On the De-Construction and Re-Construction of Social Ethics
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On the De-construction and Re-construction of Social Ethics: A Feminist Proposal for Debate of Abortion in Taiwan1
Hannah CHEN
Introduction In recent years, abortion has become one of the most critical controversial issues of bioethics in Taiwan. In considering the degrading and discriminating situations of women in all fields, local feminist activists have appealed strongly to the Legislative Yuan for statutes that allow women or teenage girls to have abortion with the aid of doctors without prerequisite of approval from husbands or parents. However, various religious groups' campaign against abortion, enhanced by the stance of the president of the Catholic theological seminary of Fu-ren University, holds that the right to life is above all concerns, because since the moment of conception, the fertilized egg is a person. They also feel that no abortion should take place legally while mother and fetus are all in good health, both mentally and physically2. The pro-life vs. pro-choice dilemma in Western cultures has been reintroduced again into a Taiwanese context, quoted by both sides to justify their positions.3
Whether the theory of rights originating from the western liberal tradition is a good way to solve, or could really solve the dispute of abortion is a question that must be faced. Can the anti-abortion religious alliance, especially from the catholic tradition, provide sufficient reasons or evidence to hold onto the legal provision constricting women’s reproductive rights, right to privacy, and right to body integrity? Especially in Taiwan, with rich traditional values of communitarian-oriented heritage, like Confucianism, has the society no other alternatives to turn to, but to engage itself in the dilemma of pro-choice vs. pro-life? These are the main problems to be dealt with in this paper.
Finally, after thoroughly exploring the above problems, a possible proposal for the abortion issue in Taiwan will be presented by highlighting the principle of relational autonomy, as well as the role of imagination in moral consideration, based on the process of deconstruction and reconstruction of Confucianism and feminist ethics of
1 This is only a rough draft, which will be revised later. Please do not quote anything from it. 2 http://www.cdncare.com.tw/20050524/med/yybj/733640002005052320094038.htm 3 http://www.drkao.com/3rd_site/3_2/0190.htm care.
Are All Human Beings Persons? In Donum Vitae, from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it says, “From the moment of conception, the life of every human being is to be respected in an absolute way.” Also, in the very same document the Congregation recalls the teachings found in the Declaration on Procured Abortion: " From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. To this perpetual evidence . . . modern genetic science brings valuable confirmation. "4
Beyond doubt, each and every person’s human rights and dignity of life should be respected and not be violated arbitrarily. That is not the crux of the problem at stake. The problem is why not take a developmental, not a substantial view of personhood. In another words, how can we build a strong, persuasive, and reasonable chain of equations to have the rights of a person, especially the right to life, deductively inferred back from a complex organism, whose personhood is certain, to the original single cell, whose personhood is still undecided yet?
For Catholics, the only one morally significant truth about abortion cannot be more clear: from the moment of conception, the spermed ova are human beings, therefore, persons. Since ‘All human beings are persons’ is not an analytical proposition, nor self-evident truth, how simply clear can this be?
To proclaim ‘it would never be made human if it were not human already’ commits the fallacy of begging the question, simply to affirm one’s position of faith, regardless of fact. It’s seemingly being convincingat the first sight is due to the ambiguity of the phrase. The two uses of ‘it’ and ‘human’ in the same sentence might have different connotations. It could be paraphrased as T1: ‘It, the individual organism, would never be made a person, if it, the zygote, were not a person already.’ But to say human beings can not gradually develop into persons of moral significance, is itself what should be proved.
Or, with a different interpretation, the very sentence then turns out to mean something else. T2: ‘It, the individual organism, would never be made person, if it, the zygote, were not human being already.’ Most of us probably accept this proposition without
4 http://www.cin.org/vatcong/donumvit.html difficulty. But even T2 might lead to philosophical dispute. On what ground, for what reason, being a member of Homo sapiens is the necessary condition of being a person? No matter what, there is one thing sure, even if T2 is true, that doesn’t imply or follow that T1 is also true.
In fact, while being aware of the sex and number of genetic individual doesn’t necessarily be the exact sex and number of what one delivers at the end, the modern biology can only assert T3: ‘It/they, the individual organism(s), would never be made human being(s), if it, the zygote, were not human being.’
What Person or Reason Means? Since the truth, “all human beings are persons” can not be ascertained just by stipulating the use of the word ‘person’, we must first clarify what the word ‘person’ actually means. According to the western tradition of philosophy, X is a person, in short, if and only if X is a rational being. But then what is reason? Were it mere a capacity of calculation, or principled thinking, none of them manifests in the activities of the stage of zygote or fetus. To define reason as the essence of human beings again is a tautology. Another alternative will be drawn from Christian metaphysical tradition, also inherited by the Enlightenment, of the universal, essential, and disembodied reason, but it still need to be proved why we should extend it to the zygote or the fetus. Genetic identification is the only remaining resort.
To explicate more fully, most of anti-abortionists hold an essentialist theory of humanity, made of mind and body. Taking reason as one central function of mind, it therefore is the generic essence or nature of human beings without exception. Different from the traditional static view of reason, the modern version now takes it as an internal structure with dynamic force to fulfill the goal of welfare of life in the future. Consequently, zygote, embryo, and fetus are all nothing but different stages of person with the same essence of reason, but not yet fully realized. The argument is persuasive by making an analogous comparison with the gestational process of body plus the very genetic identification between different stages.5
However, this universal abstract conception of reason can hardly be approved of by
5 Sun Hsiao-chih, “Are All Human Beings Persons?”, ttp://210.60.194.100/life2000/professer/johannes/articles/8..Human%20Persons.htm; 艾立勤，〈論接合子是不是位格人〉，《哲學與文化月刊》第 28 卷第 8 期（2001 年 8 月），頁 691-715。〈胚胎幹細胞的倫理省思〉， http://210.60.194.100/life2000/professer/ilichin/i5.htm，〈天主教會對「代理孕母」的倫理立 場〉，http://210.60.194.100/life2000/professer/ilichin/i4.htm the cognitive sciences. Take for example the fact that a baby with anencephaly is also a member of human species, which could scarcely, if not impossibly, be said with reason.
Hence, Mary Ann Warren, one prominent exponent of functionalism, on the contrary, proposes that genetic humanity is not sufficient for moral humanity, that ‘person’ and ‘human beings’ are not a pair of concepts with the same share of the extensive, nor the intensive. She then enlists five traits of personhood, namely, 1) consciousness, 2) reasoning, 3) self-motivated activity, 4) the capacity to communicate, and 5) the presence of self-concept and self-awareness. Although, she did not consider any one of these criteria a necessary condition for personhood, she does insist that 1)-3) could be viewed as sufficient and fairly candidate for a necessary condition for personhood. Since fetus is a being which satisfies none of the above characteristics, it certainly is not a person.6
Mary Ann Warren is insightful of this wide diverse range of the word “person”. Her analysis accords with discoveries of cognitive science. Recent empirical research has revealed that in the classical theory of categories and concepts, every concept is supposedly defined by a set of necessary and sufficient features shared among all the members of its extension, and is not a precise appropriate description of how our ordinary concepts are formed. Our basic moral concepts, including reason, are far from being uniformly or homogeneously structured. They are prototype structured, taking male not female as the prototypical cases. Not until this point, the metaphysical normative characteristics of reason reveal, which we will discuss more fully later in the section of redeeming moral folk theory7.
Genetic Individuality vs. Developmental Individuality Now days, the debate of personhood shifts its focus from discussion centering on the conception of reason to individuality. Based upon the scientific discoveries of the pre- implantation stage of embryo, biologist Clifford Grobstein and Father Richard McCormick suggest the distinction of genetic individuality and developmental individuality. By taking primitive steak as the necessary condition of individuality, which personhood should imply, pre-embryo can only be said of something with moral significance or moral standing rather than person. This theory implies that at least some first-trimester abortion should be morally allowed.
6 Mary Anne Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”, 7 Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination:, Pre-embryo stage is distinguishable according to three empirical evidences. First, within the first 14 days of conception, the unfertilized ovum starts the process of division in order to form the exterior not interior tissue, which mainly consists of. the plcenta. Second, in the pre-embryo early stages, after dividing into balstomere of eight identical cells, there is only loose association between them, and it is possible for each and every one of them, with the intervention of reproductive technologies, to develop into one human being, or be re-united together as an individual. Third, in this period of conception, it is possible to form twins or more.
As Richard McCormick explains,
“Are there very strong reasons for maintaining that the pre-embryo is not yet a person? I believe so…There are two arguments officially adduced to defend personhood ab initio. The negative—absence of any subsequent development so significance as to indicate a qualitative change—he (Mahony) regards as ‘upon further examination to carry little, if any, force.’ The possibility of twinning and recombination are key here. The positive argument—from genetic uniqueness—what is used by the Declaration on Procured Abortion and Donum vitae, shows only genetic, not developmental uniqueness.”8
For a theological tradition such as Christianity with clear definition of individuality as something of incommunicabilis and susistneia, the significance of this biological substrate should be taken seriously. It marks the transitional event of which ‘a potential human being’ now changes into ‘an actual human being with the potential to become a person’. Therefore, the biological individual might not coincidentally accompany ensoulment.
Although some ethicist, like Antohny Zimmerman, and biologists, like Dianne N. Irving and Ward Kischer, mostly from the Catholic background, accuse these persons of not being professional or qualified enough to make such conclusions of the not-yet- person status of pre-embryo, they insist the primitive steak is not such a remarkable line to draw. However, their critical judgments seems to overlook the significance of the pre-embryos’ to twin or recombination. Let us imagine one vicious scientist in his lab doing the pre-embryo research. Suppose he removes one of the eight cells out of the womb, and takes a closer look at it. In terms of its might-be-a-new-fetus, it should have a distinguished mind B. If he implants it back, luckily, it recombines with the
8 Richard A. McCormick, “Who or What is the Preembryo?”, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 1991:1:1-15, p3 & p10. other seven cells to be still part of the old one A. Whether it is A or B? How busy would God be with ensoulment and outsoulment?
The more details of personhood we examine, the more it turns out to be that the whole abortion debate centering around personhood is by no means about a mere simple fact. Contrary to that conviction, evidence from embryology shows that even a fetus that has passed the period of conception is not yet a person, but being with potential to become a person. That means the controversial definition of person is still unresolved.
The Moral Law Folk Theory Behind However, it seems quite obvious now that the unsolved question of personhood partly results in a whole set of moral mentality and conceptual framework. It is that which determinates whether we decide to extend person and legal protection to the zygote, the embryo and the fetus. That mentality which accompanies the conceptual framework is what Mark Johnson called ‘the Judeo-Christian Moral Law Theory’.
Although this kind of morality has its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, because of several reasons, it has been circulated and widely held true since the era of Enlightenment among people regardless of gender, faith, culture, and nationality. This ‘moral law folk theory minus God’ can be put in the following brief summary,
“Human beings have a dual nature, part bodily and part mental. It is our capacity to reason and to act upon rational principles that distinguishes us from brute animals. The free will, which humans possess but animals do not, is precisely this capacity to act on principles we give to ourselves to guide our actions. Therefore, our freedom is preserved only in acting on principles our reason gives to us. There is a deep tension between our bodily and mental aspects, because our bodily passions and desires are not inherently rational. That is why we need reason to tell us how we ought to act in situations where our actions may affect the well-being of ourselves and other people.”
“Reason guides the will by giving it moral laws—laws that specify which acts are morally prohibited, which are required, and which are permissible. Universal reason not only is the source of all moral laws but also tells us how to apply those principles to concrete situations. Moral reasoning is thus principally a matter of getting the correct description of a situation, determining which moral law pertains to it, and figuring out what action that moral law requires for the given situation.”9
9 Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination:, In brief, it consists of at least six assumptions at the heart, namely, the split self of body and mind, faculty psychology with rigid distinctions among discrete mental capacities, the universal, essential, disembodied view of reason, radical freedom, absolute moral laws, and the strict scope of morality as a matter of ‘doing the right thing’10. We will turn to scrutinize these later. So far, we only need to realize that this mentality is consciously or unconsciously embedded in our mind.
With the mentality of the moral law folk theory in mind, now we can understand why the moral reasoning of anti-abortion taking place here is such a rule-oriented absolutist one, why, in the context of Taiwan, with the rate of Christianity only up to 3 percent of the population, this theory of rights approach adapted by both camps can have such an enormous influence upon the public.
Even the Buddhist discourse of abortion,11 with claims to discard the anthropocentric essentialist accent of the personhood, builds its argument on the traditional religious belief that all sentient beings should be treated equally, costing no effort to deliberately outweigh the right to life against the reproductive rights, but easily insists on a fundamentalist moral absolutism against abortion, by more or less secretly letting indoors the mentality of moral law folk theory while using the language of rights.
Moreover, this stand, preclusive of any adequate account of the social foundations of moral rights, has been challenged and attacked by the social-grounded theory of rights. It comprises the so called “intrinsic-properties assumption” and “single- criterion assumption”12. The former states that there are the intrinsic not extrinsic properties of those individuals as the justified qualification of the ascription of basic moral rights. The later views only some single property to be morally accountable. For instance, having reason, or being sentient. With these two assumptions, relationships among individuals or groups are not relevant to basic moral rights. Only the presence or absence of intrinsic properties matters, with which the world divides into those things with moral rights, and those things without.
Other Alternatives: Feminist Ethics of Care and Confucianism
10 Ibid, 11 12 Mary Anne Warren, “the moral significance of birth”, Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, ed. by Helen Bequaert Holmes & Laura M. Purdy, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.213 Fortunately, feminist ethics of care as well as Confucianism, from different perspective, with diverse concerns, begin to sense the impropriate restrictions against abortion, and try to reconfigure the other ethical approach to define what person is.
Ⅰ.Feminist Ethics of Care One of the feminist pioneers initiating the paradigm shift of morality, Nel Noddings elaborates the particular ethics of care to deal with the problem of abortion, claiming that there should be no concern over the waste of “human tissue,” that abortion “should be freely available in first trimester, subject to medical determination in the second trimester, and banned in the third, when the fetus is viable”13.
Her ethical stand is neither made out of the principled moral rules, nor on the ground of the justified sufficient condition of personhood, but by tackling the concrete situation with unprincipled mind of the one-caring, not to judge but to support the pregnant women, the one-cared. She specifically insists that the one-caring cares first for the one in immediate pain or peril, while criticizing the retreat of shattering the ethical ideal of oneself, “away from human beings and toward other objects of caring —ideas, animals, humanity at large, God.”14
Although she does mention, in one or two places, the capability of the sentient fetus to respond as related element of moral thinking, but it is not relevant to a question of when life begins, but of when relation begins. Thus it follows that the capability to respond should not be taken as an absolute determinate factor, but one of constituent part of our encounter with fetus as one-cared15.
However, in spite of her endeavor to get away from the principled ethics of justice, she still is somehow stuck in the trap of ethical norm of obligation that moral law requires in a given situation. In her book, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education, she mentions a probable argument against ethics of Caring: “Suppose the child is born, but the mother admits no sense of relatedness. May she commit infanticide?” To avoid the might-be blasphemy of infanticide, Noddings invents a historical and non-cultured myth of “the sweetest and most unselfconscious reciprocity between the infant, or even the near-natal fetus and the mother,” to rule out the possibility of “moral” infanticide, if not immoral, without considering incredibly harsh cases.
13 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education, (California: University of California Press, 1984),p 88 14 Ibid, P87-88 15 Ibid, 89 Just as Mary Ann Warren points out, in the article of “The Moral Significance of Birth,” even infanticide might have a persuasive defense under special circumstances.16 Let us envision one or two examples. In the extremist Islamic world under the hostile rule of patriarchy, or the Nazi’s notorious concentrate camp, women will go through savage abuses for pregnancy or supposed sexual transgressions, e.g. burning to death, when there is no access available to abortion. Those who resort to infanticide to conceal an “illegitimate” birth may be forgiven to some degree.
Nel Noddings’ failure to be “bold” enough to recognize the possible cases of infanticide shows that even she is confined to some degree within the cultured ideals of mother-fetus relationship, that even she is too ready to accept the given moral paradigm of ethics of justice to fully recognize the important role of imagination, or empathy, as well as diversity in moral deliberation. Therefore, her refusal to the principled morality can not be said a complete one. Ethics of care can at most be an indispensable complement to the ethics of justice.
In addition, she also fails to realize relation between two beings is usually determined by elements of a broader context, not only confined to the network of social, economic, or political factors. Communal myth and ritual of culture, conceptual frame, metaphorical thinking, as well as narrative, etc. all influence our ability to relate to one another. If this is correct, mother-fetus relationship should not and could not depend solely upon the mother’s particular feelings or thoughts.
If so, the question remains: Which theory is of the first priority? Or, we can put it this way: On what ground should we adapt the related theory, provided by ethics of care, in stead of an intrinsic single criterion, of personhood? Can ethics of care really be the complement of ethics of justice so that the two would find some way to get consensus. What if this vision of complement is nothing but illusion, why on earth should we choose ethics of care, in the case of abortion, rather than ethics of justice?
Ⅱ. Confucianist Ethics After a survey of Feminist ethics of care, now it is time to turn our attention to Confucianist ethics. Like Western feminist ethics of care, Confucianism, with the origin of communitarian-oriented federalism for thousands of years, believes in particular ethics, which means moral obligation for most part depends on the degree
16 Mary Anne Warren, “The Moral Significance of Birth”, Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, ed. by Helen Bequaert Holmes & Laura M. Purdy, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.213 of intimacy between moral agents. And the family model among other societal interactive ones would be of the first and the most importance, not only in education, but also in the practical reasoning of morality. Abortion as a disruption of the family ideal, therefore, is of highly concern.
Hence, Shui Chuen Lee argues, in “Mother-fetus Relationship from a Perspective of Confucianist Ethics,” that abortion might be forgivable as a last resort to end the mother-fetus relationship, only in case that the mother did not intend to get pregnant of her free will. However, since the unwelcome fetus is innocent, and deserved a moral treatment, although she needs not to feel in bond to the special obligation of motherhood, the pregnant woman should first consider other proper resolutions, instead of abortion, for the unanticipated difficulties due to the pregnancy.17
With the recognition of more than one model, none of given determinate cognitive significance of mother-fetus relationship, he bases his discourse, not on the model of part of the woman’s body, not on the model of separate entities, but on the model of indivisibly linked, or in a better paraphrase, “not one but not two.” There are some implications of this model,
“Mother-and-fetus is complex, both bodily and morally. Just as we cannot easily say whether pregnancy involved two bodies or only one (in a special expanding state), just so we cannot easily say whether pregnancy involved two sets of overlapping interests or only one set (in a special expanding state). If we allow that there are two sets, then we must recognize that they are mutually dependent to an unusual degree.”18
He ramifies the original conceptual framework of “not two but not one” model with “metaphysical interpretation” of critical notions. First, he classifies the mother-fetus relationship as one of internal rather than external relation, which needs no immediate agency to get contact with each other, just like a body part to the whole integrated. Second, different from Nel Noddings, he releases women’s related caring awareness of the fetus from the constraint of fetus’s capacity to respond to the caring, then extends the concept of caring as something more like an intuitive empathy(感通). As long as the fetus is within the moral community of the mother, within the family, as long as the mother is a moral agent, in terms of the principle of Jen (仁), the intimate internal relation is and should be there. It is “metaphysical interpretation”, because the caring relationship is now not built on actual experience of encounter between the
17 18 W Ruddick and W Wilcox, “Operating on the Fetus”, Hstings Center Report, 1982, 12(5) one-caring and the cared-for, but extended by interpretation to a “not one but not two”, with which the caring relationship is “not one but not two”.
Lee admits that the fetus could be imaged as an invasion of “the other” in certain circumstances, especially when the woman of pregnancy is deprived of free will, either by others’ coercive force, in the strong sense, or because of her taking no preventive procedure in advance, in the weak sense. But the woman having abortion is still considered as in “moral debt” more or less to the innocent but unwelcome fetus. Not to mention those immoral ones, whose end of pregnancy is a reckless result of selfishness, or self-indulgence.
It is not clear whether Lee would agree that the “moral debt” may somehow eventually turn to “legal debt,” or the women’s reproductive legal rights should be simply overruled in certain cases; however, serious condemnation of immoral abortion would definitely be made in accordance with Confucianist ethics.
Many things deserve discussion in detail, such as the seemingly, but not actually “universal” essential model of family, the unexamined ideal of special obligation of parenthood, etc. But the most crucial problem of Lee’s reconstruction of Confucianist attitude toward abortion is, although it is originally based on the “not two but not one” model, but “paradoxically” turned out to be “not one but two” at the end. The mother is in debt to the fetus; the fetus is a member of the mother’s moral community; the mother has an internal relation with the fetus. Full of descriptions of “not one”; scare of “not two.” This criticism leads one to ask: What is “model?” What is “not one but not two?” How does the “not one but not two” model function in our moral deliberation?
In sum, obviously, both feminist ethics of care and Confuciansit ethics try to adopt the approach of particular ethics to deal with abortion issues, and situate individuals within a related network by refusal to take a liberal view of autonomy. Unlike liberalism, while dealing with abortion debate, they do not prioritize ethics of justice, or human rights theory as the only moral paradigm we can turn to for help, but view the mother-fetus relationship not as two separate individuals, but as things related to each other. But their approaches all fail to be really that “particular” at last by letting in some concerns of universal ethics.
Because of different theoretical elaboration of such relationships, their conclusions seem contradictory to each other. For Nel Noddings, the fetus is not counted as a person unless the mother thinks of it “as if” it is “joined to loved others through formal chains of caring,” “linked to the inner circle in a clearly defined way.” It is by an act of “metaphorical imagination” to extend the relation to it, although she seems not quite aware of that. Now we can say “it is in the formal and indirect relationship.” But if the mother is not herself in a loving relation, it is nothing but “information speck-a set of controlling instructions for a future human being” with no given sanctity.
For Lee, this is unacceptable. Compared to Nodding, Lee clings more to the paradigm of principled ethics, and tends more to view the fetus-mother relationship as “not one,” hence he feels more reluctant to embrace abortion. The mother-fetus relationship is not determined by arbitrary metaphorical imagination. Metaphorical imagination should be imagined ethically according to the special obligation of motherhood, as well as the just treatment of the innocent fetus. Therefore, even if the mother metaphorically views it as an intruder, she is still in bond of moral obligation to treat it as a family-yet-to-be. Abortion can only be the last resort, and the moral debt to the family-yet-to-be will still be a debt, only forgivable.
We now realize that particular ethics no matter how “particular” will deliberate more or less with the universal principled ethics of justice. However, at what point, to what degree will particular ethics bridge itself with universal ethics? It is determined by devices of metaphorical imagination, such as metaphor, model, and analogous reasoning, etc. Since no imagination is rootless, we believe, it is provided by the mentality and the conceptual framework of moral law folk theory.
Before we start examine the three models mentioned above, there are few observations in need of clarification right now. I believe it would help us to know how we actually do our moral thinking or reasoning. First, there is no one objective given description of mother-fetus relationship at hand, but only models whose function is to help us use something we’ve already known to understand and the other things that we are not familiar with yet. Second, based on the different models we can elaborate diverse conceptual frameworks to sort out certain important elements of pregnancy, to define a range of possible responsive alternatives, and to form some moral implications of abortion. Third, each model could form a set of related derived metaphors to help us imagine the complexities of pregnancy, to express our deepest moral feelings about abortion, e.g. “moral debt” for sense of incomplete goodness. Fourth, every model seems to be made of at least one root metaphor or several complementary metaphors, to picture and determine the doubtful status of the fetus, such as “a body part,” “a separate entity,” or “not one but not two.”
Metaphoric Morality In spite of many philosophers’ denial, using devises of imagination, such as metaphor, model, or analogical reasoning, may help us properly investigate all the related element of a critical situation, to reframe the application of our moral ideal, values, or principles, and to adjust both in a wide reflective equilibrium. That is true for all moral theories. The debate about abortion is just one case of controversial issues that helps us highlight the traditional relegated depreciated aspects of moral deliberations.
One thing that needs to be clear in the very beginning is that imagination is not what people might think of an arbitrary mind-wandering, or fantasy out of control. In fact, it is “a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation,” “a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole.”19 Also, imagination is not something merely personal or subjective, but with a communal and collaborative dimension. Imagination might not always be metaphorical. But moral imagination needs to be metaphorical in the sense of being alerted to the constant necessity of stretching ourselves beyond the present identity and context that we have.
Metaphor, “the locus of our imaginative exploration of possibilities for action,” enters into our moral deliberations in three ways, as Johnson mentioned,
“1) It gives rise to different ways of conceptualizing situations. 2) It provides different ways of understanding the nature of morality as such (including metaphorical definitions of the central concepts of morality, such as will, reason, purpose, right, good, duty, well-being, etc.), 3) Metaphors also constitutes a basis for analogizing and moving beyond the clear or prototype cases to new cases.”20
Although morality is metaphoric, not all metaphorical devices are acceptable or practical due to the change of society and culture. Nor would they be assessed as important as of the same value.
Bellow we will try to discern the metaphorical thinking at two levels, to see how metaphoric imagination work in our moral deliberation of abortion. First let us look at the three models of mother-fetus relationship. Then, we will examine the moral folk
19 Steven Fesmire, “Morality As Art: Dewey, Metaphor, and Moral Imagination”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Summer, 1999, Vol. XXXV, No.3, P 528 20 Mark Johnson, theory hidden behind.
I. Models of Mother-fetus Relationship Now let us examine the three models of mother-fetus relationship in detail. According to the model of part of the woman’s body, a fetus is contained within a woman’s body just like a room as part of a house. It implies that a fetus is no more than a body part, that woman and fetus are seen as one entity. This single-entity model not only contradicts some women’s experience of pregnancy, but also oversimplifies a complex relationship of pregnancy.
A model of separate entities is widely held by both the liberal and the conservative, which perpetuates a notion of the fetus as a separate entity from the mother, with the aid of modern reproductive technology in medicine, as well as the language of rights. Factual statement of the fetus, within the conceptual framework of the model, easily turns out to be value judgment. From an entity, to a human being with “interest,” to a person with moral “right,” and then to an legal individual with “right entitled by the Constitution,” such as the right to be born healthy, right to utero surgery or genetic therapy, right to intervention designed to control the mother’s behavior during pregnancy, etc..
The last but not the least model of “not one but not two” recognizes, as John Seymour points out,
“the possibility of two sets of overlapping interests possessed by two entities which are peculiarly interdependent. This avoids the objectionable features of a model built on separate entities with conflicting rights, while at the same time allowing for a fetus to be treated as having some interests which the law can protect.”21
It has two versions. Each one implies a series of analyses plus related moral consideration of mother-fetus relationship,
“Given the special nature of the mother-fetus relationship, who should be responsible for articulating those interests Two answers are possible. It might still be argued that a third person should be able to articulate—and take action to protect—the rights of the fetus. Alternatively, it can be asserted that only the mother should be empowered to articulate the rights of the fetus.”22
21 John Seymour, “A Pregnant Woman’s Decision to Decline Treatment: How Should the Law Respond?” Journal of Law and Medicine 2(1), 1994, 27-37 22 Ibid, Since the former version has been rejected as one deviant of the model of the separate entities, John Seymour concludes, “not one but not two” had better be interpreted as the latter.
This model differentiates from the model of the women’s body by insisting on two different sets of interests, and distinguishes itself from the model of the women’s body by insisting on two series of interest. However, in terms of the way how the model deals with the conflict of two sets of interests, obviously, the model of “not two but not one” is better viewed as the model of separate entities only with some restrictions, such as the mother’s right to decide when, where, and how to explicate the rights or interests of the fetus. Therefore, it is not actually that “not two” as much as “not one.”
Perhaps, there is reason for this unequal emphases of the “not one but not two” model. It is a model of negation, and not affirmation of two different metaphors. Therefore, it tells us nothing positive, nothing particular in comparison to the other two models, but to complement each other with some restrictions. And since metaphorical imagination or analogous reasoning is most of the time working without consciousness, since we are so acquainted with the perspective of substance in stead of relation, since we are so used to take the static understanding of body and self, or mind, it is easy for us to fall short of true meaning of the “not one but not two” model, and fail to view the mother-fetus relationship as something totally different.
If the “not one but not two” model is taken seriously, the “not two” aspect should be also underlined. That means at least three things. One, the fetus should not be conceptualized as a static entity already there with different interests from the mother, but in an ongoing process of individualization within a context of complex relationships at all levels, including physical gestation level and symbolically, the imagination level. Two, it is not until the deliverance this relational self emerges as embodied separate human being. Three, only birth, rather than sentience or viability, could mark the beginning of legal personhood, because “there is room for only one person with full and equal rights inside a single human skin.”23
It is by no means coincident that we always view mother-fetus “bodily” relationship as one contained in the other, that we always consider the mother-fetus “moral” relationship as a special obligation between two selves regardless of women’s
23 Mary Anne Warren, “The Moral Significance of Birth”, Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, ed. by Helen Bequaert Holmes, Laura M. Purdy, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992) personal feeling and experience. Because of this, it seems so easy or “natural” to empathize with the fetus, and so hard to put ourselves in pregnant women’s shoes.
No wonder in America, and probably in Taiwan too, physicians usually would have no feelings of guilt, no sense of moral conflicts or confusion, to keep a brain-dead pregnant woman alive until the fetus is mature to deliver by cesarean section. However, for a mother who is in need of marrow donation, to be cured by way of having a baby with the matched marrow, this is something that no doubt will get the public stirred up and accusing the taking person of using this as the means not the end.
That does not mean the fetus should never be protected at all. But, to say it is a person is one thing, but to say it should be protected is another. Therefore, we should always carefully think from both perspectives of “not one” and “not two.” Any legal procedure we take to protect the fetus should be minus to a degree that the fetus and the mother would not be considered exactly like one contained in the other. While at the time, the mother should always be supported and protected from all kinds of harm, like one plus something more. For those against abortion at all costs, they fail to do the minus; for those who support abortion with no reservations, they need to do more plus. Anything less than that would be considered as inadequate theory of the mother- fetus relationship.
Take the recent discussion of the extension of legal right to the fetus as an example. Accompanied by the rise of anti-abortion campaigns in Taiwan, there are voices calling for the punitive sanctions regulating women’s behavior in pregnancy, such as smoking or drinking, etc. The public would not feel obligated confidently to get a legal order from the court to coerce a man to have marrow donation for his dying son, or to protect someone from committing suicide by putting him in isolation ward. Even in cases where people might be influenced by others’ certain type of behavior, there is severe constriction of the empirical evidence and the cause-effect evaluation to decide whether or not to place responsibility upon others, to make law against this type of behavior. For example, second-hand smoking or air pollution may also endanger the health both of the mother and the fetus, but we scarcely ever hear of such kind of regulations or punitive sanctions against second-hand smoking or air pollution. Why take pregnant women alone?
Behind that is a possible analogical reasoning: Since in an ordinary situation, people who might endanger others will have to be punished according to the law, since the fetus is more helpless, more innocent, why not favor fetus more? Lack of due minus, this reasoning takes the fetus as an individual with interests of body, while at the cost of canceling the body integrity of women.
Another example is concerning the mechanism of compulsory pre-abortion consultation. Local feminists strongly oppose the installation of this mechanism, by appealing to the principle of autonomy, claiming that women or teenagers can make decisions by themselves without the intervention of others. Behind that is a possible analogous reasoning: Since people may have the right of liberty with only one restriction, that is, no harm to others, women or teenagers should have the full right of liberty, without any investigation of the government. This time, it is short of due plus, taking fetus simply as a part of body, and failing to use this chance to negotiate procedures to protect women with the fetus from harm of patriarchy.
Contrarily, we believe compulsory pre-abortion consultation is not a bad idea, but it should be extended to include the male partners in the consultation process. Otherwise, a man can leave the decision to abort and to take contraceptive devices entirely to women without even thinking of his responsibility. This makes men more easily subject to the deep-seated mechanism of inhibition, and take abortion as killing a different “other,” since the embryo is not related to him as a part of body as to the mother. Eva Pattis Zoja, the Jungian analyst, mentions particularly how the different bodily experience might seriously impact the different attitude of life and death issues: “Feminine consciousness is prone to experience life as a cycle in which birth and death ceaselessly gives way to, and flow into, one another; Masculine consciousness is marked by a linear concept of time as having a beginning and an end, and death as something definitive.”24
Besides, according to one clinical interview study of the experience accompanying their partners to the clinics, abortion would be experienced as a facilitator or a derailleur, to influence the development of fatherliness and parenthood.
“The event of a pregnancy stimulated fantasies of being a father in which comparisons with one’s own father, as well as with one’s ego ideal of fatherhood, were implicit. These involved consideration of capacities as a caretaker and provide in the narrow sense of pleasure in relating to others in a nurturant fashion and effectively managing one’s own affairs.” 25
24 Eva Pattis Zoja, Abortion: Loss and Renewal in the Search for Identity, (London: Routledge, 1997), P 133 25 Arden Rothstein, “Male Experience of Elective Abortion: Psychoanalytic If our moral model keeps take men’s bodily experience as the prototype, without making them share the women’s experience and imagination of abortion to some extent, how can our bioethics be gender-friendly? How can we dismantle the cultural mechanism of masculinity, as well as the ideal values of family?
We may not like this minus-plus-balance reasoning. It seems too uncertain, too compromising, and too situational. But before a more suitable, more appropriate model or metaphor of mother-fetus relationship occurs to us, we can learn to like it, or lump it. But I sincerely doubt there is any ‘once for all’ model existing.
II. Moral Law Folk Theory Moral Law Folk Theory regards moral reasoning as accounting, consisting entirely of the bringing of concrete cases under moral laws or rules that specify ‘the right thing to do’ in a given context. It requires at least three things: 1) one and only one correct conceptualization of the situation; 2) moral laws are stated in literal concepts with univocal meanings; 3) with the set of necessary and sufficient conditions of concepts, moral laws can decisively apply to the situation in doubt. This characterization of moral reasoning underlines unreflectively certain assumptions of our sense of morality, which is premised on, as Mark Johnson said, “bad psychology, bad metaphysics, bad epistemology, and bad theories of language.”
It is “bad metaphysics,” because moral law folk theory assumes a spilt self, taking the human being as a metaphysically bifurcated creature of mind and body, values mind more precious than body, and blames all the moral wrongs on the sinful instincts of the body. “Bad psychology” then discriminates reason as the only one against all the other capacities of mind, that is able to keep distance from the contamination of body, and formulates principles actively not passively out of the universal, essential, disembodied pure moral laws from within. Combined with radical freedom, now we can define ourselves as beings of autonomy, being able to exert force over our bodily actions under the constraint of universal law.
Given that universal laws already exist, how can we apply it to the concrete situations? Here come “bad epistemology” and “bad theories of language”. We used to believe that things have essence to distinguish one from the other, and we are able to conceptualize them objectively by seeking the proper set of the sufficient and
Perspectvies”, Psychiatric Aspects of Abortion, ed. by Nada L. Stotland, (London: American Psychiatric Press, 1991), P 150 necessary conditions of things. There is no room for conceptual indeterminacy, no room for imaginative reasoning, but only one true theory.
This set of beliefs has been outdated by cognitive science. It is proved that our moral concepts do not have the essentialist structure, but prototypical structure in order to expand them to fit new cases. These concepts get their meaning not directly from the laws, but also relative to larger frame or schemas, that are the ideal models and framework structured by systematic metaphorical mappings, via mappings from domains of concrete bodily experience to get the hold of abstract less-structured domains of mentality. But not all the bodily experiences are as important as the others; some will achieve priority in our conceptual system, some not. It depends on how basic the bodily experience are and how important role it play in the cultured narratives.
No doubt, these empirical findings of cognitive science certainly turn our thinking of morality upside down. That may not means that we can once for all abandon the moral law folk theory entirely, but certainly should we try to interpret the concepts or ideals of it in accordance with a more practical, more evolutionary view of morality. Put it in another way, we need to have a new moral philosophy, reflectively imaging morality more like art, rather than accounting, in need of perceptivenss, creativity, expressiveness, skill, response of others. Fortunately we might form new questions, open to virtues or values that were previously hidden or relegated.
As a consequence of that, in place of the problematic metaphysical notion of “split self,” there is the concept of “relational self,” whose identity is shaped by the re- definition of ongoing relationship with others. Following that is the “relational autonomy,” in need of reciprocal and collaborative activities, instead of “autonomy of reason.” The so called “moral laws” now are best understood as reminders of our moral shared experience as a community, or metaphorically speaking, “capsule summaries” of the collective moral wisdom. The basis of moral objectivity is not in pure reason, but upon the “transperspectivity” of an ongoing process that makes us able to live with harmony, to have our values, ideals and principles constantly scrutinized.
Let us turn to abortion as an example to see what kind of impact this new moral philosophy might have upon us. Sticking to the notion of “split self” and “pure reason,” traditional ethics won’t take birth as a feature of much importance. The only thing that matters is the intrinsic properties of the fetus, being sentient or self- awareness, etc. According to most common sense, there is difference between abortion and infanticide. What birth marks is a separate body, therefore, a set of separate interests. The mother-child relationship can now really be viewed as two entities, not “not two but not one” anymore. This bodily experience causes our perception to change, as do our moral deliberations. Just like how the legal age limits our sanctions, but at a different level. With evolutionary morality, we may now decide to extend some legal protection to the fetus, but it should never be equal to or overridden the women’s legal rights. To use Mary Ann Warren’s word, “There is room for only one person with full and equal rights inside a single human skin.” 26
In placing the abortion issue in a broader context, it may even bring a change of traditional family values. As George Lakoff points out, there is more than one model of traditional family values. The fatal weakness of the liberal’s argument is disregard of its own family-based morality, then failing to underline a unified moral picture with a set of moral values like what the conservative often do. In contrast to “the Strict Father Model” of the conservative, it is “the Nurturant Parent Model,” of which the primal experience of family is being cared for and cared about, and of which the values, such as empathy, nurturance, shaped the pursuit of self-interest. Applying this to the political field, abortion would not be viewed as fault against morality of “unmarried teenagers, whose pregnancy have resulted from lust and careless, and women who want to delay conception for the sake of a career but have accidentally conceived,” but a part of governmental nurturance for “women who want to take control of their lives or teenagers needing help.”27
Conclusion: A Proposal for Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Debate of Abortion in Taiwan In Taiwan, a quite communitarian-oriented society, the debate of abortion has been taking the wrong track of “pro-choice vs. pro-life” from the very beginning. However, its wrongness is not so much about whether the mother should be granted the reproductive rights to have an abortion like in the western individualistic liberal society. The fatal effect of this approach of the human rights theory adopted by both camps is its failure in setting up the proper theoretical framework of the debate, highlighting the metaphorical imaginative dimensions of moral deliberations, therefore, unreflectively letting the mentality of moral law folk theory creep into the
26 Mary Anne Warren, “The Moral Significance of Birth”, Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, ed. by Helen Bequaert Holmes & Laura M. Purdy, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.213 27 George Lakoff, “Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, or Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals in the Dust”, Social Research, Summer 95, vol. 62, Issue 2. core of the controversies.
The point is not to entirely throw out or turn our back on the language of rights, one of the still leading moral theories in our era, while dealing with the abortion issue, but rather to call for a reconfiguration of rights theory, and to de-construct and reconstruct the debate of abortion. But it is not easy for us to get away from the mess centering around the notion of personhood, partly because of the sweeping-for-all tendency of the western moral theories and moral philosophy, partly resulting in the deep-seated unconscious mentality of moral law folk theory within our own cultural traditions.
However, since the thorough survey of the arguments from the anti-abortionists shows us no decisive proof of the fetus as a person, of the mother-fetus relationship as two separate entities, of the “must” for women’s rights giving away to the protection of the fetus, we may now confidently move to the next stage to erect new model of family values, and new paradigm of moral deliberation. References
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