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Rosalind Hursthouse –
Virtue Theory and Abortion
The following is an excerpt of Rosalind Hursthouse’s “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” originally published in 1991 in Volume 20 of Philosophy & Public Affairs.
Guiding Questions:
1. What is the major criticism of virtue ethics that Hursthouse identifies? How does Hursthouse defend _virtue ethics from this criticism?
- What features do you think an adequate normative_ theory should have? Does virtue ethics have these _features?
- How does Hursthouse apply virtue ethics to abortion?_ Do you find her analysis convincing? Would you apply _virtue ethics to abortion differently?
- What might a utilitarian, a Mohist, a deontologist, a_ Confucian, or a social contract theorist say about abortion?
- Which moral theory provides the best or most illuminating normative guidance on abortion? Why?
(^1) Intimations of this criticism constantly come up in discussion; the clearest
statement of it I have found is by Onora O’Neill, in her review of Stephen
I want to articulate, and reject, what I take to be the major criticism of virtue theory. Perhaps because it is the major criticism, the reflection of a very general sort of disquiet about the theory, it is hard to state clearly—especially for someone who does not accept it—but it goes something like this.^1 My interlocutor says: Virtue theory can’t get us anywhere in real moral issues because it’s bound to be all assertion and no argument. You admit that the best it can come up with in the way of action-guiding rules are the ones that rely on the virtue and vice concepts, such as “act charitably,” “don’t act cruelly,” and so on; and, as if that weren’t bad enough, you admit that these virtue concepts, such as charity, presuppose concepts such as the good , and the worthwhile , and so on. But that means that any virtue theorist who writes about real moral issues must rely on her audience’s agreeing with her application of all these concepts, and hence accepting all the premises in which those applications are enshrined. But some other virtue theorist might take different premises about these matters, and come up with very different conclusions, and, within the terms of the theory, there is no way to distinguish between the two. While there is agreement, virtue theory can repeat conventional wisdom, preserve the status quo, but it can’t get us anywhere in the way that a normative ethical theory is supposed to, namely, by providing rational grounds for acceptance of its practical conclusions.
Clark’s The Moral Status of Animals , in Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 440-46. For a response I am much in sympathy with, see Cora Diamond, “Anything But Argument?” Philosophical Investigations 5 (1982): 23-41.
My strategy will be to split this criticism into two: one… addressed to the virtue theorist’s employment of the virtue and vice concepts enshrined in her rules—act charitably, honestly, and so on—and the other… addressed to her employment of concepts such as that of the worthwhile. Each objection, I shall maintain, implicitly appeals to a certain condition of adequacy on a normative moral theory, and in each case, I shall claim, the condition of adequacy, once made explicit, is utterly implausible.
It is true that when she discusses real moral issues, the virtue theorist has to assert that certain actions are honest, dishonest, or neither; charitable, uncharitable, or neither. And it is true that this is often a very difficult matter to decide; her rules are not always easy to apply. But this counts as a criticism of the theory only if we assume, as a condition of adequacy, that any adequate action-guiding theory must make the difficult business of knowing what to do if one is to act well easy, that it must provide clear guidance about what ought and ought not to be done which any reasonably clever adolescent could follow if she chose. But such a condition of adequacy is implausible. Acting rightly is difficult, and does call for much moral wisdom, and the relevant condition of adequacy, which virtue theory meets, is that it should have built into it an explanation of a truth expressed by Aristotle,^2 namely, that moral knowledge—unlike mathematical knowledge—cannot be acquired merely by attending lectures and is not characteristically to be found in people too young to have had much experience of life. There are youthful mathematical geniuses, but rarely, if ever, youthful moral geniuses, and this tells us something significant about the sort of knowledge that moral knowledge is. Virtue ethics builds this
(^2) Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1142a12-16.
in straight off precisely by couching its rules in terms whose application may indeed call for the most delicate and sensitive judgment. Here we may discern a slightly different version of the problem that there are cases in which applying the virtue and vice terms does not yield an answer to “What should I do?” Suppose someone “youthful in character,” as Aristotle puts it, having applied the relevant terms, finds herself landed with what is, unbeknownst to her, a case not of real but of apparent conflict, arising from a misapplication of those terms. Then she will not be able to decide what to do unless she knows of a virtuous agent to look to for guidance. But her quandary is ( ex hypothesi ) the result of her lack of wisdom, and just what virtue theory expects. Someone hesitating over whether to reveal a hurtful truth, for example, thinking it would be kind but dishonest or unjust to lie, may need to realize, with respect to these particular circumstances, not that kindness is more (or less) important than honesty or justice, and not that honesty or justice sometimes requires one to act unkindly or cruelly, but that one does people no kindness by concealing this sort of truth from them, hurtful as it may be. This is the type of thing (I use it only as an example) that people with moral wisdom know about, involving the correct application of kind , and that people without such wisdom find difficult. What about the virtue theorist’s reliance on concepts such as that of the worthwhile? If such reliance is to count as a fault in the theory, what condition of adequacy is implicitly in play? It must be that any good normative theory should provide answers to questions about real moral issues whose truth is in no way determined by truths about what is worthwhile, or what really matters in human life. Now although people are initially
Abortion As everyone knows, the morality of abortion is commonly discussed in relation to just two considerations: first, and predominantly, the status of the fetus and whether or not it is the sort of thing that may or may not be innocuously or justifiably killed; and second, and less predominantly (when, that is, the discussion concerns the morality of abortion rather than the question of permissible legislation in a just society), women’s rights. If one thinks within this familiar framework, one may well be puzzled about what virtue theory, as such, could contribute. Some people assume the discussion will be conducted solely in terms of what the virtuous agent would or would not do… Others assume that only justice, or at most justice and charity,^3 will be applied to the issue…
Now if this is the way the virtue theorist’s discussion of abortion is imagined to be, no wonder people think little of it. It seems obvious in advance that in any such discussion there must be either a great deal of extremely tendentious application of the virtue terms just , charitable , and so on or a lot of rhetorical appeal to “this is what only the virtuous agent knows.” But these are caricatures; they fail to appreciate the way in which virtue theory quite transforms the discussion of abortion by dismissing the two familiar dominating considerations as, in a way, fundamentally irrelevant. In what way or ways, I hope to make both clear and plausible.
(^3) It seems likely that some people have been misled by Foot’s discussion of
euthanasia (through no fault of hers) into thinking that a virtue theorist’s discussion of terminating human life will be conducted exclusively in terms of justice and charity (and the corresponding vice terms) (Philippa Foot, “Euthanasia,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 6, no. 2 [Winter 1977]: 85-112). But the act-category euthanasia is a very special one, at least as defined in her article, since such an act must be done “for the sake of the one who is to
Let us first consider women’s rights. Let me emphasize again that we are discussing the morality of abortion, not the rights and wrongs of laws prohibiting or permitting it. If we suppose that women do have a moral right to do as they choose with their own bodies, or, more particularly, to terminate their pregnancies, then it may well follow that a law forbidding abortion would be unjust. Indeed, even if they have no such right, such a law might be, as things stand at the moment, unjust, or impractical, or inhumane: on this issue I have nothing to say in this article. But, putting all questions about the justice or injustice of laws to one side, and supposing only that women have such a moral right, nothing follows from this supposition about the morality of abortion, according to virtue theory, once it is noted (quite generally, not with particular reference to abortion) that in exercising a moral right I can do something cruel, or callous, or selfish, light-minded, self- righteous, stupid, inconsiderate, disloyal, dishonest—that is, act viciously.^4 Love and friendship do not survive their parties’ constantly insisting on their rights, nor do people live well when they think that getting what they have a right to is of preeminent importance; they harm others, and they harm themselves. So whether women have a moral right to terminate their pregnancies is irrelevant within virtue theory, for it is irrelevant to the question “In having an abortion in these circumstances, would the agent be acting virtuously or viciously or neither?”
die.” Building a virtuous motivation into the specification of the act in this way immediately rules out the application of many other vice terms. (^4) One possible qualification: if one ties the concept of justice very closely to rights, then if women do have a moral right to terminate their pregnancies it may follow that in doing so they do not act unjustly. (Cf. Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion.”) But it is debatable whether even that much follows.
What about the consideration of the status of the fetus—what can virtue theory say about that? One might say that this issue is not in the province of any moral theory; it is a metaphysical question, and an extremely difficult one at that. Must virtue theory then wait upon metaphysics to come up with the answer?
At first sight it might seem so. For virtue is said to involve knowledge, and part of this knowledge consists in having the right attitude to things. “Right” here does not just mean “morally right” or “proper” or “nice” in the modem sense; it means “accurate, true.” One cannot have the right or correct attitude to something if the attitude is based on or involves false beliefs. And this suggests that if the status of the fetus is relevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion, its status must be known, as a truth, to the fully wise and virtuous person.
But the sort of wisdom that the fully virtuous person has is not supposed to be recondite; it does not call for fancy philosophical sophistication, and it does not depend upon, let alone wait upon, the discoveries of academic philosophers.^5 And this entails the following, rather startling, conclusion: that the status of the fetus—that issue over which so much ink has been spilt—is, according to virtue theory, simply not relevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion (within, that is, a secular morality).
Or rather, since that is clearly too radical a conclusion, it is in a sense relevant, but only in the sense that the familiar
(^5) This is an assumption of virtue theory, and I do not attempt to defend it
here. An adequate discussion of it would require a separate article, since, although most moral philosophers would be chary of claiming that intellectual sophistication is a necessary condition of moral wisdom or
biological facts are relevant. By “the familiar biological facts” I mean the facts that most human societies are and have been familiar with—that, standardly (but not invariably), pregnancy occurs as the result of sexual intercourse, that it lasts about nine months, during which time the fetus grows and develops, that standardly it terminates in the birth of a living baby, and that this is how we all come to be. It might be thought that this distinction—between the familiar biological facts and the status of the fetus—is a distinction without a difference. But this is not so. To attach relevance to the status of the fetus, in the sense in which virtue theory claims it is not relevant, is to be gripped by the conviction that we must go beyond the familiar biological facts, deriving some sort of conclusion from them, such as that the fetus has rights, or is not a person, or something similar. It is also to believe that this exhausts the relevance of the familiar biological facts, that all they are relevant to is the status of the fetus and whether or not it is the sort of thing that may or may not be killed. These convictions, I suspect, are rooted in the desire to solve the problem of abortion by getting it to fall under some general rule such as “You ought not to kill anything with the right to life but may kill anything else.” But they have resulted in what should surely strike any nonphilosopher as a most bizarre aspect of nearly all the current philosophical literature on abortion, namely, that, far from treating abortion as a unique moral problem, markedly unlike any other, nearly everything
virtue, most of us, from Plato onward, tend to write as if this were so. Sorting out which claims about moral knowledge are committed to this kind of elitism and which can, albeit with difficulty, be reconciled with the idea that moral knowledge can be acquired by anyone who really wants it would be a major task.
deliberate abortion is just like an appendectomy or haircut rarely hold the same view of spontaneous abortion, that is, miscarriage. It is not so tendentious of me to claim that to react to people’s grief over miscarriage by saying, or even thinking, “What a fuss about nothing!” would be callous and light- minded, whereas to try to laugh someone out of grief over an appendectomy scar or a botched haircut would not be. It is hard to give this point due prominence within act-centered theories, for the inconsistency is an inconsistency in attitude about the seriousness of loss of life, not in beliefs about which acts are right or wrong. Moreover, an act-centered theorist may say, “Well, there is nothing wrong with thinking ‘What a fuss about nothing!’ as long as you do not say it and hurt the person who is grieving. And besides, we cannot be held responsible for our thoughts, only for the intentional actions they give rise to.” But the character traits that virtue theory emphasizes are not simply dispositions to intentional actions, but a seamless disposition to certain actions and passions, thoughts and reactions.
To say that the cutting off of a human life is always a matter of some seriousness, at any stage, is not to deny the relevance of gradual fetal development. Notwithstanding the well-worn point that clear boundary lines cannot be drawn, our emotions and attitudes regarding the fetus do change as it develops, and again when it is born, and indeed further as the baby grows. Abortion for shallow reasons in the later stages is much more shocking than abortion for the same reasons in the early stages in a way that matches the fact that deep grief over miscarriage in the later stages is more appropriate than it is over miscarriage in the earlier stages (when, that is, the grief is solely about the loss of this child, not about, as might be the case, the loss of one’s only hope of having a child or of having one’s husband’s child). Imagine (or recall) a woman who already has children; she had not intended to have more, but
finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. Though contrary to her plans, the pregnancy, once established as a fact, is welcomed— and then she loses the embryo almost immediately. If this were bemoaned as a tragedy, it would, I think, be a misapplication of the concept of what is tragic. But it may still properly be mourned as a loss. The grief is expressed in such terms as “I shall always wonder how she or he would have turned out” or “When I look at the others, I shall think, ‘How different their lives would have been if this other one had been part of them.’” It would, I take it, be callous and light-minded to say, or think, “Well, she has already got four children; what’s the problem?”; it would be neither, nor arrogantly intrusive in the case of a close friend, to try to correct prolonged mourning by saying, “I know it’s sad, but it’s not a tragedy; rejoice in the ones you have.” The application of tragic becomes more appropriate as the fetus grows, for the mere fact that one has lived with it for longer, conscious of its existence, makes a difference. To shrug off an early abortion is understandable just because it is very hard to be fully conscious of the fetus’s existence in the early stages and hence hard to appreciate that an early abortion is the destruction of life. It is particularly hard for the young and inexperienced to appreciate this, because appreciation of it usually comes only with experience. I do not mean “with the experience of having an abortion” (though that may be part of it) but, quite generally, “with the experience of life.” Many women who have borne children contrast their later pregnancies with their first successful one, saying that in the later ones they were conscious of a new life growing in them from very early on. And, more generally, as one reaches the age at which the next generation is coming up close behind one, the counterfactuals “If I, or she, had had an abortion, Alice, or Bob, would not have been born” acquire a significant application, which casts a
new light on the conditionals “If I or Alice have an abortion then some Caroline or Bill will not be born.”
The fact that pregnancy is not just one among many physical conditions does not mean that one can never regard it in that light without manifesting a vice. When women are in very poor physical health, or worn out from childbearing, or forced to do very physically demanding jobs, then they cannot be described as self-indulgent, callous, irresponsible, or light- minded if they seek abortions mainly with a view to avoiding pregnancy as the physical condition that it is. To go through with a pregnancy when one is utterly exhausted, or when one’s job consists of crawling along tunnels hauling coal, as many women in the nineteenth century were obliged to do, is perhaps heroic, but people who do not achieve heroism are not necessarily vicious. That they can view the pregnancy only as eight months of misery, followed by hours if not days of agony and exhaustion, and abortion only as the blessed escape from this prospect, is entirely understandable and does not manifest any lack of serious respect for human life or a shallow attitude to motherhood. What it does show is that something is terribly amiss in the conditions of their lives, which make it so hard to recognize pregnancy and childbearing as the good that they can be. […]
The foregoing discussion, insofar as it emphasizes the right attitude to human life and death, parallels to a certain extent those standard discussions of abortion that concentrate on it solely as an issue of killing. But it does not, as those discussions do, gloss over the fact, emphasized by those who discuss the morality of abortion in terms of women’s rights,
(^7) I take this as a premise here, but argue for it in some detail in my
Beginning Lives (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). In this connection I also
that abortion, wildly unlike any other form of killing, is the termination of a pregnancy, which is a condition of a woman’s body and results in her having a child if it is not aborted. This fact is given due recognition not by appeal to women’s rights but by emphasizing the relevance of the familiar biological and psychological facts and their connection with having the right attitude to parenthood and family relationships. But it may well be thought that failing to bring in women’s rights still leaves some important aspects of the problem of abortion untouched. Speaking in terms of women’s rights, people sometimes say things like, “Well, it’s her life you’re talking about too, you know; she’s got a right to her own life, her own happiness.” And the discussion stops there. But in the context of virtue theory, given that we are particularly concerned with what constitutes a good human life, with what true happiness or eudaimonia is, this is no place to stop. We go on to ask, “And is this life of hers a good one? Is she living well?” If we are to go on to talk about good human lives, in the context of abortion, we have to bring in our thoughts about the value of love and family life, and our proper emotional development through a natural life cycle. The familiar facts support the view that parenthood in general, and motherhood and childbearing in particular, are intrinsically worthwhile, are among the things that can be correctly thought to be partially constitutive of a flourishing human life.^7 If this is right, then a woman who opts for not being a mother (at all, or again, or now) by opting for abortion may thereby be manifesting a flawed grasp of what her life should be, and be about—a grasp
discuss adoption and the sense in which it may be regarded as “second best,” and the difficult question of whether the good of parenthood may properly be sought, or indeed bought, by surrogacy.
ground for guilt if getting into those circumstances in the first place itself manifested a flaw in character.
What “gets one into those circumstances” in the case of abortion is, except in the case of rape, one’s sexual activity and one’s choices, or the lack of them, about one’s sexual partner and about contraception. The virtuous woman (which here of course does not mean simply “chaste woman” but “woman with the virtues”) has such character traits as strength, independence, resoluteness, decisiveness, self-confidence, responsibility, serious-mindedness, and self-determination— and no one, I think, could deny that many women become pregnant in circumstances in which they cannot welcome or cannot face the thought of having this child precisely because they lack one or some of these character traits. So even in the cases where the decision to have an abortion is the right one, it can still be the reflection of a moral failing—not because the decision itself is weak or cowardly or irresolute or irresponsible or light-minded, but because lack of the requisite opposite of these failings landed one in the circumstances in the first place. Hence the common universalized claim that guilt and remorse are never appropriate emotions about an abortion is denied. They may be appropriate, and appropriately inculcated, even when the decision was the right one.
Another motivation for bringing women’s rights into the discussion may be to attempt to correct the implication, carried by the killing-centered approach, that insofar as abortion is wrong, it is a wrong that only women do, or at least (given the preponderance of male doctors) that only women instigate. I do not myself believe that we can thus escape the fact that nature bears harder on women than it does on men,^9 but virtue theory can certainly correct many of the injustices
(^9) I discuss this point at greater length in Beginning Lives.
that the emphasis on women’s rights is rightly concerned about. With very little amendment, everything that has been said above applies to boys and men too. Although the abortion decision is, in a natural sense, the woman’s decision, proper to her, boys and men are often party to it, for well or ill, and even when they are not, they are bound to have been party to the circumstances that brought it up. No less than girls and women, boys and men can, in their actions, manifest self-centeredness, callousness, and light-mindedness about life and parenthood in relation to abortion. They can be self-centered or courageous about the possibility of disability in their offspring; they need to reflect on their sexual activity and their choices, or the lack of them, about their sexual partner and contraception; they need to grow up and take responsibility for their own actions and life in relation to fatherhood. If it is true, as I maintain, that insofar as motherhood is intrinsically worthwhile, being a mother is an important purpose in women’s lives, being a father (rather than a mere generator) is an important purpose in men’s lives as well, and it is adolescent of men to turn a blind eye to this and pretend that they have many more important things to do.
