academic journals. Talk of termination of pregnancy in the
UK has no doubt been proved popular on the ground of what is not mentioned.
Those who use it seem not to have noticed that to top is a verb meaning to kill
(perhaps originally, to kill by decapitation).
13 A British woman pregnant with twins is suing a California couple, saying the
husband and wife backed out of a surrogacy contract after she refused to abort
one of the foetuses (CNN, 14 August 2001). The case was widely reported. There
was some disagreement whether the pregnant woman was requested or told
to have the abortion.
fantasy. Robert Winston, perhaps the best known fertility specialist in the
UK, has said that such a feat would certainly be possible. One day there
might be a demand for male pregnancy clinics in the name of equal oppor-
tunity. Still, those who believe that abortion is murder are hardly going to
think differently or make exceptions when it is a man who is pregnant. And
those who talk of the right to do what one likes with ones very own body,
will talk similarly in this case too.
Are we at any rate essentially concerned with reproduction? No. This
is perhaps surprising, but it will help us to handle our topic to see that
this is so. We need to remember the range of cases we mentioned. It is
particularly obvious that someone who is wondering whether a new-born
baby may be gently put down if terminally ill, or whether it may be sedated
and left to die if affected by Downs syndrome, is not thinking about a
reproductive question. The question only arises because reproduction has
already occurred and the fact is perhaps unwelcome. (I am assuming of
course that breast feeding and toilet training and elementary schooling are
not part of the reproductive process. There is perhaps a harmless element
of stipulation involved.) Sometimes the question whether we are concerned
with reproduction is part of the issue to be discussed. This simple point is
nearly always missed. At the present time much is made of a distinction
between reproductive and therapeutic cloning. The terminology is tenden-
tious if therapeutic cloning already involves reproduction.
Perhaps I should say at this point that our topic is not about sexuality
except of course for Freudians who think that every topic is about sexuality.
Our problems would be just the same if scientic research was able to
provide women with babies parthenogenetically an advance which may
arrive sooner than we think. There seems to be a good deal of associative
unthinking in this matter, both among those who are for choice and those
who are for life. Some examples. Historian James Mohr, writing about the
nineteenth century, says: Christian women could not and would not be
involved with such an unchaste and unnatural procedure, and as a conse-
quence, there was no reason to discuss the matter in their publications.
14

Whence the unchaste? Would infanticide count as an unchaste topic too?
Judge and academic Richard A. Posner, in his book entitled Sex and Reason,
includes a section on abortion. What is a discussion of abortion doing in
an academic book about sex, especially when it is said at the outset, and
reasonably enough, that abortion is usually objected to as a form of infan-
ticide? The morality of infanticide is hardly related to problems about sexu-
ality.
15
An exhaustive (981-page) study of Roe v. Wade by David Garrow is
entitled Liberty and Sexuality.
16
The prominent campaigner Lawrence Lader
14 Abortion in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 183.
15 Sex and Reason, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 272.
16 Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade, New York:
Macmillan, 1994. Just over a third of this book is devoted to controversies over
Introductory 9
wants us to think that having an abortion is a kind of sexual behaviour.
He talks of prohibitions, not only over abortion, but over other forms of
sexual behaviour as well.
17
Philosopher Georgia Warnke would like to stress
the supposed association with sex in the minds of abortion opponents. For
pro-life advocates, not only is human life sacred, so is the act of intercourse
through which new life begins.
18
And what about the bed sheets one wants
to ask? Wouldnt they be considered just a little sacred too? Sidney
Callahan, who is pro-life, does not go quite so far. But she states that how
one interprets and denes sexuality is critical to abortion discussions and
decisions.
19
With due allowance for the obscurity of interpretation and
denition in such a context, this seems to be arbitrary and unfounded.
Pro-choice pioneer Mary Anne Warren writes: One reason that abortion is
controversial now is that it has become a symbol of contemporary cultural
and political struggles over sexual morality and the social roles of women.
20

Seeing that this is something of a received opinion, I should perhaps say
on my own behalf that I have no view whatsoever on the social roles of
women
21
and nd sexual morality impossible on the whole to think well
about. So these struggles will have little part to play in what follows. A
discussion of sexual morality might indeed involve reference to abortion,
but abortion is a topic to itself.
22
contraception. It is of course possible to think of abortion as a form of birth
control, and indeed to think of infanticide in this way, as controlling a certain
consequence of birth as in Linda Gordons Womens Body, Womans Right: A Social
History of Birth Control in America, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977; for example,
p. 28. In regard to infanticide Birth Correction would be the better term. Much
homicide might be seen as birth correction, I suppose.
17 Abortion, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966, p. 90, italics added.
18 Legitimate Differences: Interpretation in the Abortion Controversy and Other Public Debates,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 90. Professor Warnkes book was
singled out for discussion at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
19 Value Choices in Abortion, in Sydney and Daniel Callahan, eds, Abortion: Under-
standing Differences, New York: Plenum Press, 1984, p. 287.
20 Moral Status, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 208.
21 In this respect I am unlike Mill, who quaintly wrote: The great occupation of
woman should be to beautify life (On Marriage, in J. M. Robson, ed., Essays on
Equality, Law, and Education: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XXI,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, p. 44).
22 People like to assimilate the objection taken by Catholics to abortion with that
other objection they make to contraception. This is clearly a useful move. Not
only is the teaching against contraception much despised, but the association
plays down disturbing thoughts of homicide two birds with one stone. Some-
times, of course, this will not be dishonest, but merely unthinking. The BBC
programme Panorama ran a feature called Sex and the Holy City (12 August
2003) which included a good deal of comment on abortion. The reporter, Steve
Bradshaw, said that trying to stop abortions is just one way the Vatican is trying
to impose its sexual values across the world (BBC website). Most people oppose
infanticide. Should this too be seen as an attempt to impose sexual values?
About abortion in particular I am going to assume, as is natural, that
abortion is a failure if the pregnancy ends with a living baby, a baby which
then must be kept or given up for adoption or perhaps killed. If the indi-
vidual in the womb has already died of natural causes then any subsequent
medical procedure in connection with it will not be counted an abortion.
23

As I said: what is wanted almost invariably is that a certain developing
human individual will cease to exist. (I do not, of course, mean that this is
wanted for its own sake. Perhaps it would not be intelligible to claim to want
such a thing just in itself and for no further reason.) What is paid for, the
service, is that by such and such a time there will no longer be such an
individual. If there were some way of proceeding which would give the baby
a chance of a healthy normal life this would deliberately be avoided. If the
foetus happened to be viable, its heart might need injecting with potassium
chloride, or its head might need crushing or cutting off. Of course, no one
would want to dwell on this aspect. But it would just be embarrassing in a
particular case if at the last minute someone were to wheel in an efcient
articial womb, the latest Sony Pregnatron just arrived from Tokyo. Not
every choice is welcome. I am going to consider arguments which aim to
legitimise abortion in this sense, where death is not a by-product or side-
effect (or even something one could somewhat cheatingly imagine to be a
side-effect: what counts as a side-effect is clear in some cases, but there is a
large zone of indeterminacy). That is enough to be going on with.
24
23 It is perhaps rather pedantic to make this stipulation. But Sarah Weddington, the
lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade before the US Supreme Court, is prepared to put
a case for abortion rights in the following terms. What if a woman is discovered
to be carrying what is already a dead foetus? Surely she should have the right to
an abortion (A Question of Choice, New York: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 252).
24 Bernard Nathanson, who had once been in charge of a large abortion clinic,
wants vehemently to insist in his anti-abortion book that abortion is not killing.
Medically speaking, abortion is not the killing of the foetus, never has been,
and (I trust) never will be. I repeat. Abortion is not the killing of the foetus. Rather
abortion is the separation of the foetus from the mother. The fundamental mis-
understanding here corrupts the entire debate. Though in practice death has
become the aim as well as the result of separating the foetus, the medical term
does not imply any intent to destroy it. From Alan Guttmachers essay in the
rst medical anthology on abortion (1954) through recent statements of
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the point is made
that the foetus is not the doctors target, and that its death is a by-product of its
removal (Aborting America, New York: Doubleday, 1979, p. 177, italics in text).
Indeed, Dr Nathanson, following an older usage, does not want to call what
happens after viability abortions at all. By contrast, Leonora Lloyd of the National
Abortion Campaign says rather plainly and clearly that it is important to remem-
ber that the desired outcome, even in a later abortion, is a dead foetus (R. Gillon,
ed., Principles of Health Care Ethics, Chichester: Wiley, 1994, pp. 5734). Charles
Rodeck and Susan Bewley (in S. Bewley and R. Humphrey Ward, eds, Ethics in
Introductory 11
Abortion thus understood is not to be classed with self-defence, where
the use of minimum force would be expected, and the child might chance
to live to everyones satisfaction. Still less should it be classed with an
assertion of ones property rights in ones body, or resistance to a hostile
takeover.
25
There has been much discussion of abortion as mere detachment
like turning an unwelcome guest out of ones house with death as a sad
foreseen consequence, a letting die rather than a killing, which one would
have avoided if one reasonably could (but one must be allowed ones
privacy, after all . . .). Perhaps abortion is sometimes like this. Deliberate
detachment gives us a spectrum of cases. At one end of the spectrum we
have ordinary induced birth, where a woman decides for one reason or
another not to continue the pregnancy. Those opposed to abortion have
no objection to that. At the other end, where death is certain, detachment
might incur the guilt of murder, either because it is a mere pretence that
the death is unintended, or because, as seems reasonable, we should not
insist that the kind of wronging we class as murder must in every case
involve the intention to kill (in this respect, we are of course following the
legal concept of murder in the common-law tradition). But the topic of
mere detachment is not our concern. What people mean by abortion emerges
clearly from what they choose to mean by a safe abortion.
Cases where a pregnant woman has a cancerous uterus removed can
involve foetal death which is clearly not wanted even reluctantly, in the
way someone may want to go to the dentist. A woman might wait, hoping
against hope, day by day, that the operation can be postponed long enough
to give the baby a chance of survival. I once saw a harrowing programme
Obstetrics and Gynaecology, London: RCOG Press, 1994) reasonably contrast mere
termination of pregnancy, which might, as they point out, be undertaken to save
the life of the foetus, with abortion with the aim that the foetus does not
survive (p. 262). And they point out, for example, that extra-amniotic infusion
is now less used because it has a higher failure and infection rate, and also may
result in a live baby (p. 263, italics added). The authors regard foetal survival as
an appalling complication (p. 263).
25 Implantation is described by Miriam Stoppard as the rst step in the embryos
hostile takeover of the innocent mother and a sign of the uncompromising sav-
agery to come. The vandalizing embryo, she says, acts like a malignant cancer,
the mothers uterus having to absorb the ferocity of the babys attack. You
thought you were having a baby? Think again, your baby is having you (Forced
Labour? Birth is More a Hostile Takeover, Times Higher Education Supplement, 26
January 2001.) This would all be just amusing chatter in the ante-natal clinic if
it were not for what ethicists tend earnestly to say about self-defence, enslave-
ment and property rights. L. W. Sumner expresses himself more soberly, but in
the same vein. Not only does pregnancy violate a womans physical integrity . . .
(Abortion and Moral Theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 8.)
Would having an aged parent to look after violate ones social integrity?
on TV involving just that. The poor woman was eventually given her dead
baby to caress. This will not be the sort of case under consideration here.
Catholics often say that this operation is justied under so-called double
effect. And to be sure, it seems to me that some doctrine involving double
effect considerations is required in moral philosophy. I half suspect, however,
that a reasonable doctrine of this kind might often be too weak to give us
the result we would like, even in this case. But I will not pursue the
matter.
Our central problem concerns killing: the killing of (what is said to be)
a developing human individual. And this, as we have said, whether or not
the individual is detached from a pregnant woman it might be in an
articial womb, a hospital incubator or a homely cradle. It might be in a
petri dish. Is it sometimes permissible to kill young human individuals, if
that is what they are? Wouldnt that always be murder? Wouldnt it always
be murder if we can rule out, perhaps as fanciful, considerations of self-
defence? And if we are not to talk of murder here, should we at least view
killing as the destruction of something specially valuable? Is that our real
worry, hidden behind our worried language? Dont we all, whatever our
views, think that what is destroyed is somehow valuable, but differ, under-
standably enough, when asked just how valuable it is, and what could
be worth sacricing in order to preserve it? Or do we think (in addition
perhaps) that what is destroyed has the most fundamental right of all which
is being violated? Do we understand this reference to a right? If we talk
concernedly about human rights abuses around the world, is there not a
human rights abuse which has become a daily part of the respectable life
of our own community, and therefore not to be mentioned?
26
Or could we
condently reply that someone at this early stage in life cannot possibly
have rights any more than there could be rights possessed by cabbage
plants? After all, it will be said, a human individual at this stage of life
cannot have plans, cannot be disappointed, cannot assert a right, cannot
stick up for the rights of others that much would be agreed by everyone.
Would this in turn show us that abortion is not could never be murder?
Or does the wrongfulness of murder not turn upon the possession of rights
at all? Many of these issues are rather general, and will even be of interest
to those (if any) who simply do not care how the dispute over abortion is
26 People talk of the human rights community, which must surely be a partisan
organisation of mutual admirers. We could hardly expect its members to recog-
nise abortion as an infringement of a human right. Frances Kissling says with
evident satisfaction: The human rights community is moving steadily towards
recognising a womans right to choose and there is no countervailing view in
this community that even considers the question of whether or not foetuses are
rights-bearing entities (Is There Life after Roe?, Conscience, Winter 2004/05,
<www.catholicsforchoice.org/conscence/current/LifeAfterRoe.htm>, p. 2 italics
added).
Introductory 13
to be decided. Indeed, we will probably not think about these matters well
unless, at least to some extent, we can detach ourselves from the practical
anxieties and retreat into the study.
1.3 Down with murder or up with maternity?
It will help us to focus on the question of killing if we reect that our
topic has nothing to do with a fondness or xation on maternity. Or
indeed on the equivalent paternity should men become capable of
gestating.
Given that abortion is bad in the way usually supposed, what would be
required of a pregnant woman? I want to suggest: much less than many
moralists might suppose. Opposition to homicide represents a minimal
requirement in a sense, something not in the least impressive. What more
generally is required could perhaps be put like this: that the pregnant
woman is required to treat her foetus with (what could vaguely be called)
ordinary care. It will be quite usual for women to want to do more than
this minimum, of course, and even to talk quite extravagantly of what is
required of them. But it would be mere moralism to take this talk seriously,
though it might be attractive enough in its place. What is required, the
treating with ordinary care, would usually involve doing rather little, but
simply leading a normal life. Someone might wish to comment that the
womans body is doing rather a lot, or that her circulation is working over-
time, that her glands put out this and that, etc. The amount of activity which
goes on under the headings of digestion and metabolism might be pretty
impressive too come to think of it. Books on our subject sometimes like to
remind us of this sort of thing lest we be insufciently appreciative, so let
us be duly reminded.
Let us now suppose that for some reason the pregnant woman is liable
to have a miscarriage unless she stays in bed, the opponent of abortion
need not suppose that she is required to stay there, still less that she should
be forced to do so. (With some pregnancy complications, the mother and
her foetus may benet from a very sedentary existence says Williams Obstet-
rics.
27
) Again if the woman needed some medicine that might well cause a
spontaneous abortion as a side-effect, this would not show that it was
wrong of her to take it.
28
All this would involve a very different discussion.
Surely a woman might be entitled to take certain risks? Analogies might be
27 F. Gary Cunningham et al., eds, Williams Obstetrics, 20th edn, London: Prentice-
Hall International, 1997, p. 240.
28 It has recently been suggested that miscarriage is correlated with taking aspirin.
Suppose that there is a causal inuence. Why should someone who thinks abor-
tion is murder suppose it wrong on this account for a pregnant woman to swallow
an aspirin for her headache?
found helpful. Thus we might ask what a woman would be entitled to do
if she were to wake up one day to nd that she had become attached by
various tubes to someone else during the night, and was now providing
irreplaceable life support. Would one be entitled to behave in ways which
might risk his life? Smoking? Walking about?
In special circumstances of course it could easily be wrong to act in a way
which increases the likelihood of a miscarriage. This is because any action
which is in general all right can be wrong if done for a bad reason. If abor-
tion for Downs syndrome is gravely wrong qua homicide, and qua unjust
discrimination against the already disadvantaged, then it would seem to be
wrong to risk miscarriage by having amniocentesis if this is done with a
view to eliminating ones offspring if affected. Recent research at St Bart-
holemews Hospital, London, claims that for every Downs syndrome baby
identied by amniocentesis, four unaffected babies are miscarried.
29
A woman who did not happen to feel sad after a miscarriage should not
be the subject of any reproach. This is worth underlining. No one opposed
to abortion need insist that a woman be maternal. It might of course be
true that those opposed to abortion also tend to admire baby-bearing. Abor-
tion opponents might even come, by some proceess of association, to be
fond of babies. I know of someone, long opposed to abortion for foetal
handicap, who once felt privileged to hold a young baby born with spina
bida, where the killing option, though doubtless available, had not been
chosen. It is true that we regard someone as doubly wrong who kills
someone for whom they have (perhaps very rudimentary) duties of care.
But this is not particuarly or exclusively a maternalist thought, for we think
exactly this about a doctor who kills a patient (who might perhaps be a
foetal patient). And of course this is a side issue in regard to abortion.
The mistaken idea that the objection to abortion has something to do
with an odd enthusiasm for birth perhaps it will be called pro-natalism
is very common. No doubt it helps to suppress an uncomfortable thought.
Lofty-sounding sentiments of a pronatalist character are freely attributed,
as if these were of the essence. The judgment in Casey, for example, talks
of those whose view
is based on such a reverence for the wonder of creation that any preg-
nancy ought to be welcomed and carried to full term . . .
30
29 As reported in the Independent, 5 April 2001. One imagines that Professor Dworkin
about whom more in a moment would come out strongly against the practice,
on grounds of the loss of all that intrinsic value.
30 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 853. This
pious attitude of reverence is even-handedly contrasted with another from the
abortion-friendly side of the fence: that the inability to provide for the nurture
and care of the infant is a cruelty to the child. Moralists tend not to be pleased
Introductory 15
The question at issue, say the justices, is whether the state can insist upon
its own vision of the womans role.
31
Yet why must someone opposed to
abortion (or indeed contraception, since that seems also to be under discus-
sion) think that a woman ought always to welcome being pregnant? Such
a sentimental idea is harmful to clear thinking on this topic. Elizabeth
Anscombe was a philosopher twice arrested for protesting about abortion
(as I have recently learned). And she was indeed prepared to say there were
times and places where child-bearing was a womans pride and many chil-
dren her honour. However, she also felt free to talk about the reckless and
callous begetting of children.
32
Hardly a maternalist turn of phrase. And
not one to t the Casey piety. A woman might well be heard to say: Dammit,
Im pregnant again! How could anyone take exception to that? It would be
quite in line for a friend who takes it for granted that an abortion would
be murder to sympathise with her: Rotten luck! Perhaps the woman is
determined this time not to fall in with the vision of a womans role. She
will have the child adopted. Far from protesting, opponents of abortion
might well be offering to assist her.
It can even be all right to be pleased about a miscarriage. Since there are
very many people opposed to abortion, there are no doubt some so silly
and insensitive to think that a teenager who is unhappily pregnant should
be made to pay for her mistake by being made to keep the baby. But it is
no part of the view that killing an unborn child is a wrong to think such a
thing. A miscarriage in such circumstances is not the unjust avoidance of
punishment. Quite generally, a woman (or the man in the case) can some-
times, all things considered, welcome without reproach the fact that their
baby has died, whether born or unborn. This would not even be evidence
of hardness of heart, as it might well be in the case of the death of a toddler.
It is here that talk of bonding has a place though no doubt a certain
amount of bonding must go with a baby in the womb after ultrasound or
after quickening. It is reasonable to spend medical resources on the saving
of born children in particular, partly because they tend to be particularly
loved.
when the sincerity of this unlovely excuse is put to the test by the provision of
help for both mother and offspring.
31 Casey, 852.
32 You Can Have Sex Without Children, Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, rst quote p. 82, second p. 83. And there is no reason
to suppose that in admitting that begetting can be reckless and callous she would
have gone as far as the illiberal Mill. Mill claimed, in On Liberty of all places,
that the state was entitled to prevent poor people from marrying, people who
could not show that they had the means of supporting a family. On Liberty,
Chapter 5, para. 15, in J. M. Robson, ed., Essays on Politics and Society: The Col-
lected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVIII, Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1977, p. 304.
There is a general point here to be made about death. It is quite often
reasonable to be gratied by someones death, and not just because one
considers it the best thing from the deceaseds point of view. Someone who
is a pain in the neck drops dead, leaving a job opportunity for ones friend
Bill. One says: Thank heavens! Why must a reasonable devotion to the
sanctity of life rule out such a reaction? It would be distinctly unimpressive
(though no doubt expected) for someone keen on abortion rights to express
shock horror.
33
This point is quite important. There is no such thing as the natural or the
appropriate reaction to a death, the mandatory response of the long face.
To an undertaker a death means a business opportunity. It would be espe-
cially comical to suppose that there was an appropriate response to the
death of organisms generally, even if we conne our attention to those
which are sentient beings. A man might be more upset by the death of his
goldsh than by the death of his uncle he would not necessarily have to
reproach himself for that. And of course we should not be drawing earnest
conclusions about their respective moral statuses! Nor should we be won-
dering whether goldsh-days are somehow more valuable than avuncular-
days. If all this makes it more difcult to understand the objection we
rightly make to murder, then that is progress.
This whole topic invites humbug. And how many there are who respond
to the invitation. I know very well, as we all know, that people are dying all
the time. They are dying right now as I write. Each full stop marks the full
stop of someones life. I am quite unmoved. Everyone would say something
of the kind if they were not trying to make a good impression. In truth, it
would be rather alarming to learn that death had just been abolished. Envi-
ronmentalists would be particularly upset. People might well retort: If you
dont feel upset a little bit at the thought that an individual, NN, has died,
you cannot really think of him as a human being. You must think of him
as sub-human, a robot, a crocodile perhaps or a mere foetus. This species
of argument it is hard to avoid the scare quotes turns out to be quite
popular. In particular, we are told: You cannot really think of this miscar-
riage as the death of your child, because the appropriate reaction to the
death of your child is XYZ and your reaction is PQR. This is often thought
decisive: So there . . . It seems to me an exceptionally feeble consideration,
which would not be accorded weight if it did not allow us do what we want
33 Pro life advocates link the principle of the sanctity of human life to the need to
accept, gratefully, new human life in all its forms and in all circumstances
(Warnke, Legitimate Differences p. 93). Some of them might be generous or yea-
saying in this way. But why need they be? It is hardly of the essence of their case
the hard-edged case that many people would evidently like to hide beneath a
lather of scented soap. Professor Warnke is here tripped up, like so many, by the
misleading connotations of the phrase pro-life.
Introductory 17
to do without feeling too bad about it. Sometimes people feel devastated at
a miscarriage, sometimes relieved, quite often a bit of both. Each reaction
can be appropriate. What dies, however, is the same in each case.
34
Abortion liberals do not like to refer to their opponents as pro-life. They
prefer to say anti-choice or anti-abortion. In this, their animus leads them
aright. It is most misleading to say that the aim of their opponents is the
preservation of foetal life.
35
That better describes a specialist in foetal medi-
cine. Janet Radcliffe Richards assumes the presence of a principle in the
mind of the abortion-opponent who is not just moved by disgraceful preju-
dices perhaps unconscious, to wit: that life is more important than
freedom and the absence of suffering.
36
Allowing for a certain unclarity as
to meaning, I do not see how an abortion opponent who supposes abortion
to be murder need sign up to such a grand generalisation. He or she might
reasonably think it right on occasion to support measures to protect freedom
or reduce suffering, measures which will eventually, sooner or later, have
lethal consequences. We all do, whatever our views about abortion.
1.4 A limited objective
The central problem then concerns killing rather than life-saving. Now it
is not part of my purpose to provide (what might be called) a comprehensive
solution to this central problem. I could hardly do that, for I do not know
of such a solution. Here, for once, is a book on this subject which does not
pretend to answer all your questions. My treatment, as I have suggested, is
conned to certain topics within the eld. I will certainly not be attempt-
ing to prove that it is bad to kill a baby, before or after its birth. People who
believe that it is gravely wrong to kill a baby as I do simply lack such a
proof. At least, we have nothing which would frogmarch any competent
philosopher to the conclusion in question. The place of proof in our lives
34 Arguments of the kind you cannot honestly believe it is a baby because you do
not shed tears as you would have to if you really thought . . . spread about like
the common cold. Or the argument, on similar grounds, might be that you
cannot believe it is really a person (whatever that is). For an example here see
Simon Blackburn, Being Good, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 645.
Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. See
also Margaret Olivia Little, The Moral Permissibility of Abortion, in Andrew I.
Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman, eds, Contemporary Debates in Applied
Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, p. 28.
35 . . . the conservative, whose aim is the preservation of foetal life. Christine
Overall, Ethics and Human Reproduction: A Feminist Prespective, Boston: Allen and
Unwin, 1987, p. 79.
36 Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Sceptical Feminist, London: Routledge, 1980, p. 217.
See also p. 283 below. I prefer Bill Shankley: Football is not a matter of life and
death. Its much more important than that.
is grossly exaggerated. Philosophers themselves soon run out of reasons and
carry on regardless. Furthermore, it is extraordinarily easy for a philosopher
of modest ability to justify the most monstrous conduct. This is one of
the rst things a student should learn on a course in practical ethics. It
induces the right kind of scepticism. (As an exercise, the reader might like
to consider in how many ways he might justify the killing of toddlers or
destroying the world. Hint: he could start by saying suffering should be
prevented at all costs, or again, there is, philosophically speaking, no such
thing as moral obligation.)
Apart from this inability to provide a proof, I am quite uncertain what
to say in particular about human zygotes, morulas and blastocysts. These
entities should not be referred to as babies. It is not that this would be
upsetting, or rhetorical. To call them babies would be at best unnatural
and at worst untrue. But would they be human beings? Not every human
entity is a human being, a human blood corpuscle, for example. Those who
are opposed to abortion often say with condence that human zygotes, etc.,
are all human beings, and thump their textbooks of embryology. For all I
know they might be right in their conclusion; but nearly all of what I have
to say will bypass this issue. I suspect that it is not a straightforward empiri-
cal question the answer being well known to every textbook writer.
37
I
imagine that it is at least in part a conceptual issue in biology. If there is a
subject called philosophy of biology it would be dealt with there. It seems
to me important to admit the existence of such a discipline. There are cer-
tainly conceptual unclarities in biology and these can have a bearing on
our subject. Thus it has become surprisingly usual to ask whether a foetus
(or embryo or zygote) is a full human being. Perhaps there is thought to
be comfort in it. However, we should settle rst what this obscure question
means. Do we know that a toddler is a full human being? Is a puppy a full
dog? If there were centaurs we might indeed wonder whether to say that a
centaur was a full human being, but even here the question would not
really be satisfactory. Such questions arise because our grasp of our concepts
is not wholly secure. This is a very familiar situation in philosophy.
However, even if the opponents of abortion are not right to say that
human zygotes, morulas, etc., are human beings, this admission might not
be as big a concession as they tend to suppose. For certain anomalous
37 More unusual, however, is the appeal to the textbook of embryology to establish,
in support of choice, that doctors who have consulted such a volume, even if
they recall little of it, will somehow know that abortion is not murder: Some
doctors are opposed to abortion, strongly upholding the right of the embryo. But
the major issue that confuses them is not that they think abortion is murder
they usually vaguely remember sufcient embryology to ensure that this is not
the case . . . (Malcolm Potts, Peter Diggory and John Peel, Abortion, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 533).
Introductory 19
human entities, or quasi human-beings, or whatever we call them human
entities which are signicantly unlike blood corpuscles might come under
the protection of the moral law in just the way human beings do. That is
perhaps not implausible. Again, people who say that human beings are
valuable not an altogether satisfactory notion as we shall see might be
entitled to claim that these anomalous human entities are equally valu-
able. It is so very often assumed that those who are pro-life will say: the
killing in question is wrong if and only if what is killed is a human being.
But what entitles us to attribute to them the only if part of this claim?
This question might become acute where a philosopher offers a restricted
account of what it is to be a human being. If for example a newborn baby
is not to count, and is instead referred to as a potential human being rather
than a real one, the only if will be rejected.
However, I do not discuss the issue even though, what we ought to say
about human zygotes and morulas is coming to be of practical importance
as people wonder whether they can do wrong by destructively experiment-
ing with them, perhaps with the aim of doing good. The debate here seems
to me to share all the difculties of the one I shall be engaged in with
the addition of a few more. Perhaps these difculties are easily settled, as
is often supposed by those who are pro-life but perhaps not. Perhaps there
will be indeterminacy after all, even someone who believed that a human
being starts to exist at conception might have to admit that since the
process of conception is continuous there will be times at which it will be
indeterminate whether we yet have a new human being. I make no judge-
ment about these matters. In what follows I may occasionally bring up
questions about zygotes, etc. But in the main they are not my business. I
shall largely conne myself to the if part of the above claim: the thought
that the killing in question is wrong, and indeed gravely wrong, if what is
killed is a human being.
And I shall adopt a naive approach, or what might appear to be such, as
to what counts as a human being. People opposed to abortion sometimes
like to wear a little gold badge showing tiny feet. I shall largely be guided
by this icon, and in the main will conne myself to human individuals or
entities which have such feet, or would have them if they were not maimed
by injury or heredity. I shall assume that non-disabled members of the
human race, men generically speaking, have feet. People who think that
abortion is permissible suppose that it is often all right to dismember a
foetus, and that seems to their opponents to be murder. I am interested in
this difference of opinion. Dismembering presupposes members. This
restriction in the scope of our enquiry is in no way a matter of sentiment.
It is not as if it were especially cuddly to be the kind of being which has
lower extremities. The assumption is a temporary one for purposes of argu-
ment. No one who is pro-life has reason to be cross about it. It is merely a
matter of setting a modest target. Why should we have to solve all our
problems at once? Why is one expected to have a well worked-out position
across the board? Perhaps we will need to say something special about
morulas, etc. But we can come back to that another day, after we have made
progress with matters which ought to be easier.
It is quite often said, by philosophers at least, that certain developing
human beings (with feet let us say) are somehow not persons and that
this entitles us to kill them, or to kill them for a serious reason such as
saving a reasonably large sum of money, etc. It is this kind of thought which
will concern us. Doctrines of this kind divide human individuals into two
categories, those protected from assault under the shield of justice, and the
others not, being insufciently developed. We will not be much concerned
with the various denitions of personhood introduced for this liberating
purpose, though such a task can be quite entertaining in an academic sort
of way. Instead we will look at the substantive claims which lie behind the
introduction of a special use of person in the rst place.
That there are two such categories is increasingly being taken for granted.
Indeed this category of persons comes into quite elementary treatments,
as if there were no difculties in the notion. In fact the word person need
not itself appear, and homicide need not be under consideration. Here, for
instance, is a remark selected as an epigraph by the well regarded philoso-
pher of mind Daniel Dennett:
Once the child has learned the meaning of why and because he has
become a fully paid-up member of the human race.
That seems to have a certain charm. Joining in, one might try other possi-
bilities: Once someone has blushed for shame . . ., Once someone can be
held legally liable . . .. Once someone has said I love you. . . . Texans will
insist that one must have visited Texas. We assume that the thought of
homicide is not even on the horizon. No one supposes that those who are
not fully paid up can be used for target practice.
Here, however, is something rather more sinister, just one step along the
road. It is a clip just culled from an exam paper by a good student. He is
writing about the idea of equal rights.
Babies do not have the concept of what a human right to life is and,
therefore, without comprehending this right, can be seen in a sense to
be not fully under its protection.
The remark is presented just as it is, without further discussion. He had
evidently learned to be cautious: in a sense . . ., not fully . . .. We cannot
therefore be sure what conclusions he would have drawn. Abortion or
infanticide were not on the syllabus at all. The student had simply been
doing his own study. Things of this sort are a commonplace in academic
Introductory 21
circles. What is here a students remark could easily have been memorised
from a textbook. It will be noted that no special meaning of person had
to be introduced.
Here the question arises: what can we take for granted? Or rather: what
can we nowadays take for granted. I expect that the time is upon us when
a division of human beings into those protected under the moral law and
those not protected, or only, as it were, half protected, will be said to be
where we start out from. The question will be: how is this to be explained?
Various accounts will be offered, and there will be many academic papers
on the topic, leading to further, more complex, accounts. Or again, a dif-
culty with what is said by philosopher Robinson will take the form:
How can Robinsons theory of virtue, piety and integrity be reconciled
with the fact that it is quite all right to kill a baby?
Exam papers will ask:
Seeing that it it is seriously wrong to kill a six-year-old but not seriously
wrong to kill a toddler (religious considerations aside), what is the
morally relevant difference between the cases?
We can be sure that a moderately competent student will nd some morally
relevant differences, a good student rather more. Moral theory and meta-
physics respond to just such needs. It is no longer thought sufcient to raise
the objection but that would mean deliberately killing a child. After all,
what is so special about a child, we shall be asked. (If you must use such
an emotive word.) What are its morally relevant characteristics? I would
be very surprised if anyone could say. Someone opposed to abortion as
baby-killing could not, I believe, explain, in the face of modestly competent
philosophical enquiry, why it is bad to kill a toddler that is to say in the
way it is still thought to be bad. Quite generally, our understanding of what
underlies the morality of homicide is very defective.
I have been struck while working on this subject how often the public
discussion does not directly concern the plausibility of moral judgements,
but turns on certain background considerations. I have selected some of
these for attention in this book, thinking that we are likely to make more
progress if we attempt to settle some relevant issues. We shall be taken up
with questions like: is the right to life an atypical right? What sorts of
beings have a good of their own? Can we understand the claim that a
human being is valuable? It will be noted incidentally that none of these
questions about rights, worth and welfare are about abortion as such. That
is all to the good. Some of our discussion will have just as much relevance
to disagreement in environmental ethics, for example. I would like to think
the pages which follow would offer something of interest to someone quite
uninvolved with the abortion controversy. The topics are important in their
own right.
In our consideration of these topics we shall often be concerned about
what it makes sense to assert or to suppose. The idea that philosophers often
go wrong by saying what is nonsensical rather than false was of course made
much of perhaps too much of by logical positivism in the 1920s and
1930s. Our very reasonable rejection of positivism since that time should
not lead us to lose the insight that questions of sense, and not just questions
of truth, are important in our subject. We do not need the doctrine of veri-
cation to see that people can become very muddled when handling abstract
questions. Nor need a rejection of what is said as meaningless or at least
as insufciently clear to be discussed be brash or scientistic.
38
1.5 The permissive case will be represented in this book by the
work of various philosophers. But in particular by the liberal
arguments of Ronald Dworkin. What liberalism is.
Do we then have this freedom to take young human life? To dismember?
If we are to consider this question well we need to know what is being said
in defence of this freedom, and to represent it fairly and in some detail. In
38 Perhaps I should indicate here a further way in which my enquiry is limited. A
publishers reader regretted that this book did not discuss what the position of
the law should be. I have deliberately left out this much discussed topic, though
I know it is of interest to many. It seems to me secondary. I shall conne myself
to a few brief points.
First, that it is not reasonable to ask Whose choice should it be, the govern-
ments or the pregnant womans? (with the obvious expected answer) before we
have settled that someone should be given the two-way power to decide in the
rst place, the only question being who should be given it.
Second, that someone who urges that abortion (perhaps just later abortion)
should be made a crime need not be suggesting a strange thought! that preg-
nant women or doctors are somehow less able to make moral judgements, or are
less to be trusted, than other people.
Third, that even if abortion (or later abortion) is recognised by legislators to
be murder it would not follow that they should make it a crime. One might say
much the same thing about a proposal to make duelling illegal in a country in
which it is largely accepted. The law must take into account all manner of prag-
matic considerations. What would follow is that the law should not talk or act as
if there were a right to abortion. The law can frown where it does not forbid. It
can refuse to support litigants. If abortion is murder the law should at least refuse
to support a woman who wished to sue her doctor for not having given her the
chance to kill her offspring, or again where an incompetent procedure had
resulted in that dreadful complication: a surviving child.
Fourth, that if abortion were were made illegal on the ground that it is murder,
it would not follow that those involved should be dealt with just like those who
commit other kinds of murder, shoot a business rival, say, or poison an aunt.
Nor conversely could we conclude from the punishments provided by statute
Introductory 23
this way, we might hope to move the debate on a bit, either by acknowledg-
ing ground already won, or by clearing away obstacles. I shall for the most
part (though not exclusively) build my argument around the most broadly
well-received among modern attempts to defend this freedom to kill: that
offered by Ronald Dworkin in three chapters of his easily accessible book
Lifes Dominion, parts of which I shall expound and discuss with some thor-
oughness.
39
Ronald Dworkin will no doubt be thought the most eminent
academic to write on this topic in recent times. This does not of course
entail that his work on this subject is pre-eminently good. But it has evi-
dently been well thought over, for he seems effortlessly able to provide
answers to all objections. His work is especially useful to us, for it raises just
the questions we singled out for attention just now, to do with the right to
life, the concept of a good of ones own, and the idea that human individu-
als have a special kind of value. I shall argue, at the very end of this book,
that he has had a very useful insight, without quite seeing its importance.
It is equally signicant that his book is devoted to the reconciliation of the
warring parties to the dispute about abortion and therefore might for this
reason seem to have a certain plausibility. It will appeal to all those who
complain perhaps rather conventionally and even unthinkingly that
the debate has become polarised. A reconciling book might be thought to
that the law did not really regard abortion as murder (a mistake frequently made
in discussions of the history of these matters).
Fifth, that where abortion (perhaps just later abortion) is a crime we should
be careful to describe things correctly. It is quite tendentious, but exceedingly
common, even among people supposedly possessed of critical minds, to say that
such a law forces women to have babies or forces women to remain pregnant.
It would be as tendentious to maintain such a thing as it would be to say that
the law wittingly punishes the innocent on the mere ground that innocent
people unfortunately suffer (sometimes quite grievously) when a man is justly
sent to jail.
Sixth, that it is not an objection to the introduction of a law against abortion,
thought of as murder, that the rich will still be able to obtain abortions abroad.
Whatever equal opportunity may be, we need not seek to provide equal oppor-
tunities to kill the innocent.
39 Lifes Dominion, London: Collins, 1993. Ronald Dworkin is Jeremy Bentham Pro-
fessor of Jurisprudence at University College, London, and Sommer Professor of
Law and Philosophy at New York University. For many years he was the Professor
of Jurisprudence at Oxford. Material from this book has been reprinted in numer-
ous anthologies. Some of the arguments about abortion had appeared earlier in
Unenumerated Rights: Whether and How Roe v. Wade Should be Overruled,
University of Chicago Law Review, 1992. This article has recently been republished
under the name What the Constitution Says, in Professor Dworkins collection,
Freedoms Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, alongside several related
articles. References to Lifes Dominion will be indicated by the abbreviation LD;
Freedoms Law by FL. Practically all that I have to say about Lifes Dominion con-
cerns just the rst three chapters perhaps a third of the whole. Two later chap-
ters of the book deal with euthanasia, and I shall not be remarking on these.
be moderate in its claims though the signicance of such an estimate,
as is often forgotten in discussions of abortion, plainly depends upon the
range of comparison, of what lies round the corner.
40
The book will perhaps
seem to offer a certain sensitivity missing in the writings of ostensibly
bolder ethicists. Often it presents in an elaborate way what many people
outside the academy, one suspects, are half inclined to think but are unable
to express. All this goes some way to explain why the critical reception has
been almost embarrassingly rapturous as we shall see in the next chapter.
My remarks must on the whole be critical. However, I hope also to point
out what must be praised and underlined. In the search for truth, a critic
is a collaborator.
We are concerned about thoughts rather than a thinker, however well-
regarded. Ronald Dworkins ideas on these matters, though doubtless origi-
nal in many ways,
41
are part of a stream of contemporary opinion in which
many academics, so sceptical in other ways, have a remarkable condence.
No doubt we are all under considerable pressure not to let the side down.
However, when we consider Professor Dworkins case rather generally, it
might seem that on this particular point or that, another philosopher (it
might be Joel Feinberg perhaps, or Bonnie Steinbock) can produce a better
defence of it. From time to time, therefore, we shall turn to discuss what
various other writers have to say. Naturally I do not want unfairly to attri-
bute to Professor Dworkin the ideas and arguments of others who think
rather like him.
It is important to see ideas in their academic context, especially, as here,
where this context is rich and remarkable. Someone with not the slightest
interest in the outcome of the debate might well be intrigued by the oddi-
ties of it. At times I will be presenting various exhibits from the academy,
as in a museum. It is instructive to see just what can be thought by those
who are paid to think. It is to be hoped that the reader will be patient with
40 The moderate convict to young Pip: You bring me, to-morrow morning early,
that le and them wittles . . . You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler,
no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted
and ate. Now I aint alone, as you may think I am. Theres a young man hid with
me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears
the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting
at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide
himself from that young man . . . I am a keeping that young man from harming
you at the present moment with great difculty. . . . Now, what do you say?
41 I do not wish at all to criticise Ronald Dworkin for being unoriginal, if that is
what he is. Sometimes he may say what is new. But like anyone of sense, he is
not concerned about such a thing. I do not wish to claim originality for my
work: that is the most foolish claim an author can make (Posners Charges:
What I Actually Said, posted on the internet at <www.nyu.edu./gsas/philo/
faculty/dworkin/papers/posner>).
Introductory 25
this, the documentary side, of this book. I have tried to conne my atten-
tion to authors who seem to know what an argument looks like and who
offer their thoughts in reasonably clear prose. This latter requirement cuts
down the eld considerably, for like the unexplored depths of the ocean
the universities nurture some very strange creatures, but it still remains
large. Since readers in a wide variety of disciplines read books of this kind,
and since what is said might often seem to those new to this topic to be
somewhat odd or implausible, I will sometimes state where these authors
are employed or for what they are noted. This is a practice followed by
Dworkin himself. Specimens in a museum need to be labelled.
In the title to this chapter I put the word liberal in scare quotes so often
necessary in regard to such labels. In this case, something more needs to
be said. Although Dworkin appears before us as peacemaker, it is clear from
his other writings that he considers himself to be a liberal, and because of
the way this word has come to be used we will naturally suppose that the
abortion-peace is to be made on pro-choice terms. And the other writers
whose views we shall examine will doubtless think of themselves as liberals
too. However, if we do not want the use of a political label to replace
thought, we should not assume at the outset that what deserves to be
regarded as a liberal view of abortion will have to be pro-choice. A liberal
might have to take a very different line. And then he might well be called
not just a conservative, but an extreme conservative.
42
The liberalism offered
in the marketplace of ideas is like feminism, a package deal, and the ques-
tion will arise for anyone with a critical mind whether a belief in or support
for abortion rights must be included.
43
42 The latest example to come my way. Margaret Olivia Little talks about Extreme
conservatives who claim abortion to be the moral equivalent of murder. Those
who say that it is a form of murder must presumably be entirely off the Richter
scale (Abortion, in R. G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman, eds, A Companion
to Applied Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, p. 313).
43 Some documentation. Elisabeth Mensch and Alan Freeman express their liberal
unease at the outset of their long, search for compromise article on the abortion
controversy The Politics of Virtue (Georgia Law Review, Vol. 25, 1991, p. 934,
also published as a book, Duke University Press, 1993). We have both been
identied with the left-liberal side of law and politics, a setting in which unques-
tioning adherence to the pro-choice position has seemed obligatory.
Columnist Katha Pollitt clearly nds it difcult to see how a North American
liberal can be anti-choice. She has been made uncomfortable by the position on
this issue of paradigm liberal Dennis Kucinich, chairman of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus. From tax cuts for the rich and the death penalty (against) to
national health insurance and the environment (for), Kucinich has the right liberal
positions. Very reassuring. Unfortunately, she says, as if revealing a secret, he is
a solidly anti-choice politician, and she details his voting record (Regressive
Progressive?, The Nation, 27 May 2002. It might be a mere coincidence, but after
this drubbing Dennis Kucinich has suddenly become a progressive progressive,
It is hard not to be attracted to liberalism is some shape or form.
44
There
seems something honourable about it. We are not thinking of the modern
refrain that we ought to be tolerant and inclusive offered to us without
the slightest indication of what and of whom and in which way. We might
not be in the least attracted to the liberal doctrine of wife-beating: let us
say, the idea, once claimed to be part of the common law, that a man must
be allowed to chastise his wife so long as his stick is no thicker than his
thumb.
45
No doubt there have been liberals who have taken this view. They
will have talked about rights, privacy, etc.; they will compassionately have
insisted that a wife should not be permanently harmed. But we tacitly
exclude such liberties. Assuming then this precautionary ltration, what,
shall we say, is a liberal, broadly speaking?
46
and now, just in time for his announcement of his presidential bid, afrms Roe v.
Wade on his website, reports Katha Pollitt, The Nation, 10 March 2003).
The Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the world-wide Anglican Church,
Rowan Williams, is said repeatedly in the press to have liberal social views. What
is not said is that he has long been a member of the English pro-life group, The
Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child.
Naturally, a reporter writing for a newspaper like the Guardian will talk of
opposition to abortion as if it must be a conservative or right-wing affair. It is
what its readership will on the whole like to hear. For example: The ground was
laid for an epic battle over abortion yesterday after conservatives delivered their
most signicant blow in decades to a womans right to choose. The report later
talks of the anti abortion movement and other causes of the Christian right. It
does not mention that the measure under discussion in the House of Representa-
tives was supported by nearly a third of the Democrats (62 for, 133 against)
(Guardian, 6 June 2003). (When the measure reached the Senate, 21 October
2003, the vote among Democrats was 17 for, 30 against.)
44 I say in some shape or form because even Ronald Dworkin is only a liberal on
his own terms. Readers of Professor Dworkins earlier work will know that he
rejects the idea that there is a right to liberty. And Lifes Dominion clearly shows
that he also rejects Mills harm principle: the idea that the only purpose for
which power can be exercised over any member of a civilized community,
against his will, is to prevent harm to others. For in Dworkins view, the liberal
state may sometimes forcibly protect items of (what he calls) intrinsic value. (See
LD, p. 149, mentioning Mill in this connection. Also, for example, FL, p. 97:
government sometimes acts properly . . . when it requires businessmen to spend
money to avoid endangering a species. As we shall see, some species are said to
have intrinsic value.)
45 The idea that English Common Law allowed such beating is amusingly and instruc-
tively discussed by the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers in Who Stole Feminism?,
New York, Simon and Schuster, 1994, pp. 2037. See also the Victorian kidnap case
of R. v. Jackson QB1 [1891] 671, where the Lord Chancellor remarked: such quaint
and absurd dicta as are to be found in the books as to the right of a husband over
his wife in respect of personal chastisement are not, I think, now capable of being
cited as authorities in a court of justice in this or any civilized country.
46 I have in mind a social or political outlook. Liberal has other uses. A liberal
Christian, for example, is not someone with views about the economy, helping
Introductory 27
One answer might be this. A liberal is someone who thinks that there
are aspects of what we vaguely call morality which are not matters of
obligation or of social demand. Morality under these aspects, the liberal
will say, should not be pressed upon people even where it would be practi-
cable to do so. This is an eminently reasonable view. Morality, it would
seem, comprises more than a set of demands. The moral law (the phrase is
of course to be found in both Kant and Mill) can indeed involve an extreme
imposition on our liberty, as liberals will recognise like everyone else, and
where practicable we would all expect the positive law to back it up, as Mill
says in the last chapter of Utilitaranism.
47
However, there is another part of
what we are inclined to call morality which encompasses diverse, and
sometimes incompatible, ideals from which we may select as the spirit
moves us. Raising a family can plainly be an excellent and challenging way
to lead a life. But Helen Prejean chose another path, spending her life cam-
paigning against capital punishment. One would not have to be convinced
by all her arguments to see something wholly admirable in this alternative.
No one, not even an anti-abortion maternalist, will suppose that she
should have been forced instead to have babies and raise them. And perhaps
there is another part of morality which enjoins personal prudence or good
sense, one of the cardinal virtues, perhaps indeed the most cardinal of them
all. The law-like part of morality might insist Do not lie!, Do not kill!,
Pay your debts!, etc. But otherwise, within these bounds, it leaves us at
liberty perhaps more than many moralists are apt to suppose. Often, on
this version of liberalism, we are free to choose perhaps to be ungenerous,
perhaps to be unattractive and annoying, perhaps to be unwise. But the
choice is ours. It is our own affair. In these matters, the liberal is someone
who is unfriendly to the busybody, and is rather cool towards the improver.
The liberal slogan would seem to be: Live and let live. Yet what happens
when we turn to the debate over abortion? We nd that the word liberal
seems to have been appropriated; it has been been given a different, and
altogether more sinister, meaning. Abortion is not just the action of someone
who might have been a little more generous or a little less irritating. Live
and let live would not be the favoured phrase at all.
the poor and weak, or whatever, but is rather a Christian who does not believe
in God, or in a personal God, or in a divine lawgiver, or in the divinity of Christ,
etc.
47 It would . . . chime in with our feelings of tness, that acts which we deem unjust
should be punished, though we do not always think it expedient that this should
be done by the tribunals . . . We should be glad to see . . . injustice repressed, even
in the minutest details, if we were not, with reason, afraid of trusting the mag-
istrate with so unlimited an amount of power over individuals . . . The idea of
penal sanction, which is the essence of law, enters not only into the conception
of justice, but into that of any kind of wrong. Utilitarianism, Chapter 5, para.
13, in J. M. Robson, ed., Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society: The Collected Works
of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969, p. 245.
There is another aspect to what has been called liberalism, something less
passive than a tolerant attitude of live and let live. Liberals have thought of
themselves as the guardians of the voiceless, children among them. In On
Liberty Mill raised a protest on behalf of the young: One would almost think
that a mans children were supposed to be literally, and not metaphorically,
a part of himself, so jealous is opinion of the smallest interference of law
with his absolute and exclusive control over them.
48
Here again, abortion
seems to have had the power to make black into white, to make up into
down. A liberal in this regard is now to be someone who wishes to support
the strong in an assault upon the weak. Absolute and exclusive control is
continually called for. It is said to be a right. Unborn human individuals
are regularly supposed to be bodily parts
49
if indeed they are not charac-
terised as parasites.
50
To be sure, this astonishing turnabout is often obscured
by the claim that these liberals are standing up for the weak, namely for
women. It is readily forgotten, in this context, that this represents a some-
what inaccurate and unfortunate stereotype. The voiceless are those whose
liberty we hold in trust. And it would be a contemptible liberalism which
cared only about the liberties of those at present able to exercise them.
And suppose it be said that liberalism is more concerned with equality
rather than the mere protection of the voiceless? Abortion seems to out
equality in the most dramatic possible way, since the most basic protection
offered to many under the moral law is, as a matter of design, not to be
available to all. When it comes to the teachings about justice and wronging
by which we are to live, some of our fellow individuals are not to count.
The shield of justice is not to be extended over them. They are nobodies.
They can be cut limb from limb. Their remains are not even entitled to a
decent burial.
Ronald Dworkins work on abortion might be seen as an uneasy, and I
shall argue unsuccessful, struggle to come to terms with these paradoxes.
1.6 Something for everybody
The teachings in Lifes Dominion will, as I have said, provide the framework
for our discussion here. Professor Dworkins book has provoked admiration
48 Mill, On Liberty, p. 301.
49 Medically and legally the embryo and foetus are merely parts of the mothers
body and not yet human, write Keith Hindell and Madeleine Simms reassuringly.
In case there are residual doubts, they add that at twelve weeks the foetal head
is grossly misshapen (Abortion Law Reformed, London: Peter Owen, 1971, pp.
478, published with a charming frontispiece of David Steel MP, hero of the
British 1967 Abortion Act).
50 Pregnancy is a parasitic relation . . . (Sumner, Abortion and Moral Theory, p. 8).
A denition of parasite is given in a supporting footnote, together with the
comment: Host and parasite need not be members of different species.
Introductory 29
in a way quite unusual for a scholarly work. We shall rst illustrate this
reaction and then seek to understand it.
Even before its birth, the book was the object of considerable devotion
and care. A ne team of midwives were on hand, to judge at least from the
lengthy acknowledgements page, including Thomas Nagel, Frances Kamm,
Joseph Raz, Derek Part, John Finnis and G. A. Cohen, names which will
be known to more or less every student in moral philosophy. A draft of the
book was used as the basis of a seminar in Oxford conducted by its author
and the philosopher Bernard Williams, regarded by some as the leading
moral philosopher of his day. Its inuence already extended beyond the
academy. When in a landmark case the Court of Appeal in England con-
cluded that a hospital could lawfully cease to feed a comatose patient Tony
Bland, a manuscript of Lifes Dominion, with its intricate account of the
sanctity of life, was found helpful by one of the judges, Lord Hoffman, as
he generously acknowledges.
51
The books emergence into public view was widely celebrated. Articles by
Professor Dworkin based on it appeared in The Times (When Can a Doctor
Kill?, 27 April 1993) and the New York Times Magazine (Life is Sacred. Thats
the Easy Part, 16 May 1993). And as one might expect, the New York Review
of Books came out with an extract (Feminism and Abortion, 10 June 1993).
A special debate was held in London to mark the books arrival before the
public. The Independent joined in with a full-page prole of the author. The
Times, for its part, went so far as to speculate that he might shortly be ele-
vated to the United States Supreme Court, an event we are still awaiting.
Lifes Dominion was described (admittedly by its publishers) as the most
important and original examination of this controversy to have appeared
in many years. The reader leaves the book, they said, with his thinking
on the questions which it tackles immeasurably claried. To be sure, no
one would normally bother with such talk. Grand claims are made for every
book. But in this case appreciative reviews quickly followed, for once entirely
bearing out a publishers estimates. Almost immediately the book was being
characterised as a miracle, a meticulous and rich reformulation of how we
think, important and compelling, something which illuminates the very
nature of how we live our lives, etc.
52
Two commentators even went so far
51 It seems to me that in such an unusual case as this, it would clarify my own
thought and perhaps help others, if I tried to examine the underlying moral
principles . . . In so doing, I must acknowledge the assistance I have received from
reading the manuscript of Professor Ronald Dworkins Lifes Dominion, Judgment
of 9 December 1992, Airdale NHS Trust v. Bland [1993] 1 All E.R. 8256. For a nice
example of an American case relying heavily on Lifes Dominion, see the 1999
case in the Montana Supreme Court, Armstrong v. State 1999 MT 261.
52 Some further appreciations for the record: Susan Sontag proclaimed Lifes Domin-
ion as Ronald Dworkins most seasoned, most necessary book, that the argument
it contains is fresh, agile and improving. Its author was complimented by
as to refer to Lifes Dominion, quite without irony, as a courageous book, and
a third informed us that the argument in it is brave. This is a little odd, for
how could anyone be tempted to break the good professors windows for
writing a work which seems to offer all of those capable of throwing a stone
Baroness Helena Kennedy, chair of the UK Human Genetics Commission, on his
great clarity and wisdom. T. M. Scanlon of Harvard, writing in the New York
Review of Books (15 July 1993), was singularly impressed. Ronald Dworkin, he
said, is our leading public philosopher; in this work he shows a characteristic
brilliance and subtlety to the values at stake, a brilliance which has given us an
exciting, thought provoking and potentially very constructive book. Professor
Tribe, the leading constitutional lawyer, also of Harvard, referred to it as a won-
derfully rich and evocative investigation, a feast for the mind and balm for the
soul; adding for good measure that it was Dworkins masterpiece, in which he
displayed enormous ingenuity and insight (New York Times, 16 May 1993). Dame
Mary Warnock said (Spectator, 29 May 1993): it is of immense value to have so
intelligible and sympathetic a discussion of the moral issues. The philosopher
A. C. Grayling, referring to Professor Dworkin as the worlds leading philosopher
of law, tolds us that in this book he shows that complicated questions can be
discussed with originality, profound insight and utter clarity. Indeed nothing,
it seems, would ever be the same again: From now on, he wrote, there can be
no discussion of abortion and euthanasia that does not start from here (Financial
Times, 12 June 1993). It is a work of considerable humanity, said Christopher
Belshaw of the Open University in Mind (July 1995). The book was timely, gener-
ous, and above all sane. Jeremy Waldron, Professor of Law at Columbia Univer-
sity, said: Lifes Dominion gives us a deeper account than any we have yet had of
what is at stake in these life-and-death controversies, and is clearer, more sensi-
tive in its arguments than anything that I have read (London Review of Books, 12
May 1994). Eric Rakowski, Professor of Law at Berkeley, said that we were offered
a remarkably coherent argument from our most thoughtful and inuential
legal philosopher (Yale Law Journal, 1994). According to Stephen L. Carter, Pro-
fessor of Law at Yale, writing in the New Yorker (9 August 1993), Professor
Dworkin is as thoughtful and creative a legal scholar as the American academy
currently possesses and his new book is as thoughtful and creative a scholarly
treatment as the subject is likely to receive. As a new and stronger case for a
womans right to choose . . . one would have to pronounce it a resounding
success. John A. Robertson, Professor of Law at the University of Texas, talked
about the richness and subtlety of his highly accessible and compelling account
of why society should defer to individual choice about abortion . . . (Autonomys
Dominion, Law and Social Enquiry, Journal of the American Bar Foundation, 1994,
p. 458). Professor Robinson was specially impressed with the books more cosmic
insights: few thinkers, he says, have confronted as forthrightly as Lifes Dominion
does the religious or spiritual nature of these dilemmas (p. 457). A philosopher
at Cambridge, David Mitchell, said in the Times Higher Education Supplement (16
July 1993), that the writing is of an exemplary lucidity and sensitivity, and
claims that the work is rich in original argument, marks a major advance and
sets a new standard. Karen Armstrong, author of many books on Christianity,
etc., is full of admiration: Dworkin refuses to simplify these immensly difcult
issues: he leads the reader through the moral and legal maze with mastery and
humility. His book is learned, passionate, careful, eloquent and highly readable
Introductory 31
exactly what they want?
53
For Lifes Dominion does indeed offer something
to everyone. This is a generosity, I shall argue, which we should not be
grateful for. There is indeed something of value in this book, but it does
not emerge here. Let us see how this versatility operates, looking at the book
rst from one side then from the other side of the fence.
(Sunday Times, 13 June 1993). Conor Gearty, now Professor of Human Rights Law
in the University of London, wrote in the the Independent (12 June 1993) that
the book is brilliantly argued and utterly convincing, adding that it should be
required reading for every member of every legislature that has to address the
abortion issue. The reputed ethicist James Rachels says of Ronald Dworkin:
Readers of his earlier books will have high expectations, and they will not be
disappointed . . . It is a tour de force that could have been written only by an
accomplished philosopher who has thought long and hard about a great many
matters (Bioethics, 1994, p. 268). Frances Kamm, of Harvard University, herself
a well known writer on these topics, said that the book does a superb job of
providing . . . an account with complex and subtle philosophical reasoning,
always aimed at elevating the nature of the public debate (Abortion and the
Value of Life: A Discussion of Lifes Dominion, Columbia Law Review, 1995, p. 160.
I shall return to Professor Kamms essay several times in what follows). Eileen L.
McDonagh in her admired book Breaking the Abortion Deadlock (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996, p. 199) said of Lifes Dominion that it offered perhaps the
most philosophically complex and persuasive denial that a foetus is a person
(we discuss this curious aspect in Chapter 3.2 below). Frances Olsen, Professor
of Law at UCLA, said of two articles in the New York Review of Books published
as a sort of preliminary to Lifes Dominion: Ronald Dworkin recently presented
the conventional liberal argument in support of Roe v. Wade in what is perhaps
its most elegant form to date (Unraveling Compromise, Harvard Law Review,
1989, p. 109). It perhaps should be noted that Conor Gearty and Helena Kennedy
are both eminent Roman Catholics.
I do not, of course, wish to suggest that these reviewers had no critical com-
ments to make. Eric Rakowskis review in the Yale Law Journal, for example, is 70
pages long, and could hardly consist entirely of praise and exposition. And not
every reviewer liked Lifes Dominion. Jenny Teichman made some good critical
points in What is Sacred? Ronald Dworkin and His Answers (Polemical Essays,
Aldershot: Ashgate 1997). And Peter Singer in the British Medical Journal (23
October, 1993, pp. 10778) complained that Professor Dworkin did not engage
with other writers: Glover, Hare, Kuhse, Part, Rachels, Tooley or Warren. (This
last is odd: Ronald Dworkin was actually helped by Derek Part who offered
long, generous and searching comments (LD, p. 261), and the book refers to
Rachels (p. 248) and Tooley (p. 245). It does not, however, refer to Peter Singer
as Professor Singer was too modest to mention.)
53 Academics who argue in favour of abortion, but with a slightly furrowed brow,
are certainly not in any danger from their colleagues who just love to hear this
sort of thing put across in this sort of way. It is curious that Amy Gutmann can
admiringly say of Judith Jarvis Thomson that she has dared to defend the moral-
ity of abortion (Introduction by Professor Gutmann to Judith Jarvis Thomsons
Goodness and Advice, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. viii, italics
added). The morality of abortion is continually defended on university campuses
by legions of the timid, and Judith Thomsons well known Defence of Abortion
Suppose that a reader is outraged by abortion, and thinks it an infamous
assault on the weak for whom we have a responsibility of care. What is
there for him? Dworkin could hardly be more reassuring. First of all, he
is offered a sovereign commitment to the sanctity of life (LD,
p. 238). This is a matter which we all take so seriously (LD, p. 238). Each
separate human life, it is proclaimed, has an intrinsic and inviolable value
(LD, p. 27). It is indeed worthy of a kind of awe (FL, p. 93). It is a miracle
which ought not to be frustrated (LD, p. 90). Human life is sacred just in
itself (LD, p. 11). This is theme which catches the editorial eye. The review
in the Financial Times (A. C. Grayling) appears under the title With Respect
for the Sanctity of Life. The review in the New York Review of Books (T. M.
Scanlon) is proudly headed Partisan for Life.
54
Needless to say, this sovereign commitment extends to the life of those
in the womb the book is quite explicit on the matter, referring to the
sanctity or inviolability of every stage of every human life (LD, p. 238, italics
added). The individual in the womb is something we should respect and
honour and protect as marvelous in itself (LD, p. 73). This is a value that
unites us as human beings (p. 238). We all agree that it is in principle
wrong to terminate a life (LD, p. 34). The life of every single human indi-
vidual commands respect and protection . . . no matter in what form or
shape (LD, p. 84). It has intrinsic creative importance.
55
We must all show
a reverence for the wonder of creation.
56
I myself believe he says, that an
abortion is morally wrong when it does not show respect for the intrinsic
value of every human life, in no matter what stage or form . . ..
57
That
sounds a severe test. Is there anything we ever do which shows such com-
prehensive respect? No wonder the reviewers found the work so inspiring.
Someone opposed to abortion might indeed be inclined to think that this
stress on sacredness, reverence and commitment is just a little overdone.
Steady on now! he might exclaim, Were not asking you to worship it.
Were just asking you not to kill it.
Anyway, not content with having expressed this reverence, Professor
Dworkin often talks frankly about what is going on behind closed doors in
our hospitals and clinics.
58
This is, in part, what makes his book of value.
has proved more popular than perhaps any other philosophical article. She must
have known she was onto a winner.
54 For references to Grayling and Scanlon, see note 52, this Part.
55 New York Review of Books, 10 June 1993, p. 28.
56 This, though very much in Ronald Dworkins style, actually comes from Planned
Parenthood v. Casey, 505 US 833, at 853. The phrase is singled out by Professor
Dworkin (LD, p. 171) as a way of conveying this notion of sacredness.
57 Sovereign Virtue, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 431.
58 Often he talks frankly in this way, but not always. Sometimes he is restrained by
prudence. When talking about the abortion of disabled individuals he avails
himself of the popular and so often innocuous phrase bringing a child into the
Introductory 33
Someone who has an abortion is not, in Professor Dworkins view, simply
failing to rescue as if she were refusing (reasonably or unreasonably) to
give life-saving bone marrow. Abortion is not a matter of letting die. We
are not entitled to the (surely sometimes quite dubious) comfort of that
phrase. As everyone knows, if there is a chance of foetal survival, steps are
taken to prevent it. Human individuals are the subject of deliberate attack.
Abortion generally requires a physical attack on the foetus, not just a failure
to aid it (LD, p. 111). Professor Dworkin clearly wants to emphasise this
point, for the sentence also occurs twice in his collection Freedoms Law (pp.
48 and 87). Those who are involved in abortion, he says, without mincing
words, are engaged in deliberate killing (LD, p. 3). Theirs is a choice for
death (LD, p. 3). One can hardly get more forthright than that. He does
not take refuge in scare quotes. Abortion is not for him merely alleged
killing.
59
His article in The Times introducing Lifes Dominion is entitled, as
we saw, When Can a Doctor Kill? In his article Objectivity and Truth,
which is not particularly about abortion, abortion is described in passing
as the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.
60
In case anyone is
not sure what human being means, what is killed is said in Freedoms Law
(unsurprisingly of course) to be a member of the animal species Homo
sapiens, and (a little oddly) a human organism whose life has begun (FL,
world (LD, p. 33). It should be realised what not bringing a child into the world
means in this context. It wont simply be a matter of avoiding pregnancy, you
can be sure of that. It will be . . . well, what the above paragraph indicates.
Margaret Olivia Littles article The Moral Permissibility of Abortion affords an
excellent example of what I here complain of: p. 36 quite bristles with such
misleading phrases. The context, of course, is one of impressive responsibility,
of not wanting to burden the poor child with more life. One might be tempted
to bring a child into existence which is already burdened by rejection, but
responsibility says no. This is all rather familiar. If a mother looks after her
toddler in the usual way would we describe this as bringing a toddler into the
world? Bringing an older toddler into the world? Bringing a teenager into exis-
tence? Would she perhaps have to answer for doing these things?
59 Scare quotes are often a comfort for those who favour what is called choice. Even
the normally forthright Katha Pollitt resorts to them. That the woman who
kills one baby can be and often is a loving mother to another is just mind-
boggling (Everythings Up to Date in North Dakota, Tikkun, January/February
1990, p. 58). Of course it is a matter of interest that parents can kill their children.
In fact, most (born) children who are killed die at the hands of their parents or
carers. Those most at risk are babies under one year old, writes Mary Marsh,
director NSPCC (The Times, 10 August 2002), adding: it is not true that these
cases are rare and are becoming less common. The rate has not dropped for
more than 25 years. Perhaps the ability to kill ones children is a manifestation
of intelligence, as human sacrice is. Thus if there is such a thing as maternal
instinct, intelligence enables people to transcend it.
60 Objectivity and Truth Youd Better Believe It, Philosophy and Public Affairs,
1996, p. 98.
p. 85).
61
In describing the controversy in his anthology The Philosophy of
Law, it comes naturally to Professor Dworkin to talk of the unborn child
(as legal documents quite often do, and as foetus is often still dened in
dictionaries, though we could have expected that to have changed by
now).
62
And insofar as the killing is concerned, deliberate must surely be the
right word the thing is done with care and skill by doctors, etc. It is often
necessary though Dworkin does not mention this to count the body
parts, a stressful activity calling for desensitising strategies and a little
recontextualisation.
63
And though innocent is an odd semi-technical notion
when used in debates about homicide, it does not matter much for present
purposes how it is interpreted.
It might seem odd that there should be this insistence that abortion
involves killing. But it is admirable of Professor Dworkin to emphasise the
fact, for it is denied or covered up by distinguished legal academics. Law-
rence Tribe, for example, talks of abortion as if it were like refusing to give
a kidney in order to save a life, and so does Cass Sunstein. In Constitutional
Choices Professor Tribe contrasts the idea that men are not to be forced to
61 I say oddly, because the qualication seems somewhat redundant. What would
a human organism be whose life had not yet begun? Anyway, things become
more complicated in Lifes Dominion. By this time Professor Dworkin had come
to think that the phrase human being is ambiguous, though the different senses
are not explained (LD, p. 22). Is rabbit similarly ambiguous I wonder? Professor
Dworkin does not explain why ambiguity gives trouble here so often ambiguity
gives no trouble at all, and such trouble as is caused is easily avoided. Any ambi-
guity that there might be seems of little conseqence, for those who are opposed
to abortion seem to use human being in the plain sense recognised so clearly
in Freedoms Law, and I think implicitly at least in Lifes Dominion. Compare
also Joel Feinberg who says: But the term human being is subtly ambiguous
(Freedom and Fulllment, Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 56). The subtly
here is nice. It suggests rened appreciation or perceptiveness. If we still fail to
perceive the ambiguity, why, we must be missing something. For more on the
alleged ambiguity see the much reprinted article by Mary Anne Warren, On the
Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, The Monist, 1973. Professor Warren talks
surprisingly about a sense of human being which means something like a
fully edged member of the moral community . I seem to have lost my member-
ship card.
62 Ronald Dworkin, ed., The Philosophy of Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977, p. 13.
63 Wendy Simonds, Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic, New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Women working at the Center
developed strategies that enabled them to desensitise themselves. They would,
for example, make sure that the parts did not become arranged in order, in the
broken doll conguration. Or they would never look at the face when pro-
cessing tissue (pp. 867). Many realised they had the power to recontextualise
their work; they could deliberately see late abortion as interesting rather than
disgusting (p. 71).
Introductory 35
donate organs to save their childrens lives with the thought that it is all
right for the community to force poor women to act as incubators by not
being willing to provide them with free abortions.
64
In his later book, The
Partial Constitution, Professor Sunstein refers to abortion as a refusal to
allow ones body to be devoted to the protection of another, and compares
this with a refusal on the part of a man to undergo a risk free kidney
transplant to save a child.
65
None of this sounds like the deliberate killing
that Dworkin is talking about.
As for the other side of Dworkins coin, that abortion is not just the
withdrawal of the helping hand, the point is still well worth his making.
It is important to note in this connection how unnatural it is to see gesta-
tion as a matter of giving aid. (What! Continuously, 24 hours a day? And
for nine whole months!) This point will be clear when we consider what is
essentially the same process in a non-human mammal, a rabbit say. A preg-
nant rabbit helps its foetal rabbits only in the vestigial sense in which it
helps its eas. It is not that it is impossible for a woman to assist her devel-
oping child. Thus a woman might indeed be said to be helping her foetus
grow well by choosing to eat certain dietary supplements recommended by
her doctor, and this might indeed be thought of as benevolence. To be sure,
a pregnant woman provides oxygen in a sense just as the soil provides
nutrients to a tree, whose leaves in turn provide shade to a grateful cow.
And we will equally say that a womans lungs provide her with oxygen. But
we would hardly want to conclude that the two of them are continuously
and faithfully giving aid. And no one would call them life savers except
playfully. It is if anything even more misleading to suggest that a gestating
woman is acting creatively, especially if we would not be prepared to say
such a thing about a pregnant rabbit or a tree putting forth leaves in the
spring. (Perhaps it sounds complimentary to women. Fancy being able to
engage in such sophisticated creating continuously even when fast asleep
or when concentrating on a mathematical proof! And fancy being able to
create two babies at the same time! How does she do it?) Even those volun-
tary actions on the part of the pregnant woman which could be counted
as the providing of care should not be thought of as creative, as if the
newborn baby was somehow being created by them. Plainly, when the baby
is born, and is being fed and kept warm, no one would say that these activi-
ties amounted to creating a toddler.
66
64 Lawrence Tribe, Constitutional Choices, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, p. 245.
65 Cass Sunstein, The Partial Constitution, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, p. 274.
66 For a conspicuous failure to consider these matters see Margaret Olivia Little,
Abortion. Professor Little contrasts what she calls metaphors metaphors
which depict gestation as passive carriage with the truth which is of course
far different. She goes on in the same paragraph to talk about providing,
Abortion then is killing. And this killing is said to matter in a very fun-
damental way. It is a kind of dishonouring. Something is sacred or invio-
lable, Dworkin explains, when its deliberate destruction would dishonour
what ought to be honoured (LD, p. 74). He pointedly reminds us of the
horror we feel in the wilful destruction of a human life (LD, p. 84). We are
horried at the dishonour done to innocent human beings when they are
killed by our doctors. And as we all know, there is a great deal of this wilful
destruction going on. (One hears said that abortion is the commonest surgi-
cal procedure.) It is very important, we are told, that these lives ourish
and not be wasted (LD, p. 74). All this is strong language, but perhaps in
the circumstances understandable. To be sure, one might well wonder who
is covered by this phrase the horror we feel. For there are those for whom
wilful destruction is all in a days work. As I once heard an abortion doctor
say, one gets used to it. But the we is certainly intended to include the
author of Lifes Dominion. That is why Professor Dworkin is called a Partisan
for Life.
Needless to say all this threatens to disconcert some of Professor Dwor-
kins loyal readers. They will certainly not be accustomed to such foeto-
centric discourse as it is sometimes known in the academic trade. They
will regard what he says as inammatory. Does he really have to talk about
deliberate killing in this way?
67
They might even accuse him of inciting
violence against abortion doctors, in effect if not in intention. How, they
might anxiously ask after all this frankness, is he going to be able to support
the abortion status quo? But they need not worry; they are in very safe
hands. No one is going to be called our leading public philosopher who
donating, creating (creating blood), delivering and says assistance it
plainly is. This she adds has crucial implications for abortions alleged status as
murder (all p. 315). She does not go so far as to say that the developing child
puts in an order for various nutrients, but it is hard to see why not. Later she tells
us that decisions to abort often represent, not a decision to destroy, but a refusal
to create (p. 322) making it sound like the proposal of an artist to take time
off.
67 It is interesting to see what happens to all this upsetting talk about deliberate
killing, when Professor Dworkin is synopsising. Chapter 7 starts out with quite
extraordinary tact (LD, p. 179): Abortion is the waste of the start of human life.
Death intervenes before life in earnest has even begun. Now we turn . . . What
is missing? All this could be said of miscarriage. Dworkin could easily have
expressed what he really believes, making use of his word deliberately: In
having an abortion, we deliberately lay waste or ruin someone elses life, before
he (more probably she) has had a chance of appreciating what life in earnest is
all about. I am not here arguing that he is right to believe this about every abor-
tion, for it might be difcult to know what to say about the very earliest stage
of pregnancy, and technical innovation might make very early abortion possible.
But it is his view, and he is obviously right to be troubled in mind if it is even
remotely possible that this is correct.
Introductory 37
would seriously frighten them in this matter. The edition of Lifes Dominion
printed in the UK has the subtitle An Argument about Abortion and Eutha-
nasia. However, the US edition seems wisely to have expanded this descrip-
tion, adding and Individual Freedom. No doubt it was feared that sensitive
liberal readers, hearing all this stress on the sanctity of life, might be put
off.
These nervous readers need, it would seem, to take the deeper view. As
the philosopher Galen Strawson remarks in his review of Lifes Dominion for
the Independent on Sunday (13 June 1993): To go deep is to see that to be
pro-life is to be pro-choice. The remark is reprinted in the middle of
the review, in large letters, in case anyone missed it. It well represents the
spirit of the book. This emphasis on the inviolability of human life should
in fact be reassuring to those in the business of taking it. It is indeed an
emphasis which has suddenly come into its own. For the Democratic Party
has begun to realise, after the 2004 presidential election, that a public
acknowledgement of the exceptional value of foetal life might be necessary
if it is ever to secure the White House once again. That enthusiast for
choice Frances Kissling recently wrote an article asking whether we had
perhaps ceded too much territory to antiabortionists by not articulating
the value of foetal life. On the strength of this, a commentator detected
that Ms Kissling might be leaning towards the pro-life position. The fact
is, I am already pro-life, she replied. After all she had written in her article
that pro-choice values include respect for life, recognition of foetal life as
valuable and a concern for fostering a society in which all life is valued.
68

This kind of claim is not new. Pamela Maraldo when president of Planned
Parenthood, one of the largest abortion providers in the United States was
able to proclaim her organisation to be pro-life. This was clearly quite an
achievement. We can begin again to inculcate America with our values,
she said. We are the real pro-life force in America. I want to take the moral
high ground.
69
(In truth of course, the heart of the debate about abortion
entirely occupies the moral low ground: that minimal part of morality
which concerns what we strictly owe one another. That is why both sides
talk about rights.)
Certainly there is in Lifes Dominion this sovereign commitment to the
total, complete and absolute inviolability of every stage of every human life,
a fundamental commitment which unites us all as human beings . . . But
what will it cost, the nervous reader will ask, to agree with such a pro-
nouncement? The truly extraordinary thing about Professor Dworkins
teaching about inviolability is just how untroubling it can be. Its yoke is
easy and its burden light.
68 Is There Life after Roe?
69 J. Warner, Mixed Messages: Where is Pamela Maraldo Taking Planned Parent-
hood?, Ms, NovemberDecember 1993 Vol. 4, No. 3, p. 25.
Remember the title of Professor Dworkins article in the New York Times,
mentioned above: Life is Sacred. Thats the Easy Part. No doubt he meant
that it was easy to recognise it. But in fact it can turn out remarkably easy
to live with it too. The sovereign fundamental commitment is quite com-
patible with the deliberate killing of the innocent. People who learn to
believe in Dworkin-sanctity will be able to destroy their offspring let us
say in the furtherance of their careers. It is not surprising that this will be
thought a sufcient reason. That is the way of the world. What is so new
and refreshing is to hear this explained in terms of the sanctity of life. A
doctor could specialise in gruesome late abortions and perhaps earn a
good deal of money in the process all the while being overwhelmed with
the unutterable sacredness of the seriously unwanted infants he is daily
disposing of. The keen-eyed reader will have noticed the occurrence of the
phrase in principle: it is in principle wrong to terminate a life (LD p. 34,
quoted above). And we are all said to accept that in principle human life
is inviolable (LD, p. 84). To be sure, the very occurrence of the word prin-
ciple in ones manifesto sets a good tone, and it is elsewhere a favourite item
in Professor Dworkins vocabulary. But the phrase in principle is what
British readers will associate with that well-known civil servant Sir
Humphrey Appleby.
Professor Dworkin, it would seem, wants to defend abortion even where
others who seem eminently sensible and loving are willing to adopt the
individual whose life is in question. For many women would suffer great
emotional pain for many years if they turned a child over to others to raise
and love (LD, pp. 1034). In case we have doubts about this, Professor
Dworkin cites an example where a Catholic woman, seeking to justify
having an abortion, claimed that this had once been the case when she
had previously turned a child over. Of course, many women might also
suffer great emotional pain for many years if they were to destroy their
offspring instead there seems to be evidence, matching anecdote for
anecdote, for this too. The curious thing is that someone can be thought
to show a reverence for human life who is prepared to say: better killed
than cared for.
70
Inviolability in Lifes Dominion tends, as we have just seen, to be not-quite-
inviolability. But something might be better than nothing. We are told that
abortion is never permissible except to prevent serious damage of some
kind (LD, p. 33). That sounds pretty restrictive. How many abortions do
we hear about that are necessary to prevent serious damage? But just how
70 This passage about adoption is signicant, for it reinforces what we have been
saying: that Professor Dworkin is talking about a right to destroy ones offspring,
not just to detach oneself from it and let it die. An abortion is here exactly of
the kind we are considering: the procedure is a failure if the child survives it and
grows up like any other child, for others to raise and love.
Introductory 39
restrictive is it? We do not have to look far. In the very next paragraph, we
nd Professor Dworkin claiming that it would have been all right deliber-
ately to kill (his own honest language, of course, but not employed here) a
foetal thalidomide victim (LD, p. 33). To be fair, Dworkin emphasises later
that the liberal doctrine does not imply contempt for disabled individuals
(LD, pp. 989), and we might take his word for it. But we are thinking here
of the serious damage claim that abortion is never permissible except to
prevent serious damage. Yet if a foetus already lacks arms, the damage is
done. What damage is one preventing by destroying utterly the whole of
the body which remains to it? The old story! Strong claims are made which
are scarcely spoken before they are being weakened. It is the old absolutely
never, well hardly ever, I mean quite often really slide.
The general impression that the reader will get from Professor Dworkin
is that although an abortion, like a funeral, is somehow a solemn occasion,
one can more or less do what one wants, even beyond the rst couple of
months of pregnancy, provided one is sufciently earnest and conscientious
in the doing of it.
71
Abortion? he seems to be saying, Aint it a shame! Did
I say seems? When, in casting an initial glance at Lifes Dominion, this
phrase rst crossed my mind I wondered whether it wasnt rather unfair
and polemical to describe his outlook in this way. Yet the phrase turned
out to be a near quotation. There is scholarly accuracy in it. Abortion in
Professor Dworkins view, and apparently in everyone elses view, is a
shame (LD, p. 84). The deliberate ending of a single human life is objec-
tively a shame (LD, p. 81). It is, for what its worth, a cosmic shame
(p. 13). So Aint it a shame! is precisely the message. It would have made a
good title for his book.
72
In 1920 a legal scholar, Karl Binding, joined with the psychiatrist Alfred
Hoche to publish a book now well remembered. It was called Permission for
71 In a section of her article Abortion it is called The Sanctity of Life: Respect
Revisited Margaret Olivia Little, after appreciative remarks about Lifes Domin-
ion, asks us to consider whether crass jokes should perhaps be avoided during
an abortion (p. 319). They might after all make us morally queasy (p. 320).
Clearly a nice topic for the ethics class. Sample jokes might be compiled and
their queasibility put to the test.
72 Naomi Wolfs Our Bodies. Our Souls (see note 4, this Part) takes very much this
line, and indeed mentions Professor Dworkin. Aint it a shame! is the message
here too. One has to be honest, she says, and admit just what one is doing. One
must be serious about the whole business, promising in advance to repent and
make amends to prepent, one might say while waving a fond goodbye to the
individual one is about to wrong.
Aint it a shame! also seems to be the attitude of Whoopi Goldberg: But,
yeah, we wept . . . we wept going for those abortions, we wept coming back . . .
because both times this was something made from love. (Angela Bonavoglia,
The Choices We Made, New York, Random House, updated edn, 1992, p. 119,
ellipses in text.)
the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life.
73
Karl Binding was at the end of a
distinguished career. He is described by the historian Michael Burleigh as
one of Germanys leading specialists in constitutional and criminal juris-
prudence.
74
The book was written at a time when German scholarship was
second to none in the world; and of course, it was not yet tainted with
Nazism. Michael Burleigh refers to the premises from which Binding argues
in this book as unimpeachably liberal.
75
Now the phrase life unworthy of
life is not one we would be inclined to use nowadays, even if the thought
behind it has not quite gone away. We cannot help remembering what it
eventually meant for psychiatric patients in Germany, and indeed what
happened after that; and indeed, without remembering what it might have
meant for psychiatric patients outside Germany in England, let us say.
76

And one would clearly not be turning to such an unpopular phrase in con-
nection with Lifes Dominion. Lifes Dominion is written in quite a different
73 Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, Ihr Mass und Form, Leipzig:
Felix Meiner, 1920, on the web at <staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~rohrmann/
Literatur/binding>. There is a translation by Walter E. Wright, under the title
Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life: Its Extent and Form, in Issues in
Law and Medicine, 1992. I have preferred the perhaps more usual translation of
the title given by Michael Burleigh in the book cited in the next note.
74 Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany, 19001945, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994, p. 15.
75 The book, when one gets beyond its rather disagreeable title, is what would be
called liberal in its conclusions too. In so many ways it has not dated. Thus there
is much talk of compassion as a motive for killing, and of course an absolute
insistence on securing consent where the patient is competent. In the case of
children, the mother of a child is naturally to be given a choice whether the
killing should proceed. An ethics committee is to be consulted (where there is
time). There is an insistence that killing should be painless. There is the by now
familiar compulsion to invent a sense of not really alive to characterise the
living. And we nd the search for a soft word (here release) to describe what is
done to them. Lastly, we nd throughout our modern assumption that someone
who has the misfortune to be completely dependent somehow lacks dignity as
a human being. As a secondary matter, the book evinces a responsible attitude
to social costs. All this is quite current. The work of Binding and Hoche is surely
due for rehabilitation. If they did not get everything right that had to wait for
the early 1970s they were remarkable pioneers.
76 Virginia Woolf on an uncomfortable incident, writing in her diary, 1915: On
the towpath we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The rst was a very
tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second
shufed, and looked aside; and then one realised that every one in that long line
was a miserable ineffective shufing idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no
chin, and an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible.
They should certainly be killed. We found a market going on at Kingston, as if
it were Marlborough. We bought a pinapple for 9d. . . . (Anne Olivier Bell, ed.,
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, London: Hogarth Press, 1977, p. 13). It should
not be thought that such an opinion was particularly unusual among intellectu-
Introductory 41
spirit. Its tone is reverential. What we are offered is something quite differ-
ent: Permission for the Destruction of Life Worthy of Life.
Is this an advance? Even those who are not particularly opposed to vol-
untary euthanasia have been disturbed by the permissive claims of Binding
and Hoche. For many, the worry has been that some are to be killed for the
good of others family members, society at large. This is, as it happens, a
very secondary consideration in Binding and Hoche, but even a trace of it
makes us liberals nervous. We would be decidedly cautious about this kind
of altruism in regard to euthanasia. However this element is much in the
mind of of abortion advocates. It is almost always the good of others they
have in mind (though there are certain well known pretences used to cover
this up). Permission for the destruction of life worthy of life for the sake
of others. That seems to be what is on offer.
1.7 What people really think
How can Professor Dworkin make all those admissions about deliberate
killing, etc., at so little a cost? Here is someone, we might say, who allows
himself to be handcuffed, stuffed into a weighted sack and thrown into the
sea from the top of a cliff, only to emerge moments later a free man. How
is the trick done? Answer in brief: Professor Dworkin appropriates the way
people talk about the sanctity of life and puts it to a novel use. He uses it
in the interest of what we might call adult liberation. It might seem at rst
sight that few people who object to abortion could be persuaded to follow
him, even though they are all adults and stand to gain. But, he argues, they
are more or less persuaded already.
Professor Dworkin, it would appear, has made a signicant discovery: that
the familiar and uncomfortable objections that people often make to abor-
tion do not represent what they really think. The public protest says one
thing, but the thought behind it says another. He wants us all to get away
from the nasty idea that abortion, even later abortion, in the second tri-
mester, let us say, is doing to the unborn human individual what Dr
Shipman, graduate of my university, was convicted of doing to so many of
his patients an idea which has distinctly awkward implications. People
who say such a thing, he argues, cannot really be in earnest about it, although
they evidently seem to be in earnest about something. What they want,
indeed what everyone wants whether they are pro-life or pro-choice, is to
avoid insulting (his word) the value of human life. Almost everyone
shares, explicitly or intuitively, the idea that human life has objective,
als. For more, see Donald J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats
and the Culture of Degeneration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
I am indebted to Professor Childss book for putting me on the track of this
particular quotation.
intrinsic value that is quite independent of its personal value for anyone
(LD, p. 67). This is a doctrine which is usefully open to differing interpreta-
tions (LD, p. 70), but which enables everyone to exercise their moral pas-
sions, without, one hopes, being a nuisance to others in the free exercise
of theirs. This forms the basis of the reconciling project.
On this view, abortion is on the whole sad rather than bad. What people
who are opposed to the procedure really think, according to Professor
Dworkin, is, as we have already suggested, that it is such a pity to destroy
ones offspring, or for a surgeon to do the deed on ones behalf. And the good
news is that those who speak up for what are called abortion rights think
just the same! with perhaps a difference of emphasis (replacing such
with rather). It was generally admitted in these discussions, even before
Dworkins researches, that no woman ever went in for having abortions as
an agreeable pastime. Which woman would enjoy surgical intermeddling
with her reproductive system? Which woman would want a doctor to scrape
around, and perhaps dismember something or other inside her that she
(and the nurses) would rather not see? But we can now say more. Those
seeking to have abortions, even those later abortions, when the embryo has
become a foetus, which pretty uncontroversially involve the killing of
human beings, indeed the killing of human beings that it is their evident
responsibility to protect and cherish, are quite as deeply concerned as the
other lot about the value of human life though in this case it may of course
be a concern for the value of their own lives, business prospects, etc.,
abstractly considered (LD, p. 60).
77
The abstractly considered is important, for otherwise the decision might
risk being called selsh. Professor Dworkin puts his point here by referring
us to the abortion decision study discussed in a well-known book by the
Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice.
78
Here 29 women
77 pretty uncontroversially involves the killing of human beings. For a philosopher
who thinks that human beings, along with cats, horses, are not animals are
not, to put the matter pedantically, organisms belonging to the animal kingdom
and that a human foetus in mid-term is only an animal and not a human
being, see Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, New York: Oxford University Press,
2002, and my discussion of it in Death Sentences (Philosophy, forthcoming).
78 In a Different Voice, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Of the 29
women interviewed only four are known to have decided against abortion. Two
miscarried, and the decision of a further two is unknown (p. 72; Ronald Dworkin
also gives these gures). I should perhaps add that Professor Gilligan does not
claim that her study tells us much about what women in general think about
the abortion decision (p. 72). However, in a later edition she talks of the strong
resonance she feels with Dworkins account of what people really think on the
topic as opposed to what they might say. See Letter to Readers in the 1993
reprint, p. xi.
Introductory 43
were interviewed about abortion. All of them considered abortion an option,
and nearly all of them eventually decided to go ahead. Only one of them
appears to have mentioned murder, and even this, says Professor Dworkin,
was hardly to be taken seriously (LD, pp. 589). Instead to everyones
surprise, we can only assume they all talked and wondered about respon-
sibility (LD, p. 59, italics added). What is more, some of them said that the
selsh choice would be to have their babies! (LD, p. 59, italics added. To
have in this context, we must remember, is to turn down the killing offer).
Professor Dworkins suggestion on the basis of such evidence he recognises
that the sample will not be typical of all women having abortions is that
people on the point of choosing to have an abortion, in a country in which
the procedure is, to say the least, controversial, and is commonly referred
to by quite ordinary and sober people as baby-killing, would, if they consent
to being interviewed about it, report they are being unselsh. They would
make themselves out to be sensitive and caring people. One can almost
hear them say: I did it for you!
79
If they had been of an academic bent they
might also have claimed to be preserving, or honouring, or not wasting,
abstract value, a quantity they would have read about in ethics books. All
this gives us an important result. Whatever the choice, virtue rules. And
one might add, people seriously prepared to have an abortion tend not to
say that it is murder.
80
From all this we may conclude that their eventual
decision to have an abortion was very respectful of the sanctity of life
broadly considered. As Professor Dworkin puts it, each of these abortion-
choosers was taking up the challenge to show respect for all life (LD, p.
60, italics added).
Well then, seeing that even those who dispose of their offspring tend to
be devoted to this sanctity and respect, there is every hope that we, the
parties in the abortion debate, can all get together and make a convivial
evening of it, celebrating jointly the value of human life and congratulating
79 Catharine MacKinnon: Many women have abortions as a desperate act of love
for their unborn children. Ach! So! It gives a wholly unexpected meaning to
She loved him to bits (see her Reections on Sex Equality under Law, Yale Law
Journal, 1991, p. 1318). I originally came across this reference in Janet Hadleys
Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity, London: Virago 1996, p. 85. She adds
that it nds Catharine MacKinnon in an uncharacteristically delicate moment.
An indispensible source on this matter is of course Naomi Wolfs Our Bodies,
Our Souls (see note 4, this Part).
80 This nding is quite parallel to another, which is just about to be made, the
results to be published in The Times and the New York Review of Books, after a
preliminary announcement at a specially convened wine and cheese party in
Tate Modern, that candidates who are being interviewed for a job 98.31 per
cent, in fact make out that they are eager and competent, and in general are
on their best behaviour.
one another on our quiet, dignied unselshness and piety. One is reminded
of Mr Squeers and Mr Snawley:
I should wish their morals to be particularly attended to, said Mr
Snawley.
I am glad of that, sir, replied the schoolmaster, drawing himself up.
They have come to the right shop for morals, sir.
You are a moral man yourself, said Mr Snawley.
I rather believe I am, sir, replied Squeers.
I have the satisfaction to know you are, sir, said Mr Snawley.
I asked one of your references, and he said you were pious.
Well, sir, I hope I am a little in that line, replied Squeers.
I hope I am also, rejoined the other. Could I say a few words with you
in the next box?
By all means, rejoined Squeers with a grin.
81
Like a good showman, Professor Dworkin seems eager to tell us just what
a wonderful audience we are. Of course there will remain disagreements
about the comparative value of this or that. That can hardly be helped. But
these disagreements, even if they are between atheists, can usefully be
supposed religious, and hence, according the First Amendment of the
American Constitution, a no-go area for legal intervention. (One can see
this coming a mile away without ones specs at dusk on a foggy evening;
it arrives in fact in Dworkins Chapter 6.)
82
The idea that people who say that abortion is murder hardly ever believe
it seems to me deeply implausible, and that Professor Dworkins arguments
in favour of this view are bad. It would be a distraction, however, to consider
this matter here. As for the substance of the matter, it seems to me very
arguable that at the very least by eight weeks or so, and probably quite a
bit earlier, abortion can, with dry and undemonstrative accuracy, be
described as murder, something morally comparable, let us say, to the
killing of a toddler.
83
Furthermore it seems to me very arguable that the
81 Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby.
82 Arguments of this general character must be quite common. Joel Feinberg, for
example, suggests that the objection to abortion, in the rst trimester at least,
cannot be incorporated into law since this would involve the establishment of
religion forbidden under the Constitution. See his article Abortion in Freedom
and Fulllment, p. 75.
83 Or, if you like: the killing, in a way that is pretty painless and quite unfrighten-
ing to the victim, of a toddler, unwanted by its parents or carers, in circumstances
that will never come to light and cause distress. That would certainly be counted
murder, even if permitted by corrupt laws of the country in queston, the particu-
lar child being Jewish let us say, and the society anti-Semitic.
Introductory 45
value story, as we might call it, is unintelligible. And if it is unintelligible,
people cannot really believe it whatever they say.
1.8 Why it is wrong to kill. Are there two
independent reasons?
We can usefully approach the doctrine of Lifes Dominion by considering an
innocent-seeming question. Let us assume that we have a sufciently ade-
quate understanding that actions can be wrong. This notion is doubtless
quite problematic when it comes to philosophical enquiry, as so many
notions are, but we will not go into that here. Let us then ask why is it
wrong for us to kill other human individuals when that is to say it is
wrong? Of course, we leave aside incidental exacerbating circumstances.
Anyone who teaches moral philosophy will recognise that the explana-
tions people put forward for their quite uncontroversial moral beliefs are
often unsatisfactory. And this will assuredly include the explanations
offered by moral philosophers. No doubt the notion of explanation
involved is not very clear. But at any rate, we expect there to be a deeper
understanding of these matters, but nd that it often eludes us. And here
it really is illuminating to get away from issues about which people, for
good reason or bad, disagree. We should not be racking our brains about
abortion or capital punishment or the targeting of civilian populations
during a war. We should think of what we suppose to be the plainest of
moral truths. It is wrong to kill an aunt for a legacy or It is wrong to shoot
a toddler in a playground might do as examples. We are all condent
here.
84
Yet although we understand very well that these judgements are true
no one in such a case would accept the wide-eyed plea I did not know it
was wrong! we are apt to offer inadequate accounts when we seek to
understand what it is that we know. Professor Dworkins work has a merit
here missed by those who have so much praised it. It shows up very well
both that there is a problem of understanding and how far we are from
solving it.
To see how our understanding of what we know falls short in this way
we need not restrict ourselves to the case of homicide. Consider a simpler
matter: the bill that is to be paid. Very many people, when asked why one
has to pay, will exclaim: Well, you wouldnt like it if someone refused to
pay your bill! That this is an inadequate understanding of our obligation
to pay bills is very evident, for we often owe money to corporations, which
84 At least if we so much as accept the category of the wrong at all. Someone might,
I suppose, say that wrong and all right are tied in with a conception of ethics
which they reject. This is not of course to say that it would be impossible for
them to criticise the killing of the aunt or the toddler in other terms as unjust
or improvident, etc.
have no feelings to be hurt, or to the taxman, whose feelings on the matter
can be discounted. We can also steal goods from forgetful individuals which
we are condent will not be missed. This example of explanatory inade-
quacy is, of course, quite supercial; we are merely illustrating the general
idea.
Our convictions in regard to the killing of aunts, etc., are not of course
contingent upon the convincingness of the answers we give to the philos-
ophers question why it is bad to kill. To undermine our explanatory answers
is not to undermine our moral convictions at the bar of reason. Suppose
that we have always taken it for granted that the objection to murder turns
upon a right to life. At least this much is true, we say to ourselves, even if
this much does not take us very far. We then meet a philosopher not
Professor Dworkin who tells us that the whole idea of a natural right of
this kind is a nonsense. There are indeed difculties with the notion.
Anyway, we are impressed by the way he argues. But we will not now draw
a liberal conclusion, claiming a new freedom. We will not say that murder
is permissible after all. We will properly search for another explanation why
murder is bad, assuming we are sufciently interested in the topic. In regard
to what is obvious, conviction comes rst, and the deeper understanding
comes a poor second. Thus we shall be inclined to think that there is a
right to life because murder is bad, and not vice versa. To borrow an image
from Wittgenstein: the house supports the foundations.
85
An understanding of the wisdom in our objection to (what is uncontro-
versially regarded as) murder is, I suspect, pretty difcult. We can of course
say something, but we will lack the whole picture.
86
Of course, there is
nothing to stop an action from being wrong on more than one count. This
is particularly evident when we consider an individual action rather than
a kind of action. In this sense there need be no such thing as the badness
of a particular act of killing. Thus the killing of a certain child may be
complained of both as murder and as a betrayal, a betrayal of the child in
view of our responsibilities of care. Or it might be bad because one is a
doctor and it is contrary to some oath one has taken. It might also be a
bad example to others, cause considerable distress to third parties, deprive
85 I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say
that these foundation walls are carried by the whole house (On Certainty, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1969, para. 246).
86 Here I would like to draw attention to Jeff McMahans striking and I believe
accurate remark: Although the belief that killing is normally wrong is as uni-
versal and as uncontroversial a moral belief as we are likely to nd, no one . . . has
ever offered an account of why killing is wrong which even begins to do justice
to the full range of common sense beliefs about the morality of killing (Killing
and Equality, Utilitas, 1995, p. 1. See also his The Ethics of Killing, p. 189). This
is to my mind a fair comment, and would remain a fair comment about our
beliefs even if they deviated to some extent from common sense.
Introductory 47
people who long for a child of the opportunity of caring for it and loving
it, etc. But special circumstances apart, murder just as such might be bad
for more than one reason.
If we are asked why killing someone, a child say, is a bad kind of action,
and we are making our rst steps towards understanding, we will perhaps
come up with two answers. We will say that individuals have a right to
life, of course. That is very natural. But we might also say that human life
is valuable thinking here of a special kind of value constitutive of sacred-
ness or at least indicative of it. The rights answer and the value answer would
not be carefully distinguished. In fact, all we would have in hand would
be a couple of catchphrases hardly anything much thought over. Elucida-
tion would be called for. It is here that Professor Dworkin appears to help
us. He himself offers these two answers, but wants us carefully to distin-
guish them. That sounds like a good thought: we often run different things
together.
This distinction between having a right and having a value enables
Dworkin to make a crucial move. Very often, we may presume, a killing
will be objectionable on both grounds at once. In the case of most of us,
it would be a twofold wrong were we to be deliberately killed (LD,
p. 108). Something valuable or sacred would be destroyed, and in addition
our right to life would be violated. But here we encounter a surprise. At a
sufciently early stage of our lives (we are told) we lacked this right to life,
and had only our value to protect us. Accordingly, early killing (abortion,
the killing of a foetus in an articial womb, and presumably infanticide)
never involves the violation of a right to life; all we have is just the destruc-
tion of something precious. This is indeed more or less admitted (we are to
believe) by those who oppose this destruction, at least when they are not
being carried away by purple prose, their own or their advisors.
Of course it is not only a human foetus that is alleged to have this value:
as I have just indicated, we are all said to have it whether we are at the
foetal stage or not. Professor Dworkin says, rather unusually for a liberal,
that it might be all right for the state to forbid suicide for this reason (LD,
p. 108), that is, in order one might say to preserve the objectively precious,
This sounds a matter of great seriousness, though it has its comic side. One
might after all choose to kill oneself in some value-enhancing way, say by
feeding oneself to objectively precious Siberian tigers which would other-
wise become extinct. Or one could make up for the loss by having ones
remains turned into a work of art, following the example of Jeremy Bentham.
Works of art are said to have this special value which human beings also
have.
This distinction between an appeal to an individuals rights and an appeal
to his value is thus of practical importance. It could help us, we might
suppose, to solve other disputes about homicide. We could perhaps make
use of Professor Dworkins idea to raise an objection to capital punishment
in fact it is hard to believe that someone has not already taken this line.
We would argue that although certain criminals, fairly convicted of certain
crimes, had indeed forfeited the right to life as people say, this would not
be the end of the matter. In lacking a right to life, these criminals would,
in this respect at least, be in the position of unborn babies (as seen by Pro-
fessor Dworkin). Still, these criminals, just like the babies, would be objects
of value, and not to be killed unless this would be needed to preserve
intrinsic value overall one thinks perhaps of using them as life-saving
organ banks. It might be necessary to assess with some care the value of
this or that criminal. These days, no doubt, an ethics committee would
be set up to advise the state governor, the home secretary, or whoever has
to make the decision.
This new idea seems then to be quite powerful. It must be acknowledged,
however, that opponents of abortion have been a little slow to accept this
value not rights reformulation of what they think. And this, even after
the publication of Lifes Dominion and the prominent reviews it received.
For example, 45 of these opponents, mostly academics, and including Mary
Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School whose views are taken seriously by
Dworkin (LD, pp. 615), persist in talking about the rights of the unborn.
In their manifesto The America We Seek they say, for example,
The right-to-life of the unborn will not be secured until it is secure under
the Constitution of the United States.
87
and
The renewal of American democracy according to the highest ideals of
the Founders requires us to stand for the inalienable right-to-life of the
unborn, to stand with women in crisis, and to stand against the abortion
license.
88
On the other hand, the Dworkin formulation has seemed curiously plau-
sible to those on the liberal side. Frances Kissling, president of the oddly
named Catholics for a Free Choice, also aims to end the abortion war.
89

Indeed, as if in anticipation of Professor Dworkins own ndings, she herself
has recommended that those who are pro-choice should acknowledge
87 Society, July/August 1997, p. 15.
88 Ibid., p. 16.
89 Ending the Abortion War: A Modest Proposal, The Christian Century, Vol. 107,
No. 6, 21 February 1990, pp. 1814. Frances Kissling is upbeat: politicians con-
sidered pro-life are defecting to the pro-choice camp daily (ibid., p. 180). Free
Choice Catholics, it seems to me, might increase the ow still further with the
assistance of a patron saint. Might I respectfully suggest St Uncumber? (Feast
Day 20 July).
Introductory 49
foetal life as valuable but should not be conferring . . . rights on the
foetus.
90
In the matter of rights they should simply talk of the womans
right to make what are coyly called reproductive health decisions.
91
Like
Professor Dworkin, she too considers that abortions are a shame. Perhaps
she goes somewhat further. The goal of caring people is eliminating all
abortions. This will require in a way unexplained a radical transformation
of society.
92
Ironically, Professor Dworkins account of the distinction between our
rights and our worth might well have taken its origin from his reading of
John Finnis, a professor of law at Oxford, and a Catholic not at all for a free
choice. In 1977, Dworkin edited an anthology called The Philosophy of Law.
It included not only the well-known article by Judith Jarvis Thomson on
abortion what anthology would be complete without it? but also a reply
to this article by Professor Finnis. In his introduction to the anthology,
Professor Dworkin wrote a comment about this last which contains, I
believe, the seed of his further thoughts:
John Finniss reply is valuable . . . because it argues that it is wrong and
pointless to conduct the debate about abortion as a debate about compet-
ing rights. Finnis believes that abortion is wrong, not because the balance
of rights cut against it, but because acts that take life in any circum-
stances, including suicide, deny the fundamental value of life, and so
are wrong quite independently of any theory of rights. The issue he thus
raises is of great importance, because it questions certain widespread
assumptions about the justication that is needed for any constraint on
liberty.
93
This is the view which was to emerge 15 years or so later in Lifes
Dominion.
Professor Dworkins key distinction between our worth and our rights
sets us an agenda. We must ask two independent questions:
1. Can we make sense of the idea that the badness of a killing can be
explained by the value of what is destroyed?
2. Did we at an early stage of our lives lack a right to life?
The rst question will occupy us in the next part, Part Two. I shall attempt
to show, insofar as such a thing is capable of demonstration, that a certain
would-be idea of intrinsic value which appears in Lifes Dominion (and, it
90 Ibid., p. 181.
91 Ibid., p. 183.
92 Ibid., p. 184.
93 Dworkin, The Philosophy of Law, p. 13.
must be said, in many other peoples writings too) has not been given a
sense. The idea that we lacked a right to life at an early stage of our existence
is based upon the suggestion that at that time we had no good of our own
no welfare which such a right would exist to protect. So the second
question largely resolves into
2a. Did we at an early stage of our lives lack a welfare?
Parts Three and Four are devoted to a consideration of this question.
In effect, we shall rst criticise an argument which might tend to make
people uncomfortable about abortion, and then criticise an argument
devoted to setting their minds at ease. Eventually we will return, in Part
Five, to consider the initial thought, that the destruction of value and the
violation of rights form distinct reasons for objecting to homicide. I shall
argue that although it is indeed misleading to see things in this twofold
way, Dworkins idea eventually leads us towards a better understanding
though so much remains to be understood.
Index
abortion
and sexual ethics 89
as a failure if there is survival 10
of already dead foetus 10
is not killing 1011
as mere detachment 11
objectionable only if what is killed is
a human being? 19
legal aspects 223, 128, 165
not simply refusal of aid 33
as a shame 39, 49, 131
as desperate act of love etc. 43
disagreement about as religious 44
as murder 44, 161, 171
abortion freedom as protective of
ecosystems 56
concern about does not come under
infant welfare 58
saves taxpayers money 99100
eliminates potential criminals 100
objection to, based on minimal
respect due 134
and miscarriage equally a waste
136
after rape 161
early, and Roe 165
which causes no harm 2056
acceptability as great step
forward 2212
objection to, based on loss to victim
274
said to ensure nobody comes into
existence 291
without consent might be legal 316
abstract or cosmic mattering 130
Ackerman, Bruce: rights linked to the
ability to claim 1645, 317
acting as a trustee, as it were, for an
unborn child 300
adoption as an alternative 38
adoption waiting lists 112
Airdale NHS Trust v. Bland 29
Amnesty, on childrens rights as human
beings 314
335
cannot afford to offend many
members 332
amniocentesis x
Angela Carder case, In Re A.C. 223
angels
good of 268
status of 133
Anscombe, G.E.M. ix
on reckless begetting 15
consequentialism as her coinage 69
on Christianity and human value
84
on self-defence and intention 97
says rights restricted to
persons 1967
on man has nn teeth 258
on the concept of ourishing 259
on what would have happened if . . .
284
on killing and the dignity of the
victim 309
wronging several by not helping at
least one 324
the prohibition may be prior to the
right 330
Anselm: devil acts ill even in
punishing those who are not
thereby wronged 327
anthropocentrism wrongly complained
of 149
apotemnophilia 323
Appleby, Sir Humphrey 38
applied ethics, and what is chosen to
be applied 242
Aquinas: a mans soul is not the man
292
Aristotle
on choosing for the sake of 756
man not the best thing in the world
134
goodness of a thing related to its
ergon 158
among animals, only humans can
act 315
336 Index
Armstrong v. State 29
Armstrong, David: claims no one has
pain in their hands 242
claims pain can be quite unconscious
247
claims we can have illusions of being
in pain 248
articial wombs 6
Atiyah, Patrick: duties of criminal law
not owed to particular people
326
atomic bombing as life saving 60, 115
autonomy 5
of plants, as autonomous good 266,
272
Ayer, A.J. ix
babies:
having them supposed to ruin
academic prospects 4
baby carrots etc. have no interests,
so babies . . . 251
plausibility of saying they lack a
right to life 305, 306
are moral agents by nature 315
bacterium, value of, set against the
value of item of knowledge 102
bearing the responsibility for killing
120
Bairnsfriend 58
Barnett, Ruth: her solicitude 260
Barry, Brian: abortion as ensuring that
nobody comes into existence 291
Benn, S.I.: only a moral agent can
have rights 315
Bentham, Jeremy
on bawling on paper etc. 66, 164
denition of for Xs interest 216,
2345
better killed than cared for 38, 111
a better world, vulgar v. cosmic view
of 79, 95
Bewley, Susan 1011
Binding and Hoche, Life Unworthy of
Life 3941
biodiversity 149151
Blackburn, Simon 17
blastocysts are not babies 18
Boethius: his denition of person
175
Bok, Sissela: on the use of harm or
deprive 199, 215, 265
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich: on our incapacity
to compare value 119
Boonin, David: thermostats have
desires 254
Bourne, Aleck 221
Bradley, F.H.: in search of the self
212
Braybrooke, David
Xs interests as what meets Xs needs
217
on reducing interests to preferences
232
Brentano, Franz 119
Brock, Dan W.: on signicance of
future capacity 228
Brody, Baruch: the mother as maker
and unmaker 328
Bunch, Charlotte: on amniocentesis in
India 1889
Burleigh, Michael: on the economics of
euthanasia 100
Burley, Justine, Dworkin and His Critics
83, 120, 167, 195, 291
Callahan, Sydney 9
Callicott, J. Baird: our entitlements rest
upon our value 87
cannibalising of foetus supposed no
harm to it 1812
Cannold, Leslie 91
capacity, ability, potential 260
capacity
Harris criticises Finnis on 261
Frey criticises Warren on 261
capital punishment 478, 60, 250,
328
care
idle to postulate a sui generis reason
to care 128
cars not intrinsically valuable, even
though worked upon 146
caring about people because God loves
them 135
Carruthers, Peter: his doubts about
consciousness in animals 2467
Cassam, Quassim 210
Catholics and contraception 9
cats in the moral sense 177
Index 337
Chalmers, David, J.: uninteresting to be
a thermostat 245
assumes consciousness exists 248
champerty, maintenance, and
litigiousness 310
Chervenack, Frank A. 166, 203
child welfare, unreasonable concern
for 58
childrens rights, champions of rarely
mention the right to life 316
childs good is the good of the human
being which is a child 28990
Childs, Donald J. 41
Chisholm, R.M.: denes person via
potentiality 174, 197
claims we weigh much less than we
think 211
Chlorophyllophobia 268
claims: one only has a claim once one
has met a claim 310
cloning, therapeutic contrasted with
reproductive 8
Cohen, G.A.: on equality as good in
itself 1689
Coke, Sir Edward 177, 262
collections of cells 73, 184, 25960
Collee, John: facing up to it 11617
concern for choice: seen as protecting
individuals for choice 301
concern: the range of what can be of
concern to us is limited 128
Condit, Celeste Michelle 185
consciousness
possessed by people, or their brains?
239
conceptual v. scientic uncertainty
239, 250
hospital criteria of 240, 247
without a body 241
undetectable, nding neural basis for
242
in thermostats? 2445
possibly present in mantis shrimps?
245
contained in rocks which are not
themselves conscious? 245
without an inner aspect 246
only attached to fundamental
particles? 248
does not exist 248
Cartesian source of troubles about
255
consent no defence to a murder charge
325
consequentialism (in Anscombes
sense) 69
continuing to exist a property, existence
not 295
contraception, alleged basis of
objection to 55
Copernican astronomy, reasons for
resisting and human pride 134
corporate bodies as having a welfare
2523
corpses as damaged animals 52
creation as sacred contrasted with
ordinary creation 141
crime against humanity 329
criterion of value cannot rely on
judgement 106
cruelty not limited to causing suffering
281
cure as opposed to alteration or
transformation 286
curious value-comparisons 1023
Damage to X, but injustice to Y 313
Davis, Deborah L. 6
de Chardin, Teilhard: on the within of
things 243
de Martell v. Merton and Sutton Health
Authority 6
death, being pleased to hear of
someones 16
death with dignity, a misleading
phrase 299
defect, concept of 234
defective animal v. fragment of an
animal 286
defensive appeal to complexity 108
denition by mere exclusion 85,
159
Dennett, Daniel 20, 248
uncertainty as to whether we are
persons 178
Denyer, Nicholas 303
dependence on existence and on
continued existence 295
Dershowitz, Alan: on torture warrants
64
338 Index
Descartes: the soul is always thinking
21112
destruction not involving pregnancy
6
Diamond, Cora 2223
disposal of the unt saves on
marmalade 100
disposing of a shrimp 291
distributive justice 168
Djerassi, Carl 56
dolls as objectively more valuable than
babies 1234
Donaldson, Lord 316
Donohue, John 100
double effect 12
doubts about whether things persist
287
Douglas, William O, his inclusive
attribution of personhood 177
duties owed to a man not to a stage of
a man 2934
duties to ourselves 323
duty not to kill infants not a matter of
benevolence 322
duty to rescue, the appeal to value has
here a certain aptness 612
Dworkin, Ronald
rejects the harm principle 26
shows that there is no right to liberty
26, 176
a partisan for life 32, 36, 110
on what people really think 41
on the greatest insult to the sanctity
of life 545
supports a taboo against torture 63,
172, 282, 3323
on permissible but nevertheless
unjust actions 64
decries postulation of absolutes 65,
333
the explanatory ambition of 923
on the equal worth of each of us
1389
on equal concern and respect 166,
171
on the idea that the right to life can
vary in strength 167
on the impossibility of compromise
172
on the brink of a conviction 172
sceptical of person-talk 179
rejects an interest theory of rights
193
an interest in not being killed
presupposes complex capacities
204
has little to say about newborns 205
on the soul 21112
fate of each is of equal importance
217
once took foetal rights seriously
225
on what Gilligans subjects really
meant 293
on right to dignity even when
unconscious of indignity 298
on subsidy for the arts without
paternalism 299
the insight behind his distinction
between rights and value 331
earning a disposal licence 1001
eliminativism: there are no thoughts,
pains, etc 248
Elster, Jon 3001
Ely, John Hart 182
environmentalism and the risk of
disaster 117
equal protection under the moral law
28, 1667, 171, 321, 323, 331
equal worth of human beings? 83,
1389, 138, 308
error theory of obligation and
permissibility (of abortion, etc.)
303
estimates of distress after parting with
baby 112
ethics, applying philosophical insight
to 178
experience, a misleading concept
867
explaining wrongfulness often difcult
456
extending-a-right-to assumes
intelligibility of possession of right
165
extravagant claims often not what they
seem 303
extreme conservative, what counts as
256
Index 339
fair shares within a family 1689
Feinberg, Joel 273, 279, 282
on human being 34
on establishment of religion 44
on moral sense of person 176
on what can have rights 196
rights consequent on capacity 197
shows sensitivity towards trash
collectors 198
animals susceptible to harm 214
interests as components of
well-being 216
says harm to tree is harm to its
owner 266
his over-narrow view of an animals
good 276
on a childs right to an open future
301
Feldman, Fred
foetal efforts earn entitlements
1423, 186
on compounding value 105
on intrinsic value 122
des quaerens intellectum, philosophy as
162
Finnis, John
Harris on 261
Dworkin on 49
Fishkin, James S. 232
Flathman, Richard 55, 165, 317
owering plant which is not owering
262
foetal
killing as murder in law 5
death, public recognition of 6
welfare, alleged senselessness of
183
interests recognised by Glanville
Williams, Singer etc. 2206
foetus
talked of as if it were a species rather
than a stage 290
as a second patient 297
foetus-farming 114
Foot, Philippa
on torture 64
what a good man must see as a good
thing 70
on things of importance to mankind
129
on the grammar of goodness 160
human good as problematic 259
on the philosophical relevance of
plants 264
on being happy picking up leaves
275
forcing women to remain pregnant
23
foundations are carried by the house
46
Freeman, Alan 25
Frege, Gottlob 956
on adjectives of number 157
Frey, R.G. 261
functions of unequal level 158
Garrow, David 8
Geach, Peter 58, 159, 160, 245, 292
Gewirth, Alan: on foetal rights to well
being 187
Giddens, Anthony: his account of
Dworkin 224, 232
Gilligan, Carol 423, 164, 293
glaciers, we may never know their
intrinsic value 138
Glendon, Mary Ann 48, 220, 3312
Glover, Jonathan 1212
on the importance of animals
1045
God
Gods best efforts 133
man not his best work 1334
frustrating Gods creative power
1345
is he a sentient being? 184
is anything in his interests? 1956
his knowledge of what might have
been 284
good fortune not the same as
preference satisfaction 277
good of an individual is related to its
nature 259
goodness
non-relational 723, 76
is not straightforwardly a property
156
of a thing may relate to typical
interest in it 159
goods missed are not always
experiences 276
340 Index
Gordon, Linda 9
Gowans, Christopher 856
granting arguendo that a born child has
interests 226
Grifn, Donald R. 245
Grifn, James: on the interests of
plants 266
Grobstein, Clifford 534
on minimal awareness of being
239, 241
recognises the existence of foetal
interests 241
Gutmann, Amy: on daring to defend
abortion 31
Hadley, Janet 43
Haldane, J.B.S.: mind occurs
throughout universe 2434
Hardin, Garrett: on freedom of
denition 177
Hare, R.M. 123, 126, 21314
claims embryos as such dont have
interests 204, 28990
we cannot now benet this embryo
290
harm
the harm principle and supposedly
harmless abortion 206
the time of a harm, often not
determinate 295
as swallowed up by subsequent harm
2956
Harman, Gilbert 86
Harris, John
his focus on duty to rescue 612
what it is for a life to have moral
value 912
says birth lacks moral signicance
11415
sees no moral difference between
ovum and neonate 123
suggests we may kill to save 173
neonate not harmed by being killed
2001
criticises John Finnis 261
use of modal expressions 263
Hart, H.L.A.
defended abortion but not by
invoking rightlessness 313
on rights 314, 31617
obligations as arising from
relationship of parties 314, 326
harvesting 11213
Hawking, Ronnie Zoe 56
Hawley, Katherine 287
Hern, Warren M. 4
helping, does not always excuse 4
heroism sometimes a minimal demand
3
Hills, Alison 53
Hobbes, Thomas
state of war a cause of loss, not just
misery 282
breach of law of nature infringes
divine authority 313
claims an injustice involves breach of
an agreement 320
what is unjust is unjust to all
32930
Hoffman, Lord: nds Dworkin helpful
29
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 1489
Hughes, Robert 57
human being an ambiguous phrase?
34
human beings, excessive reverence for
32, 1334
human dignity, some murders not a
violation of? 309
human life, rhetorical valuation of 32
human rights abuse 12, 332
human rights community 12
humanity, reservations about it as a
virtue 282
humans as irreplaceable 85
humans, cats, etc. are not organisms
42
Hume, David
on the possibility of wronging a
woman 1701
his introspective search for the self
212
on the impossibility of indebtedness
to the weak 320, 321
Hunter, James Davison 57
Hursthouse, Rosalind 31112
important to and important for 202
impoverished view of human concerns
151
Index 341
incommensurability 105, 161
incremental v. non-incremental value
7881
infanticide 7, 8, 57, 90, 100, 163, 175,
200, 281
as post dated birth control 9
Hare on 204
innite value
the liberating appeal to 117
should be hard to miss 121
Inglesias, Teresa: respecting a right as
exercising it 321
injustice(s)
on being thankful for earlier 294
played down in modern virtue ethics
31112
instrumental value 712
interests
said to be susceptible to violation
193
as concerns v. interests as welfare
194, Ch 4.1 passim.
potential 1978, 294
of brains, or of parts of brains 210
of souls 211
of selves 212
of possible people 213
of abstract entities 214
denition of should be
contextual 215
Feinberg on 216, 217
as related to needs 21617
said typically to be conscious states
21920
of animals 233; the doubts of
McCloskey, Passmore, and Frey.
209
interests as not a genuine
plural 2334, 236
as sustained by ones nervous
system 237
topic to be treated independently of
ethics 270
intrinsic misfortunes 69
intrinsic value
of a name 73
religion called on to make sense of
the notion 845, 130, 148
supposed vulnerable to insult 85,
1301, 331
assessment of needed for informed
consent? 108
can mistakenly be attributed 118
and the purpose of living 125,
12930
is it something possible to care
about? 12631
intrinsic as suggesting
genuine-to-the-core 128
likened to Lockes substance 131
can it change over time? 137
possibility of negative 137
notion needed by
environmentalists? 1489
intrinsically bad actions 689
investment
said to create value 81
personal v. natural 140, 143
inviolability not differing in degree
62
James, William 212
Jodie and Mary 58, 61, 2267
Johnson, Lawrence, E.: on the interests
of ecosystems etc. 2089
judgement and capacity:
on not being able to judge in
advance 115
one cannot judge unless one has had
to judge 116
justice
not directly related to sympathy 64
supposed requirement of fair shares
within the family 1689
as a cardinal virtue curiously
neglected in virtue ethics 31112
property rights a misleading
paradigm of 321
must an injustice violate a right?
321
Kagan, Shelly 122
good behaviour as increasing our
value 138
Kamm, Frances 83
review of Lifes Dominion 31
on liberal tactics 67, 148
on a reason not to make what is
valuable 81
on the pity of ceasing to be 132
342 Index
Kamm, Frances continued
would slower growth increase value?
1434
on killing to save 173
on person 175
rights to equality not dependent on
interests 195
embryos cannot be harmed by loss of
future 2001
killing can impose a loss without
harming 2767
her analogy: a table changes into a
man 291
right to life as involving self-
sovereignty 308, 325
on creation and abortion 3289
Kant, Immanuel 66, 212, 323
on mans place in the world 134
on what is good without
qualication 160
the offspring is a person 175
on the rights of offspring 1901
children are at all times free 2623
treating as a mere means 309
possible to do wrong but not to
anyone 327
Kelsen, Hans: murder not a rights
infringement 3256
Kennedy, Ian: on weighing foetal rights
187
Kenny, Anthony
on experience 87
on the nature of mind 2545
killing
two independent reasons against?
47
to save, rapidly becoming ethical
114, 173
to save 115, 173, 329
as a maternal privilege 328
Kissling, Frances 12, 37, 489
Kitcher, Philip 184, 260
knowing more than we understand
46, 634, 148
knowledge said to have intrinsic value
78, 82, 1013
Korsgaard, Christine: on intrinsic value
723, 76
Kucinich, Dennis: his difculties
256
Kuhse, Helga 140, 290
on a creatures instinct to favour own
species 124
continued life cannot be in interests
of newborns 199200
talks of momentary interests 288
saving a baby seen as a benet to a
later someone 290
labour theory of value 141
Lader, Lawrence 89
legal representation presupposes
interests 223, 227, 229
legalism not necessarily out of place
312
Leibniz on the impossibility of waste
133
Lemos, Noah 102
Levitt, Steven 100
Lewis, C.S.: animals sentient without
being conscious 246
Lewis, David: on the philosophers
failure to understand 93
liberal Christian, what 267
liberalism, its undoubted attractiveness
268
Lifes Dominion, enthusiastic reactions
to 2931
limbo as missing-out without misery
277
limited aims of this book 2, 1719
limits to rational pro-life concern for
the unborn 58
Little, Margaret Olivia 17, 25, 33,
356
live and let live 27
Lloyd, Leonora: her forthright realism
about abortion 10
Locke, John
on intrinsic value 73, 74
on mans place in the world 134
on the labour of begetting 142
a man is born rational 262
duty to preserve offspring 262
on infanticide 262
logical syntax 1578
love a response neither to expectations
of gain nor to suppositions of value
153
Lovejoy, Arthur, O. 134
Index 343
Luker, Kristin 1, 188
lying 330, 331
a right not to be lied to a quasi-right
324
MacCallum, Fiona 112
MacCormick, Neil: on childrens rights
31718
MacIntyre, Alasdair: proposes not to
vote 3
Mackie, John
how foetal rights slowly grow 186
abortion as good for the child 230
his error theory of obligation 303
MacKinnon, Catharine 43
Maclean, Anne 91
Malcolm, Norman: on dreaming 240
man not Gods best work 1334
Maraldo, Pamela 37
Marquis, Don:
suggests we stipulate that murders
are equally wrong 167
on Dworkin and interests 235
his objection to abortion 247
Marsh, Mary: on parents who kill
33
Marx: our emphasis on rights as
divisive 310
Matthews, Eric 30
McCloskey, H.J. 214
on the rights of animals 191
on the interests of animals 20910
on the interests of plants 265
McCullough, Laurence B. 166, 203
McDonagh, Eileen 223
McGinn, Colin 248
we cant know how matter generates
experience 244
McMahan, Jeff 42, 67, 203
on our limited understanding 46
on violation of intrinsic worth 51
unwanted foetus lacks instrumental
value 72
on making use of newborns 115
divine investment hard to measure
145
stipulates an equality for all except
the very young 167
on disputants who all belong to an
interested party 224
loss subject to a discontinuity
discount 2845
nds a difculty in justifying animal
euthanasia 285
McTaggart, J. McT. E. 121
Mensch, Elizabeth 25
mere intrinsic value of no possible
concern to anyone 127
metaphysics an uncertain guide to
morals 304
metaphorical use of xs good 265
Mill, J.S.
on the great occupation of women
9
on preventing the poor from
marrying 15
the harm principle 26
on power over ones children 28
on our need for wilderness 151
on the introduction of new
competitors 170
his account of a mans interest 234
his denition of a right 322
his doubts about volenti non t injuria
325
mind as a capacity to acquire capacities
2545
miscarriage
duty to prevent? 13, 136
possibility of, as reason not to get
pregnant? 136
misery not the only misfortune 2812
misfortune is still misfortune if
unnoticed 274
missing-out
does not presuppose wanting 277
or ability to understand what is lost
278
or even generalised wanting 278
mixing oneself with what one works
on 1412
moderate, what 24
Mohr, James: abortion supposed
unchaste 8
momentary humans as altruists 288
Moore, G.E. 119
astonished by what philosophers say
84
claims people cant have intrinsic
value 121
344 Index
Moore, G.E. continued
himself puzzled by the idea of
intrinsic value 125
on change in intrinsic value 137
pretty items still have value where
appreciation impossible 155
his difculty in detecting his
consciousness 2489
moral cost which, alas, has to be borne
148
moral status
dawns in the second year of life
166
an unclear notion 309
morally contaminated discussions of
welfare 270
morally signicant 271
mother and baby both doing well
200
murder
without intention to kill 11
the killing of any reasonable
creature . . . 262
a purer sample of a public wrong
than stealing 326
is murder even where the victim
cannot complain 327, 329
is murder even when the victim is
no worse off 328
in a duel 329
Nagel, Thomas
on considering ourselves valuable
879
on the value of pictures no one can
see 126
thinks he might be his brain
211
on the bad effects of a fear of
religion 2312
mind found in various complex
systems? 244
misfortune includes possibilities
unrealised 2801
navete viii
Narveson, Jan 272, 311
no duties to children, but duties in
regard to them 319, 3267
the idea of having a duty to a child
a mere intuition 319
Nathanson, Bernard
says abortion is not killing 10
says foetus is a second patient 297
nature said to be valuable in itself
149
nature: the idea of a nature related to
idea of defect 258
Nelson, Leonard: on the interests of
stones 209
newborns as lacking human rights
201
Nietzsche viii
claims the value of life cant be
known 119
nonsense
not to be given religious passport
148
cannot be the content of a belief
161
Noonan, John T.: on saving money
99100
Norrie, K. 176
Nozick, Robert 106, 128
on inviolability 66
on the reduced value of bad people
103
compares trees and mice 104
on enamelling driftwood 142
on the self as a system of
principles 213
Nuremberg trials: offence against
mankind, but not defendants?
328
Nussbaum, Martha: on
incommensurability 161
Nuyen, A.T. 55
obligations
not always to be faced on ones own
5
which are quasi rights-related 324
Olson, Eric T. 178, 21213
on mental capacities of a foetus 255
organism(s)
can an organism come to have a
good? 198, 206
can an organism cease to have a
good? 252
organisms have a good, not organism
stages 287
Index 345
what counts as a single organism?
292
organisms have a good essentially
302
own-species-favouring instinct 124
panpsychism
and the uniformity of nature 2423
as part of an evolutionary outlook
2423
Part, Derek ix
on ones life going well 21819
parthenogenesis 8
pebbles, the perfections of 120
People v. Davis 5
person
person, its use as adjustable spanner
175
en ventre sa mere 176
husband and wife as single person
177
wondering whether one is such
178
could father and son count as single?
178
David Wigginss account 179
persons
individuals declared not to be 1756
in the moral sense, proof there are
none 176
are they alive? 178
each of us as two? 178
as brains? 21011
as exceedingly small? 211
Petchesky, Rosalind 124
Planned Parenthood v. Casey 1415, 32,
177
planned baby as more valuable 141
plants
the autonomous good of 266, 267,
272
good of, not a secondary notion 267
Polkinghorne Committee 113
Pollitt, Katha 256, 33, 567, 58
Posner, Richard A. 8
potlatch 79
practical ethics, a suitable motto for
173
preciousness of child thoroughly
ideological 124
precautionary principle applied
11718
preference not an internal impression
102
pregnancy
male 7
reduction 7, 58, 61
as hostile takeover 11
as continuously creative 35
as giving aid 35
reduction, fairness in 59
pregnant woman said to be the best
judge 108
Prejean, Helen 27
Prichard, H. A.: on directly
appreciating a must 115
pride as source of belief in human
value 120
pro-choice could gain from admitting
foetal interests 230
pro-choice is what is really pro-life
37, 56
Pro-Life Alliance 2
pro-life lacks concern for children
once they are born 567, 187
pro-natalism not here at issue 1415
proof, limited role of 1718
protection of choice requires the
concept of a right 311
protestors responsible for horrible
illnesses 114
Pucetti, Roland 178
Purdy, Laura 222
Putnam, Ruth Anna 109
Quinn, Warren
spheres of justice and of
benevolence 190, 315, 322
on loss of what we think most
important 278
not all rights waivable 325
what is owed to X presupposes Xs
choice 327
Rachels, James: on the evils of death
229, 281
Railton, Peter: leaves plants out of
consideration 268
Rakowski, Eric 188, 200, 251
on Dworkins real opinion 120
346 Index
Rakowski, Eric continued
on the negative value of the
comatose 137
suggests the right to life varies in
strength 167
Rawls, John
rights founded on capacities 188
interests related to needs 217
on paternalism 27980
Raz, Joseph
only those ultimately valuable have
rights 185
on forward-looking aspect of harm
208
realism in the ante-natal clinic 2978
reasons, the place of in rational
believing 1718, 333
reasons for looking at a picture 8990
recognising the sanctity of life, what
53
recycling benets, on being inuenced
by 113
reection on what was best for foetus
as post-abortion therapy 230
Regan, Tom: on the equal value of mice
and men 104, 138
Regina v. Jackson on wife-beating 26
religion, morality partly dependent on
viiiix
religiosity 65, 147
repentance in advance 39
representing Xs good v. representing
Xs wishes 324
resurrection of the body 2923
respect, shiftyness of appeal to 113
Rhees, Rush: on euthanasia 116
rhetoric not always out of place 333
Richards, Janet Radcliffe 17, 283
right to life
is a junior or half-serious right to life
possible? 173
protecting it, as solely a response to
the wish to live? 237
would not be a welfare right
3245
not transferable 325
central in importance but not a
central case of a right 332
rights, various particular
a right to pornography? 193
to give ones children second-best
care 222
the factory owners right to choose
297
not to be put down when in the
way 299
rights, conceptual matters
possession dependent on ability to
make claims? 164
rights of others a barrier to freedom
1678
reckless attribution of right as
injustice 168
rights of different kinds 18990,
306, 330
possession connected with having a
good 1968
what can be accorded can be
possessed 191, 204
connected with having a good
1968
we hear too much about rights these
days . . . 30910
which cannot be waived 311, 325,
330
notion of, not absent from the
ancient world 312
trouble for both choice and benet
theories of rights 313
violation of, not always more serious
than neglect of a duty 323
trump card or lever pulling model of
a right 324
duties, question of priority need not
have uniform answer 330
rights and interests
Pavlovian pairing of 191
an interest dened as a right 193
to vote and having an interest in
voting 194
Rodeck, Charles 1011
Roe v. Wade 109, 165
Ross, W.D. 159
Rothman, Barbara Katz 297
Russell, Bertrand 65
on the moon is one 157
psychology should not be concerned
with consciousness 249
consciousness not the essence of
mind 254
Index 347
Ryan, Alan: his alarm at value-talk in
relation to abortion 148
Ryle, Gilbert 255
sacredness without intrinsic value 80
Dworkins notion of 7981
safe abortion, sense commonly given
to 11
Sagan, Carl: on the scope of the right
to life 56, 307
sanctity: of contract, letters and
lavatories 62
sanctity of life
grossly inated ideas of 546
of protoplasm 55
rightly associated with a taboo 63
how related to rights 66
Savulescu, Julian: on underestimates of
ability to cope 112
on having an interest in not being
born 228
Schiff, Rabbi Daniel 97
Schwartz, Stephen, D. 257
Schweitzer, Albert: on our ignorance of
the value of organisms 120
Searle, John: on reasons to help others
88
the self as a philosophical
illusion 212
self-defence
as a duty or as a privilege 97
badly explained by forfeiture of right
to life 328
senselessness of what appears to have
sense 936
sentience as philosophically dodgy
category 182
sentient being 246, 256, 261
sentient beings as beings with a certain
nature 256
sex selection discriminatory? 11
said not to be proper ground for
abortion 110
sexual ethics not our concern 89
Shankley, Bill: his estimate of football
17
Sherwin, Susan 223
Shipman, Harold 41
Sider, Ted 287, 289
Sierra Club v. Morton 177
Simms, Madeleine: on saving money
98
Simonds, W.: on desensitising strategies
34
Singer, Peter 57, 65, 823, 114, 1223,
124, 140, 2089, 21920
on killing to save 173
his new Copernican
revolution 2212
stones cant suffer, and hence have no
interests 2678
interests of tree comparable to
interests of icicle 2689
generating as compensation for
killing has an air of peculiarity
280
on momentary interests 288
saving a baby as a benet to a later
someone 290
on being intimidated by talk of
human dignity 333
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter:
on goodness 160
on loss 2745
Slote, Michael: on killing to save 173
Smith, Holly M. 293
Smoker, Barbara 201
smoking while pregnant harms your
baby 215
society: there is no such thing as
society 303, 310
Sommers, Christina Hoff: on wife
beating 26
spare parts: getting pregnant just to
provide them 11314
species-favouritism 118, 3089
Squeers, Wackford: the piety of 44
status of foetus compared to would-be
immigrant 177
Steinbock, Bonnie 229, 282
interests as the content of rights
194
having interests related to mattering
to 202
welfare as compounded of interests
238, 273
gives a morally doctored account of
interests 272
duty not to foetus but to future
child 293
348 Index
Steiner, Hillel:
crime infringes rights of civil
authority 313
strictly speaking, only adults have
rights 315
for political purposes possible to
talk of a childs rights 31819
Stevens, John Paul 177
Stith, Richard 534
Stoppard, Miriam 11
Strawson, Galen 37
on the experience of being alone in
ones head 211
people as a succession of selves 287
strictly speaking, the harm is to the
future child 2904, 2978
strictly speaking and roughly speaking
200
suicide and execution as the
destruction of valuable items
478
Sumner L.W.
pregnancy violates womans physical
integrity 11
pregnancy, a parasitic relation 28
on the importance of sentience
2023
on what counts for us as harm 203
proposes account of welfare adapted
to suit womens needs 203
assigning a right to life, a matter of
policy 204
recognises an ambiguity in interests
232
on the popularity of a preference
account of welfare 235
interests are compounded out of
desires and experiences 238
and foetal incapacity 2612, 263
says talk of a plants interests
strained 266, but see 270
on Robin Atteld 2697
young children cant be said to have
rights 315
Sunstein, Cass: on forcing women to be
incubators 35
survival as appalling complication 11
taste and decency 2
Taylor, Paul W.: on interests 264
Teichman, Jenny
on inviolability 66
on intrinsic value of human beings
76
Temkin, Larry: killing harms by
causing loss 281
Thatcher, Margaret: on society and
entitlement 310
there are no people and we have
obligations to them 289
Thomson, Judith Jarvis 72, 17980
intrinsic v. product value 1367
Was St Francis better than this
chocolate? 1601
considers it possible that a zygote has
rights 1878
rough account of having a right
194
on the interests of bees and ants
210
Tomassi, John 145
Tooley, Michael 205, 229, 266
interests in the morally relevant
sense 271
recognises that opponent of abortion
need not invoke a right 307
duties to and duties in respect of
319
TOP 7
Torre-Bueno, Ava 115
Tracy, Stephen 65
treating a child as if it could be
harmed 257
treatment futile if effects cannot be
appreciated 201
Tribe, Lawrence 345
on foetal rights in an articial womb
186
television, what can and cannot be
shown on 2
twin, of less value than singleton?
13940
UN Convention on Rights of the Child
189, 314
unborn child, a phrase like unmade
bed 332
unconsciousness compatible with rich
mental life? 29
Uncumber, St 48
Index 349
Unger, Peter
on mental life without consciousness
247
on there being no people 289
Uniacke, Suzanne 66, 77
universality of human rights 1678
using as a mere means 113
value
of life or of the living individual?
52
of biodiversity 75
supposed generated by complexity
77, 81
described as objective 86
balancing and moral regimentation
98
compounding value of different
kinds 105
of life said to be unknowable 119
in ordinary sense not dependent on
actual wanting 154
of painting compared with that of
facsimile 1556
our critique of intrinsic value as
pro-choice 163
value to a plant 71
value claims as reecting, not
explaining, our views 912, 331
Varner, Gary: gives a moral account of
interests 2701
Vera Drake 4
virtues as intrinsically good for
possessor 70
von Wright, G.H.:
having a good goes with being alive
265
the sufciently strong cannot wrong
320
Waldron, Jeremy, on intrinsic value
756
Walton Committee, report 92
wanted for its own sake 71
wanting as related to value 702
wanton introduction of rival claimants
169
Warnke, Georgia 9, 16
Warnock, Mary: on good-in-itself
745
Warren, Mary Anne 34, 55
offers a reason why abortion is
controversial 9
has troubles with infanticide 175
a pioneer of person-dening 180
defended on concept of
capacity 261
her account of the right to life 322
waste in the world shows theres no
God 1323
waste, every-day and cosmic notions
of 132
wastefulness of nature 1323
wasting inviolability 132
water ouzel as person 177
Weddington, Sarah, 10, 57
Weininger, Otto: great men recognise
the I 212
Wellman, Carl, infants cannot be said
to have rights 315
grants for the sake of argument that
infants have interests 226
on duties we may yet have to a
rightless foetus 318
duties to, and in respect of, said not to
be a clear distinction 327
Wertheimer, Roger 91
Wertz, Dorothy: on adoption 112
White, Alan:
on rights and interests 1923
in the interests of peace etc. 214
on the deserts of a book 214
interested in v. in Xs interests 232
on our difculties with
modality 262
Wiggins, David:
a foetus as a person 179
need for X involves an interest in
having X 217
wildness of sober philosophy 3023
Wilkes, Kathleen 222, 286
on a wasps interest in survival 210
Williams Obstetrics, foetus as patient
297
Williams, Bernard 263
Williams, Glanville ix, 2201
Williams, Rowan 26
Wilson, E.O.: on why biodiversity
matters 149151
Winning, Thomas 4
350 Index
Winston, Robert 8
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 46
on tting into a surrounding 94
on the colour of vowels 96
On Certainty 207
the self 212
an inner process . . . 240
disparateness of the mental 254
concepts cannot be inaccessibly
inner 305
Wolf, Naomi 3, 39, 43
women, the position of unhappily
pregnant 34, 303
Woolf, Virginia, on imbeciles 401, 60
Zemach, Eddy 178
Zimmerman, Michael: on intrinsic
value 70, 122
zygotes, morulas, not here under
consideration 1819

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