My ethic of life

organizing my thoughts regarding life and death into a coherent philosophy; special thanks to Wilson Sporting Goods and 20th Century Fox for sponsoring a portion of this post

Recently a friend posed an open-ended question about assisted suicide. This friend had come across some media coverage of a few people with mental illness choosing assisted suicide; this friend felt uneasy about it. The question: what does that mean for the whole concept of assisted suicide in general? The discussion among my friends was wonderfully thoughtful and, as is often the case when people with different views talk openly but compassionately with one another, I’ve revised my views a bit.

Leaving religious reasons aside—obviously not everyone who is religious even holds the same views—I think it’s important to consider such philosophical questions on their merit, especially as medical advancement has more of us living longer, and dying more slowly, than ever before in history. When it comes to an ethic of life, philosophy meets reality fast.

An ethic of life

The abortion debate, for me, falls into the same category as the debate about the death penalty, assisted suicide, and even the killing and eating of animals. Much like physicists have for decades attempted to uncover a grand unified theory, I have toiled over my laptop, pacing the floor of my home, buried myself in texts, in hopes of creating a unified ethic of life!

Well ok, so, no. But! When I do spend time thinking about such hot button issues, I have attempted to hold my views up against one another to check for inconsistencies or flaws in my ideas. I can’t get away from the notion that all of these topics are and should be somehow connected—not in the political purity test kind of way (well if you believe x, then you MUST believe y, or you’re a hypocrite!), but in a defensible way that makes sense. Because in all of these cases, we’re talking about ending the life and potential of another living being.

Animals

I’m not a vegetarian. I do eat a lot of meatless meals, and I’ve struggled with the idea of eating animals on and off since I was a teenager. This isn’t a philosophy paper, so I won’t bog you down in details, but I believe that we are animals that in some crucial ways are just like other animals, particularly in how we’ve physiologically evolved and how we fuel ourselves. Whether you believe God made humans or humans evolved from other animals, we’ve relied on meat for our entire existence. Just as we wouldn’t condemn a lion for eating a gazelle, I don’t think we can condemn a human for eating a cow.

Philosophical caveat: One thing that humans have that sets us apart is our incredible brain and the consciousness it houses. We have the ability to think about thinking, which seems to be largely unique to us. So we should use that ability—not to torture ourselves (which we do with chronic worry and regret) but to become a more noble being. Again, not a philosophy paper, so I won’t get into why we should be more noble, except to say that if I have a core belief about human morality, it’s that we should promote flourishing.

So we can use our intellect to ennoble our practices. Religious practices like halal and kosher are, in my view, a way of doing that. For the nonreligious or unconvinced, adopting humane practices for the raising, killing, and butchering of livestock is a step in that direction. Factory farms are a travesty. We can and should do better, without feeling compelled into veganism if we choose to continue the evolutionary and cultural practice of meat eating.

For animals with lower consciousness, there doesn’t seem to be a fulfillment arc. Today is the same as yesterday is the same as tomorrow, with few exceptions. A young chick’s purpose is to become an adult chicken. An adult chicken’s purpose is to…be an adult chicken and reproduce chicks. For many reasons we can feel kinship with other animals—especially dogs, cats and other domesticated pets, but I extend this to all kinds of animals because we’re social creatures and will befriend a volleyball if that’s the only other guy around—but even our beloved pets have a limited range of potential.

I once read somewhere that for an animal raised humanely for food, it hopefully only has one bad day: its last. Animals can feel fear and stress—which is why inhumane butchery is a travesty—but they don’t seem to feel existential dread.

Abortion

A fetus certainly doesn’t feel existential dread; if you’re a parent or have ever had a baby in your life, over the first months and years you will watch awareness dawn, each day bringing new experiences and thus levels of understanding, creativity and capability into a child’s life.

That’s the difference between a fetus and any other low-consciousness animal. Potential. And not merely potential—certain animals have much more than others, like dolphins and apes—but human potential. Because a fetus is a human, it just looks weird because it’s at the start of the life cycle.

I recently learned of a group called Secular Pro-Life, whose pro-life views are grounded in a pro-human ethic, with plenty of philosophical arguments under-girding the position. For every pro-choice argument, they have a counter argument based on philosophical consistency rather than religious belief or a generalized morality. Also note: most pro-life people, even the religious ones, maintain some sort of exceptions, like the health of the mother, in cases of rape or incest where consent to sexual activity doesn’t enter the equation, in the case of fatal fetal anomalies, etc. In these cases, the philosophical arguments for the mother’s safety, bodily autonomy, and for the dignity and suffering of the fetus outweigh the arguments for birth-no-matter-what. Secular Pro-Life adherents do not believe that the exceptions should change the rule.

Personally I find the arguments compelling: when weighed against one another, the life of the more developed human ultimately outweighs the rights of the less developed, non-viable one. But viability in itself doesn’t settle the matter, because viability is nebulous and has dropped to an ever younger gestational age as medical technology improves. What’s more, certain aspects of viability don’t even develop until birth. For example, there are parts of the heart¹ that are altered by the child’s first breath. And as we all know, a child must be multiple years old before it could come close to keeping itself alive unassisted. So in that way, even toddlers aren’t “viable” humans.

My ethic includes choice, but at an earlier stage in the process of conception and birth, and in a limited way. I think one area second wave feminism wobbled was divorcing sex from procreation. It’s the same type of error in thinking—“women are just like men!”—that has continued to limit the flourishing of women, because the template is still male. And males cannot grow and birth new humans. Females can. (Of course these are generalizations based on the two types of gametes required to create an embryo; individual males and females may have a range of fertility and variation in sex organs, but that doesn’t change the genetic design for any given individual to produce either a large gamete² or a small gamete³ regardless of if that design has been transcribed properly at the cellular level.)

I believe women should have a greater degree of choice in the matter of pregnancy and childbirth than men because they gestate, a process that is body and life altering.⁴

Which leads me to my ultimate point of choice: conception. Again, divorcing sex from procreation, because procreation is an inevitable outcome of sex unless certain steps are taken to prevent it. I believe women should have complete choice about using birth control, that birth control should be free for all, because birth control offers high-percentage conception prevention. I also believe women should have access to measures like the morning after pill and even first trimester abortion. I don’t love the idea of first trimester abortion, but at that stage the fetus is far more potential than person.

But what if you don’t know you’re pregnant? What if it’s an accident? Etc. etc. Well, I promote the empowerment of women through encouraging self-knowledge: the regularity or irregularity of your periods, the acceptance that less effective forms of birth control require more monitoring for accidental pregnancy, that the choice to engage in sexual activity opens the possibility for conception. The law conferring basic personhood rights to life on a halfway-baked baby doesn’t seem dystopian to me; it seems humane. Making abortion of a halfway-to-birth baby some level of crime is not “forced birth” if every step along the way to that point was subject to affirmative consent.

My personal story is of course an anecdote of one, but it absolutely informs my thinking. I was married at age 21, I’ve had three children, and no accidental pregnancies in 17 years despite being apparently very fertile (every pregnancy was confirmed less than 2 months after ceasing birth control measures). So: when used properly, birth control works far more often than it doesn’t. Paying attention to your body and taking control of the potential outcomes of sexual activity is empowerment. The ability to choose to terminate an early pregnancy. The benefit of personhood bestowed upon the most vulnerable humans—those who are recognizably human if only at the early stages of human development. All of this seems reasonable to me, especially while negotiating the abutting rights of an unborn human and the human female carrying it.

Disclaimer

This post (and my subsequent planned one covering death penalty and assisted suicide) are not meant as persuasive essays or treatises. Many of these issues have been front-of-mind for me, and discerning the edges of each piece helps me form a cohesive philosophy, a shorthand to access when confronted with individual cases.

Though, of course, what I think and believe doesn’t mean much. I’m not a jurist or a lawyer or an elected official. But just as you don’t have to be famous (or particularly talented) to be an artist, you don’t have to be a Person of Social Consequence to develop a philosophy. And if any of these scenarios arise in my life—odds say that at some point at least one of them will—I’d like to have given some thought beforehand so I’m not flying blind.

I invite you to share some of your philosophical decisions in the comments! But please don’t be a meany poo or an evangelist. Reasonable people can arrive at different conclusions; how you got there is more interesting to me than where you end up.

See Part 2a: Assisted Suicide here.

1. the foramen ovale becomes the fossa ovalis; the ductus arteriosis becomes the ligamentum arteriosum

2. egg

3. sperm

4. However, I believe that a partner should have some sort of consideration (albeit probably not legal) because, after all, it’s half his genetic material. No spoilers but if you’ve watched the first episode of House of the Dragon, that’s not what I’m advocating for.