I think when doing any sort of dissociating from SBF, there’s two errors in opposite directions I would like to see EA avoid:
-
any responsibility on the part of EA should be very clearly acknowledged. I don’t want to get into what sort of responsibility there might be, and I think your questions are a good start. But there’s a tendency for corporate PR to want to airbrush responsibility and the movement’s long term reputation will win if EA conducts itself with integrity.
-
for integrity’s sake, too, I hope we avoid throwing Sam or anyone else under the bus before the facts are clearly demonstrated. I think you can distance without blaming, and in early stages, that might be the most appropriate action.
I want to acknowledge the challenging time leaders in the space right now must be having. Easy for me to write a list of demands here on a thread, but doubtless more difficult to make the calls. Thoughts are with folks having to make big calls on this right now.
The cognitive and experiential capacities of an organism are important for us in determining how they treat them. So any consideration about fetuses as moral patients needs to consider their capacities. 38-week old fetuses have a very different set of cognitive and experiential capacities compared to 24-week old fetuses, and even more so to 14-week old fetuses. Because 90% of abortions in the US occur prior to 14 weeks, and 99% before 22 weeks, the relevant questions about capacity are probably about experience in that time. At least prior to 12 weeks it seems unlikely fetuses could consciously experience pain, and unlikely they experience anything at all (EDIT: I’ve updated against this somewhat—see Callum’s comment below). As a result, and considering negative consequences for women’s autonomy in cutting abortion funding, I caution against recommendations that involve cutting any funding for abortion prior to that time.
I worry that some folks will get a little bit queasy about me launching into comparisons with animal suffering, but I think that is unavoidable, and ultimately justifiable. But when we try to determine how we should treat pigs, chickens, and shrimp, we look to their capacity to suffer, and their overall capacity to experience things. This is important because if we want to know whether it is net positive to farm animals, we need to know if farming them is net positive, i.e., if the positive experiences they have and we have as a result of farming them outweigh the suffering they experience, compared to the counterfactual of having not existed. If a particular animal doesn’t have any capacity for suffering or any kind of conscious experience, arguably they are, as an individual creature, no more a moral patient than a rock or stone. That raises the question: do fetuses have the capacity to consciously suffer or experience, and if so what sort of experience do they have?
Conscious experience is not the only consideration one would have when considering a fetus as a moral patient. There are other reasons that have been explored in more general abortion debates over the last few decades about various social factors that lead us to assign fetuses more or less personhood, which I acknowledge. But in this comment I’ll focus on the issue of conscious experience.
The conventional medical advice has been that “the cortex and intact thalamocortical tracts are necessary for pain experience”, and because these don’t develop until after 24 weeks of pregnancy, we can rule out any kind of fetal pain until that point. This is a based on a theory of human conscious pain that posits that something about the neocortex is what gives humans many or even all of our conscious experiences. Whether this is true is not clearly known but it would seem to follow from leading theories of human consciousness. The evidence that experience of pain in particular arises from the neocortex—let’s call it the “thalamo-cortical pain theory” is somewhat stronger. The neocortex contains the somatosensory cortices; it also contains the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex, which at least until recently have been inseparable from the conscious experience of pain in normal humans. Because those features don’t develop until some time after 24 weeks, it seems plausible fetuses don’t have conscious experience of pain until after that time.
On the other hand, there’s mounting evidence that animals without these advanced cognitive structures also have some experience of pain. I am sceptical this implies humans have experiences of conscious pain before they develop a neocortex, because those animals could have evolved other features giving them the experience of pain that humans do not have.
What’s more important is the thalamo-cortical pain theory I described in the previous paragraph is under question, specifically with respect to fetuses, raising the possibility that fetuses before 24 weeks could feel some sort of conscious pain, though it would almost certainly not reach the full expression and intensity that fully-formed humans can experience. This is based on evidence in adult human patients, including patients with disabled cortices and patients who were born insensitive to pain. On this theory of fetal pain would place development at closer to 12 weeks. This is based on the fact the “first projections from the thalamus into the cortical subplate” occur around that time. [This paragraph edited slightly to update in favor of the 12-week theory]
Overall I am somewhat convinced by the recent work that pain processing doesn’t require the neocortex
, but less sure thatconscious experience of paincan be had without it. However, at least in the United States, over 90% of abortions occured before 13 weeks. Less than 1% occur after 21 weeks. Prior to 13 weeks, there doesn’t seem to be a viable theory of conscious experience of fetal pain. I should acknowledge that in this context, we’re not only concerned about pain—we’re concerned about personhood more broadly. But one can infer, from the debate about pain, it seems unlikely that there are conscious experiences in general at the very least prior to 12 weeks. Consequently, any concern about the moral patienthood of fetuses at the time when most are aborted (spontaneously or otherwise) should be order of magnitude or two less than concern we might have about a fetus at that 38-week period which Peter Singer points out seems to be minimally distinguishable from an infant child.Finally—I can’t help but spell out some of my own motivation for this comment. Although it is very clear that it advocates only for voluntary abortion reduction, the original post does recommend defunding of abortion services for which funding may have previously been provided. I have less of a unique contribution to make in this area, than in the neuroscience, so I won’t say too much about it. But it does seem to me that even defunding services could have tangible negative consequences for pregnant women’s autonomy and control over their pregnancy. That probably motivates my caution against such a recommendation, and it needs to be considered alongside the discussion about fetal personhood, and within that discussion, fetal consciousness, which is the primary topic of this post.