In part 1 I introduced what I see as a problem with the three main modes of ethical thinking I've encountered - what I called results, rules and virtue ethics. In part 2 I laid out how I see the three modes interacting with and informing each other in something I'm calling wisdom ethics. In part 3, as promised, I'm going to try applying wisdom ethics to abortion as an experiment. In part 4, I want to talk more about wisdom ethics, and get more specific about the different ways I see each mode functioning.
Rules
The abortion 'debate' (read: shouting match) is often defined in rules terms, so I will start there. On the one hand, you have the pro-choice movement, which places as it's highest value the autonomy of women over their own bodies and reproduction. On the other hand, you have the pro-life movement, which places as it's highest value the protection of innocent life. This is probably not anything new - if it is, I recommend reading up on both sides of the abortion debate before reading this.
On it's face, both rules, valuing autonomy and valuing innocent life, seem good, but they are in direct conflict as characterized. Exercising the autonomy on one side results in ending an innocent life on the other; protecting the innocent life on the one hand necessitates violating the autonomy on the other. We could try to compare the rules and see if one should trump the other. We could also try to find some kind of middle ground between the two, but neither side seems interested in a lot of compromise.
These two basic rules-based positions have been espoused and defended for decades, and nothing has been resolved. That is, good-intentioned reasonable people have not been able to reconcile them thus far. It seems that rules-based ethical consideration is not sufficient here.
Results
Since this debate is about public policy, and both sides want to see their view enacted as binding law on the other, let's look at results we can expect in each case. In other countries where abortion has been outlawed, the actual abortion rate does not drop. In some cases, it is actually far higher than it is in the US per capita where abortion is legal. So if we look at the result of applying the rule 'protect innocent life' in this case as a law against abortion, we can see that the results are not necessarily consistent with the rule at all. For reasons I won't pretend to understand right now, simply making abortion illegal does not serve the rule 'protect innocent life' very well.
To go on, approximately 50% of maternal deaths in the first half of the 20th century resulted from black-market abortions. If we assume that at least some of these mothers were 'innocent', we can see that applying this rule as law further goes against the rule itself.
In the United States where abortion is legal, about one fourth of all pregnancies in a given year result in abortions (half of all pregnancies are unplanned, and half of those are terminated). I have not seen solid numbers for abortions before they were legalized in 1973 because, of course, no one was going to announce they were breaking the law to terminate a pregnancy. Now, however, there a lot of them. In 1996, for example, I've read that there were 1.37 million abortions. About 1% of those are because of rape and/or incest, about 6% because of health complications threatening the mother, and 93% because the pregnancy is simply unwanted. (Note - numbers are my approximations from my own research - for more detailed figures, I recommend doing your own research). By age 45, almost half of all women have had an abortion at some time in their life.
This is to say that the exercise of the autonomy valued by the pro-choice side results in a lot of abortions taking place. The effects of these procedures can be lingering. Women who have abortions have been shown to have higher incidents of suicide, death from other causes, substance abuse, clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and psychiatric hospitalization. I've read that between 30 and 60 percent of abortions are undertaken because of pressure from a woman's male partner, medical staff, and/or friends and family members (it isn't as if legalized abortion means that womens' autonomy is respected across the board).
Can we say that legalized abortion results in the most good for the most people involved (assuming here for now with the pro-choice side that a fetus is not a person)? I don't think we can. The procedure is not ethically sanitized, and seems to clearly result in psychological devastation in many cases.
Virtue
Now to look at virtue, or the kinds of people each side's position seems likely to foster. First, the pro-life side. Respect for innocent life is virtuous. It is just to offer each living person the opportunity to flourish. It requires fortitude to protect innocent life where it is threatened. It is temperate to be reluctant to end any life. Theologically, I think that the destruction of innocent life is inimical to experiencing the gifts of faith, hope and love.
However, in looking at the pro-life lobby in general, there is a lot of overlap with other issues which seem to contradict the virtues espoused by the movement. For example, many who are pro-life are also pro-war, and war certainly results in the destruction of innocent life on a massive and tragic scale. I think that this is intemperate and also unwise, in that war lacks a careful consideration of each life involved by it's definition, and wisdom would imply that one would apply the same principles in all relevant situations.
There is also little resistance to in-vitro fertilization, which is another elective procedure which results in the destruction of many embryos as a matter of course. Justice would demand, it seems, that these embryos be defended as well, but at the moment they are at best frozen and then forgotten, with vague ideas of perhaps thawing and adopting all of them.
I would also expect to see much more of a pro-life movement following birth as well, and much more advocacy for food programs and public assistance for children growing up in poverty. Right now, about 1 in 4 children is on the verge of hunger and 1 in 8 children is undernourished in the United States. These are also innocent lives (and unlike with embryos, everyone agrees that a child is a human being), also worthy of our efforts to protect them.
What I see here, in brief, is not a situation where the pro-life position results in fostering the virtues one might expect, but rather a continued one-issue focus which does not lead to the development of values and practices applied more broadly.
On the other side is the pro-choice movement. I also believe that respect for autonomy is virtuous. In fact, any ethical system demands autonomy insofar as it is possible, because ethics is about making meaningful decisions. Fortitude, justice, temperance and wisdom all require autonomy - without it, they cannot be exercised. It is just, however, in some cases, to limit autonomy. (For example: putting a sociopathic killer in prison for society's protection, or enacting environmental regulations for same) There are cases where the flourishing of virtue for as many as possible requires the limitation of autonomy in some situations.
I do not think that a society which is blase about something like abortion will be one that will foster virtue. A fertilized egg is more than just another disposable tissue, like a fingernail. It is at the very least a potential human being, and human beings are the reason ethics exists. I would say that both temperance and wisdom would lead one to be careful about making the person/non-person distinction, and in other situation we are normally very careful. If one pulls the plug on a person in a persistent vegetative state, for example, this is a long process with a lot of input.
I've been through the process, with both the family and the clinicians, from beginning to end during which it is decided whether to stop treatment of a person who is very unlikely to recover (more than once). If there is a sign of significant brain activity in the cortex, everything possible is done. Only when it is determined, to the best of our ability, that the person-ness of the person is gone, or that death was immanent and nothing more could be done, would we talk about withdrawing life support.
Saying that "the only thing that matters is the autonomy of the mother" is also simply not true. This ignores the web of relations this woman exists in; the bonds to which she is responsible, which is very important in virtue ethics. Justice demands that she flourish, in part, by rendering to each person in her life their due. She is not the only person who should have a say in the decision whether to have an abortion. And as soon as you involve other people, autonomy becomes fuzzier and fuzzier. Because a woman does not create a child on her own, and will not raise it in a social vacuum, I'm not sure that justice allows complete autonomy. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
Lastly, there is the consideration in virtue ethics of the practice of parenthood and the practice of medicine. Central to the practice of parenthood is protection of one's children. Even in the event that one does not believe a fertilized egg, or an embryo, or a fetus is fully a person, abortion cannot help but erode the practice of parenthood, and I think this is part of what is behind a lot of the suffering women go through after having an abortion.
Central to the practice of medicine is the preservation of life by all reasonable means, as well as, in my view and to a growing degree in the medical profession, ushering people toward death with as much dignity and peace as possible. Clearly abortion is not the preservation of life, and I do not get the impression that abortion is carried out with a great deal of dignity for the potential person either. It may be possible to integrate abortion fully into the practice of medicine in a virtue-ethics sense, but I do not at the moment know how.
Conclusion
My conclusion in my own thinking, approaching this as a person who was pro-choice but was persuaded away from that position by some pro-life arguments, is that neither side is adequate and that both should be essentially abandoned. The two rules as applied cannot be resolved as far as I can tell. Neither position seems to result in the most good for the most people - or at least, I am not satisfied with the good that either side results in. And I do not believe that either side nurtures the full flourishing of virtue in all involved.
No doubt this whole discussion has touched upon dozens of connected issues, and I'm not pretending that I've been either thorough or correct. The goal was, though, to try to demonstrate what I'm calling wisdom ethics in action.
Final note
At heart is a difficult question I have avoided because I didn't want this to be the longest Examiner article in history - whether a developing fetus is a person, and at if not at what point it becomes a person. Legally, right now, the answer is "no" and "at the moment of birth" respectively, but this position does not make any rational or ethical sense. It is an arbitrary distinction.
It also makes no sense to equate a fertilized egg and a fully grown human being. There is clearly a vast difference in capacity, complexity and relationship. A potential person is not necessarily a person. Stating that a fertilized egg is a person is also arbitrary, but feels more consistent to me than the 'at birth' or 'at viability' distinction.
My answer here is a whole other post, and we'll see if I get to it. It is off topic here, however, so you'll have to wait and find out.
Comments
This is a good overview of your thought on the subject, but without, I think, a strong demonstration of the peculiar value of Wisdom Ethics as you have described it. You basically treat each of the three streams discretely and don't come to any conclusions as how they should influence each other.
How, in the case of abortion, does a virtue approach influence the conclusions you might get from a results approach or a rules approach? If I decide, for example, that the "rule" of protecting innocent life trumps the "rule" of preserving autonomy, then how is this conclusion influenced by a results analysis which tells me that illegalizing abortion is a tactic unlikely to succeed in achieving the ends I desire?
I felt like there was a lot of good analysis here and not enough synthesis. I know it is tough to do and you're trying to keep the article short etc... just trying to grapple with what I think is a very good idea.
We'll see if I can deal with those interconnecting issues more clearly in the next post. In this case, the point of intersection was the issue itself, and each stream was used to comment on the issue, but I didn't yet use each stream to comment on the other streams. That ends up being at least 9 interactions to cover, and it's a lot to do for one question. For the next post, I'd like to deal more generally with how I would use this method to approach other questions and perhaps more on how each mode comments on the others. Maybe an example for each would help, if I can come up with 9 examples...
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