This is a very detailed and fairly well thought out post, an I think it’s a very important discussion to have as EA and longtermism in particular leans further towards policy as a goal. However, I strongly disagree with the argument and the framing of the conclusions, even as I agree with a number of the policy suggestions.
While I am a strong proponent of abortion being freely and easily accessible to people who want to have an abortion, I’m also very strongly in favor of people who don’t want to have one being able to access the resources and social security nets that would allow them to carry their pregnancies to term and either raise or give their children up for adoption, which seems to be a large part of what you’re suggesting. However, I don’t think the reduction of abortion is a useful or productive framing for these kinds of policies or interventions.
Goals obviously shape policies and interventions. If the goal of a policy is to reduce abortion rather than raise the quality of life for pregnant people, families and their children regardless of potentially averted abortions, this creates perverse incentives to form policies that are only focused on the pre-natal or immediately post-natal portions of the life cycle. This post outlines some suggestions for more encompassing policies, like daycare or family tax credits, but I believe that these policies should not be closely tied to a goal of reducing abortion in order to avoid these perverse incentives and distortion down the line, and that abortion reduction should at best be seen as a tertiary goal or byproduct.
Instead of spotlighting family planning, we should shift our family-focused interventions to spotlight mothers’ physical and mental health, and support adoption as an option.
I whole heartedly believe that supporting and facilitating adoption is an important and very valuable goal, but I don’t think it acts as a replacement to family planning. Family planning and access to abortion and conctraceptives are interventions that serve a different purpose than adoption services. Ideally, they allow families and individuals to make informed and well considered choices about their future and goals, which can and should be include access to abortion and conctraceptives if one does not want to be pregnant or carry a child to term. Even if adoption is easy and unstigmatized, being pregnant and giving birth can cause long-term (and sometimes catastrophic) physical and mental health effects and significant disruptions to the career of pregnant people, even in developed nations with excellent health care and social security systems in place. Being able to avoid this is an important mechanism for empowering people, including in being the best parents they can be when they choose to have children, and this should not be minimized or written off.
we should suspend our support for charities which decrease the amount of near-term future people, until we can systematically review the effect of the above moral considerations on the morality of the charities’ interventions
The extension of longtermist thinking to abortion in this way is one reason I’ve never felt comfortable with longtermism as a prevalent moral framework without a strong countervailing focus on the rights of already existing people. Interventions offering access to abortion and family planning play an important role in ensuring the right to bodily autonomy and self-determination, particularly in places where these services are not offered otherwise. While you can argue that people should be choosing to not exercise their right, arguing for the suspension of support for charities that offer these services comes off to me as implicitly arguing for a decrease in access to the tools that allow for the realization of these rights. While I’m not arguing that EAs or charities should be tasked with undergirding rights, I do think that this is an important thing to consider. I personally think that the natural conclusion to this line of argument in the abstract is that longtermists should be anti-abortion, which is something that blurs the line between reduction of “voluntary” abortion and abortion altogether, but I realize that there are different ways to interpret it and don’t at all mean to say this is what you’re arguing for.
This consideration is also important for the discussion around personal autonomy. The post argues:
The consequentialists among us would say that it would be morally wrong for us to not help our fellow people in poverty, even if helping them reduces our personal autonomy by preventing us from enjoying some of the amenities of the wealthy countries we typically reside in.
I don’t understand this conceptualization of personal autonomy. Choosing to donate your income instead of spending it is an exercise of personal autonomy, not a diminishment of it. In the same way, choosing to have a child or to have an abortion is an exercise of personal autonomy. Both interventions that increase people’s access to abortion and contraceptives and their access to infrastructure and resources that allow for them to carry pregnancies to term and then raise or put children up for adoption increase and allow for the exercise of personal autonomy. The point at which personal autonomy becomes an important consideration is when access to resources that allow for either choice is cut off, either by defunding these services or making them illegal or harder to access. Concerns about personal autonomy should not (and do not) preclude interventions providing support to people who need resources to have a safe, healthy and happy pregnancy and recovery, but they do preclude interventions that would make access to contraceptives or abortions harder.
Hi, thanks for your thoughtful comment! You bring up some great points which hadn’t been raised yet.
This post outlines some suggestions for more encompassing policies, like daycare or family tax credits, but I believe that these policies should not be closely tied to a goal of reducing abortion in order to avoid these perverse incentives and distortion down the line, and that abortion reduction should at best be seen as a tertiary goal or byproduct.
I’ve updated from “neutral” to “agree” with this over the conversation. While reducing abortion has emotional significance for me, it was an awful framing of my post’s policy proposals. I can imagine that even the suggestion of diverting funding from charities which reduce the amount of near-term future people to charities which accomplish similar object-level goals without that externality would have been met far more charitably without the priming on “voluntary abortion reduction” as a goal.
I don’t think it acts as a replacement to family planning.
Good points here which offer some idiosyncratic benefits of family planning which are difficult to impossible to adequately replace with other interventions.
I personally think that the natural conclusion to this line of argument in the abstract is that longtermists should be anti-abortion, which is something that blurs the line between reduction of “voluntary” abortion and abortion altogether, but I realize that there are different ways to interpret it and don’t at all mean to say this is what you’re arguing for.
Yes, this is also the conclusion I reach from the post. Interestingly, it seems that we don’t actually disagree on the object-level implications of philosophical views, but just have different philosophical views. For example, it seems that my weighting of longtermism versus the deontological considerations you outlined lean more towards longtermism than your weighting, which explains our object-level disagreement quite well.
Concerns about personal autonomy should not (and do not) preclude interventions providing support to people who need resources to have a safe, healthy and happy pregnancy and recovery, but they do preclude interventions that would make access to contraceptives or abortions harder.
Yep, this is a good argument, and you’ve convinced me that my choice of section title “Personal Autonomy Shouldn’t Preclude Intervention” incorrectly claims that the section’s argument shows more than it actually shows. The section’s argument only shows that EAs should be sympathetic to the idea that we have a moral duty to exercise our personal autonomy in a particular way, but not that this (in and of itself) justifies the interventions I later argued for.
How about I change the section title to “Exercising Personal Autonomy to Help Others”?
I can imagine that even the suggestion of diverting funding from charities which reduce the amount of near-term future people to charities which accomplish similar object-level goals without that externality would have been met far more charitably without the priming on “voluntary abortion reduction” as a goal.
To be fair, I don’t think your post has been met uncharitably—in fact, I’d argue that the response has been extremely charitable despite the mismatch between stated goals and policy suggestions.
How about I change the section title to “Exercising Personal Autonomy to Help Others”?
I’m honestly quite opposed to the use of personal autonomy in this context. This is very related to the extant debates about abortion and public debates in general, where personal autonomy is broadly framed in terms of rights rather than as a synonym for “choosing to do something”. Your section starts with “When discussing abortion, it is crucial for us to emphasize the importance of personal autonomy”, and I think that it is at best poorly worded and misleading to use personal autonomy in that way because of the way the term is generally used and understood in public and political debate. The reason personal autonomy is important to discussions about abortion is because there are a lot of external forces, most importantly legal ones, that prevent people from exercising their personal autonomy to get an abortion. The opposite of this isn’t true for choosing to have a child. There is an argument to be made that the positive social right to have a child and to have the state subsidize the care of that child in one way or another is not being met and that diminishes the capacity of individuals to have as many children as they want because they don’t have the means to care them, and that this is a question of personal autonomy, but I disagree with that argument and find it a stretch at best, and in any case that argument isn’t being made. In it’s current form, using personal autonomy in that section reads like either a result of a poor understanding of the role of personal autonomy in debates about abortion or like a semantic maneuver the preemptively undermine objections on the ground of personal autonomy, which is particularly problematic because of suggestions to defund charities and intervention providing family planning and abortion services.
My understanding of your objection is that in the public discussion, personal autonomy is framed as a right, but in my post, it’s framed more as the ability to make choices which affect one’s personal life. You believe that the latter framing insufficiently addresses the external forces which prevent some from exercising their personal autonomy, which you view as fundamental to the discussion of personal autonomy with respect to abortion. (Please let me know if anything about my characterization of your objection is incorrect, since this is the characterization I’ll be responding to.)
I think there are two reasons why we’re not seeing eye-to-eye on your objection:
Credence in utilitarianism versus deontology:
I hold much higher credence in utilitarianism than deontology, so I normally wouldn’t speak of a “right” to free speech, or a “right” to personal autonomy, etc. Instead, I would frame free speech and personal autonomy as important norms—the ability to choose what to say and the ability to choose what happens in one’s personal life—which are instrumentally useful in realizing the utilitarian goal.
Your higher weighing of deontology seems like a factor in the greater focus you place on rights, which affects the insistence with which you believe external forces should have been addressed in the post.
Scope considerations:
In a post on voluntary hate speech reduction, I could write a section entitled “Exercising Free Speech to Help Others” where I argue that even though free speech is a very important norm, we shouldn’t make the choice to use our free speech to spread hate. Because the post’s scope specifically concerns voluntary interventions, I wouldn’t feel it pressing to address external forces which prevent some from exercising their free speech (hate speech laws in Europe, repression in North Korea, etc) as they’re out of scope.
As for your perspective, I’m not sure whether your opinion is (a) that this post’s scope should be broader or (b) that even given this post’s stated scope, it’s still worth it to address the external forces you brought up.
Re: your characterization of my argument, framng personally autonomy as a right or an ability is a distinction without much difference here unless you argue that external forces that would change your right to have a child or an abortion doesn’t effect your ability to have one, which is obviously untrue. If someone wants to have an abortion where it’s illegal, their ability to get an abortion is seriously constrained. Of someone wants to have a child where having children is illegal, their ability to have a child is seriously constrained as well. Ignoring this is either a myopic oversight or ignorant of the way political, economic, legal and social systems impact people’s choices and ability to make choices in the world. This also applies to your point on “Credence in deontology vs. utilitarianism”—I don’t see how a utilitarian or deontological framework changes this at all.
More importantly, the framing of voluntary abortion reduction means that people should choose to not do a certain thing, not they should or should be able to choose it. This doesn’t immediately clash with personal autonomy as either of us have defined it when your proposition is formed as “people who want to have children should be able to have them”, but when you form it as “people who are pregnant should have their children” (which seems to me to be the actual argument of the post, based on the post and your comments) it is no longer a question of ability but of choice.
The reason I find the use of personal autonomy in the post objectionable is because using a term that is central to extant debates in a way that is disconnected from and unrelated to its use in those debates implies that it is response to those arguments without actually engaging with them. This was a bigger problem when the title was personal autonomy does not preclude intervention, but i still think the bidyif the section itself reads as disingenuous in a similar way. Debates around personal autonomy in relation to abortion are not about how one should exersize their personal autonomy, they are about whether or not pregnant people should have the right to exercise their personal autonomy. These are two different arguments and the language functions as semantic tool to separate them. Treating them as if they are the same is unproductive and incorrect, so differentiating between them is necessary.
“where I argue that even though free speech is a very important norm, we shouldn’t make the choice to use our free speech to spread hate.”
I think this comparison fails because, although personal autonomy is a very important norm, the right to personal autonomy if pregnant people is being weakened or completely stripped away in many places in the world. Additionally, you are ostensibly making an argument in favor of personal autonomy (people should be able to have and raise ot adopt children if they want to), not against it (people should not be able to have abortions). This, to me, makes personal autonomy irrelevant to your proposal because you are arguing for a moral prescription because it is a prescription on how one should choose to act not on how they have the ability to act.
“As for your perspective, I’m not sure whether your opinion is (a) that this post’s scope should be broader or (b) that even given this post’s stated scope, it’s still worth it to address the external forces you brought up.”
I think that arguing against abortion without bringing up these external forces and the realities of pregnancy is deeply flawed. Although you make a passing concession to the costs of pregnancy in your post, I do think that these costs are severely minimized. Being pregnant and giving birth to a child, particular particularly an unwanted one, is extremely burdensome for women economically, socially, mentally and physically. Somewhere in a comment thread you argued that if kidneys were regenerative, EAs would be arguing that everyone should donate kidneys once a year. I think this comparison makes it clear how much these costs are being minimized; having a child once a year, even if they didn’t raise the children themselves, would likely have disastrous effects for the women doing it very quickly. Likewise, arguing that personal autonomy should be using in a certain way without recognizing that many women do not have the personal autonomy to make a choice at all feels callous at best.
This is a very detailed and fairly well thought out post, an I think it’s a very important discussion to have as EA and longtermism in particular leans further towards policy as a goal. However, I strongly disagree with the argument and the framing of the conclusions, even as I agree with a number of the policy suggestions.
While I am a strong proponent of abortion being freely and easily accessible to people who want to have an abortion, I’m also very strongly in favor of people who don’t want to have one being able to access the resources and social security nets that would allow them to carry their pregnancies to term and either raise or give their children up for adoption, which seems to be a large part of what you’re suggesting. However, I don’t think the reduction of abortion is a useful or productive framing for these kinds of policies or interventions.
Goals obviously shape policies and interventions. If the goal of a policy is to reduce abortion rather than raise the quality of life for pregnant people, families and their children regardless of potentially averted abortions, this creates perverse incentives to form policies that are only focused on the pre-natal or immediately post-natal portions of the life cycle. This post outlines some suggestions for more encompassing policies, like daycare or family tax credits, but I believe that these policies should not be closely tied to a goal of reducing abortion in order to avoid these perverse incentives and distortion down the line, and that abortion reduction should at best be seen as a tertiary goal or byproduct.
I whole heartedly believe that supporting and facilitating adoption is an important and very valuable goal, but I don’t think it acts as a replacement to family planning. Family planning and access to abortion and conctraceptives are interventions that serve a different purpose than adoption services. Ideally, they allow families and individuals to make informed and well considered choices about their future and goals, which can and should be include access to abortion and conctraceptives if one does not want to be pregnant or carry a child to term. Even if adoption is easy and unstigmatized, being pregnant and giving birth can cause long-term (and sometimes catastrophic) physical and mental health effects and significant disruptions to the career of pregnant people, even in developed nations with excellent health care and social security systems in place. Being able to avoid this is an important mechanism for empowering people, including in being the best parents they can be when they choose to have children, and this should not be minimized or written off.
The extension of longtermist thinking to abortion in this way is one reason I’ve never felt comfortable with longtermism as a prevalent moral framework without a strong countervailing focus on the rights of already existing people. Interventions offering access to abortion and family planning play an important role in ensuring the right to bodily autonomy and self-determination, particularly in places where these services are not offered otherwise. While you can argue that people should be choosing to not exercise their right, arguing for the suspension of support for charities that offer these services comes off to me as implicitly arguing for a decrease in access to the tools that allow for the realization of these rights. While I’m not arguing that EAs or charities should be tasked with undergirding rights, I do think that this is an important thing to consider. I personally think that the natural conclusion to this line of argument in the abstract is that longtermists should be anti-abortion, which is something that blurs the line between reduction of “voluntary” abortion and abortion altogether, but I realize that there are different ways to interpret it and don’t at all mean to say this is what you’re arguing for.
This consideration is also important for the discussion around personal autonomy. The post argues:
I don’t understand this conceptualization of personal autonomy. Choosing to donate your income instead of spending it is an exercise of personal autonomy, not a diminishment of it. In the same way, choosing to have a child or to have an abortion is an exercise of personal autonomy. Both interventions that increase people’s access to abortion and contraceptives and their access to infrastructure and resources that allow for them to carry pregnancies to term and then raise or put children up for adoption increase and allow for the exercise of personal autonomy. The point at which personal autonomy becomes an important consideration is when access to resources that allow for either choice is cut off, either by defunding these services or making them illegal or harder to access. Concerns about personal autonomy should not (and do not) preclude interventions providing support to people who need resources to have a safe, healthy and happy pregnancy and recovery, but they do preclude interventions that would make access to contraceptives or abortions harder.
Hi, thanks for your thoughtful comment! You bring up some great points which hadn’t been raised yet.
I’ve updated from “neutral” to “agree” with this over the conversation. While reducing abortion has emotional significance for me, it was an awful framing of my post’s policy proposals. I can imagine that even the suggestion of diverting funding from charities which reduce the amount of near-term future people to charities which accomplish similar object-level goals without that externality would have been met far more charitably without the priming on “voluntary abortion reduction” as a goal.
Good points here which offer some idiosyncratic benefits of family planning which are difficult to impossible to adequately replace with other interventions.
Yes, this is also the conclusion I reach from the post. Interestingly, it seems that we don’t actually disagree on the object-level implications of philosophical views, but just have different philosophical views. For example, it seems that my weighting of longtermism versus the deontological considerations you outlined lean more towards longtermism than your weighting, which explains our object-level disagreement quite well.
Yep, this is a good argument, and you’ve convinced me that my choice of section title “Personal Autonomy Shouldn’t Preclude Intervention” incorrectly claims that the section’s argument shows more than it actually shows. The section’s argument only shows that EAs should be sympathetic to the idea that we have a moral duty to exercise our personal autonomy in a particular way, but not that this (in and of itself) justifies the interventions I later argued for.
How about I change the section title to “Exercising Personal Autonomy to Help Others”?
To be fair, I don’t think your post has been met uncharitably—in fact, I’d argue that the response has been extremely charitable despite the mismatch between stated goals and policy suggestions.
I’m honestly quite opposed to the use of personal autonomy in this context. This is very related to the extant debates about abortion and public debates in general, where personal autonomy is broadly framed in terms of rights rather than as a synonym for “choosing to do something”. Your section starts with “When discussing abortion, it is crucial for us to emphasize the importance of personal autonomy”, and I think that it is at best poorly worded and misleading to use personal autonomy in that way because of the way the term is generally used and understood in public and political debate. The reason personal autonomy is important to discussions about abortion is because there are a lot of external forces, most importantly legal ones, that prevent people from exercising their personal autonomy to get an abortion. The opposite of this isn’t true for choosing to have a child. There is an argument to be made that the positive social right to have a child and to have the state subsidize the care of that child in one way or another is not being met and that diminishes the capacity of individuals to have as many children as they want because they don’t have the means to care them, and that this is a question of personal autonomy, but I disagree with that argument and find it a stretch at best, and in any case that argument isn’t being made. In it’s current form, using personal autonomy in that section reads like either a result of a poor understanding of the role of personal autonomy in debates about abortion or like a semantic maneuver the preemptively undermine objections on the ground of personal autonomy, which is particularly problematic because of suggestions to defund charities and intervention providing family planning and abortion services.
My understanding of your objection is that in the public discussion, personal autonomy is framed as a right, but in my post, it’s framed more as the ability to make choices which affect one’s personal life. You believe that the latter framing insufficiently addresses the external forces which prevent some from exercising their personal autonomy, which you view as fundamental to the discussion of personal autonomy with respect to abortion. (Please let me know if anything about my characterization of your objection is incorrect, since this is the characterization I’ll be responding to.)
I think there are two reasons why we’re not seeing eye-to-eye on your objection:
Credence in utilitarianism versus deontology:
I hold much higher credence in utilitarianism than deontology, so I normally wouldn’t speak of a “right” to free speech, or a “right” to personal autonomy, etc. Instead, I would frame free speech and personal autonomy as important norms—the ability to choose what to say and the ability to choose what happens in one’s personal life—which are instrumentally useful in realizing the utilitarian goal.
Your higher weighing of deontology seems like a factor in the greater focus you place on rights, which affects the insistence with which you believe external forces should have been addressed in the post.
Scope considerations:
In a post on voluntary hate speech reduction, I could write a section entitled “Exercising Free Speech to Help Others” where I argue that even though free speech is a very important norm, we shouldn’t make the choice to use our free speech to spread hate. Because the post’s scope specifically concerns voluntary interventions, I wouldn’t feel it pressing to address external forces which prevent some from exercising their free speech (hate speech laws in Europe, repression in North Korea, etc) as they’re out of scope.
As for your perspective, I’m not sure whether your opinion is (a) that this post’s scope should be broader or (b) that even given this post’s stated scope, it’s still worth it to address the external forces you brought up.
(On mobile and can’t do quotes)
Re: your characterization of my argument, framng personally autonomy as a right or an ability is a distinction without much difference here unless you argue that external forces that would change your right to have a child or an abortion doesn’t effect your ability to have one, which is obviously untrue. If someone wants to have an abortion where it’s illegal, their ability to get an abortion is seriously constrained. Of someone wants to have a child where having children is illegal, their ability to have a child is seriously constrained as well. Ignoring this is either a myopic oversight or ignorant of the way political, economic, legal and social systems impact people’s choices and ability to make choices in the world. This also applies to your point on “Credence in deontology vs. utilitarianism”—I don’t see how a utilitarian or deontological framework changes this at all.
More importantly, the framing of voluntary abortion reduction means that people should choose to not do a certain thing, not they should or should be able to choose it. This doesn’t immediately clash with personal autonomy as either of us have defined it when your proposition is formed as “people who want to have children should be able to have them”, but when you form it as “people who are pregnant should have their children” (which seems to me to be the actual argument of the post, based on the post and your comments) it is no longer a question of ability but of choice.
The reason I find the use of personal autonomy in the post objectionable is because using a term that is central to extant debates in a way that is disconnected from and unrelated to its use in those debates implies that it is response to those arguments without actually engaging with them. This was a bigger problem when the title was personal autonomy does not preclude intervention, but i still think the bidyif the section itself reads as disingenuous in a similar way. Debates around personal autonomy in relation to abortion are not about how one should exersize their personal autonomy, they are about whether or not pregnant people should have the right to exercise their personal autonomy. These are two different arguments and the language functions as semantic tool to separate them. Treating them as if they are the same is unproductive and incorrect, so differentiating between them is necessary.
“where I argue that even though free speech is a very important norm, we shouldn’t make the choice to use our free speech to spread hate.”
I think this comparison fails because, although personal autonomy is a very important norm, the right to personal autonomy if pregnant people is being weakened or completely stripped away in many places in the world. Additionally, you are ostensibly making an argument in favor of personal autonomy (people should be able to have and raise ot adopt children if they want to), not against it (people should not be able to have abortions). This, to me, makes personal autonomy irrelevant to your proposal because you are arguing for a moral prescription because it is a prescription on how one should choose to act not on how they have the ability to act.
“As for your perspective, I’m not sure whether your opinion is (a) that this post’s scope should be broader or (b) that even given this post’s stated scope, it’s still worth it to address the external forces you brought up.”
I think that arguing against abortion without bringing up these external forces and the realities of pregnancy is deeply flawed. Although you make a passing concession to the costs of pregnancy in your post, I do think that these costs are severely minimized. Being pregnant and giving birth to a child, particular particularly an unwanted one, is extremely burdensome for women economically, socially, mentally and physically. Somewhere in a comment thread you argued that if kidneys were regenerative, EAs would be arguing that everyone should donate kidneys once a year. I think this comparison makes it clear how much these costs are being minimized; having a child once a year, even if they didn’t raise the children themselves, would likely have disastrous effects for the women doing it very quickly. Likewise, arguing that personal autonomy should be using in a certain way without recognizing that many women do not have the personal autonomy to make a choice at all feels callous at best.