The abortion debate is characteristically discussed in terms of either a broadly Kantian framework of rights or a broadly utilitarian framework of maximization of happiness, so Alasdair MacIntyre’s rejection of both approaches may cast new light on the ethics of abortion.
MacIntyre rejects arguments from the “right to life.” But he also rejects arguments for a “right to reproductive autonomy.” He rejects both for the same reason. In his words, “There are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.” Although the debate about abortion is often carried out in the language of rights, MacIntyre rejects a rights-based approach.
Likewise, MacIntyre repudiates a utilitarian framework because he thinks that the “notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that.”
So, how does the author of After Virtue lead us to think about abortion? The answer begins with an understanding of what it means to be human. In After Virtue, and to an even greater extent in Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, MacIntyre emphasized the embodied, the vulnerable, and the dependent nature of all members of our species. He rejects the paradigm vision of a human being found in many Enlightenment philosophers: a full-grown, intellectually self-aware, autonomous (male) adult. The radical vulnerability and dependence of human beings at the beginning of life is just one end along the continuum of vulnerability and dependence that characterizes all human beings. To be dependent, whether as a radically disabled geriatric or the nearly dead victim of a car accident, does not alter the animal identity of the individual in question. Indeed, we all exist at some point along the continuum of dependence and vulnerability. We all began our existence as radically dependent, and many of us will return to radical dependency because of old age, disease, or injury.
The helpless provide opportunities for the growth and development of the community and teach us lessons that we might otherwise not learn about our own inherent vulnerability.
Nor should vulnerability, dependence, or disability remove a human being from the community of human concern. On the contrary, the more helpless a fellow human being is, the more that human being deserves our help. MacIntyre notes:
Those who benefit from that communal flourishing will include those least capable of independent practical reasoning, the very young and the very old, the sick, the injured, and the otherwise disabled, and their individual flourishing will be an important index of the flourishing of the whole community. For it is insofar as it is need that provides reasons for action for the members of some particular community that that community flourishes.
The disabled, the sick, the very young, the very old, and victims of accidents and diseases are not impediments to the well-being of the community but rather part of the community. The helpless provide opportunities for the growth and development of the community and teach us lessons that we might otherwise not learn about our own inherent vulnerability. MacIntyre holds that all human beings, including the disabled, the very old, and the very young, should be included in the moral community. MacIntyre is a critic of the ethics of exclusivity, which divide the human family into those like us, who deserve justice, and those unlike us, who fall outside the scope of virtuous treatment.
Moreover, MacIntyre thinks that all human beings exist embedded in human kinship relationships, acknowledged or unacknowledged. These relationships are sometimes chosen, as in marriage, but sometimes given. The individualist self-conception is a fiction. No human being emerges fully grown and autonomous like Athena from the head of Zeus. We come into existence embedded in relationships with a biological father and biological mother. As members of families, larger social groups, and nations, our debts, inheritances, rightful expectations, and obligations are the starting points of our life.
The moral particularity of individual life is given by the particularity and interrelatedness of each individual human to many other persons in the family, in the local community, and in the wider community. Human beings are socially embedded and interdependent. Thus, the story of the isolated individual who “pulled himself up by his bootstraps” is a fable that reinforces Enlightenment myths of what it means to be human.
Moreover, according to MacIntyre, we are not intellects housed in human organisms. Unlike Platonic and Cartesian accounts, “for the Aristotelian, the body and the soul are not two linked substances. I am my body and my body is social, born to those parents in this community with a specific social identity.” Later, in Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre emphasizes the commonality of the human animal and the nonhuman animal. He writes:
Both dolphins and humans have animal identities and animal histories. Human beings are able on occasion to ignore or to conceal from themselves this fact, perhaps by thinking of themselves instead as Lockean persons or Cartesian minds or even as Platonic souls.
MacIntyre highlights the animal identity of the human being from conception to death because from conception to death there is a living organism, an organism of the human species.
As far as I can determine, having searched his works electronically, there is only one place in print where MacIntyre explicitly addresses the ethics of abortion. In his essay “From Answers to Questions: A Response to the Responses,” MacIntyre writes:
As children and adolescents become more and more independent within the family by whom they have been brought up, they generally recognize—to greater or lesser degree—that they owe their increasing independence to those elders, especially their parents, who took responsibility for them when they were wholly dependent. The wrong of infanticide by parents or other family members is not only that it is the taking of an innocent human life, but that those parents and family members have a special responsibility for caring for this particular human individual and ensuring that she or he is able to develop from total dependence to adult independence, just as they have done. This responsibility to care and protect falls especially on the parents. If they cannot discharge it, as might be the case with a too young unmarried mother deserted by the child’s father, then someone must be found who will care for and protect the child. So infanticide is a violation of this duty to care for and protect. But the infant three months after birth is the same human individual as the embryo three or six or eight months before birth. So that the very same duty is violated by an abortion.
This passage invokes the special responsibility—sometimes called misericordia—to care for dependent and vulnerable humans and the virtues of parenthood for those who have brought humans into existence.
All people of good will are called to exercise the virtues needed to help vulnerable human beings in their need.
How would MacIntyre respond to arguments for abortion from bodily autonomy and free choice? I think he would say that an ethics centered on autonomy rearticulates the myth of radical individualism and fails to adequately acknowledge that all human beings are dependent and interdependent rational animals. Our relationships and our responsibilities are not created only by our free choice. MacIntyre wrote, “For if my own choice is all that is authoritative, I am in the end playing an arbitrary self-enclosed game, a variety of spiritual patience in which if the cards will not come out the first time, I can, if I choose, allow myself a indefinitely large number of reshufflings.” In fact, our ethical responsibilities are in part given by our unchosen histories, relationships, and communities.
In his prepared remarks in his lecture “Catholic Instead of What?”, MacIntyre grounds prenatal justice in the nature of the developing human being:
To whom do we owe justice? Catholics rightly affirm that we owe it to the unborn child, asserting an identity of that child with a child after birth. The child grows up. But if so, we owe it to the child throughout its life, the child with an animal and more than animal identity. We are then committed to a strong metaphysical conception of human identity, of what this child is and has it in her or him by reason of her or his nature to become. What we owe to each child in justice are the resources that will enable this child to become what she or he has it in her or him to become. The agents who primarily owe this child justice are its parents and later its teachers.
Parents have the primary responsibility to care for their children and provide for their flourishing, but others, like teachers, play an important role. Moreover, in a secondary way, all virtuous people also share in the duty to help young human beings develop from total dependence to adult independence. All people of good will are called to exercise the virtues needed to help vulnerable human beings in their need.
We can summarize MacIntyre’s argument. He grounds his view not on Kantian rights nor on utilitarian maximization but on what it means to be human. We are all dependent, vulnerable, and interrelated rational animals. We begin our existence embedded in human relationships, and we remain embedded in human relationships until we die. The human newborn and the human being prior to birth are also dependent, vulnerable, and interrelated rational animals. They are part of our community, differing from us only in degree of dependence, vulnerability, and temporary need. Our own good is constituted by networks of giving and receiving. These networks of giving and receiving require and are constituted by the exercise of virtues, including the virtue of misericordia, the virtue of justice, and the virtues of parenthood. On MacIntyre’s view, abortion is contrary to three different virtues, any one of which is sufficient to show that abortion is an act contrary to virtue.