The NHS goes to the effort of saving unborn babies from miscarriage from 22 weeks because, IIRC (I can’t find the reference quickly), there are no cases of babies surviving below that gestation time. Also, there’s no knitted nervous system before then. This provides IMO a plausible “big and sharply defined hurdle”, now that premature babies do remarkably better than even a few decades ago.
In the future we may have artificial womb technology, letting fertilized eggs develop without a mother at all. By your argument, that would make devices that prevent e.g. implantation in the (biological) womb wrong, because fertilization would be a big and sharply defined hurdle.
This reductio ad absurdum is intended to demonstrate that technological considerations such as viability should have no impact on morals. The reason we allow abortion at, say, 1 week after conception isn’t because the fetus isn’t viable or because we’re weighing its interests against those of the morther. It’s because at that point it has no moral weight and no interests to be protected due to its level of development or sapience.
Regarding your statement that “technological considerations such as viability should have no impact on morals”.
Why not? Think of a case where a terminally ill person can be kept alive if another healthy human being was somehow connected to them for nine months and used to provided nutrients, oxygen and other life support material to them from their bodies. This is roughly analogous to the case of an unborn child.
I’m guessing that if the technology were available to provide support to the dying/ill patient without hooking another person to them, we would consider it immoral to deny them this treatment. However, would it be immoral to not force a healthy/independent human being to provide life support to another person for nine months? If you were capable of providing this care, would it be immoral for you to refuse on account of it interfering with your other interests?
Technological considerations of course determine what we can do and through that, what we actually end up doing. In that sense they’re a necessary component of moral ‘what to do’ calculations.
What I meant was that you should be able to order all physically-possible actions by your preference function—in this case by morality—and then cross out the ones you can’t actually achieve because you don’t have the necessary technology, and take the highest remaining action on the list.
If the availability of some technology (artificial wombs) would make you select a choice you don’t really want to select (declaring pre-implantation abortions immoral and illegal), then the thought experiment has helped us found a mistake in your proposed morality evaluation function (“a fetus can be aborted only if it couldn’t survive outside the mother’s body at that age”).
As for your example: calling the terminally ill human ‘a person’ presupposes they have full personhood and moral value, and so should be kept from death. Whereas for early fetuses I and others hold that they are not persons and therefore we don’t have a moral imperative to keep them alive no matter how easy it may be to do so.
The NHS goes to the effort of saving unborn babies from miscarriage from 22 weeks because, IIRC (I can’t find the reference quickly), there are no cases of babies surviving below that gestation time. Also, there’s no knitted nervous system before then. This provides IMO a plausible “big and sharply defined hurdle”, now that premature babies do remarkably better than even a few decades ago.
I don’t understand why getting a knitted nervous system is a “hurdle” in the sense that I used the word. Does it kill many babies?
In the future we may have artificial womb technology, letting fertilized eggs develop without a mother at all. By your argument, that would make devices that prevent e.g. implantation in the (biological) womb wrong, because fertilization would be a big and sharply defined hurdle.
This reductio ad absurdum is intended to demonstrate that technological considerations such as viability should have no impact on morals. The reason we allow abortion at, say, 1 week after conception isn’t because the fetus isn’t viable or because we’re weighing its interests against those of the morther. It’s because at that point it has no moral weight and no interests to be protected due to its level of development or sapience.
Regarding your statement that “technological considerations such as viability should have no impact on morals”.
Why not? Think of a case where a terminally ill person can be kept alive if another healthy human being was somehow connected to them for nine months and used to provided nutrients, oxygen and other life support material to them from their bodies. This is roughly analogous to the case of an unborn child.
I’m guessing that if the technology were available to provide support to the dying/ill patient without hooking another person to them, we would consider it immoral to deny them this treatment. However, would it be immoral to not force a healthy/independent human being to provide life support to another person for nine months? If you were capable of providing this care, would it be immoral for you to refuse on account of it interfering with your other interests?
Technological considerations of course determine what we can do and through that, what we actually end up doing. In that sense they’re a necessary component of moral ‘what to do’ calculations.
What I meant was that you should be able to order all physically-possible actions by your preference function—in this case by morality—and then cross out the ones you can’t actually achieve because you don’t have the necessary technology, and take the highest remaining action on the list.
If the availability of some technology (artificial wombs) would make you select a choice you don’t really want to select (declaring pre-implantation abortions immoral and illegal), then the thought experiment has helped us found a mistake in your proposed morality evaluation function (“a fetus can be aborted only if it couldn’t survive outside the mother’s body at that age”).
As for your example: calling the terminally ill human ‘a person’ presupposes they have full personhood and moral value, and so should be kept from death. Whereas for early fetuses I and others hold that they are not persons and therefore we don’t have a moral imperative to keep them alive no matter how easy it may be to do so.
I’ll be interested to hear what you mean by ‘a person’.
By ‘a person’ I meant ‘anyone or anything with moral weight’.