By James G. Robinson

What makes it wrong to kill a human being? A simple and commonly invoked answer is that human beings have a right to life and killing them would violate this right. For many ethicists, however, the right to life is not something that we all have simply because we are members of the species homo sapiens, but rather is something that we have because we possess certain capacities. Most commonly, it is argued that we have a right to life because we are persons – that is, we have the mental capacity to be aware of ourselves as a being that continues to exist over time. It is because we have this capacity that we can develop plans and goals for the future, undertake long-term projects, and desire to continue living. Killing a person is therefore wrong because it prevents them from satisfying some of their most important goals and desires and in doing so undermines their autonomy.

Over the past fifty years, this line of thought has been central to the abortion debate. Philosophers like Michael Tooley and Peter Singer have used it to argue that abortion is morally permissible since the foetus has not yet developed these mental capacities and so cannot have a right to life. However, in response to these arguments it is routinely pointed out that infants also lack these capacities. Indeed, newborn infants and late-term foetuses are practically identical in terms of the capacities they possess. Consequently, it is widely believed that these arguments could only establish that abortion is permissible at the cost of implying that infants also lack a right to life and so infanticide must be permissible as well.

Some authors, like Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, have (in)famously argued that we should bite the bullet and accept that infanticide is in fact morally permissible in many of the same cases as abortion would be. This is, however, an extreme position and one that many advocates of abortion are unwilling to take. Other authors, like Bruce Blackshaw and Daniel Rodger, therefore take this implication as a reason to reject these pro-abortion arguments altogether and instead accept that both abortion and infanticide are wrong.

However, both of these responses simply assume that if infants do not have a right to life then it must follow that infanticide is morally permissible or that it is morally equivalent to abortion. This assumption overlooks the possibility that killing an infant, or killing any human being for that matter, may be wrong for other reasons that just the violation of its right to life. In Infanticide and Infant Bodily Rights, I argue along these lines to show that it is possible to explain the wrongness of infanticide without rejecting Tooley and Singer’s defence of abortion. In particular, I defend the view that even if infants do not have a right to life, they do have bodily rights and killing them would require serious violations of these rights.

Shifting the debate away from the right to life and towards bodily rights is useful for several reasons. Firstly, the properties needed for bodily rights seem very different from those that Tooley and Singer suggest are necessary for a right to life. For example, it is not obvious why the fact that infants lack the self-awareness needed to form long-term goals or desires should be relevant to the question of whether they have bodily rights. Furthermore, whilst many philosophers have struggled to defend the view that birth marks the moment when we gain a right to life, it seems much more plausible that birth is when we gain bodily rights. For one thing, birth is when the infant and mother’s bodies are physically separated, and on some views it consequently marks the moment when the infant’s body ceases to be part of the mother and instead becomes an independent body of its own.

Much more can and should be said regarding the role of the child’s bodily rights in this debate. However, at the very least I hope to show that the wide-spread assumption that Tooley and Singer’s defence of abortion simply must imply the conclusion that infanticide is permissible is a mistake. Even setting aside the right to life entirely, there remain many other morally relevant asymmetries between infants and foetuses that warrant thorough examination before this conclusion would be justified.

Paper title: Infanticide and Infant Bodily Rights

Author: James G. Robinson

Affiliations: Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University

Competing interests: None