Recently I’ve been giving some more thought to abortions, given what’s happening with the Supreme Court in the U.S.
Entertain this crass analogy.
Let's say that you have some ashes of a dead person. You're 100% confident the person is dead. Throwing the ashes into the ocean is clearly ok. It's not immoral.
Now let's instead say that you have the body of someone lying in front of you. You're 50% confident the person is dead. (i.e. you think there's a good chance, 50%, that the person is alive) Then, it is your moral obligation to save that person.
Even if that probability reduced from 50% to 5%, as long as you had a certain confidence that the person is alive and rescue-able, you'd be obligated to immediately bring that person to the hospital, no matter how inconvenient that would be for you. (This is assuming that there's only 1 person in front of you. You're not a emergency responder that has to triage 100s of people.) Even if it took you 9 months to carry that person, it would not be admissible to throw that person into the ocean (you see where the analogy is going).
Okay, now, let's naively say that I'm 50% confident that embryos are human. (~50% of people in the US are supposedly pro-life) Then, intentionally having an abortion is potentially an intentional killing of another human. Even if I were 5% confident that embryos are human, I'd be morally obligated to carry that pregnancy to term.
It would be immoral to have an abortion.
We can even take this a step further, past abortion and Roe v. Wade. Unintentional abortions, i.e. miscarriages, are also potentially the deaths of other humans.
"Miscarriages occur in at least 20 percent of pregnancies, many in the first twelve weeks." There are cost-effective interventions to prevent miscarriages, such as providing folic acid, adequate maternal nutrition, education etc.
Thus, if we are purely utilitarian, then the highest priority item ought to be to stop unintentional abortions, as that would literally increase lives saved by 5x (1/0.2). Even if we set our prior at 50% of whether embryos are human, then still the highest priority ought to be to stop unintentional abortions. 50% times 20% of all pregnancies is 10% of all pregnancies, which is still a massive number.
That would be orders of magnitude greater than any other EA cause area.
Someone check my logic?
Might stopping miscarriages be a very important cause area, or are your priors much much lower?
Additionally, (regardless of legality, constitutionality or effectiveness of repealing Roe v. Wade), on purely moral grounds, if one has a 50% prior that something is human, doesn't that mean that getting rid of it is immoral?
Thank you.
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Edit 1: Thanks to @Lark for pointing out that Toby Ord makes the reverse argument in his piece, The Scourge: Moral Implications of Natural Embryo Loss. Toby says that the implications of the above argument are so radical that it must imply that most people do not believe that embryos are human. As stated in the comments, I think this is flawed--it could also be the case that most people have not yet internalized the consequences of what they believe. As with most challenges that have afflicted us for long periods of time, miscarriages are so diffuse as to not have any particular advocacy group and therefore be not very politically tractable.
The original argument you're reacting to is flawed, which carries over into your second one. To make both arguments clearer, we need to know the significance of an embryo being human, why this matters to utilitarians, and what sort of utilitarians you mean. Does an embryo being human mean it has the same moral status as an adult human? Does it mean it has a similar interest in continued living as an adult embryo does? Does it mean it is harmed by death -- and if so, does this harm of death leave it worse off than if it were never conceived at all?
And what type of utilitarians do you have in mind? Total hedonic utilitarians presumably wouldn't be that worried about miscarriages for the sake of the embryos themselves even if the embryos were human, had the same moral status as adult humans, and had an interest in continued existence. That's because embryos are usually relatively replaceable and their deaths are usually less traumatic for others than the deaths of those who are already born.
As for the harm of death, total utilitarians care about intrinsic value of outcomes, and most philosophers of death don't think of death as an intrinsic harm. This means that for a total utilitarian, if someone pops into existence, has a good fleeting moment of existence and then dies painlessly without anything else being affected, the only thing that counts is the good moment. We don't count the death as something bad, or something worse than the being never existing in the first place. It would be better if the being lived longer and had more good experiences, but it's not worth preventing an existence just to prevent a death.
Total hedonic utilitarians care about saving lives because that seems like an effective way to increase good. Stopping miscarriages does not seem like an effective way to do that.
But maybe you have other sorts of utilitarians in mind. There could be some utilitarians with certain person-affecting views, or who think of death as an intrinsic harm, who might be more worried about this. But even then it would be important for them what the moral status of embryos is and whether embryos have an interest in continued existence. I would expect them to think an interest in continued existence would require sentience at least, or a greater conscious awareness than we expect embryos to have.
It isn't a temporary state if the embryo dies, though, so this seems to reduce back to a potentiality argument, if we're using a standard based on sentience for moral status.
A suicidal person may have an interest in continued existence that is contingent on them becoming better off. They may rank outcomes as status quo < death < happiness.