Why Inconsistency Arguments Matter

Abstract

Abortion opponents are sometimes accused of having inconsistent beliefs, actions, and/or priorities. If they were consistent, they would regard spontaneous abortions to be a greater moral tragedy, or they would adopt more frozen in vitro fertilization embryos, or they would support more robust social welfare programmes for children and single parents, or so on and so forth. Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rodger have recently argued that such inconsistency arguments ‘fail en masse.' They propose three main objections: The Diversity Objection, The Other Beliefs Objection, and The Other Actions Objection. This paper argues that they are incorrect. First, Colgrove et al.’s objections rely on misrepresentations of inconsistency arguments, their structure and the extent to which their proponents have addressed counterarguments to them. Second, none of their objections show that these arguments fail as a whole.

KEYWORDS:

• Inconsistency arguments
• abortion
• embryos
• fetuses
• in vitro fertilization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Murphy (1985), Ord (2008), Devolder (2015, 18), Berg (2017), and Simkulet (2017).

2 See Annas (1989), Sandel (2005), Steinbock (2007, 432), Devolder (2015, 18), and Shaw (forthcoming).

3 See Lovering (2020).

4 Colgrove et al. also propose a fourth objection, what can be called their Hypocrisy Objection, which holds that inconsistency arguments amount to argumentum ad hominem. For my purposes, however, I wish to ignore this objection as it is presented more as an addendum to the three main objections mentioned above.

5 For examples, see, again, Murphy (1985), Ord (2008), Devolder (2015, 18), Berg (2017), and Simkulet (2017).

6 See, respectively, Annas (1989), Sandel (2005), Steinbock (2007, 432), Devolder (2015, 18), Lovering (2020), and Shaw (forthcoming).

7 I hasten to add that some proponents of heartbeat bills do accept a full moral status view. An anonymous reviewer for this journal astutely points out that at least two major Texas pro-life organizations, Texas Right to Life and Texas Alliance for Life, support Texas’s recently passed heartbeat bill, Senate Bill 8, but indicate on their webpages that they endorse a full moral status view. My suggestion in the above paragraph is only that some proponents of heartbeat bills are not threatened by the usual varieties of inconsistency arguments because they do not necessarily accept a full moral status view.

8 Lovering makes a similar point. He discusses a married couple, the Sims, pro-life Evangelicals, who consider embryo adoption to be a morally obligatory ‘rescue operation’ and who have adopted IVF embryos (2020, p. 243). Lovering makes it clear that his argument does not apply to these OAs.

9 See Shaw (forthcoming), Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics) for an inconsistency argument that does not target a full moral status view but instead focuses on Francis Beckwith’s parental obligation objection to abortion.

10 For examples, see Murphy (1985), Ord (2008), Devolder (2015, 18), Berg (2017), and Simkulet (2017).

11 See Ord (2008), Berg (2017), and Simkulet (2017).

12 See Lovering (2020).

13 See Shaw (forthcoming, Social Theory and Practice).

14 See Annas (1989) and Sandel (2005).

15 See Stretton (2008).

16 See Cloud (2016), Jeffries (2016), Levinowitz (2017), and Schlumpf (2019).

17 See Bovens (2006).

18 The earliest example Colgrove et al. give is Murphy (1985). However, Murphy does not exactly view himself as arguing against abortion. Ord (2008) has some claim to be the first example of this type of argument. Somewhat controversially, then, I would suggest that relatively few pro-choice inconsistency arguments can be found prior to 2007/2008. However, pro-life inconsistency arguments were made with some frequency by Catholic bioethicists, who, following the Donum Vitae (1986), sought to explain how abortion opposition entailed (on pain of inconsistency) opposition to IVF, contraceptives, and, later, hESCR.

19 This point is illustrated, I find, by one the texts Colgrove et al.’s cite as an example of an inconsistency argument. They reference a 2004 quotation from Sister Joan Chittister in which she claims that pro-life abortion opponents are ‘morally inconsistent’ in not supporting more robust educational social welfare programs for children (Schlumpf). In the original interview from which this quote taken, however, Chittister flatly states that she is ‘opposed to abortion.’ Yet it seems wrongheaded to accuse Chittister, a Benedictine nun, of being oblivious to the fact that pro-life Catholics are not homogenous, monolithic group.

20 See Simkulet’s remarks on ‘fair-weather defenders of life’ in Simkulet (2021a) for an example of this type of argument.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Joshua Shaw

Joshua Shaw is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.