[This post was suggested by my Patreon backer Ryan (yes, the same Ryan– this is how random number generators work, people). A random backer at the $5/month or more level is selected each month to suggest a post or story.]
Many people care about animal welfare: that is, they might stop eating meat or donate to charities which campaign for cage-free eggs, because they care about creatures that are generally less intelligent than humans. However, a lot of people who support animal welfare are pro-choice: they think it should be legal to kill fetuses, often because fetuses are less intelligent than born humans and thus matter less. That seems sort of strange.
I think there are three ways to harmonize pro-choice and pro-animal-welfare beliefs.
First, young fetuses are probably significantly less morally relevant than chickens or even crickets. A systemic review suggests that fetuses certainly cannot feel pain before 23 weeks, because their thalamocortical fibers have not developed yet, and evidence from electroencephalography suggests that they probably cannot feel pain before 30 weeks. Conversely, there is no scientific consensus on whether insects feel pain, and chickens certainly do experience pain. Pain matters not just because it’s a pretty significant source of disutility but because it’s relatively simple. If a fetus has not developed the ability to feel pain, it probably hasn’t developed other morally relevant capacities either, most of which are probably more complicated than feeling pain and would thus take longer to develop. 88% of abortions occur during the first trimester, which is well before the fetus has developed its capability to feel pain. Only a tiny percentage of abortions occur with a morally relevant fetus, and a much smaller percentage are for reasons other than life or health of the pregnant person or severe disability of the fetus, which most people think are okay reasons to abort.
Second, most consequentialist vegetarianisms are not about the right to life per se but instead about suffering. Many vegetarians believe it is okay to kill animals, but not okay to allow them to suffer. However, broiler chickens do not have lives that are worth living; therefore, one should avoid eating them in order to not create an incentive to create more broiler chickens. Fetuses, conversely, probably have pretty okay lives: they’re in a warm and safe environment, they are adequately fed, they generally don’t suffer from many diseases and they can enjoy pleasurable activities like listening to their parents’ voices, thumb-sucking, and masturbation. The only painful thing an aborted fetus is likely to experience is its death. Of course, given how short a fetus’s life is, its death makes up a pretty significant percentage of its life. However, it is possible to eliminate even this suffering. Fetal anesthesia has been developed, and laws in some states require its use during abortion, although usually far before the fetus is actually capable of feeling pain. It seems wise to me to require anesthesia to be used in third-trimester abortions (which, again, are a tiny percentage of abortions), assuming that there is no health risk to the pregnant person in doing so. Given that most third-trimester abortions are of wanted children, routine use of anesthetic may even provide some comfort to the mother.
Third, most vegetarians are not advocating for making meat illegal. We even think it’s okay to eat meat in certain serious situations: for instance, if you have an eating disorder triggered by vegetarianism, your diet is very limited due to a physical health condition, or you are averse to eating essentially all plant matter and if you became vegetarian you would wind up living on white bread and Skittles. And we certainly wouldn’t want to have a doctor or government board who’s in charge of deciding whether or not someone’s situation is grave enough to allow them to eat meat; that’s something the individual should decide for themselves. Even many vegetarians who believe that animals have a right to life believe that that right can be overridden by the welfare of a human being.
Imagine adopting a similar attitude towards fetuses. You don’t want abortion to be illegal. You think abortion is okay in certain serious situations: for instance, if you have a health condition aggravated by pregnancy, you’re carrying your rapist’s child, or you’re phobic of pregnancy. And you certainly wouldn’t want to have a doctor or a government board who’s in charge of deciding whether or not someone’s situation is grave enough to allow them to abort; that’s something the individual should decide for themselves.
Congratulations, you’re pro-choice! Certainly you have a complex and not unambiguous relationship with abortion, but so do many pro-choice people.
Of course, you might want to take steps to reduce abortion. For instance, one might want to make long-acting reversible contraception easier to access, so that people have fewer unintended pregnancies. One might want to accommodate parents better (both through government and workplace policy and through social support for parents), so that fewer people have abortions due to financial difficulties or the inability to be a single parent. One might ensure that birth parents have access to appropriate mental health support after their adoption and that open adoptions are legally enforceable, so that the grief of giving up one’s child for adoption can be minimized.
What you definitely don’t want to do is make abortion more difficult to get, because that means that pregnant people will get abortions later. The older a fetus is, the more likely that it is morally relevant. Thus, the entire strategy of the pro-life movement is unacceptable to a consequentialist who believes fetuses have a right to life.
Thing of Things 
Only morally relevant if you feel pain.
Right.
We take someone who has congenital insensitivity to pain – let’s make it a four year old child, just for giggles (after all, if we’re giving moral worth to crickets, why blanch at age?)
We torture that four year old. Remember, they can’t feel pain, so what we’re doing isn’t immoral!
Correct or incorrect?
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We have other evidence about whether a four-year-old has developed other morally relevant capacities, which means the evidence from whether they can feel pain is screened off.
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While a four-year-old is certainly morally relevant whether or not they have CIP, torture in particular is kind of a bad example, since none of the common methods of torture would really feel like torture for such a child. I mean, all the methods I can think of carry a risk of later medical problems, and it’s certainly a violation of the child’s bodily autonomy. So it’s still very horrible, but not *as* horrible as torturing a four-year-old who does not have CIP, because the worst part of torture – the pain – simply isn’t there.
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There are a wide variety of torture techniques not based on physical injury. Just off the top of my head, solitary confinement and waterboarding would both work fine.
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Neither solitary confinement or waterboarding use pain to torture people. Solitary confinement is psychological torture based on the human need for human contact and waterboarding uses the panic of dying.
I would assume that a person with CIP is just as susceptible to this as other people.
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Ability to feel pain isn’t the only thing that makes you morally relevant. But inability to feel pain is strong evidence that something lacks other morally significant traits as well. It seems pretty unlikely that fetuses grow the parts of the brain that allow them to think about the future, have a sense of identity, and create future plans before they develop the ability to feel pain.
It’s not impossible to develop complex cognitive faculties without developing a pain sense. People with CIP have. So it would be wrong to torture them (although since they have CIP they’d probably just find the torture mildly annoying). But brains like that are rare.
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CIP doesn’t prevent you from feeling emotional distress, does it? I don’t think that any four year old would have a positive reaction to getting removed from their parents and subjected to unfamiliar behavior.
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My pro-choice stance has very little to do with the intelligence of fetuses, and a great deal to do with the fact that they’re inside of other people’s bodies, which live chickens are not. I know Ozy’s familiar with the violinist argument even if they don’t accept it, so this seems like an odd thing not to discuss.
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I do not plan to include arguments that do not move me on my own blog. (Fact: when I first read about it I thought the violinist argument was a pro-life argument because it was so obvious to me that you ought not disconnect the violinist.)
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Hold the phone, the violinist argument isn’t pro-life?
*reads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion#The_violinist*
Well I’ll be damned. I’d heard a few versions of this over the years and always thought them to be making the case against the permissibility of abortion. The mechanisms never involved a nefarious Society of Music Lovers but rather, say, a receptionist at a hospital Christmas party drinking a bit much and stumbling about, ultimately losing consciousness in the violinist-body-donor pre-op room (before a surgery that would bind them to the violinist for approximately 40 weeks, with premature disconnection spelling death for the latter… and they had to pass through various security measures, and were aware the violinist was awaiting surgery, and so on). I’ve even mentioned it myself a few times when devil’s advocating against abortion lol
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Would you still accept the violinist argument if instead of being coerced by the Society of Music Lovers, the victim is coerced by circumstance? For me the whole thing hinges on that. If someone puts me in that position intentionally, it triggers my “do not negotiate with hostage takers” reflex, and I’ll kill the violinist and bomb the headquarters of the Society of Music Lovers, and collateral damage is acceptable if it can’t be avoided because you do not negotiate with hostage takers. But If there’s no agent trying to put me in that position, then no way would I kill the violinist.
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Yep, I would absolutely definitely still accept the argument.
Mind, I myself would probably not kill the violinist. But I would feel that anyone connected to the violinist had an absolute moral right to disconnect themselves, and that choosing to remain connected might be morally praiseworthy but was certainly not morally obligatory.
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@san, so conjoined twins have an absolute moral right to disconnect? How do you decide who’s got the absolute moral right to which body parts?
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If one takes the amount of stuff done to the body etc by pregnancy and imagines this was caused by not eating meat, I think any vegans who are saying that they’re not trying to stop people who need it from eating meat should consider this an abdolutely acceptable situation for people to eat meat. Let alone eat one animal in 9 months, which is a closer equivalent.
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1. Some people would get abortions later, but others wouldn’t get them at all. For example, if the government passed a law that milk could only be purchased after 7 PM, one would expect evening milk purchases to rise but overall purchases to fall. The same principle applies to abortions. If you think that late term-abortions aren’t much worse, it’s possible that this is a good tradeoff from a pro-life perspective.
2. This assumes that whatever gives moral relevance to a fetus happens during development, but if life begins at conception, then from the beginning the fetus has a human soul that entitles it to not being murdered. Then reducing total abortions is definitely more important than focusing on those that happen later in pregnancy.
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Of course, pro life advocates rarely actually do anything constructive to reduce abortion.
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“A systemic review suggests that fetuses certainly cannot feel pain before 23 weeks”
👏 this is the right way to approach the issue, and it’s exactly the sort of information that is annoying hard to find among the horrible sea of “ensoulment happens at conception” and “no fetus has any rights that the mother is bound to respect” propaganda. Well Done.
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>Second, most consequentialist vegetarianisms are not about the right to life per se but instead about suffering. Broiler chickens do not have lives that are worth living; therefore, one should avoid eating them in order to not create an incentive to create more broiler chickens.
If fetuses live lives worth living, this is an argument against abortion, not for it.
Also, quite a lot of consequentialist vegetarians do in fact believe killing animals is wrong (myself among them.) Obviously it is also true that animals are experiencing tremendous suffering, which simplifies the population-ethics concerns, but that doesn’t mean that I’d be OK with killing animals (or people for that matter) for amusement.
A relevant example – are you OK with people who choose not to spay their pets and then regularly kill the resulting offspring?
>The only painful thing an aborted fetus is likely to experience is its death. Of course, given how short a fetus’s life is, its death makes up a pretty significant percentage of its life. Fetal anesthesia has been developed…
This proves way too much, given the same is true of adult humans.
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I said most, and I even put “vegetarianism” in the plural to make it clear that I am talking about a common consequentialist vegetarian belief and not one that literally every consequentialist vegetarian believes. (Personally, I draw the right-to-life line for animals somewhere around pigs, and “about the point where they start feeling pain” and “birth” both seem like a reasonable place to draw the line of when fetuses have a right to life.)
Most people consider adult humans to have a right to life, and the murder of adult humans has various negative consequences that abortions of unwanted children do not.
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I don’t think it actually proves too much. Allowing abortion but banning infanticide is a schelling fence, at least to a hedonic utilitarian. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the spherical-cow example of killing a person for the amusement of a huge crowd is actually bad. In the real world I think it is, because there are plenty of second-order effects and slippery slopes, but we allow people to drive to fun events despite knowing that there’s greater than a one-in-a-few-million chance of each individual driver killing someone.
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Actually, I do want eating meat to become illegal once adequate substitutes are available. And torturing farm animals, of course.
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Who decides what’s an “adequate substitute” and what’s “meat”?
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My thoughts exactly.
I’m usually a pretty easygoing fellow, but if a law declared tofu to be an “adequate substitute” and consequently outlawed eating meat, I’d seriously consider the merits of hoisting the black flag and slitting a few throats.
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The concept of “adequate substitute” doesn’t need to be codified into law. Once de facto adequate substitutes are available and affordable, we just outlaw meat and that’s it (I assume that they won’t stop being available at a later time). Regarding deciding what is “meat”: I am referring to meat of sentient animals of course, not e.g. lab grown. This doesn’t seem to be a very ambiguous concept, but perhaps I missed your intent?
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Banning meat is insufficient to prevent the killing of animals, since many other animal products are used. You need to have substitutes for most of them.
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Vat meat technology seems like it could plausibly be used to grow vat leather, or vat bone, or whatever you like. Plus, there are acceptable substitutes for some animal products already like pleather, and probably more would be developed if you no longer had a bunch of extra leftovers from the animals being slaughtered for meat.
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Vat meat is a good idea (and I eagerly await it), but texture is hard to replicate and important for some meat products. Certainly the earliest vat meat will be taking over as a ground meat substitute, rather than as a replacement for eg steak. If steaks get more expensive because the beef market shrinks, that’s fine by me, but I would be upset if people decided to ban steaks because non-cow beef burgers were available. There’s a point where banning butchered meat is fine, but at that point butchered meat is probably not much of a thing in any case, and a ban might not make much sense.
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gazeboist, I think we disagree about the location of the point where banning butchered meat is fine, but I’m glad that you agree there is such a point.
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This comment is sort of horrifying to me. I’ve met a lot of vegans who think that tofu and those burgers made of beans are adequate substitutes for meat and we should all just stop eating it now. I can’t eat either tofu or beans without spending the next day in intense stomach pain, but a lot of vegan “outreach” likes to just pretend I don’t exist and proclaim from the rooftops how there is no reason not to become vegan RIGHT NOW because there are so many TOTALLY GREAT substitutes out there.
I don’t want vegans deciding when it’s okay to ban meat consumption – vegans are a group self-selected for not being allergic to any of the “acceptable” meat substitutes and they’re likely to forget people like me who will be left on a diet of gluten-free lettuce sandwiches if you force everyone to go vegan. Most of the vegans I’ve met agree that I should not be forced to live on gluten-free lettuce sandwiches, but many of them also didn’t consider I might exist before meeting me. (A diet of purely gluten free lettuce sandwiches is a mild exaggeration, but I only know of two or three dishes which, with some modifications, can plausibly feed both me and a vegan.)
If enough people go vegan, demand for meat will drop, it’ll become even more of a “luxury” than it already is, and my cost-of-living will skyrocket. That’s already quite enough to make meat eaters only eat meat if they really need to. Banning meat will just hurt people.
Vat meat will be an acceptable substitute – iff they don’t add anything to it in the process of creating it that I’m intolerant to. But things I’m intolerant to are really often used as thickeners/sweeteners/sticky-makers in seemingly unrelated-to-what-I’m-intolerant-to things – so, for instance, I can’t eat most soups, or most sweets, or many spreads, such that I’ll often have to decline a chicken soup even though I can eat chicken because it’s thickened with wheat flour. I don’t imagine early vat meat is going to be any better. It will probably be a mix of pure meat and various preservatives or sweeteners or texture-changing-substances, and I wouldn’t put better than 50/50 odds on me being able to eat it without issues.
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actrice, to remove doubt an “adequate” substitute is a substitute that is equivalent from health / nutrition point of view and whose taste is at least as good as “typical” meat. When I said I disagree with gazeboist, I meant that I don’t think we should allow torture and murder merely to provide someone with gourmet luxuries. Also vegans are not going to decide when to ban anything anytime soon, so you don’t have to worry. I am not even vegan (I eat fish and seafood; I consider it unlikely these animals have significant moral value but I would go full vegan if an adequate substitute was available, to be on the safe side).
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No, a substance that is equivalent from a health/nutrition point of view and tastes as good is absolutely not adequate. Like, Nutella (a spread that tastes like chocolate but made with nuts) is even healthier and more nutritious than real chocolate, and tastes just as good. For me it is a great, healthier chocolate substitute. It is not an adequate substitute for everyone because people with nut allergies can LITERALLY DIE if they eat Nutella.
I fiercely object to your characterisation of meat as a “gourmet luxury”. I eat a lot of meat because it’s one of the few things I’m not intolerant to. If I had to eat a vegan diet I would probably spend a great deal of my life feeling nauseous and in pain and incredibly fatigued while my body struggled to process tofu or soy or beans or whatever else I’d have to eat to get protein.
If someone makes a great meat replacement that contains nuts and it’s just as healthy and nutritious and tasty as meat, that might be a perfectly adequate substitute for you or I, but the people with nut allergies who respond “I can’t eat this, it will put me in the hospital if I so much as touch it, please give me real meat instead” are not asking for a “gourmet luxury”. They are asking to not die.
This is precisely the kind of thing I’m worried about. Most vegans I know are perfectly nice and agree that I should get to eat a diet that does not make me sick. And then there are the ones who go around declaring we should just entirely ban whole categories of food that some people are massively reliant on because they personally can survive perfectly well on alternative diets so why can’t everyone?! It’s *scary*.
Saying this kind of thing is also really counterproductive vegan outreach strategy: when I feel like a viewpoint is a threat to my ability to feed myself I will go around advocating against that viewpoint. And it makes me feel much less inclined to cooperate with animal rights supporters on non-food issues (like not wearing fur or leather or supporting bans on putting dolphin poison in the ocean or whatever).
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If something is going to poison you, it is obviously not the same from a health/nutrition perspective. This conversation was mostly about vat meat, which is chemically identical to meat.
Meat is a gourmet luxury for the vast majority of people who eat meat. 5% of the population has food allergies. Let’s assume that every single one of those is incapable of being vegetarian (which is not true) and quadruple the number to be on the safe side. Observably, far less than 80% of the population is vegetarian. The remaining individuals eat meat because they like it and it tastes good. While meat is not a gourmet luxury for you, it is for most people who eat it.
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It’s fair to say that meat is a gourmet luxury for most people, but it’s still scary when people say it is a gourmet luxury without qualification in this kind of context.
In the same way I would be comfortable with someone saying “owning a car is an expensive luxury” in most contexts, but if we were discussing whether to ban cars entirely once we expand public transit outside of inner cities because they’re bad for the environment and public transit will have become a great substitute, I would suddenly be not-comfortable with that statement because people exist who can’t walk to train stations due to disabilities or have anxiety about small underground spaces full of strangers and I would be concerned for those people.
Or I would usually be comfortable with someone saying “sugary snacks are a gourmet luxury”, but if this was in the context of “…and we should tax them loads or ban them to encourage people to eat healthily” I would be uncomfortable because I want diabetics to be able to purchase large amounts of sugary snacks cheaply when they are having their need-sugar-right-now-or-will-die problems.
I would be unhappy about people making those statements in those contexts even though people who are too disabled to use public transit are a tiny minority of car owners and diabetics are a tiny minority of sugary snack purchasers, because they are disproportionately harmed by the proposed thing and it is easy for people to forget about them when busy talking about all the immoral people who refuse to do public transit purely because they love driving their high-status sports car into work. It is far too easy to say something, and be challenged “but what about the minority for whom that thing doesn’t work”, and be like “well OBVIOUSLY not them” but still not take steps to make sure those people are actually okay. Like when people say “people should be trying their hardest to get employed if they’re on welfare!” and someone is like “but what about people who are too disabled to work?” and the former people are like “well OBVIOUSLY not them but they’re a tiny minority” and then go vote for policies that kick people off welfare if they can’t prove they’re applying for things.
It’s not trivially true that vat meat will be chemically identical to meat in the form it’s sold. Fruit grown in greenhouses by corporations should be chemically identical to fruit grown in my back yard if it is the same fruit with the same genes, but there end up being differences because the corporations will spray pesticides and add preservatives and I won’t. (In that case I tend to think it doesn’t make a big difference, or I slightly prefer corporation-made food, but some people definitely have strong feelings about it.) The chicken in chicken soup is made from the exact same animal as the chicken in a packet of raw chicken, but I can’t eat the finished chicken soup because people put flour in it.
It seems likely that a lot of weird stuff is going to get added to vat meat – like, my understanding of the science here is not that great, but as I understand it, the “vat” it’s grown in is going to be some kind of nutrient jelly thing, and scientists will need to add hormones to make only the muscle tissues grow and not the nerve or brain or other organ tissues, and they may need to add sticky thickener things to make it all stick into a lump because they’ve been fucking around with the hormones that usually tell what cells to stick to what other cells, or they might add preservatives or something to ensure chicken grows in this vat and salmonella does not, and then they might add various things to cancel out any changes to the taste made by all the previous additions. I have not been able to find any information about this kind of thing and whether it will be necessary, just articles that squee excitedly about how ethical it all is.
And it’s entirely possible that, like the makers of most sausages and chicken soups and meatballs, they will add things that are not meat but are much cheaper than meat to lower the price. This often does not have adverse effects on the nutrients or the taste! People sometimes add flour and also extra protein powder to a meat thing, such that it still has the same amount of protein as if it were pure meat. In some cases, like in sausages where the tiny breadcrumbs inside the sausages get fried in sausage-juice, the non-meat additions actually improve the taste and texture (gluten free sausages will often be weird-textured and leak stupid amounts of liquid when bitten into because there’s no breadcrumbs to soak up all that liquid). Sometimes people actively improve the nutrient profile of foods by adding vitamins! (I am in favour of adding vitamins, but am also in favour of clearly labelling when this has been done because poisoning oneself with too many vitamins is pretty damn rare but people do do it.)
It’s totally plausible that vat meat will be fine. But it’s also totally plausible that scientists will be like “well, we put chicken genes in this nutrient slurry, and we added growth hormones and various stuff so only muscle textures grew and we stopped nerves and brains from growing, but the lack of connecting tissues made the texture a bit weird, but we added a sticky thickening agent and it worked fine” and everyone agrees that it now has the exact taste and texture of meat, and some small minority of people still can’t eat it because they have an intolerance or allergy to the stuff that was in the slurry or the sticky thickening agent (or similar issue).
It might be totally fine! It might be pure chicken genetically modified so only muscle cells and the bare minimum of connecting tissues grow, and they grow really efficiently when just dumped in sugar water, and then everyone thinks it is very important for PR reasons that it be pure meat so they do not add anything else even if there are cheap things they could add that would make it better or cheaper.
However, I think I have legitimate reason to worry, given that the vast majority of meat products on a supermarket shelf that are not just “some plain raw meat in a box” are off limits to me currently. I can buy, like, “here are six chicken thighs for £2”, but often when there’s cheap frozen chunks of chicken I won’t be able to have it because it’s breadcrumb-encrusted, or when there’s processed meat like meatballs I won’t be able to have it because they added onions and garlic, or I won’t be able to have the sausages because wheat flour, or I won’t be able to have the ready-to-cook meat slices because they are coated in sauce that contains stuff I can’t have, or etc etc.
Vat meat will in theory be identical to regular meat but that’s not a reason to assume everyone who can eat meat will be able to eat vat meat in the form it is sold.
(I am still in favour of encouraging most people to switch to vat meat as soon as it is available! It’d be great if it was! But I am basically never in favour of entirely banning broad categories of foods.)
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1) There’s an interesting consequentialist argument to be had on whether it would be morally superior to engineer animals who enjoy being factory farmed. At that point, (a) we should engineer the animals to be as intelligent as would be consistent with that enjoyment – they could think deep philosophical thoughts and enjoy sublime virtual tours through the universe’s most beautiful sights and finest art while lying in their own filth prior to being butchered, which they would find the culmination of a perfect life of artistic appreciation, philosophical engagement, and masochism; and (b) it would then be morally unacceptable NOT to eat meat.
1.1) Maybe this argument resolves by saying we should devote the resources necessary for any living organism to AIs, who we would engineer to feel even more meritorious feelings, and even more economically, than the shmoos I have just proposed. This also resolves the fetus/mother argument – yes, their interests are in conflict, but they’re both just unfortunate violinists who can more profitably be reduced to nanogoo for the benefit of our new super-congnitive AIs.
1.1.1) I’m sure I could read the sequences or something and resolve this, but if we really value fetuses and animals by how cognitively developed they are (and I do, I think), then it sort of follows.
2) Once vat meat is as good as animal meat and cheaper, I don’t think you’d see much opposition to outlawing the hobbyists who wanted to eat real meat. Maybe from hunters.
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1. I have no idea what would you gain by that. I consider it a repugnant notion.
1.1. I completely disagree. We value minds not only by how advanced they are but also by how human-like they are in certain respects. For example, I consider animals which are evolutionarily closer to humans to be more morally valuable.
2. Yes, I certainly hope so.
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Thanks!
1. That’s my moral intuition too, but it mostly convinces me that either I’m not a consquentialist or that I substantially misunderstand conseuquentialism. (Probably the second – probably the term isn’t meaningful until you identify your priors, in which case we might just be arguing about priors, not about consequentialism.)
1.1. If we value entities by how human-like their congnition is, we still have a bit of a definitional step to go. I have a close friend who’s passionately pro-life on exactly those grounds – fetuses are definitionally human, and they are helpless, and that’s enough for her. Given that fetuses are human and animals are not, the only way to give animals requires some more investigation into what qualities make something human-like. (Or we could conclude that fetuses are worthy of more rights than an animal but less than the mother).
Anyway, we can engineer my hypothetical AIs to be as human like as you like, provided that it’s ok that they run on nanocomputers instead of neurons. I guess there’s some risk that they’d drift away from your priorities.
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1. I don’t see a contradiction with consequentialism. Consequentialism just means you have *some* utility function you are trying to maximize, it doesn’t say what the utility function is. You might be conflating consequentialism with hedonistic utilitarianism.
1.1. Fetuses are “human” in the biological sense but their minds are not very human, that is, not very similar to minds of human adults. The valuable part about human minds is the sort of experiences, emotions and thoughts they have, not the DNA of the cells computing the mind. For example, a human with severe brain damage that destroyed all cognitive functions might be still biologically alive but from my perspective is not really “human” in the morally relevant sense (that is, the person that existed before in that brain is dead).
If you implement a human mind on silicon or whatever instead of neurons, I definitely consider the result to be as morally relevant as a biological human.
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1.0: see ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ by Douglas Adams.
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Lots of live babies are born before 30 weeks, and I think there have been rare cases born before 23 weeks. Are you saying these born babies are unable to feel pain? Do they not cry when they get injections and stuff?
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I remember someone on SSC citing a pretty hard cutoff for premature births around 24-26 weeks (I forget when exactly). Not in the sense that no babies born before then ever reach maturity, but the survival rates fall off a cliff.
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What happens if technology improves and mortality rate before 20 weeks increases?
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(Assuming you meant to write “decreases”…)
My ideal solution to abortion issues is the introduction of a proper artificial womb (or whatever is actually needed here – I am not a biologist). A procedure that results in a live baby to be put up for adoption without the mother having to remain pregnant and eventually give birth is a good substitute for abortion in my eyes, and works on a societal level as long as its monetary cost is pretty close to that of abortion (my guess is within about 10% of the cost of abortion, but that’s just a guess).
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The first Google result gives a 20% survival rate for kids born at 23 weeks – so if there’s a cliff, it probably reduces survival rates *dramatically*, not to nearly 0.
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Ozy, I think that’s a good job of coming up with a rational position that supports both veganism and pro-choice. IMHO, it’s idealized to the point where I’m not sure how many people hold it, but I guess our hypothetical self-reflective rationalist consequential would end up in a place like that.
In my experience, I haven’t seen many people who identify as pro-choice but also advocate for late-term fetal anesthesia – at most, they never think about it, and at worst, they’re skeptical of any pro-fetus legal intervention as a camel’s nose under the tent advanced by bad people.
I also think you leave a bit of proof to the reader with “you certainly wouldn’t want to have a doctor or a government board who’s in charge of deciding whether or not someone’s situation is grave enough to allow them to abort; that’s something the individual should decide for themselves.” IMHO, the hardest case for pro-choice is one hour before birth, just as the hardest case for pro-life is one hour before conception. The pro-choice side can kind of get around it by saying “well, that’s really rare,” but if we hypothesize that a third-trimester fetus (or 8 month) is a human with some rights, then I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that we are willing to leave every decision up to a doctor and the mother.
I’d put the hypothetical argument like this: Sure, a fetus has an interest in remaining alive, and an interest in not suffering, just like animals do. Of course, the mother has an interest in her liberty, in not suffering, and in remaining alive.
We have to balance those rights. If medical experimentation on an animal will save human lives, or if a rural family will potentially die of malnutrition if they don’t hunt, then I think the human is entitled to privilege their own and their families’ lives over the animals. if a squirrel runs out into the road, I want my kids to swerve the car only if they can do so safely – saving the squirrel’s life isn’t worth risking their own but running the car off the road. Similarly, in this hypothetical, I’d argue not that the fetus has no interests worth recognizing but that the mother’s liberty interest outweighs the fetus’s life interest.
Of course, if you’re a vegan absolutist – people shouldn’t eat animals even if a doctor thinks it is putting their health at risk; medical experimentation isn’t OK even if we’re pretty sure it will help save human lives; then the path through the needle is much more narrow.
I’m also not sure why fetal anesthesiology isn’t a moral imperative for almost everyone. Rather than admirable that a few states require it, isn’t it monstrous that anyone is doing late term abortions without it?
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I think, you mean one hour *after*, no? I’ve never seen a pro-life person advocate truly retroactive personhood, anyway.
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Yeah, what gazeboist said.
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The more you write, the more I want to adopt all of your political opinions. Do you have them listed all in one place so I can just Bayes update now?
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>A systemic review suggests that fetuses certainly cannot feel pain before 23 weeks, because their thalamocortical fibers have not developed yet, and evidence from electroencephalography suggests that they probably cannot feel pain before 30 weeks… Pain matters not just because it’s a pretty significant source of disutility but because it’s relatively simple. If a fetus has not developed the ability to feel pain, it probably hasn’t developed other morally relevant capacities either, most of which are probably more complicated than feeling pain and would thus take longer to develop.
I think this is circular reasoning? It’s undisputed that fetuses have nioception from about 20 weeks; the review you’re citing is simply arguing that, based on our understanding of consciousness, they probably don’t have the relevant qualia yet:
>Pain is an emotional and psychological experience that requires conscious recognition of a noxious stimulus. Consequently, the capacity for conscious perception of pain can arise only after thalamocortical pathways begin to function, which may occur in the third trimester around 29 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, based on the limited data available… EEG patterns denoting wakefulness appear around 30 weeks’ PCA. Both of these tests of cortical function suggest that conscious perception of pain does not begin before the third trimester.
So you’re saying that the fact infants aren’t conscious proves they probably can’t feel pain proves they aren’t conscious. Probably better to just say “these experts argue fetuses probably aren’t conscious”.
>If a fetus has not developed the ability to feel pain, it probably hasn’t developed other morally relevant capacities either, most of which are probably more complicated than feeling pain and would thus take longer to develop.
I’m not sure what you mean by “morally relevant capacities” – TBH I’d call “is developing into a human” a morally relevant capacity – but I think it’s worth pointing out that the review you’re citing explicitly speculates that, because pain is more basic than consciousness, it may develop earlier than 23 weeks (although there’s no actual evidence for this):
>While the presence of thalamocortical fibers is necessary for pain perception, their mere presence is insufficient—this pathway must also be functional. It has been proposed that transient, functional thalamocortical circuits may form via subplate neurons around midgestation, but no human study has demonstrated this early functionality.
>A systemic review suggests that fetuses certainly cannot feel pain before 23 weeks, because their thalamocortical fibers have not developed yet, and evidence from electroencephalography suggests that they probably cannot feel pain before 30 weeks. Conversely, there is no scientific consensus on whether insects feel pain
It feels like a huge exaggeration to call this one treatment “scientific consensus” just because it’s the first google result. The roundup of evidence on insect pain you link to includes a bunch of entomologists arguing that insects probably do feel pain, it just also finds a bunch of them arguing the opposite.
Here are the first three other ones I found (that weren’t paywalled):
This similar review (http://anes-som.ucsd.edu/VP%20Articles/Topic%20C.%20Anand.pdf) states that
>Whereas evidence for conscious
pain perception is indirect, evidence for the subconscious incorporation of pain into
neurological development and plasticity is incontrovertible.
This one (https://www.rcog.org.uk/globalassets/documents/guidelines/rcogfetalawarenesswpr0610.pdf) argues that fetal pain probably doesn’t exist at all, until after birth and umbilical separation:
>the fetus never experiences a state of true wakefulness in utero and is kept, by the presence of its chemical environment, in a continuous sleep-like unconsciousness or sedation. This state can suppress higher cortical activation in the presence of intrusive external stimuli… it it is only after birth, with the separation of the baby from the uterus and the umbilical cord, that wakefulness truly begins.
(I’m pretty sure this is actually bollocks – they admit later that they’re deriving this from “largely from observations of fetal lambs”, and that those observations are different to those of human fetuses under the same conditions(!) – but including it for completeness.)
This one (http://www.nrlc.org/archive/abortion/Fetal_Pain/BJOGfetalpain1999.pdf) argues that
>The physical system for nociception is present and functional by 26 weeks and it seems likely that the fetus is capable of feeling pain from this stage. The first neurones to link the cortex with the rest of the brain are monoamine pathways, and reach the cortex from about 16 weeks of gestation. Their activation could be associated with unpleasant conscious experience, even if not pain. Thalamic fibres first penetrate the subplate zone at about 17 weeks of gestation, and the cortex at 20 weeks. These anatomical and physiological considerations are important, not only because of immediate suffering, but also because of possible long term adverse effects of this early experience.
All four of these reviews seem to agree on the facts themselves (although the last one is from ’99 and so merely speculates that fetal pain might cause long-term trauma, whereas the later ones can draw on studies proving this is the case); they just differ in interpretation and what they consider relevant.
Uncharitably, the fact that the one you cite was explicitly written because “[p]roposed federal legislation would require physicians to inform women seeking abortions at 20 or more weeks after fertilization that the fetus feels pain and to offer anesthesia administered directly to the fetus” may have influenced which evidence they considered relevant to the topic of fetal pain. (Although if so, it clearly didn’t influence them enough to include the lamb studies, so props to them.)
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Ugh, typos. Hopefully it’s clear enough.
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https://thinkandthriveblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/why-legal-us-abortion-is-vegan-friendly-and-ethically-sound-in-general-every-time/
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