Habermas on Abortion and Finnis's critique

Ken Hanly khanly at mb.sympatico.ca
Wed Aug 15 09:13:05 PDT 2001


Here is Habermas' position on abortion according to Robert Cavalier:

Below is Habermas's perspective on the abortion debate:

"Is there only one correct answer to the abortion question, for example? At this stage of the debate, both sides in this dispute appear to have good, perhaps even equally good, arguments. For the time being, therefore, the issue remains undecided. But insofar as what is at issue is in fact a moral matter in the strict sense, we must proceed from the assumption that in the long run it could be decided one way or the other on the basis of good reasons. However, a forteriori the possibility cannot be excluded that abortion is a problem that cannot be resolved from the moral point of view at all. From this point of view, what we seek is a way of regulating our communal life that is equally good for all. But it might transpire that descriptions of the problem of abortion are always inextricably interwoven with individual self-descriptions of persons and groups, and thus with their identities and life projects. Where an internal connection of this sort exists, the question must be formulated differently, specifically, in ethical terms. Then it would be answered differently depending on context, tradition, and ideals of life. It follows, therefore, that the moral question, properly speaking, would first arise at the more general level of the legitimate ordering of coexisting forms of life. Then the question would be how the integrity and the coexistence of ways of life and worldviews that generate different ethical conceptions of abortion can be secured under conditions of equal rights

In other cases, it is possible to deduce from the inconclusive outcome of practical discourses that the problems under consideration and the issues in need of regulation do not involve generalizable interests at all; then one should not look for moral solutions but instead for fair compromises (Justification and Application, pp. 59 - 60).

COMMENT: Both sides in the debate? THE abortion question? There are many sides and many questions. What are the moral rights of pregnant women vis-a-vis the fetus and at what stages of development and the newborn. What is the moral status of the fetus at what stages? The newborn? When is abortion and/or infanticide morally justified? What legal restrictions on abortion should there be if any? and so on. There are moderate, liberal, and conservative positions on all these questions and also on the fetal status question a position that denies any position can be shown to be the correct one (Wertheimer, Cosby) but Wertheimer at least concludes that this implies that legally abortion on demand would be justified. So there are many sides, many questions, and some of the arguments on some sides strike me as not worth much at all. For example concluding the zygote has the same right to life as the mother because they are both members of the human species seems to me a bad argument but it is a standard argument of the conservatives on the status of the fetus.

Here is a response of Finnis, a prominent conservative law professor to Habermas. While I don't agree with Finnis' position on abortion I do agree with his critique of Habermas. If Finnis argument is equally good then Habermas cannot discount the unborn's interests! He has in fact engaged in an evasion that avoids the issues. Notice that Finnis a conservative and Singer a liberal on these questions at least face the issues. Finnis tends to go ballistic when he reads Rawls and Habermas or Judith Jarvis THomson but he has a point.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

John Finnis:

A similarly mock-philosophical argument has recently been proposed by the leading German political philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, who draws a distinction between ;'ethics' and 'morality'. Ethics, he says, is concerned just with 'how one sees oneself and who one would like to become'. It is thus in a different domain from 'morality', which is concerned with 'the interests of all'.2 This distinction he then deploys in much the same way as Rawls deploys his own distinction between 'comprehensive doctrines' and 'public reasons'. In each case the author treats the distinction he has drawn as enabling him to set aside, but without seeking to refute, objections to legally permitting and authorising the deliberate killing of very young or irreversibly damaged (unconscious?) human beings. That is to say, each distinction is an elaborate device for evading the great issues at stake. Rawls, as I said, shunts aside the objections to killing young unborn babies, claiming that these objections are not within the alleged 'overlapping consensus' or 'reasonable' in the 'public' sense. Habermas shunts similar objections aside as being merely 'ethical' and thus concerned, not with what is required by a morally indispensable respect for the interests of all as equals, but only with what is 'best for us' (i.e. for the partisans of this or that ethical opinion). He thus proposes a quite fallacious rationalisation for abandoning very many of our fellow human beings, by legally authorising the intentional termination of their lives. In doing so, he abandons his own fundamental 'moral' thesis that decisions must be taken in the interests of all, and he lays aside his own 'appeal to an ever-wider community.'3

His argument goes like this. The usual arguments between supporters and opponents of abortion are not moral arguments. They are merely 'ethical', that is, concerned with 'the ethical question of which regulation is respectively 'best for us' from 'our' point of view.4 So: when it becomes apparent that in reality the disagreement 'cannot be resolved either by discourse or by compromise', then the matter must, he says, be raised to a new 'level':

Each participant must turn away from the ethical question ... They must, instead, take the moral point of view and examine which regulation is 'equally good for all' in view of the prior claim to an equal right to coexist.'5

The 'all' for whom the regulation is to be 'equally good' do not include the unborn (or the irreversibly unconscious), but rather the 'all' comprising those who want or 'need' to choose these killings, all those who oppose them, and all who look on more or less indifferently. The 'equal right to coexist' is emphatically not the 'equal right of the unborn and the permanently unconscious' which those on one side of the so-called 'ethical' debate had been asserting. No, indeed. Anyone on that side of the debate must now - in virtue of the other side's 'right to coexistence' - stand aside to let people on the other side opt for the killings they (often, no doubt, reluctantly) propose:

... the normative expectation connected with this - that when necessary we tolerate the members of another group whose behaviour is ethically reprehensible to 'our' view - does not necessarily imply any damage to our integrity: 'we' (for instance, as Catholics confronted by a 'liberal' abortion law) may continue at an ethical level to abhor the legally permissible practice of others as we have in the past. Instead, what is legally required of us is tolerance for practices that in 'our' view are ethically deviant.6

But all this distorts almost beyond recognition the actual and historical discourses on abortion, euthanasia, and their legislation. When the Walton Committee report on euthanasia explained its unanimous rejection of legalised euthanasia or assisting in suicide, it did so precisely on the ground of right:

society's prohibition of intentional killing ... is the cornerstone of law and social relationships. It protects each one of us impartially, embodying the belief that all are equal.7

When Peter Singer and I debated these matters at the Philosophy Society in Oxford in May 1998, it did not for a moment occur to us or, I dare say, to any of the many philosophers in the room, that either of us was discussing what is 'respectively best for me/my group' from 'me/my group's point of view' or what preserves or damages 'my integrity' conceived (absurdly, as Socrates showed) as separable from justice. The naive relativism implicit in the claim that the ethical question is What is good (or right) from my point of view?' was decisively criticised and left behind by analytical philosophy by, at latest, 1960, with the demonstration that it makes ethical discourse (argument, disputation) practically senseless.

The sentence of Rawls directed at 'Catholics', strikingly similar to Habermas's invitation to 'for instance, Catholics' stand aside and allow abortion and euthanasia because such 'behaviour' 'does not necessarily imply any damage to [y]our integrity.' In Rawls' words: 'They [Catholics] need not exercise the right of abortion in their own case.8 So the position is this. Citizens opposed to abortion are claiming, with some good arguments, that abortion is rather like slave-owning. (The overwhelmingly secular and non-Catholic Walton Committee saw essentially the same issue of basic equality rights at stake in euthanasia.) The argument of these citizens is that the killings whose legislation Rawls and Habermas defend are a radical, basic injustice imposed on people deprived or to be deprived of the protections of citizenship. The response(s) suggested by the argumentation of Rawls and Habermas would run something like: 'You free citizens need not exercise the right to [own slaves] [abort your children] in your own case, so you can and must recognise our law as legitimate as it applies to the rest of us (and as we will enforce it against you if you interfere)' 'You people need not do any of this [killing] [slave owning] yourselves, so your integrity is undamaged and so you should (and will be compelled) to stand aside to allow us, in the exercise of our prior right of coexistence with you, to ['coexist' with our slaves] [terminate our coexistence with these unborn children/fetuses and with people whose lives are not worth living].'9 As an argument for tolerating injustice, this has some force. As an argument of the kind intended by Rawls and Habermas - an argument that there is no injustice - it is a sheer evasion, and a failure.

Cloning



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