By Arjun Devanesan
Recently, a group of philosophers have engaged in a lively dispute about the metaphysics of pregnancy. Specifically, Elselijn Kingma argued that, contrary to popular opinion, a foetus is not merely contained by a gestator like a bun in an oven, but a part of its body. Other authors (including myself) have argued that, rather that the foetus being a part of the gestator or contained by it, the two may only overlap i.e. share a part. One rogue voice has even argued that a hylomorphist account of pregnancy would imply that the gestator is a part of the feotus.
Why bother? This might all sound like hair-splitting, but how the foetus and gestator are related plausibly has downstream implications for how we think about them more generally, how we think about our relationships with our mothers and, perhaps more importantly, how we should treat foetuses and gestators ethically and legally. So, these distinctions are worth making. In fact, a number of authors have since argued that these views have important implications for reproductive ethics. James Robinson argued in this journal that Kingma’s Parthood View is favourable to a pro-choice position on abortion while David Hershenov argued that the Parthood View undermines many important pro-choice arguments. So, while I think we all agree that the metaphysics matters to ethics in some nontrivial way, it is not at all obvious how ethical views follow from metaphysical ones.
The purpose of my paper is not to favour any position on any topic in reproductive ethics or to support any particular part-whole view of pregnancy. Instead, I would like to propose at least one important way in which metaphysics matters to ethics. I argue that one very common way in which ethical and legal arguments are constructed involves analogy. Analogical arguments come in many forms but they all essentially rely on there being a moral similarity between some familiar situation and a disputed one. Given some established norm in the familiar case, and the moral similarity between it and the disputed case (pregnancy), we might then argue that the same norm that applies in the familiar case applies in the disputed one.
One of the most famous examples of analogical reasoning in reproductive ethics is Thomson’s Violinist. JJ Thomson has us imagine that we wake up one morning only to find that we have been kidnapped and our circulatory system has been attached to a famous violinist whose kidneys have failed. Not to worry, however, because the illness should only last nine months. As Thomson argues, it may be charitable or even laudable to remain hooked up to the violinist to save his life but it would be ridiculous to suggest that you are not permitted to unplug yourself.
One standard strategy used to undermine Thomson’s argument is to show an important disanalogy between the case of the violinist and pregnancy. The most common objection is that the case of the violinist is only analogous to nonconsensual pregnancy e.g. cases of rape. One objection I have not yet seen is that if a foetus is a part of your body, then it seems like there is an important disanalogy between the violinist case and pregnancy. The violinist is invasively using your body without your permission and hopefully we can all agree that that seems wrong. However, we do not usually think that parts of you require your permission to be parts of you, and it would be weird to consider them invasive so perhaps pregnancy and the case of the violinist are not so analogous after all.
David Hershenov expands on this idea that Kingma’s Parthood View of pregnancy might actually undermine a number of important pro-choice arguments and therefore the pro-choice position itself. While I agree with the sentiment, in my paper I argue that this is too quick. I show that whichever metaphysical view of pregnancy one takes does not foreclose on any particular ethical position, but it does restrict what sorts of analogies one can use when constructing an ethical argument and what follows from certain analogies. That is to say, it does not determine what you can argue for, but it does restrict how you can argue for it.
In explicitly laying out the steps and structure of a valid analogical argument and showing how metaphysics can feature in it, I would like to provide a guide for those interested in incorporating metaphysical views into their ethical arguments. The hope is that this will facilitate a more constructive dialogue. Kingma’s work is meant to argue that the Parthood View is the correct metaphysical view of pregnancy (and I think most philosophers would agree) but it is only a starting point for an ethical argument. This paper is supposed to show how to move from that starting point to an ethical conclusion in a careful and transparent way.
Article: Ethical implications of the mereology of pregnancy
Author: Arjun Devanesan
Affiliation: Kings College London
Conflicts of Interest: None to declare