Having addressed such issues as couch burning, divine command ethics and the love for Nacho Cheese Doritos of those under the influence of certain substances, it is time for Catch Me if you Kant - a title cleverly constructed to corner the market on illiterate Leo DiCaprio fans - to turn its attention to what I'm sure you'll agree is the next logical topic: Abortion.
Get ready for a laugh riot this week! In all seriousness, abortion should be agreed upon by both sides of the debate to be a high gravity issue; if handled incorrectly, it will result in either the murder of innocent human beings, or the deprivation of bodily sovereignty of unwilling mothers.
A favorite tool of philosophers is called the thought experiment
which is basically a hypothetical question that isolates issues relevant to real world concerns and forces the experimenter to examine them carefully. There are two famous thought experiments that philosophers use to demystify the abortion debate.
The first is as follows: Imagine you are on a spaceship in the future. Space travel has progressed to the point where humans can reach and explore other planets, and you are an explorer on just such a mission.
Unfortunately, your spacecraft has crashed and you are the sole survivor. The planet you've landed on is populated with a strange sort of creature you've never seen before. They are purple blobs called gloops that bounce from place to place.
As you run out of food, you're faced with a decision: Eat the gloops and prosper, or struggle to find another food source - none are readily apparent - and possibly die. Now, what criteria would you use in determining if it's morally acceptable to eat the gloops?
Assuming for the sake of argument that you're not a vegetarian, one might imagine that the following criteria could be agreed upon as sufficient for disqualifying an organism from candidacy for the barbecue pit: Capacity for language (don't eat it if it can ask you not to), depth of emotion (can it suffer?) and perhaps self awareness (does it know it exists as an entity separate from the world around it?).
As it happens, the gloops fail all those tests and just happily gloop along, and what's more, they're delicious! You should notice however, that a newly conceived fetus also fails all these tests. It would seem this thought experiment is a stamp of approval for abortion. However, a problem arises: A newborn infant also fails those tests.
Assuming we don't want to endorse infanticide - which is in some cultures an open question - we should move onto another thought experiment.
A second experiment that more closely mirrors the issues involved in the abortion debate goes as follows: Suppose a stranger has been diagnosed with a terminal disease and scientific tests have determined that you are the only person who can help him. You can save his life, but in order to do so you'll have to be physically connected by tubes for nine months.
That obviously will be terribly inconvenient for you. But the treatment also will wreak havoc on your hormones - sending you into irrational states of rage and invoking late-night cheeseburger cravings.
Now, you would definitely be a saint if you agreed to this, but are you really morally obligated to? It seems obvious that the answer is no. Just as you aren't obligated to pay for a stranger's medical treatment - even if it would result in his or her death - you shouldn't be obligated to physically bind yourself to another person in order to save their life.
Admittedly, some cracks start to appear in this analogy when you introduce the element that prospective parents had a hand in being tabbed as the only person who can prolong the prospective human life dependant upon them. But that example seems to clearly show that in cases of rape, a prospective mother has no obligation whatsoever to carry out the pregnancy.
With any luck, those thought experiments have shed some light on a hotly contested issue. The problem of how much prospective parents' actions obligate them to the stranger who must co-opt their body for its survival is open, but I'm sure it will be settled in a timely, civilized manner. Isn't it nice to have that issue finally settled?
- Ben Kington is a senior philosophy major who is looking forward to ending the drought of hostile e-mails regarding his columns. Send him an e-mail at bk198002@ohiou.edu. 17
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