A clear strength of Utilitarianism when discussing abortion is that there is no absolute value placed on human life, meaning it avoids moral questions about when human life begins. Act Utilitarianism is particularly useful, as it prefers to judge each individual case on its own merits, meaning abortion would be very much up to the mother, and what the consequences would be for her life. This means circumstances such as severe foetal abnormality, rape, and financial instability can all be considered under utilitarian thought.
However, judging abortion on the basis on welfare can be problematic, because we are often unable to establish the long-term consequences of the action, therefore long term damage cannot be assessed. This, in turn, lowers the quality of life of all those involved and can be seen as impeding the quality of life for the mother and her family. While not completely getting into the field of eugenics, abortions allow parents to terminate a fetus that may potentially carry fatal or severe birth defects , which inherently create emotional and financial stresses that the parents are not always able to comply with.
Also, technology stemming from studies on abortions and fetal genetic makeup has allowed scientists and doctors to come up with ways to block such disorders from appearing. Abortions allow the prevention of bringing more severely dependent people into a world that is unwilling, and unable to take care and provide for them. December Any situation that spreads depression on the populace can be seen as ethically wrong from the utilitarian outlook.
Women whom undergo abortions have averted often times sudden disaster in their life, often due to the fact they are not emotionally and financially ready to accept the responsibilities of raising a child. This absolving of unwanted hardships will ultimately result in the lessening of unnecessary burdens on not only the individual, but more importantly society as a whole.
In conclusion we have to understand that the utilitarian consequential principle of ethics seeks to set a general rule for which to be applied to all moral decisions.
In the case of abortions , the utilitarian states that all unwanted pregnancies and pregnancies that represent a physical, mental, emotional, and financial hardship should be terminated via abortion.
The utilitarian does not look at the fetus as a whole or individual as the party in which happiness is to be gained or lost, but rather the society as a whole. The consequences symbolize a systematic decrease in birth-rates; nonetheless reproduction still occurs that ultimately results in the increasing of utility amongst the population.
It is short-minded to consider only those directly involved in individual instances of abortion, and much more important to recognize the fact that society does not revolve around these individuals per se, but around general rules that result in overall happiness.
From these tenets, we can conclude that the consequences of said ethical justifications result in a question of whether or not it is ethical to bring more people into the world, or to control the rate at which children are born. Thus, in the utilitarian morality it would not be rape, because the woman would consent. Since virtually no-one argues that it is immoral for a woman to refuse consent to sex in our world, there is something wrong with the utilitarian position.
Separately, I thought it was well established that interpersonal utility comparisons were a no-no? The focus would need to be on the feelings of the survivors in both cases. If someone who has already been alive for a while dies, this is devastating to the people who know and care about the person. Utilitarianism would work better if utilitarians did away with maximization, and with the concept of pleasure and pain aggregating across individuals.
Obviously, if every women had 20 children each life would be pretty unbearable. But it seems sure that the optimal number is way more than , which simply keeps the population even.
I think the reason is that most utilitarians, like most educated people these days, hold their commitments to gender equality, gay equality, and anti-racism above anything else. They always have a post hoc justification of why their views do not violate the orthodoxy on certain topics, no matter how unconvincing.
It is not logically possible for a positive utilitarian to be anything but pro-life. On average, each person added to the world contributes a positive marginal utility, both for the person added and for those already existing.
This same logic would also oppose population control. The arguments made above that such logic would also justify rape is not correct. The timing, and not just the number, of births matters in the utilitarian calculus and it should be obvious that the ideal number for a given woman is finite, not infinite.
Therefore, it is fine to say no or to use birth control if the timing of pregnancy is clearly suboptimal. Rape would be one such example. So why are pro-life utilitarians so rare? Because utilitarians, by the nature of their position, reject traditional approaches to morality and tend to associate with others who do the same.
Since their non-utilitarian associates reject the pro-life position, they reject it also as a matter of expediency. Their position is not logical but it is a rational response to their social environment. This is absurd. I have long thought that an excellent use of charitable resources would be on the demand side of a market for unwanted babies.
To put it crassly, pay women not to have abortions and use the charity to raise and place the children. The marginal dollar spent on that charity would do a whole lot more good than the marginal dollar spent to elect pro-life politicians.
Your post ignores the question of whether what the utilitarian wants to maximize is average utility, total utility, or some other measure. I have argued in the past and Mead argued earlier that maximizing average utility leads to implausible implications. But there are problems with total utility as well, at least if you define zero as the suicide point and utility along Von Neumann lines. III , Eds. Simon and Lindert. Not so fast. My logic definitely applies to your scenario but it does not necessarily apply to abortion itself.
Why does that matter? Because the maximization of utility for everyone involved depends on mating with someone with whom you are compatible and with whom you are likely to share child raising duties. Since none of those conditions is likely to be met by mating with the rapist, the likely better outcome is to say no.
Can this logic be used to justify abortion itself, either as a result of rape or otherwise? Possibly, depending on what version of utilitarianism one espouses. However, utilitarianism is usually applied to those who already exist and have clearly identifiable future capacities for pain and pleasure. One does not try to maximize the utility of hypothetical human beings. In saying no to the rapist, the utilitarian has no obligation to maximize the utility of the imagined child that might result.
An abortion decision, however, necessarily effects the utility of an already existing human being. This is begging the question. If utilitarianism does not try to maximize the utility of hypothetical people I tend to disagree, but can take it as a premise , and fetuses are considered people, then the arguments for allowing them to survive vs. If I concieve a person, knowing full well its average utility will be negative over its life, is it not somehow wrong to actually conceive the child?
Consider the strange case of knowing that conceiving a child would bring a small net happiness to existing people, while the child itself would net suffer greatly. Then, you would conceive another child, which would suffer the same fate, over and over again.
Also, as said before, Act and Rule utilitarians have different views. Act utilitarians believe that if homosexuality does not bring the greatest amount of people happiness, then it is considered bad. Rule utilitarians accept these actions since human rights are considered. In our everyday lives we are faced with many issues and problems that question some of the decisions or choices we make. Some of our actions bring about happiness and some promotes the reverse of such actions.
The famous British philosopher John Stuart Mill also argued that. As a result, a struggle arises regarding where the rights of women end and those of the affected unborn children begin. The argument is based on assumption.
Many of the writers on the ethics of abortion believe that whether or not abortion is permissible morally, or simply put is a fetus life seriously wrong to end.
A utilitarian would ask whether having an abortion brings the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Though it has political connotations, I say it is a national policy that keeps changing.
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