John Altmann

11/30/15

The Argument of Indeterminacy

In the wake of the recent Colorado shooting targeting a Planned Parenthood facility that

saw the shooter kill three people and wound nine, I wish to take up in this brief essay the issue of

abortion because the attack was politically motivated given that the shooter was quoted as telling

the officer who brought him into custody: "No more baby parts." This essay will deal with a line

of argumentation that goes against all prior thought (or at least it does to my knowledge), and

may indeed go against the very essence of human decency and compassion depending on your

vantage point. That line of argumentation being that killing a fetus is an amoral act, because the

fetus itself is an amoral entity. I am calling this argument the argument of indeterminacy I chose

to frame the discussion around morality, because the shooter's actions, the extremist right wing

who celebrated the shooter, and the conservative media that created the climate for this act, have

all committed in their own ways a moral condemnation of women who choose to have abortions.

I hope the following essay will be a sound rebuke of said condemnation.

To begin, we must first determine the conditions by which one may be rightly classified

as a moral agent. In my view, the initial point of departure that I believe everyone can agree on is

that one cannot be a moral agent unless one has agency. After all, consequences only arise from

the actions that precede them and one cannot act without at least a modicum of agency.

However, agency alone is insufficient for one to be categorized as a moral agent, for animals

possess agency and we do not ascribe to them the status of being moral agents. So to be a moral

agent one also needs sophisticated cognitive faculties. Such faculties allow a given agent to

weigh all of their possible actions in a given situation and render a decision based on a particular

set of consequences. To put it succinctly, when an agent has matured cognitive function, they can

differentiate between right and wrong to best of their personal abilities.

So from the preceding paragraph we can see that a moral agent is someone both with

sufficient agency coupled with sufficient cognitive capability. From this we can already see why

I have determined the fetus to be an amoral entity. There are those of the pro-life persuasion that

believe, quite wrongly in my view, that a fetus is a person and this personhood gives the fetus an

inherent value. Even if we were to grant them this argument, the value of being a person is

isolated from one's moral value. To illustrate, one need not look further than the most commonly

cited example of the embodiment of evil known as Adolph Hitler. Hitler was a person and more

significantly, Hitler was a moral agent. If we were to judge him by the former characterization he

would have value and his life would be worthy of preservation. Judging him by the latter

characterization, which most people do, we are quick to render judgment upon him as a stain

upon the world in need of extermination. So much so, that recently a question was posed to

people of whether or not they would go back in time to kill baby Hitler which saw Jeb Bush

answer resoundingly that yes, he would absolutely do it.

If moral value takes priority over personhood, we can see that the main thesis of this

paper being that the fetus is an amoral entity and thus aborting it is an amoral act, still carries

weight. Now I want to address the most glaring objection before I proceed any further. That

objection being that the termination of a fetus can be either affirmed as a moral act or

condemned as an immoral one because the women partaking in the abortion are moral agents per

the criteria put forth in this essay. To which I respond with the question of what exactly is the

woman killing? For unless you are a strict Kantian, and find murder to be an absolute immoral

act per his Categorical Imperative, we as a civilized society judge the act of killing in a more

nuanced way. If someone breaks into a house and shoots two children and then gets shot and

killed themselves by the mother, we conclude that she was acting in self-defense and in the

interest of her family. Conversely, when someone shoots up a school and kills innocent children

and teachers in a massacre, our blood goes cold and we cry out collectively that the shooter is a

monster. The fetus fits into neither of these categories because it hasn't exerted its agency in one

direction or another which, as I have said previously, is precisely because they possess no agency

at all. Thus, the moral nature of the fetus is indeterminate and because of this, we have no choice

but to categorize it as an amoral entity.

This brings me to the final crucial point I wish to make. If the fetus is to be considered an

amoral entity, then how are we to perceive the act of abortion? Well as I said in the introductory

paragraph, I perceive abortion to be an amoral act. To be more specific however, I consider the

act of abortion in part, to be a form of alleviation or remedy for a woman's body that she has

determined herself to be in need of.1 Consider when someone is experiencing pain. In a

materialist sense, the pain could be articulated as a sensory neuron sending a signal to the brain.

Like the fetus, the sensory neuron is a both a part of the person internally and is of an amoral

nature. Our inclination when confronting pain is to ease it however possible, to stop these

neurons from firing. Now no one would sensibly take up a qualm with the afflicted for

1 The use of the term pain when asserting that getting an abortion is akin to alleviating pain has a very broad context. The pain could be psychological if the pregnancy resulted from a rape, it could be physical if there are complications with the pregnancy, or it could be emotional if the woman is in a socio-economic circumstance where she could not meet the child’s standard of living or where they would be provided a poor quality of life. These are just a few of the many types of pain a pregnant woman may experience.

preventing the sensory neurons from firing, for these neurons are an amoral entity. Even if

someone were to retort that a sensory neuron isn't a person unlike a fetus, we have already seen

through the aforementioned example of people's willingness to go back in time and kill baby

Hitler, that moral value supersedes personhood.

In summation, abortion is an amoral practice because it deals with the termination of an

amoral entity. To be a moral agent one must possess both sufficient agency and sophisticated

cognitive faculties which I have shown a fetus lacks. If one were to try and make an argument

that the fetus should have recognition as a person, I have shown through the hypothetical of

going back in time to kill baby Hitler that moral value even if not immediately realized, is

prioritized over the baby's value as a person. Therefore following this line of argument, we

should reclassify abortion along the same lines of other amoral acts pertaining to one's biology

such as alleviating back pain. The persecution and condemnation of women who opt for

abortions is highly illogical for the reasons outlined in this essay and well beyond it. The fetus is

nothing more than an indeterminate lump of clay from a moral standpoint. It is neither good nor

evil, for it possesses no morality at all and thus, its termination should not be met with any

judgment. The domestic terrorist who perpetrated this atrocity? That is a whole other matter

entirely.