Why arguments against infanticide remain convincing: A reply to Räsänen

In ‘Pro‐life arguments against infanticide and why they are not convincing’ Joona Räsänen argues that Christopher Kaczor's objections to Giubilini and Minerva's position on infanticide are not persuasive. We argue that Räsänen's criticism is largely misplaced, and that he has not engaged with Kaczor's strongest arguments against infanticide. We reply to each of Räsänen's criticisms, drawing on the full range of Kaczor's arguments, as well as adding some of our own.     

A dubious defense of ‘after‐birth abortion’: A reply to Räsänen

Scholars have offered various critiques of Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva's controversial article, ‘After‐birth abortion: Why should the baby live?’ My book The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice presents four such critiques. First, Giubilini and Minerva argue from the deeply controversial to the even more controversial. Second, they presuppose a false view of personal identity called body‐self dualism. Third, their view cannot secure human equality. And fourth, their account of harm cannot account for harm found in some cases of murder. In the article, ‘Pro‐life arguments against infanticide and why they are not convincing’, J. Räsänen examines and finds wanting these four critiques. This essay responds to Räsänen's defense of infanticide and argues that his responses to the four objections fail.     

Pro‐Life Arguments Against Infanticide and Why they are Not Convincing

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva's controversial article ‘After‐Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?’ has received a lot of criticism since its publishing. Part of the recent criticism has been made by pro‐life philosopher Christopher Kaczor, who argues against infanticide in his updated book ‘Ethics of Abortion’. Kaczor makes four arguments to show where Giubilini and Minerva's argument for permitting infanticide goes wrong. In this article I argue that Kaczor's arguments, and some similar arguments presented by other philosophers, are mistaken and cannot show Giubilini and Minerva's view to be flawed. I claim that if one wants to reject the permissibility of infanticide, one must find better arguments for doing so.     

Ectogenesis and the case against the right to the death of the foetus

Ectogenesis, or the use of an artificial womb to allow a foetus to develop, will likely become a reality within a few decades, and could significantly affect the abortion debate. We first examine the implications for Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist analogy, which argues for a woman’s right to withdraw life support from the foetus and so terminate her pregnancy, even if the foetus is granted full moral status. We show that on Thomson’s reasoning, there is no right to the death of the foetus, and abortion is not permissible if ectogenesis is available, provided it is safe and inexpensive. This raises the question of whether there are persuasive reasons for the right to the death of the foetus that could be exercised in the context of ectogenesis. Eric Mathison and Jeremy Davis have examined several arguments for this right, doubting that it exists, while Joona Räsänen has recently criticized their reasoning. We respond to Räsänen’s analysis, concluding that his arguments are unsuccessful, and that there is no right to the death of the foetus in these circumstances.     

POST‐ABORTION SYNDROME: CREATING AN AFFLICTION

The contention that abortion harms women constitutes a new strategy employed by the pro‐life movement to supplement arguments about fetal rights. David C. Reardon is a prominent promoter of this strategy. Post‐abortion syndrome purports to establish that abortion psychologically harms women and, indeed, can harm persons associated with women who have abortions. Thus, harms that abortion is alleged to produce are multiplied. Claims of repression are employed to complicate efforts to disprove the existence of psychological harm and causal antecedents of trauma are only selectively investigated. We argue that there is no such thing as post‐abortion syndrome and that the psychological harms Reardon and others claim abortion inflicts on women can usually be ascribed to different causes. We question the evidence accumulated by Reardon and his analysis of data accumulated by others. Most importantly, we question whether the conclusions Reardon has drawn follow from the evidence he cites.     

Boonin on the future-like-ours argument against abortion

I argue that David Boonin has failed in his attempt to undermine Donald Marquis's future-like-ours argument against abortion. I show that the ethical principle advanced by Boonin in his critique to that argument is unable, contrary to what he claims, to account for the wrongness of infanticide. Then I argue that Boonin's critique misrepresents Marquis's argument. Although there is a way to restate his critique in order to avoid the misrepresentation, the success of such restatement is precluded by the wrongness of infanticide.     

Ectogenesis,abortion and a right to the death of the fetus

Many people believe that the abortion debate will end when at some point in the future it will be possible for fetuses to develop outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, would make possible to reconcile pro‐life and pro‐choice positions. That is because it is commonly believed that there is no right to the death of the fetus if it can be detached alive and gestated in an artificial womb. Recently Eric Mathison and Jeremy Davis defended this position, by arguing against three common arguments for a right to the death of the fetus. I claim that their arguments are mistaken. I argue that there is a right to the death of the fetus because gestating a fetus in an artificial womb when genetic parents refuse it violates their rights not to become a biological parent, their rights to genetic privacy and their property rights. The right to the death of the fetus, however, is not a woman's right but genetic parents’ collective right which only can be used together.     

ENHANCING EVOLUTION AND ENHANCING EVOLUTION

It has been claimed in several places that the new genetic technologies allow humanity to achieve in a generation or two what might take natural selection hundreds of millennia in respect of the elimination of certain diseases and an increase in traits such as intelligence. More radically, it has been suggested that those same technologies could be used to instil characteristics that we might reasonably expect never to appear due to natural selection alone. John Harris, a proponent of this genomic optimism, claims in his book Enhancing Evolution that we not only have it in our power to enhance evolution, but that we also have a duty to do so. In this paper, I claim that Harris' hand is strong but that he overplays it nevertheless. He is correct to dismiss the arguments of the anti‐enhancement lobby and correct to say that enhancement is permissible; but ‘good’ is different from ‘permissible’ and his argument for the goodness of enhancement is less convincing. Moreover, he is simply wrong to claim that it generates a duty to enhance.     

On quality of evidence in phylogeny reconstruction: a reply to Zrzavý's defence of the 'Ecdysozoa' hypothesis

Zrzavý’s arguments against the critical analyses of data supporting the Ecdysozoa hypothesis (Wägele et al., J. Zool. Syst. Evol. Res. 37, 211–223, 1999) are discussed. Zrzavý does not understand that the same basic principle of a priori weighting can be applied to sequence data as well as to morphological characters. Quality of evidence is the same as probability of homology, which is estimated from the number of discernible identical details. In sequences it is the number of identical nucleotides. Spectral analyses, dismissed by Zrzavý, visualize patterns of putative homologies present in alignments and also the number of positions supporting splits by chance alone. In cases in which old phylogenetic signals for a given monophylum are eroded in a gene, plesiomorphies and chance patterns will have strong influence on tree topologies and spectra. If plesiomorphies are a cause of errors, the addition of taxa that shorten internal branches is a remedy, although, in many cases such taxa may be extinct. The place of a priori estimations of data quality in a sequence of steps necessary for a phylogenetic analysis is shown. Morphological complexity is used as a proxy for a complex genetic basis and is used as a major criterion to compare characters of the Ecdysozoa and the Articulata. The details associated with the character ‘complex cuticle’ are discussed. Neither moulting nor the known components of the cuticle are novelties occurring only in Ecdysozoa. A published total evidence analysis is used to show that the number of coded characters does not necessarily reflect the quality of the data set. Zrzavý’s misunderstanding of the role of evolutionary scenarios is clarified and the importance of the use of additional biological data for plausibility arguments is explained. Plausibility arguments in favour of the Articulata hypothesis rely on facts found in functional morphology and in the fossil record. Zrzavý’s critique follows the actual mainstream but does not uncover logical mistakes or erroneous data analyses in the work of 86 . It is concluded that the Articulata hypothesis is a well‐founded alternative to the Ecdysozoa; it is based on much better morphological evidence and supported by plausibility arguments that currently do not exist for the Ecdysozoa.     

Moral Philosophers Are Moral Experts! A Reply to David Archard

In his article ‘Why Moral Philosophers Are Not and Should Not Be Moral Experts’ David Archard attempts to show that his argument from common‐sense morality is more convincing than other competing arguments in the debate. I examine his main line of argumentation and eventually refute his main argument in my reply.     

A Defence of Conscientious Objection in Medicine: A Reply to Schuklenk and Savulescu

In a recent (2015) Bioethics editorial, Udo Schuklenk argues against allowing Canadian doctors to conscientiously object to any new euthanasia procedures approved by Parliament. In this he follows Julian Savulescu's 2006 BMJ paper which argued for the removal of the conscientious objection clause in the 1967 UK Abortion Act. Both authors advance powerful arguments based on the need for uniformity of service and on analogies with reprehensible kinds of personal exemption. In this article I want to defend the practice of conscientious objection in publicly‐funded healthcare systems (such as those of Canada and the UK), at least in the area of abortion and end‐of‐life care, without entering either of the substantive moral debates about the permissibility of either. My main claim is that Schuklenk and Savulescu have misunderstood the special nature of medicine, and have misunderstood the motivations of the conscientious objectors. However, I acknowledge Schuklenk's point about differential access to lawful services in remote rural areas, and I argue that the health service should expend more to protect conscientious objection while ensuring universal access.     

THE DISTINCTION OFPUNCTELIA PERRETICULATAANDP. SUBRUDECTA(PARMELIACEAE,LECANORALES)

Punctelia perreticulata(Räsänen) G. Wilh. & Ladd is recognized as a distinct species. The only consistent differences betweenP. perreticulataandP. subrudecta(Nyl.) Krog are the shape and length of conidia. Both species are widespread in the world. InP. perreticulata, there are differences in conidial length among the European, American and Australasian samples studied, but they neither correlate with differences observed in other morphological traits nor with the substratum. An epitype is selected to support the holotype ofP. perreticulata, because its identity is uncertain due to the absence of conidia.     

Autonomy,Natality and Freedom: A Liberal Re‐examination of Habermas in the Enhancement Debate

Jurgen Habermas has argued that carrying out pre‐natal germline enhancements would be inimical to the future child's autonomy. In this article, I suggest that many of the objections that have been made against Habermas' arguments by liberals in the enhancement debate misconstrue his claims. To explain why, I begin by explaining how Habermas' view of personal autonomy confers particular importance to the agent's embodiment and social environment. In view of this, I explain that it is possible to draw two arguments against germline enhancements from Habermas' thought. I call these arguments ‘the argument from negative freedom’ and ‘the argument from natality’. Although I argue that many of the common liberal objections to Habermas are not applicable when his arguments are properly understood, I go on to suggest ways in which supporters of enhancement might appropriately respond to Habermas' arguments.     

PROCREATIVE BENEFICENCE – CUI BONO?

Recently, Julian Savulescu and Guy Kahane have defended the Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PB), according to which prospective parents ought to select children with the view that their future child has ‘the best chance of the best life’. I argue that the arguments Savulescu and Kahane adduce in favour of PB equally well support what I call the Principle of General Procreative Beneficence (GPB). GPB states that couples ought to select children in view of maximizing the overall expected value in the world, not just the welfare of their future child. I further argue that Savulescu and Kahane's claim that PB has significantly more weight than competing moral principles, such as GPB, lacks justification. A possible argument for PB having significant weight builds on a principle of parental partiality towards one's own children. But this principle does not support PB; it supports a Principle of Sibling‐Oriented Procreative Beneficence (SPB), according to which parents selecting a child should maximize the benefit of all their children. Indeed, PB itself will in some cases be self‐effacing in favour of SPB.     

Turgoränderungen in Blasenzellen von Mesembryanthemaceen

Die epidermalen Blasenzellen von verschiedenen Mesembryanthemaceen Arten können bei mangelnder Wasserversorgung offenbar kurzfristig als Wasserspeicher für das photosynthetisch aktive Gewebe genutzt werden. Durch die bei der teilweisen Entleerung auftretende Abflachung der Blasenzellen werden bei Mesembryanthemum crystallinum die Abstände zwischen den Blasenzellen verringert, so daB die Flache, die fiir den Gasaustausch der Stomata mit der umgebenden Luft zur Verfiigung steht, 24 h nach Abbruch der Wasserversorgung auf 1/3, reduziert wird. Damit bilden die Blasenzellen beinahe eine “zweite Epidermis”, die bei Drosanthemum-Blättern durch eng aneinandergepreßte Blasenzellen erreicht wird und die die Wasserverluste durch Transpiration verringern könnte. Der Turgor in den Blasenzellen von Drosanthemum ändert sich am natürlichen Standort (südliche Namib) im Tagesverlauf: in der Morgendämmerung sinkt der Turgor urn 2 bar und steigt erst während der Nacht wieder an. Der Turgorabfall läuft parallel zu einer lichtbedingten Malatsynthese im grünen Gewebe, dessen osmotische Aktivität für den Wasserverlust der Blasenzellen verantwortlich sein könnte. Die absolute Höhe des Turgordruckes ist in den Blasenzellen der jüngsten Blätter 5 bis 10 mal größer als in den alteren Blattern.     

Thinking about Possible People: A Comment on Tooley and Rachels

Most people believe it would be wrong to bring a child into the world if in all likelihood its life would be miserable. But if pain and suffering count against bringing someone into existence, why do pleasure and happiness not count in favour of bringing them into existence? Recently in this journal Michael Tooley has re‐affirmed his rights‐based explanation for this asymmetry. In a nutshell: to create an individual whose life is not worth living would be to wrong that individual – to create an obligation that cannot be fulfilled – but it is not possible to wrong an individual who is not brought into existence. In the same issue of this journal, in an article covering a range of arguments for and against the claim that it would be good for additional people to exist, Stuart Rachels objects to Tooley’s account on the ground that it has counterintuitive implications. His most interesting argument involves a Parfit‐style counterexample: a woman is about to take a fertility pill that will result in twins, one of whom will be healthy and the other of whom will not. Does it make a difference, morally speaking, if the woman knows which of the twins will be healthy and which will not? In this paper I argue that both Rachels’ criticism of Tooley’s rights‐based account, and Tooley’s own defence of it, are unsuccessful due to their failure to come to grips with the semantics of names for possible individuals. Both of them implicitly assume that it is possible to have a potential person in mind, in a way that misleads them about the fairness of actions that involve possible people. The significance of this extends to other areas such as abortion, population policy, and embryo experimentation, where examples involving possible people are common.     

VIRTUE ETHICS AND THE SELECTION OF CHILDREN WITH IMPAIRMENTS: A REPLY TO ROSALIND MCDOUGALL

In ‘Parental Virtues: A New Way of Thinking about the Morality of Reproductive Actions’ Rosalind McDougall proposes a virtue‐based framework to assess the morality of child selection. Applying the virtue‐based account to the selection of children with impairments does not lead, according to McDougall, to an unequivocal answer to the morality of selecting impaired children. In ‘Impairment, Flourishing, and the Moral Nature of Parenthood,’ she also applies the virtue‐based account to the discussion of child selection, and claims that couples with an impairment are morally justified in selecting a child with the same impairment. This claim, she maintains, reveals that the flourishing of a child should be understood as requiring environment‐specific characteristics. I argue that McDougall's argument begs the question. More importantly, it does not do justice to virtue ethics. I also question to what extent a virtue ethics framework can be successfully applied to discussions about the moral permissibility of reproductive actions.     

It is better to be ignorant of our moral enhancement: A reply to Zambrano

In a recent issue of Bioethics, I argued that compulsory moral bioenhancement should be administered covertly. Alexander Zambrano has criticized this argument on two fronts. First, contrary to my claim, Zambrano claims that the prevention of ultimate harm by covert moral bioenhancement fails to meet conditions for permissible liberty-restricting public health interventions. Second, contrary to my claim, Zambrano claims that covert moral bioenhancement undermines autonomy to a greater degree than does overt moral bioenhancement. In this paper, I rebut both of these arguments, then finish by noting important avenues of research that Zambrano’s arguments motivate.     

Just a hypothesis: a reply to Hanski

Hanski's critique of the habitat amount hypothesis (Hanski, 2015, Journal of Biogeography, 42 , 989–993) does not actually constitute a test of the hypothesis, but rather a series of arguments for why he suspects that it is not correct. But the habitat amount hypothesis is exactly that – a hypothesis. It will remain ‘just’ a hypothesis until it has been rigorously tested against empirical data. To facilitate such testing, in Fahrig (2013, Journal of Biogeography, 40 , 1649–1663) I presented specific, testable predictions of the hypothesis. Here, I reiterate the main tests needed, in the hope that some readers will be encouraged to carry them out. I appreciate this opportunity to emphasize that the habitat amount hypothesis needs to be tested against empirical data, and I look forward to seeing the results of such tests.     

Altruistic surrogacy and informed consent

A crucial premise in many recent arguments against the moral permissibility of surrogate motherhood arrangements is the claim that a woman cannot autonomously consent to gestating and relinquishing a child to another couple, because she cannot be fully informed about what her future emotional responses will be to the foetus developing within her, and to the giving up of the newborn infant to its social parents. When conjoined with some moral principle about the justifiable limits on the ways others can be expected to exercise their autonomy on our behalf, this claim is often taken to establish that various forms of surrogate motherhood arrangements are morally wrong. In this paper I want to show that there is a serious non sequitur in this kind of argument. That is, I want to show that even if women cannot in fact have this kind of information about what their future emotional responses to pregnancy and relinquishment will be, nothing follows about the wrongness or otherwise of surrogacy. For, when we consider what counts as informed consent in the context of other important ventures with uncertain consequences, it becomes clear that informed consent does not require having this kind of information about one's future emotional states. In putting these arguments, I also hope to clarify some of the connections which might be thought to hold between informed consent and autonomous decision-making generally.