Today's post concerns an article entitled "Concern for Our Vulnerable Prenatal and Neonatal Children: A Brief Reply to Giubilini and Minerva" penned by Charles Camosy, a theology professor at Fordham University.  Though his objections to after-birth abortion are religious in nature, his evaluation of after-birth abortion arguments do shed light on libertarian views of abortion, whether prenatal or antenatal.  Here we go.

The following statement in the essay is the most interesting for a libertarian bioethicist: "Human persons remain kinds of things that subsist over time whether (1) we are currently expressing specific traits like rationality or self-awareness, or (2) those traits are currently unexpressed or frustrated as a result of disease, immaturity, intoxication, unconsciousness, brain injury, and so on."  This view is very similar to the libertarian view I have expressed several times via this blog, specifically that personhood accrues when an organism (human or otherwise) develops the minimum equipment (biological or otherwise) necessary to engage in propositional logic whether or not this equipment is ever employed.  A point of disagreement would be that Professor Camosy asserts that his definition is equivalent to a species definition of personhood activated when a sperm fertilizes an egg.  I assert that the species definition of personhood is problematic for several reasons, including the incorporation of potential persons as persons (i.e. fertilized eggs) and anencephalic fetuses as persons.  Apparently he discusses his ideas in more detail in his book, which I need to read, entitled Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization.

To interrupt the flow of this article, I must note the following fascinating fact, which I learned from reading this essay: "Pigs have very sophisticated mental lives, and have even been taught to play video games."  Who knew?  The author pulled this fact from the PETA website.  

Professor Camosy also evaluates the logic of the pro-abortion argument extended to the infant, confirming that, if a person is not a person until certain capacities of personhood are expressed, then "those holding Giubilini and Minerva's position on child-killing would be forced to defend the practice well into the second or even third year of life, depending on how one defined rationality and self-awareness."  Unfortunately, this could also be the result if one follows the logic of my libertarian personhood principle, if scientists ultimately determine that humans do not develop the minimum equipment (biological or otherwise) necessary to engage in propositional logic until the 2nd or 3rd year of life.  I hope this is not the case, but one never knows until the facts are in.

This brings me to the final paragraph of this post.  Should we as libertarians care about the science of this issue?  It strikes me that evaluation of the science to determine a position on abortion/infanticide may not be appropriate due to the Humean "is-ought" problem.  In that scenario we still need a coherent, consistent "ought" argument that proceeds, via deductive logic, from a principle that originates as closely as possible to the root of this controversy.  The LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger shall continue to ponder on this issue.  

One of the most controversial bioethics articles ever conceived was recently published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.  The authors were Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.  The paper was entitled "After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live".

After article publication, apparently the authors and the journal editors received voluminous amounts of correspondence, many containing death threats.

In the article the authors argue that, "when the same conditions that would have justified abortion become known after birth", "after-birth abortion should be considered a permissible option for women".  They distinguish after-birth abortion from infanticide "to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which 'abortions' in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child."  It is not hard to understand why this paper provoked vitriolic reactions.

The LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger experiences a mixed emotional reaction to this paper.  Personally I find the concept of after-birth abortion/infanticide) morally repugnant.  Philosophically, however, I find the concept of after-birth abortion/infanticide potentially viable.  I shall (and should) explain.  My current libertarian principle of personhood is the following: any organism with the minimum amount of mental equipment (biological or otherwise) necessary to engage in propositional logic (i.e. reason) is a person whether or not the equipment is ever employed.  This principle may or may not conflict with the after-birth abortion/infanticide idea.  If humans develop the minimum amount of mental equipment necessary to engage in propositional logic whether or not it is every employed prior to birth, then after-birth abortion/infanticide is a crime.  If humans do not develop the minimum amount of mental equipment necessary to engage in propositional logic until at some point in time after birth, then after-birth abortion/infanticide is justifiable (at least until the newborn develops the minimum amount of mental equipment necessary to engage in propositional logic whether or not it is ever employed).  The current state of science does not provide us this answer.  My best guess, however, is that future scientific discoveries will demonstrate that a human fetus develops the minimum amount of mental equipment necessary to engage in propositional logic regardless of whether it is ever employed at some point in time during the 3rd trimester of pregnancy.  But I could be wrong.

Good points of the article include the fact that it stimulated a large volume of philosophical discussion and skewered the potential person argument unfortunately utilized by Rothbard.  

A bad point of the article was the authors's definition of personhood which was the following: "an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her."

The second section of Lauren Hall's "A Classical-Liberal Response to the Crisis of Bioethics" article is entitled "The Crisis of Bioethics".  The author divides the bioethics crisis into 4 components: purpose, principles, expectations, and authority.  For each crisis component she details her concerns.

Regarding the bioethics crisis of purpose, Hall suggests a reasonable purpose, reports that others have promoted multiple conflicting purposes, and notes the schism between mainstream bioethics and conservative bioethics.  

Regarding the bioethics crisis of principles, Hall argues that the standard principles that have been used (such as autonomy, beneficence, and nonmaleficence) are vague and, therefore, essentially useless.

Regarding the bioethics crisis of expectations, Hall claims that low expectations are more realistic than high expectations for all forms of ethical analysis.

Regarding the bioethics crisis of authority, Hall reports that, currently, multiple parties responsible for decision-making means no parties are responsible for decision-making.

What is the LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger's reaction to this section of Hall's article?  He believes the schism between mainstream bioethics and conservative bioethics is another reason to create a libertarian bioethics, the standard bioethics principles are vague and ill-defined, low expectations are appropriate for non-libertarian bioethics, and libertarian bioethics can clearly define the appropriate person or persons responsible for medical decision-making.  Yes, libertarian bioethics is ambitious.

Chapter 6 of Beauchamp and Childress's Sixth Edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics is entitled "Beneficence".  The LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger could post many, many, many blogs regarding the information in this chapter.  Frustration is the key emotion for a libertarian reading this chapter.

Due to time/life constraints I shall list rather than analyze the annoying portions of this chapter: the concept of obligatory beneficence, obligation to rescue even if one is not causally responsible for the life-threatening danger to the victim, endorsement of various versions of soft and hard paternalism, a discussion of antipaternalism does not mention libertarians, justification of various versions of paternalism based on the concept that many decisions made by people are not substantially autonomous and thereby rights are not violated, support for the FDA, generally positive discussion of the "precautionary principle", and the complete lack of understanding that all value is subjective and thus cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and risk-benefit analysis (RBA) and quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and health-adjusted life-years (HALYs) are economically unjustifiable.

I may spend the rest of my life refuting many of the arguments presented in this chapter.

The LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger originally commented on "animal rights" in an 04/21/13 post.  In that post I used a Carl Cohen anti-animal rights article in NEJM broach the subject.  Today I read a Roger Scruton article titled "Animal Rights" in the Summer 2000 edition of City Journal, which prompted me to post this blog.

Roger Scruton is a conservative English philosopher.  He opposes animal rights because the "concepts of right, duty, justice, ..., responsibility, and so on have a sense for us largely because we deploy them in our negotiations and can invoke by their means the ground rules of ... social life, but which we can only use when dealing with others who also use them."  Thus, he believes rights only apply to organisms that discuss rights, which is effectively equivalent to the argument that morality only applies to organisms that discuss morality.  Scruton does not address the marginal-humans argument in this essay, but does excoriate Peter Singer, a notorious proponent of that argument; he also mocks Richard Dawkins and the animal-rights movement for "anthropomorphic and magical ways of thinking that science is supposed to dispel."  This latter point is so obvious that, when I have mentioned it to acquaintances interested in the philosophy of "animal rights", several have gasped with astonishment that this concept had never occurred to them.

My current position is that an organism has rights when that organism has developed the minimum biological equipment necessary to engage in propositional logic (i.e. reason), regardless if the organism is currently utilizing propositional logic.  The second half of the definition solves the marginal-humans problem for immature and impaired humans.  At this time, homo sapiens is the only species with rights.