I think basically all bioethicists who answered this combination will say that the “loophole” you discovered counts as the same category as embryo selection morally. True it is a version of having an abortion, but it isn’t the central case that the question “is it permissible to have an abortion” brings to mind, and these questions don’t provide fine-grained enough possible answers to nuance your view. Again I think this style of response fails anyway, but it’s difficult to produce a theory that doesn’t involve cramming these different decisions into categories based on things like intention more than the specific range of outcomes without implying funny things in cases like “is it okay to not have a child at all” and “is it okay to select for limblessness in embryos”.
True it is a version of having an abortion, but it isn’t the central case that the question “is it permissible to have an abortion” brings to mind,
I disagree completely. Using abortion to get rid of daughters and preferentially have sons is a major issue in India and some other countries, and presumably sex counts as a non-medical criteria here. I’m just using the first google hit as a source, but it seems the availability of prenatal sex screening was followed by major changes in the sex ratios in India:
Anecdotes in the article support the view that this was caused by sex-selective abortion, and this was the primary thing abortion was used for:
First amniocentesis in the 1970s and later chorionic villus sampling in the 1980s were openly advertised and extensively used in urban areas for sex-selective abortions.24 The effect became soon apparent. One of the earliest studies on the result of amniocentesis was carried out over a 12-month period, 1976–1977, in an urban hospital; 96% of the girls (430/450) were aborted, whereas all 250 boys, even with the risk of a genetic defect, were born.17 Results from an abortion center in Mumbai showed that almost 100% of the 15,914 abortions carried out following sex determination during 1984–1985 were of females. Another study of 6 city hospitals in Mumbai reported in 1988 found that 7,999 of the 8,000 aborted fetuses were girls.7 Amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling require qualified medical and laboratory staff and expensive equipment and were, therefore, available mostly to the affluent and the well-informed part of the population in the cities.
You might be right that this is not a cognitively prominent example for most westerners, but if you are an expert on the subject you should be well aware of it. The question asked is fine grained enough to express your view—if you think it is sometimes or often morally acceptable but not in some major categories like this, you can simply select one of the intermediate responses, rather than going for the extreme one. It’s not like the non-medical-criteria selection question is the only other question conflicting with their abortion response.
I suspect you might be right, and many bioethicists would in fact disapprove of aborting people just because they’re girls. But this gets back to my original point—they are answering the abortion question in a political manner, rather than based on their actual substantive moral commitments as exposed by the less politically charged questions.
I guess to elaborate a bit: The non-identity problem means that even choices that intuitively seem very morally dire when it comes to the kind of life you give your child can turn out to be morally neutral if the choice simultaneously changes the identity of the child you bring into existence. Because the results of biting the bullet on this seem so absurd to so many people, most papers in reproductive ethics kind of treat all choices about which child you bring into existence as though they are instead choices being made for the life of a single child. The reasons given vary a good deal, and there is more consensus that this is how you ought to treat these cases than why.
I think basically all bioethicists who answered this combination will say that the “loophole” you discovered counts as the same category as embryo selection morally. True it is a version of having an abortion, but it isn’t the central case that the question “is it permissible to have an abortion” brings to mind, and these questions don’t provide fine-grained enough possible answers to nuance your view. Again I think this style of response fails anyway, but it’s difficult to produce a theory that doesn’t involve cramming these different decisions into categories based on things like intention more than the specific range of outcomes without implying funny things in cases like “is it okay to not have a child at all” and “is it okay to select for limblessness in embryos”.
I disagree completely. Using abortion to get rid of daughters and preferentially have sons is a major issue in India and some other countries, and presumably sex counts as a non-medical criteria here. I’m just using the first google hit as a source, but it seems the availability of prenatal sex screening was followed by major changes in the sex ratios in India:
Anecdotes in the article support the view that this was caused by sex-selective abortion, and this was the primary thing abortion was used for:
(The second article I found agrees)
You might be right that this is not a cognitively prominent example for most westerners, but if you are an expert on the subject you should be well aware of it. The question asked is fine grained enough to express your view—if you think it is sometimes or often morally acceptable but not in some major categories like this, you can simply select one of the intermediate responses, rather than going for the extreme one. It’s not like the non-medical-criteria selection question is the only other question conflicting with their abortion response.
I suspect you might be right, and many bioethicists would in fact disapprove of aborting people just because they’re girls. But this gets back to my original point—they are answering the abortion question in a political manner, rather than based on their actual substantive moral commitments as exposed by the less politically charged questions.
I’ve been commenting too much on this post so I’m cutting myself off here, but if you want to continue the dialogue in DMs, feel free to message me.
I guess to elaborate a bit: The non-identity problem means that even choices that intuitively seem very morally dire when it comes to the kind of life you give your child can turn out to be morally neutral if the choice simultaneously changes the identity of the child you bring into existence. Because the results of biting the bullet on this seem so absurd to so many people, most papers in reproductive ethics kind of treat all choices about which child you bring into existence as though they are instead choices being made for the life of a single child. The reasons given vary a good deal, and there is more consensus that this is how you ought to treat these cases than why.