The abortion debate is something I’ve been thinking a lot about because I’m anxious that I will need to declare ‘my colors’ at some moment in an awkward social context and I want to prepare something to say that will not offend. This is tricky because in certain social groups I think a weak or an uncertain stance could still be considered offensive. I am leaning towards something that seems potentially sympathetic but that is actually too vague to infer a stance such as, ‘There is so much wrong in the world today, I feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin with fixing it’.
In actuality, I don’t feel very strongly about the abortion issue and I spend time wondering if I lack a morality that other humans have—if I’m actually less “moral” than whatever human morality would be.
My sense of morality (determining whether something is right or wrong) is that a person thinks about a situation and if they feel dismay, then they decide that situation is morally wrong. They then try to decide what is the source of their dismay—what is so awful about it and, if possible, who is to blame? In some types of morally gray areas, we feel dismay but we’re not sure who is to blame. ‘It’s just a bad situation.’
I think this is how a lot of pro-choice people feel about abortion?
However, when I interrogate my feeling about abortion, I don’t feel any dismay for the sake of the baby. I happen to be someone who easily feels dismay in other contexts. For example, if I think about a young soldier dying in combat, I feel dismay at lots of different levels. But when I think of an aborted baby or a miscarriage alike, my moral apparatus just shrugs. (Is this immoral?)
I do feel dismay from other sources. I feel dismay if other people are saddened (a mother, the father, a grandparent, even a pro-life advocate) and I also worry about what effects a disregard for the life of a fetus for its own sake (e.g., like the one I have) could have on family and society. (For example, it would be awful if employers thought pregnancies were so disposable they could choose one more convenient for their schedules, and less romantic if timid but otherwise capable and loving couples never felt any pressure to work together to face the challenge of raising a baby they hadn’t expected.)
So my question is, is the main thing going on in the abortion debate this sense of dismay that I lack? (I realize that many to most pro-choicers may also feel dismay, but weigh this differently against the freedom of the mother.)
For example, if I think about a young soldier dying in combat, I feel dismay at lots of different levels. But when I think of an aborted baby or a miscarriage alike, my moral apparatus just shrugs. (Is this immoral?)
Is there a difference in visualization? Most of us know a lot of young men who are of age to be a soldier (and/or fit that bill ourselves), and are pretty familiar with depictions of death during war. Pretty much the only exposure most people get to the physical presence of miscarriages is anti-abortion pamphlets. Babies might also be distant enough that the word conjures a vague annoyance rather than something worth defending.
This is a reasonable hypothesis, but I don’t think so. I try imagining a miscarriage in greater detail and still feel indifferent. Also, I don’t feel ambivalent or indifferent about babies. I adore holding them, have recently raised one past the baby stage and am currently working on acquiring a new one. But if this hopeful pregnancy results in a miscarriage, we’ll just try again in the next cycle and while we want a baby, I don’t mind if my neighbors don’t and their birth control fails and they decide to abort. (Though I do wonder and worry if they will always feel comfortable about their decision.)
I ask myself why I feel such a significant difference between a young soldier and a fetus. I feel like I can empathize with a grown boy, whereas I don’t consider that a fetus has feelings. Also, a huge amount of resources and emotional investment have gone into raising someone by the time they’re grown, whereas sometimes the resources gone into a fetus of a few weeks are so negligible as to be unnoticed. (A counter-example would be a couple that have much emotionally invested in their pregnancy, in which case the miscarriage is very sad and I would not in any way trivialize their pain. For me, the sadness depends on how the people around that pregnancy feel about it. I also feel sad when people want a baby and don’t conceive; and of course in that case there is no death of a potential human. My feelings on the issue simply don’t take into account anything about the fetus for its own sake.)
Intriguing, I guess. I would like to see the graph of grief verses child age and see if it has an uncanny resemblance to the values I would assign, but according to the post, I shouldn’t recognize reproduction potential as the source of my grief. (In any case, I’m open-minded but don’t currently buy it.)
My explanation would be that I see the value of a life as being the web of connections between them and other people (including themselves). These connections can wax and wane over a lifetime. When I feel sad about soldiers in combat, my mind tends to linger on the thought of girlfriends that they have, or could have had, as well as the grief for their parents, while the thought of them being married and having children at home missing them seems too sad to linger on for long.
I personally consider it virtuous to (politely and respectfully) speak my mind without worrying about offending people, so I can’t sympathize with the particular challenge you’re facing. But I want to say that I find your solution clever and I like it:
My sense of morality [...] is that a person thinks about a situation and if they feel dismay, then they decide that situation is morally wrong. They then try to decide what is the source of their dismay [...]
I believe moral psychology agrees with you. Joshua David Greene says:
Under ordinary circumstances reasoning comes into play after the [moral]
judgment has already been reached in order to find rational support for the
preordained judgment. (p. 165)
He also quotes Jonathan Haidt:
When faced with a social demand for a verbal justification, one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for the truth. [quoted in Greene, p. 165]
Now lots of people would say this is an atrocious state of affairs — we ought to base our moral judgments on reasoning, not on intuition. But there are few people who could criticize you for it without being hypocritical.
Your attitude is also a clever solution to your problem because you disavow responsibility for your moral intuitions; your job is to merely interpret your intuitions.
Thank you for holding up a mirror to my thoughts. I agree these are my views/solutions and I iterated them here.
My Less-Wrong-Story is that sometime in the first year I gave up on an external/objective morality because the arguments here were compelling that there couldn’t be one.
I had been clinging to the idea of the existence of objective morality because without it, value would be ‘arbitrary’. By this I include determined (e.g., by evolution), complex, and potentially spontaneous and beautiful but not instrinsically “correct”. Also, not deducible or reducible or necessarily logical like things embedded in physical reality must be. (Morality is technically embedded in physical reality in the way that it actually objectively exists, but describing this entity would describe how a person feels about X, not how they should feel about X.)
I spent a lot of time worrying that my brain wanted to give reasons for every value. I want to break this egg because I want to make a cake. I want to make a cake because I want the birthday party to be fun. I want it to be fun because I want to be happy. I want to be happy because … because why? The terminal values aren’t pinned to anything, but my brain expects them to be. In theory, religious people should pin the terminal values to God, but I don’t believe the mapping is very thorough or accurate.
Ah, yep! There’s a fact of the matter regarding how a person feels about X, and about how a person feels they should feel about X, and how a person feels they should feel they should feel… and so on. And the recursion continues forever.
But you can only ask why someone wants X a few times before we have to stop, or we go in a circle, or we get confused.
The abortion debate is something I’ve been thinking a lot about because I’m anxious that I will need to declare ‘my colors’ at some moment in an awkward social context and I want to prepare something to say that will not offend. This is tricky because in certain social groups I think a weak or an uncertain stance could still be considered offensive. I am leaning towards something that seems potentially sympathetic but that is actually too vague to infer a stance such as, ‘There is so much wrong in the world today, I feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin with fixing it’.
In actuality, I don’t feel very strongly about the abortion issue and I spend time wondering if I lack a morality that other humans have—if I’m actually less “moral” than whatever human morality would be.
My sense of morality (determining whether something is right or wrong) is that a person thinks about a situation and if they feel dismay, then they decide that situation is morally wrong. They then try to decide what is the source of their dismay—what is so awful about it and, if possible, who is to blame? In some types of morally gray areas, we feel dismay but we’re not sure who is to blame. ‘It’s just a bad situation.’
I think this is how a lot of pro-choice people feel about abortion?
However, when I interrogate my feeling about abortion, I don’t feel any dismay for the sake of the baby. I happen to be someone who easily feels dismay in other contexts. For example, if I think about a young soldier dying in combat, I feel dismay at lots of different levels. But when I think of an aborted baby or a miscarriage alike, my moral apparatus just shrugs. (Is this immoral?)
I do feel dismay from other sources. I feel dismay if other people are saddened (a mother, the father, a grandparent, even a pro-life advocate) and I also worry about what effects a disregard for the life of a fetus for its own sake (e.g., like the one I have) could have on family and society. (For example, it would be awful if employers thought pregnancies were so disposable they could choose one more convenient for their schedules, and less romantic if timid but otherwise capable and loving couples never felt any pressure to work together to face the challenge of raising a baby they hadn’t expected.)
So my question is, is the main thing going on in the abortion debate this sense of dismay that I lack? (I realize that many to most pro-choicers may also feel dismay, but weigh this differently against the freedom of the mother.)
Is there a difference in visualization? Most of us know a lot of young men who are of age to be a soldier (and/or fit that bill ourselves), and are pretty familiar with depictions of death during war. Pretty much the only exposure most people get to the physical presence of miscarriages is anti-abortion pamphlets. Babies might also be distant enough that the word conjures a vague annoyance rather than something worth defending.
This is a reasonable hypothesis, but I don’t think so. I try imagining a miscarriage in greater detail and still feel indifferent. Also, I don’t feel ambivalent or indifferent about babies. I adore holding them, have recently raised one past the baby stage and am currently working on acquiring a new one. But if this hopeful pregnancy results in a miscarriage, we’ll just try again in the next cycle and while we want a baby, I don’t mind if my neighbors don’t and their birth control fails and they decide to abort. (Though I do wonder and worry if they will always feel comfortable about their decision.)
I ask myself why I feel such a significant difference between a young soldier and a fetus. I feel like I can empathize with a grown boy, whereas I don’t consider that a fetus has feelings. Also, a huge amount of resources and emotional investment have gone into raising someone by the time they’re grown, whereas sometimes the resources gone into a fetus of a few weeks are so negligible as to be unnoticed. (A counter-example would be a couple that have much emotionally invested in their pregnancy, in which case the miscarriage is very sad and I would not in any way trivialize their pain. For me, the sadness depends on how the people around that pregnancy feel about it. I also feel sad when people want a baby and don’t conceive; and of course in that case there is no death of a potential human. My feelings on the issue simply don’t take into account anything about the fetus for its own sake.)
Ok. Does this seem to describe your feelings?
Intriguing, I guess. I would like to see the graph of grief verses child age and see if it has an uncanny resemblance to the values I would assign, but according to the post, I shouldn’t recognize reproduction potential as the source of my grief. (In any case, I’m open-minded but don’t currently buy it.)
My explanation would be that I see the value of a life as being the web of connections between them and other people (including themselves). These connections can wax and wane over a lifetime. When I feel sad about soldiers in combat, my mind tends to linger on the thought of girlfriends that they have, or could have had, as well as the grief for their parents, while the thought of them being married and having children at home missing them seems too sad to linger on for long.
I personally consider it virtuous to (politely and respectfully) speak my mind without worrying about offending people, so I can’t sympathize with the particular challenge you’re facing. But I want to say that I find your solution clever and I like it:
I believe moral psychology agrees with you. Joshua David Greene says:
He also quotes Jonathan Haidt:
Now lots of people would say this is an atrocious state of affairs — we ought to base our moral judgments on reasoning, not on intuition. But there are few people who could criticize you for it without being hypocritical.
Your attitude is also a clever solution to your problem because you disavow responsibility for your moral intuitions; your job is to merely interpret your intuitions.
Thank you for holding up a mirror to my thoughts. I agree these are my views/solutions and I iterated them here.
My Less-Wrong-Story is that sometime in the first year I gave up on an external/objective morality because the arguments here were compelling that there couldn’t be one.
I had been clinging to the idea of the existence of objective morality because without it, value would be ‘arbitrary’. By this I include determined (e.g., by evolution), complex, and potentially spontaneous and beautiful but not instrinsically “correct”. Also, not deducible or reducible or necessarily logical like things embedded in physical reality must be. (Morality is technically embedded in physical reality in the way that it actually objectively exists, but describing this entity would describe how a person feels about X, not how they should feel about X.)
I spent a lot of time worrying that my brain wanted to give reasons for every value. I want to break this egg because I want to make a cake. I want to make a cake because I want the birthday party to be fun. I want it to be fun because I want to be happy. I want to be happy because … because why? The terminal values aren’t pinned to anything, but my brain expects them to be. In theory, religious people should pin the terminal values to God, but I don’t believe the mapping is very thorough or accurate.
Ah, yep! There’s a fact of the matter regarding how a person feels about X, and about how a person feels they should feel about X, and how a person feels they should feel they should feel… and so on. And the recursion continues forever.
But you can only ask why someone wants X a few times before we have to stop, or we go in a circle, or we get confused.