It is not. Most people would find factory farming morally repugnant if they had to closely witness the whole process. You would not have the same reaction to hanging out with a woman who was in the process of miscarrying an embryo.
Sorry, is the argument here actually meant to be "you can't see early embryonic death, therefore causing it isn't bad"? That's a terrible argument. There are philosophical arguments for the claim that human personhood begins at conception, and they imply that it's wrong to do things which kill human beings from conception onwards. The fact that you can't observe it happening in many cases is utterly irrelevant.
More precisely, the argument is that even if you could observe embryonic death with a microscopic camera, you wouldn’t strongly feel that it is bad.
I am an intuitionist. We have strong moral intuitions about torturing animals, and most meat eaters are shielded from these intuitions because the factory farming process is kept out of sight. We don’t have strong moral intuitions about the millions of embryonic deaths that happen every day with or without contraception, and we wouldn’t have strong moral intuitions about it even if we viewed the whole process under a microscope.
Intuitionists don't think you should give equal weight to all of your intuitions. And your intuition about early zygote death seems like a paradigm case of an unreliable intuition (since zygotes are small, they're not cute, they can't yelp or scream like tortured animals, you've been taught for your entire life that contraception is OK, and so on).
Also, the frequency of zygote death seems like it should serve as an additional debunking of your intuition, since it explains why people don't take zygote death seriously (namely, that it's so frequent). It really is the wild animal suffering of abortion.
I agree that people tend to ignore the more surprising implications of their moral beliefs. Given that most fertilized eggs do not successfully implant, is procreative sex also a moral catastrophe?
In ordinary cases, the parents are not the cause of the failure to implant. They caused the conception, but they didn't do anything which brought it about that their potential zygote would die: it's just an unfortunate fact of human reproduction. But in the case of contraception, the parents have performed an action which notably increases the probability that any zygote they conceive will die. That seems obviously immoral.
I also do think that pro-lifers should be more concerned about reducing miscarriages. (This is also true of most pro-choicers, for moral risk reasons similar to those given in the post.)
To me, it seems obviously immoral to take any action that has a 50-50 chance of killing a child. Even if, with heavy heart, prospective parents accept the risk of killing children if they want to have one, surely at some point a woman who has had a string of miscarriages is just commiting (moral if not legal) manslaughter by trying again. I have never heard anyone make this case, though.
I don't think that's correct. Every parent forsees that their child will die someday; that doesn't mean that they "killed" them. It seems to me that applies to the ordinary forseen risk of miscarriage. But in the contraceptive case, the parents have *acted* in such a way as to substantially raise the probability that any child they conceive will die. In that case, it really does look like the parents are *causing* their child to die, i.e. killing the child.
This line of reasoning seems more concerned with the moral status of the parents than with the embryo dying itself. If a child dies becauae they fall out of a stroller and into the road, it's a tragedy whether or not it happened because Mom was strolling while drunk. Is it also a tragedy when an embryo is lost, regardless of the cause?
(Unrelated but I do think people should at least reflect on the moral hazard of making people who will suffer and die.)
I should say there are some circumstances which would justify taking said risk but they aren't ordinary ones. If someone told me that I could have a child iff someone else's child died (the statistical reality) I like to think I would simply adopt. I've never heard of anyone making this choice. By contrast, millions of people are willing to abstain from eating meat on moral conviction alone.
I was going to comment this (though I believe I've seen some numbers closer to 40%).
Contraceptives also aren't the only things that can prevent fertilized eggs from implanting, if I remember correctly obesity, breastfeeding, and intense excercise have similar effects.
I don't know the statistics concerning breastfeeding, obesity, and exercise, but assuming you're correct about those things, I'd say the correct response is simply for a couple affected by them to take steps to avoid conception, steps which themselves do not further increase the likelihood of zygote death (so, "let's use birth control to avoid implantation failure" isn't going to fly). That might include temporary abstinence, depending on how great the risks imposed by the relevant factors are. It is in no way clear to me why that is supposed to be an odd claim.
That's fair, and my memory may have been faulty on this point anyway. It's odd to the extent it condemns behavior we normally think of as innocuous, but that isn't powerful evidence against a theory (perhaps, on reflection, morality will turn out to be demanding in ways we didn't recognize at first).
The bigger problem, I think, is that hardly anyone regards it as a great tragedy that so many fertilized eggs fail to implant. And if they are persons, surely this is one of the greatest problems in the world, on par with the high rates of child mortality in previous centuries. You may be willing to bite this bullet, and if you have strong reason to think fertilized eggs are persons you may even be rational in doing so. But I'm not and I don't.
I agree that pro-lifers should be very concerned about preventing miscarriages and spontaneous embryonic death. That said, I think we should be *more* concerned about abortion and human killing of embryos. See e.g. the following paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/MILSWA-5
That sounds plausible, we usually think that murder is worse than killing. I do think you have to end up saying vaginal sex is usually wrong, or at the very least incredibly morally risky, but that's not the consequence of your view I find most counter - intuitive. It's that blastocyst death goes in the same category as malaria and world hunger.
This may just be another way of saying that embryonic personhood seems strange to me, if 40 - 70% of pregnancies ended in stillbirth I would probably consider it one of the greatest tragedies ever.
Concerning the morality of ordinary sex, I'll say the same thing to you that I said to another commentor. Every parent forsees that their child will die someday; that doesn't mean that they "killed" them. It seems to me that applies to the ordinary forseen risk of miscarriage. But in the contraceptive case, the parents have *acted* in such a way as to substantially raise the probability that any child they conceive will die. In that case, it really does look like the parents are *causing* their child to die, i.e. killing the child.
With respect to the tragedy of early miscarriage, I agree that it's an extremely bad thing, and that we don't take it seriously enough.
Also (and I meant to say this in response to your previous comment), I'm curious what you'd say about a couple who decided to use condoms or have non - penetrative sex in lieu of the pill. Maybe they decided that blastocysts were people but weren't willing to have children yet and were too weak - willed for abstinence. If I thought blastocysts were people, I'd count this as a win, regardless of what I thought about the morality of contraception.
But I've heard some NLT proponents say unnatural acts are incommensurately wrong (hence why some Catholics think you shouldn't lie to the Nazis about hiding Jews). This isn't meant to be a gotcha, I just don't understand NLT as well as I'd like to.
I'd be opposed to be people using condoms and/or engaging in intrinsically non-procreative sex. But the arguments for that view are very different from the arguments given here, and one can accept the argument of this post without endorsing NLT.
13 cycles per year, 30% chance of the embryo failing to implant
Case B – hormonal BCP
1 cycle per year, 90% chance of the embryo failing to implant
It’s not immediately clear that the case of the hormonal BCP will result in more lost children over normal fertility. Because the primary mechanism of BCPs is to prevent ovulation and fertilization, you have to get to a pretty high success rate for normal fertility and very successful prevention of implantation for BCPs before it would result in more deaths.
In ordinary cases, the parents are not the cause of the failure to implant. They caused the conception, but they didn't do anything which brought it about that their potential zygote would die: it's just an unfortunate fact of human reproduction. But in the case of contraception, the parents have performed an action which notably increases the probability that any zygote they conceive will die. That seems obviously immoral.
Having procreative sex is performing an action which is likely to result in embryo loss, which also seems obviously immoral if you think an embryo is a child. Why is it just an "unfortunate fact of reproduction" in the case of procreative sex and not "an unfortunate fact of contraception" in the case of IUDs? It seems like your are reasoning from the fact that you think reproduction is good for other reasons and contraception is not. I wish you would actually tackle this objection.
Let's say that the only way for someone to have another child is to take an organ from their existing child. This operation has a 50% chance of killing the child, but the mother will give birth to twins. The parents will do everything in their power to reduce the likelihood their existing child will die from the operation, but they really want at least two kids and this is their only chance. Would anyone conscience performing this operation? How is this different, on your account, from ordinary reproduction?
Edit: I didn't see your response to my other comment until after I posted-- I see that you did respond to the objection with a new point, sorry I said otherwise.
I have a section on IUDs at the end of this paper https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-022-09921-6. If you think Boonin’s argument works for abortion methods they aren’t active killings, but failures to provide life-support, these abortions will turn out to be less wrongful than you think they are
I don't think Boonin's argument works (Kaczor's critique in chapter 8 of The Ethics of Abortion seems right to me), and I think it would make for a very strange pro-life view if I did (one would have to hold that abortion is currently a moral crisis, but would cease to be one if the method of abortion was changed). I agree though that the argument you mention in that paper (concerning parthood) probably won't apply in these cases (though I admittedly haven't spent much time thinking about it).
I think "IUDs are homicide" is a reductio ad absurdum of the view that embryos are people.
Is "eating Big Macs is immoral" a reductio ad absurdum of the view that cows have moral standing?
It is not. Most people would find factory farming morally repugnant if they had to closely witness the whole process. You would not have the same reaction to hanging out with a woman who was in the process of miscarrying an embryo.
Sorry, is the argument here actually meant to be "you can't see early embryonic death, therefore causing it isn't bad"? That's a terrible argument. There are philosophical arguments for the claim that human personhood begins at conception, and they imply that it's wrong to do things which kill human beings from conception onwards. The fact that you can't observe it happening in many cases is utterly irrelevant.
More precisely, the argument is that even if you could observe embryonic death with a microscopic camera, you wouldn’t strongly feel that it is bad.
I am an intuitionist. We have strong moral intuitions about torturing animals, and most meat eaters are shielded from these intuitions because the factory farming process is kept out of sight. We don’t have strong moral intuitions about the millions of embryonic deaths that happen every day with or without contraception, and we wouldn’t have strong moral intuitions about it even if we viewed the whole process under a microscope.
Intuitionists don't think you should give equal weight to all of your intuitions. And your intuition about early zygote death seems like a paradigm case of an unreliable intuition (since zygotes are small, they're not cute, they can't yelp or scream like tortured animals, you've been taught for your entire life that contraception is OK, and so on).
Also, the frequency of zygote death seems like it should serve as an additional debunking of your intuition, since it explains why people don't take zygote death seriously (namely, that it's so frequent). It really is the wild animal suffering of abortion.
I'm very suspicious of the claim that you should discount some of your intuitions. That is the message of scammers.
I agree that people tend to ignore the more surprising implications of their moral beliefs. Given that most fertilized eggs do not successfully implant, is procreative sex also a moral catastrophe?
In ordinary cases, the parents are not the cause of the failure to implant. They caused the conception, but they didn't do anything which brought it about that their potential zygote would die: it's just an unfortunate fact of human reproduction. But in the case of contraception, the parents have performed an action which notably increases the probability that any zygote they conceive will die. That seems obviously immoral.
I also do think that pro-lifers should be more concerned about reducing miscarriages. (This is also true of most pro-choicers, for moral risk reasons similar to those given in the post.)
To me, it seems obviously immoral to take any action that has a 50-50 chance of killing a child. Even if, with heavy heart, prospective parents accept the risk of killing children if they want to have one, surely at some point a woman who has had a string of miscarriages is just commiting (moral if not legal) manslaughter by trying again. I have never heard anyone make this case, though.
I don't think that's correct. Every parent forsees that their child will die someday; that doesn't mean that they "killed" them. It seems to me that applies to the ordinary forseen risk of miscarriage. But in the contraceptive case, the parents have *acted* in such a way as to substantially raise the probability that any child they conceive will die. In that case, it really does look like the parents are *causing* their child to die, i.e. killing the child.
This line of reasoning seems more concerned with the moral status of the parents than with the embryo dying itself. If a child dies becauae they fall out of a stroller and into the road, it's a tragedy whether or not it happened because Mom was strolling while drunk. Is it also a tragedy when an embryo is lost, regardless of the cause?
(Unrelated but I do think people should at least reflect on the moral hazard of making people who will suffer and die.)
I should say there are some circumstances which would justify taking said risk but they aren't ordinary ones. If someone told me that I could have a child iff someone else's child died (the statistical reality) I like to think I would simply adopt. I've never heard of anyone making this choice. By contrast, millions of people are willing to abstain from eating meat on moral conviction alone.
I was going to comment this (though I believe I've seen some numbers closer to 40%).
Contraceptives also aren't the only things that can prevent fertilized eggs from implanting, if I remember correctly obesity, breastfeeding, and intense excercise have similar effects.
I don't know the statistics concerning breastfeeding, obesity, and exercise, but assuming you're correct about those things, I'd say the correct response is simply for a couple affected by them to take steps to avoid conception, steps which themselves do not further increase the likelihood of zygote death (so, "let's use birth control to avoid implantation failure" isn't going to fly). That might include temporary abstinence, depending on how great the risks imposed by the relevant factors are. It is in no way clear to me why that is supposed to be an odd claim.
That's fair, and my memory may have been faulty on this point anyway. It's odd to the extent it condemns behavior we normally think of as innocuous, but that isn't powerful evidence against a theory (perhaps, on reflection, morality will turn out to be demanding in ways we didn't recognize at first).
The bigger problem, I think, is that hardly anyone regards it as a great tragedy that so many fertilized eggs fail to implant. And if they are persons, surely this is one of the greatest problems in the world, on par with the high rates of child mortality in previous centuries. You may be willing to bite this bullet, and if you have strong reason to think fertilized eggs are persons you may even be rational in doing so. But I'm not and I don't.
I agree that pro-lifers should be very concerned about preventing miscarriages and spontaneous embryonic death. That said, I think we should be *more* concerned about abortion and human killing of embryos. See e.g. the following paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/MILSWA-5
That sounds plausible, we usually think that murder is worse than killing. I do think you have to end up saying vaginal sex is usually wrong, or at the very least incredibly morally risky, but that's not the consequence of your view I find most counter - intuitive. It's that blastocyst death goes in the same category as malaria and world hunger.
This may just be another way of saying that embryonic personhood seems strange to me, if 40 - 70% of pregnancies ended in stillbirth I would probably consider it one of the greatest tragedies ever.
Concerning the morality of ordinary sex, I'll say the same thing to you that I said to another commentor. Every parent forsees that their child will die someday; that doesn't mean that they "killed" them. It seems to me that applies to the ordinary forseen risk of miscarriage. But in the contraceptive case, the parents have *acted* in such a way as to substantially raise the probability that any child they conceive will die. In that case, it really does look like the parents are *causing* their child to die, i.e. killing the child.
With respect to the tragedy of early miscarriage, I agree that it's an extremely bad thing, and that we don't take it seriously enough.
Also (and I meant to say this in response to your previous comment), I'm curious what you'd say about a couple who decided to use condoms or have non - penetrative sex in lieu of the pill. Maybe they decided that blastocysts were people but weren't willing to have children yet and were too weak - willed for abstinence. If I thought blastocysts were people, I'd count this as a win, regardless of what I thought about the morality of contraception.
But I've heard some NLT proponents say unnatural acts are incommensurately wrong (hence why some Catholics think you shouldn't lie to the Nazis about hiding Jews). This isn't meant to be a gotcha, I just don't understand NLT as well as I'd like to.
I'd be opposed to be people using condoms and/or engaging in intrinsically non-procreative sex. But the arguments for that view are very different from the arguments given here, and one can accept the argument of this post without endorsing NLT.
Case A – normal fertility
13 cycles per year, 30% chance of the embryo failing to implant
Case B – hormonal BCP
1 cycle per year, 90% chance of the embryo failing to implant
It’s not immediately clear that the case of the hormonal BCP will result in more lost children over normal fertility. Because the primary mechanism of BCPs is to prevent ovulation and fertilization, you have to get to a pretty high success rate for normal fertility and very successful prevention of implantation for BCPs before it would result in more deaths.
In ordinary cases, the parents are not the cause of the failure to implant. They caused the conception, but they didn't do anything which brought it about that their potential zygote would die: it's just an unfortunate fact of human reproduction. But in the case of contraception, the parents have performed an action which notably increases the probability that any zygote they conceive will die. That seems obviously immoral.
Having procreative sex is performing an action which is likely to result in embryo loss, which also seems obviously immoral if you think an embryo is a child. Why is it just an "unfortunate fact of reproduction" in the case of procreative sex and not "an unfortunate fact of contraception" in the case of IUDs? It seems like your are reasoning from the fact that you think reproduction is good for other reasons and contraception is not. I wish you would actually tackle this objection.
Let's say that the only way for someone to have another child is to take an organ from their existing child. This operation has a 50% chance of killing the child, but the mother will give birth to twins. The parents will do everything in their power to reduce the likelihood their existing child will die from the operation, but they really want at least two kids and this is their only chance. Would anyone conscience performing this operation? How is this different, on your account, from ordinary reproduction?
Edit: I didn't see your response to my other comment until after I posted-- I see that you did respond to the objection with a new point, sorry I said otherwise.
I have a section on IUDs at the end of this paper https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-022-09921-6. If you think Boonin’s argument works for abortion methods they aren’t active killings, but failures to provide life-support, these abortions will turn out to be less wrongful than you think they are
I don't think Boonin's argument works (Kaczor's critique in chapter 8 of The Ethics of Abortion seems right to me), and I think it would make for a very strange pro-life view if I did (one would have to hold that abortion is currently a moral crisis, but would cease to be one if the method of abortion was changed). I agree though that the argument you mention in that paper (concerning parthood) probably won't apply in these cases (though I admittedly haven't spent much time thinking about it).
Have you considered that encouraging women to stop reliable forms of contraception will lead to an increase in unplanned pregnancies?
Obviously, yes. I do not think that justifies the risks described in the post.