Well, you’re the one who described the difference of the situation as follows:

she is voluntarily moving it from a situation in which it has an automatic life-support system to a situation in which it [181] does not.25 In other words, she is cutting it off from its life-support system and placing it in a situation where it depends on her care for survival.

If being in the mother’s womb also involves depending on the mother for care and survival, then the second sentence there is pretty uninformative. Since at that point you’re supposed to be explaining the difference, it’s hardly uncharitable to suppose that you’re appealing to some property that isn’t true of both circumstances.

So, let me try again, and we’ll see if I understand the structure of the argument. The crucial point, I take it, is that an unwanted fetus discharging its nutritive functions constitutes a boundary violation, whereas an unwanted newborn who depends on its mother for sustenance does not. The only thing I can see that you say to explain this difference is that the newborn is just laying there. Presumably you imagine that the fetus is more active (more an agent) than the newborn, though in both cases the child more or less passively receives what it needs from the mother. The child’s role in all of this seems to differ very little; at both points the child exists in a state of dependence as a consequence of the mother’s intentional action. You assert that the fetus constitutes a special threat in using the the mother’s body in an intimate and personal way without her consent. That’s supposed to be the whole of the problem with rape. So receiving the nutrients necessary to keep you alive from a woman who brought you into being by her own consent is equivalent to forcing a woman to give you sexual gratification? The only way to make that vaguely plausible is to downplay differences in the moral status of the fetus and the rapist. You try to address this, but besides overlooking the difference between receiving nutrients necessary for life and obtaining sexual gratification, you breeze through your argument that involuntariness is irrelevant. Besides being way too quick, it’s also question-begging. You say:

To be sure, considerations of the threat’s innocence or guilt may legitimately affect judgments of the moral proportionality of the response. But when the threat is as personal and intrusive as an unwanted pregnancy, it is difficult to see how the innocence of the fetus could make enough of a difference to justify forcing the mother to quietly endure nine months of what is tantamount to rape.

Given that you’re trying to answer an objection to the analogy between unwanted pregnancy and rape, you can’t appeal to the analogy in your defense. Or rather, you can, but you’re just providing material for the newest logic textbook’s section on informal fallacies.

Even if the relevance of involuntariness weren’t substantially more complex than you let on, the analogy between rape and unwanted pregnancy is more asserted than defended. At least, you say:

it is precisely this same fact that gives Miriam the right to kill her unwanted fetus Joshua: not that he threatens her with pain or injury, but that he uses her body in the most deeply intimate and personal way, without her consent(even if she originally consented).

I don’t think it’s uncharitable to read that as an assertion rather than an argument.

You’ll forgive me if I insist on hearing more of an argument before I accept an account of the wrong of rape that puts it on a level with growing in someone’s womb. I’m inclined to reject this as demeaning the wrong of rape as much as it inflates the ‘threat’ of unwanted pregnancy.

Since I doubt that you and I are going to agree on much (including whether or not your use of reflective equilibration more or less amounts to tweaking your principles until they give you the answers that you’ve never seriously put in doubt — note that I didn’t say that your use of the method doesn’t make you change your mind about *anything*; I’m alleging that it’s a fancy methodological mask for dogmatism; I don’t assert that the method must be used as such, just that your use of it here strikes me as just as flagrant of Rawls’ use of it in ToJ) — so let me just ask a general question that bears on this issue as well as broader concerns. What’s so important about consent? Why doesn’t it matter whether a person’s lack of consent is reasonable? I don’t doubt that consent is important, I just don’t think I find it as important as you do, and I’m certainly not clear on why you take it to be so important as to render an unwanted pregnancy the equivalent of rape or to justify anarchism.

Well, maybe he is. Does his future mother have a blog? Is he commenting there also? What’s the URL? And is she anybody I know? I hope we raise our kid to read more carefully ….

The purpose of the Stan-the-pilot case was to establish that certain apparent lettings-die actually count as killings. Likewise, the fact that the mother who voluntarily gives birth has voluntarily placed the child in a situation where it depends on her is sued to show that child abandonment would be killing. In that respect it’s like abortion, which is also a case of killing and not mere letting-die. But that doesn’t yet settle the question of what’s permissible and what’s not (since killing is sometimes permissible and sometimes not). That’s why I go on to argue that killing is justified in one case and not in the other. The stuff about voluntarily placing the child in a situation, etc., etc. is not part of my direct argument for the moral difference between abortion and abandonment; it’s argumentatively upstream from that — it’s part of my argument for abandonment’s being a killing rather than a letting-die. So the fact that the fetus also depends on the mother, which you introduce as if it’s some telling point you expect me to deny, is something I’m assuming from the start.

No, the fetus isn’t guilty of anything. Whether a wrongful violation occurs and whether the violator is morally responsible for it are two different questions; see here.

Changing your mind about a pregnancy is equivalent to changing your mind about having sex? If I didn’t know you were a serious guy, I’d think this was a satirical reductio.

Granting that the fetus is a person and that the pregnancy is initially wanted, it’s hard to see how the mother is not responsible for the alleged ‘violation.’

Well, my analogy with withdrawing consent to sex was intended to answer that. But you obviously find that analogy risible; since you don’t say what you find risible about it (it seems pretty straightforward to me), I’m not sure what to say.

Your attempt to resist the analogy with Stan abandoning his passengers is pretty bizarre; if the passengers aren’t guilty of a boundary-violation for demanding that Stan continue to fly the plane against his will, it isn’t clear why a fetus that exists because its mother wanted it to exist is somehow guilty of such a violation.

Well, I answered that question in the article. I guess you don’t like my answer, but you don’t say what you don’t like about it; you just repeat the question in an incredulous tone.

Perhaps you think it’s just obvious that “using its mother’s body as an incubator” involves using its mother as a means, while lying there completely helpless does not involve taking any action, and so cannot involve using the mother as a means.

Yes, I do think that’s just obvious.

The idea that a fetus’ nutritive functions constitute an ‘action’ on its part is pretty silly (though from your descriptions, one would never guess that a fetus was not a fully developed moral agent who made the outrageous decision to use some woman’s body as a mere means to his own ends

No, you’re the one who’s assimilating all action to conscious/voluntary/responsible action (as in your constant references to the fetus’s being “guilty” of a violation). As I explained in the paper, I was discussing action in a broad sense; I explicitly said that nutritive actions count, which is why I gave the example of the Venus’-fly-trap.

Could you explain to me how the child did not depend on her care for its survival when it was a fetus?

I never claimed that the child does not depend on her care for its survival when it’s a fetus. On the contrary, I explicitly stated that it did. You seem to have misunderstood the structure of my argument and what the difference between the moral status of the fetus and the newborn is supposed to be.

As a father yourself

Huh? Not as far as I’m aware.

its hard not to let one’s eyes roll a bit at the suggestion that a fetus’ nutritive functions are a kind of morally assessable action on its part.

I certainly agree. But that “suggestion” was your invention, not any part of my argument.

I won’t even get started on your monomaniacal Kantianism

What are you referring to? If you just mean my mere use of the language of not using people as mere means, that terminology is Kantian but the idea isn’t.

I suggest you try giving up the Rawlsian let’s-justify-our-pretheoretical-prejudices-whatever-the-cost-and-give-it-the-fancy-name-of-reflective-equilibrium style of moral theorizing sometime and face the possibility that moral philosophy might require you to change your mind.

That’s not an accurate description of reflective equilibration — which frequently requires one to change one’s mind, often drastically (and which was Socratic and Aristotelean before it was Rawlsian). For my defense of reflective equilibration see here.

Granting that the fetus is a person and that the pregnancy is initially wanted, it’s hard to see how the mother is not responsible for the alleged ‘violation.’ Your attempt to resist the analogy with Stan abandoning his passengers is pretty bizarre; if the passengers aren’t guilty of a boundary-violation for demanding that Stan continue to fly the plane against his will, it isn’t clear why a fetus that exists because its mother wanted it to exist is somehow guilty of such a violation. The real trouble with the argument, though, comes with your failure to show that the child is not violating its mother’s boundary while the fetus is.

When you’re arguing for abortion, you say:

1. “Using its mother’s body as an incubator” constitutes a boundary-crossing of the mother on the part of the fetus
2. An unwanted boundary-crossing is a boundary-invasion.
3. A boundary-invasion that is not necessary to counteract a boundary-invasion is a wrongful boundary-violation.

When you are defending the new-born, you deny that the child is guilty of an invasion. Yet you acknowledge that the child depends on the mother’s care for survival. So you apparently want to say that, in the case of the new-born, the child’s dependence does not constitute any kind of boundary-crossing. If it’s a boundary-crossing, then it should be an invasion simply by virtue of being unwanted. You say that it doesn’t count as an invasion (surely you must mean ‘crossing’) because “the child is merely lying there, newborn, not invading anything.” So you seem to be assuming that being inside the mother is somehow crossing a boundary, whereas being completely dependent on the mother and making a sort of claim on the mother’s action is not. I’m not sure why you think so. Perhaps you think it’s just obvious that “using its mother’s body as an incubator” involves using its mother as a means, while lying there completely helpless does not involve taking any action, and so cannot involve using the mother as a means. The idea that a fetus’ nutritive functions constitute an ‘action’ on its part is pretty silly (though from your descriptions, one would never guess that a fetus was not a fully developed moral agent who made the outrageous decision to use some woman’s body as a mere means to his own ends — perhaps you have a quasi-Platonic theory of persons as pre-existent fetuses who get in touch with all of reality when they’re in the womb but forget it at birth?). So is the suggestion that the situation is importantly different after the child “comes into the world” (as though a woman’s womb were not a part of the world — your theory is sounding more Platonic all the time). You describe it as the mother placing the child in a situation in which it depends on her care for its survival. Could you explain to me how the child did not depend on her care for its survival when it was a fetus? As a father yourself, you’re no doubt aware that a fetus isn’t likely to get born at all without the mother’s “positive assistance” (or did you imagine that your wife contributed nothing to the proper functioning of that “automatic (!) life support system” that she is? You’re sounding more Aristotelian now). So the situation of the fetus is a whole lot more like the situation of the newborn than you make out. Your only hope for salvation here is to show that just being inside the mother’s body somehow involves using her as a means in a way that the child won’t be once he’s outside. Besides the fact that the mother will remain every bit as much a means to the child’s ends as she was to the fetus’, its hard not to let one’s eyes roll a bit at the suggestion that a fetus’ nutritive functions are a kind of morally assessable action on its part. If anyone is morally responsible for a fetus’ nutritive functions, it’s the mother who intentionally acted to bring the fetus into the world (a part of which the womb most definitely is).

So, even granting all of your assumptions, your argument is a pretty wacky failure. And I won’t even get started on your monomaniacal Kantianism (I can’t figure out why you call yourself an Aristotelian, unless perhaps you only become a rigid deontologist when you’re talking about abortion).

I suggest you try giving up the Rawlsian let’s-justify-our-pretheoretical-prejudices-whatever-the-cost-and-give-it-the-fancy-name-of-reflective-equilibrium style of moral theorizing sometime and face the possibility that moral philosophy might require you to change your mind.

And no, by the way, I’m not a pro-lifer.

In cases of early abortion, no (since an early fetus is not a person).

In cases of late abortion, I lean toward yes (see footnote 40 in my article), but it will depend on the details — and in particular on whether the alternative method is more or less intrusive than abortion.

E.g., instead of a late term abortion, perhaps undergoing a C-section

C-section strikes me as more potentially invasive of the mother than abortion is, so I’d be inclined to think a woman within her rights to choose abortion over C-section.

Why do you take the personal/universal distinction to line up with the non-enforceable/enforceable distinction? Can’t there be universal obligations that aren’t enforceable?

I don’t think there’s any obligation — enforceable or otherwise — to choose every good thing. (After all, ought implies can.)

I think that in “personal morality” there is preferable to have children (serve the life).

Preferable for whom? For everybody? But then wouldn’t it be universal and not personal?

Also — the choice to “have children” and the choice to bring a particular pregnancy to term seem like different things (though I don’t regard either as obligatory).

Also, what is this entity “the life” that you think we should serve?