Rejecting the relevance of the distinction between short-term desires or needs and long-term goals

We should begin by rejecting the relevance of the distinction between short-term desires or needs and long-term goals. As any mother will attest, a newborn baby has many immediate desires he or she wants satisfied, such as the need to suckle the mother's breast. There is no genuine reason to believe that they should count any less than the longer-term goals of persons.

Philosophers have thought otherwise because they have been immediately struck by a consistency problem. If we allow the short-term desires of non-persons, such as a late-term fetus and a newborn, to have equal significance to the long-term aims of persons, then we must concede that it is also wrong to kill animals. Yet most meat-eaters are untroubled by the fact that animals have been killed to provide their food. If we react by claiming that the late-term fetus and newborn are different from animals, we are guilty of speciesism, which is as bad as racism. The only other option, it seems, is to give up killing animals. This is the primary consideration that drives Giubilini and Minerva, and the philosophers whose work has influenced them, to assert that we do no harm to a newborn if we kill it.ⁱ

The place of instinct and emotion in our moral framework

However, the analogy between speciesism and racism is faulty. It assumes that the protection we afford to our own flesh and blood is, like racism, the product of false beliefs or faulty reasoning. In fact, however, there is something primal about protecting our own flesh and blood, about the value we place on their wants and needs. These are the product, not of reasoning, but of instinct, and the emotional attitudes bound up with that instinct.ⁱⁱ One obviously fundamental emotional attitude is that of love for one's offspring.

The authors might respond: ‘Why is that relevant? Instinct and emotional bonds have no place whatsoever in moral discussion, for they tell us nothing about how we ought to respond to our newborns, and towards animals.’

But the point is that there is a limit to the kinds of practices and attitudes we adopt that can meaningfully be subject to moral scrutiny. That we care for our own offspring (more than, say, the offspring of other animals) is as natural to us as walking upright, so it makes just as little sense to question whether we ought to care for our own offspring in this way as it does to question whether we ought to walk upright.ⁱⁱⁱ The fact that we are rational creatures and can think about what we do, and about whether we ought to continue to do what we do, has important limitations. I can reflect on whether I ought to have more or fewer children, but not on whether, having had a child, I should care for the newborn any more than I should care for a fox. It is reasonable to consider someone who asked themselves that question to be demonstrating a kind of madness. How we care about our own can be as instinctive and as necessary to us as the need to eat, something we just cannot help but do. The terrible pain and grief of those who have lost loved ones is testimony to this. Lives can be irreparably shattered when a daughter is murdered or killed in a car accident or a toddler is snatched never to be seen again.

My claim is, then, that these facts about our maternal or paternal instincts and our consequent emotional make-up are background conditions which have served as the basis for the erection of moral norms, such as the norm that we ought not to kill our offspring. Our lives are defined in large part in terms of our relationships with our loved ones and, especially, our offspring. The value we afford to human life therefore stems from the central role our loved ones play in our lives, and the meaning they give to them.

There are, of course, occasions where the mother does not bond with her newborn. But those exceptions are not the rule, and they illustrate an important lesson of my account: our norm that it is wrong to kill a newborn is erected on the basis of instincts and accompanying emotional attitudes that most of us share, and it is by appeal to those norms that we condemn mothers who seriously want to kill their babies or who feel no emotion at the prospect of doing so. But if many of us no longer wanted our children, or started to feel nothing for our offspring, we might abandon the norm. To that extent, our moral system remains contingent, rather than necessary. But there is no more reason to believe that such a whole-scale change is likely than there is to believe that we might all wake up one day being able to fly.

Objection from earlier practices of infanticide

It might be objected that earlier (and some current) practices of infanticide undermine my claim.4 Two important points should be noted in reply. First, the practice can be misleadingly described. In hunter–gatherer societies, infanticide was practised out of material necessities we can only imagine. When more young were born than could be raised, or seriously ill children were born, those societies did not have the options we have today. The availability of such options can bring about a shift in our expectations, and therefore in the norms we are willing to adopt. Further, in some cases, ceremony and grief accompanied the practices, representing an acknowledgement that infanticide was not taken lightly. Sacrifices to supernatural figures might be read as primitive superstition, but an alternative way of reading these practices is to see them as the implementation of momentous decisions—that is, as practices whose ceremonial nature reflects the significance the participants attributed to the decision being taken. Further, even accounts that do not refer to religious ritual may be misleading. For leaving a child on a mountain top is not like leaving a child on a rubbish dump.

Second, it is important to recognise that little is known about the real psychological impact on mothers who sacrificed children out of social necessity, such as on the basis of gender. Social pressures may of course have an impact on how a mother might regard the birth of a girl, but it would be foolish to assume that infanticide in such cases is as easy for the mother as stepping on a snail, that she does not experience conflict or deep emotional and psychological torment in doing what she nonetheless feels she is compelled to do.

Philosophers are prone to over-rationalise things. Giubilini and Minerva state in a recent post3 that their paper ‘was meant to be a pure exercise of logic: if X, then Y’. But insufficient attention is given to the conditioning role our instincts and emotions play in the formation of our morality. Singer famously uses the example of orphans in his discussion, to avoid what he sees as the obscurity that might otherwise be introduced into the debate by the emotional ties of the parents.4 But this is a mistake. It is true that emotions can cloud moral debate, and can be the proper target of criticism. But in some contexts, consideration of emotions is essential because they help reveal rather than conceal the moral status of the entity towards which those emotions are directed.

Contrast, here, the way in which philosophers sometimes simply cite the fact that infanticide has been widely practised, with the following harrowing account of maternal suffering given by Dr Brian Hoolahan, an obstetrician in Nowra, Australia, who witnessed babies taken from unwed teenage mothers during a policy of forced adoption between the 1940s and 1970s: I remember the girls calling out ‘I just want to touch my baby, please let me see my baby’ and they were crying and howling and it was the most horrific thing I've ever seen in my life.^iv

The pain, anguish and unimaginable enduring grief these mothers suffered all go to show the meaning of having a baby in human life, the central place it has in our emotional make-up. It is hard to believe that these responses are the product merely of culture, and do not run deep in us, down to the foundations of our being. These instinctive responses to the birth of one's child are the sources of its moral value.^v It is senseless to ask if these mothers really ought to be having that kind of response to their children—whether, for example, they should feel the same way about the mice they set a trap for in the kitchen cupboard. It is because our offspring are so important to us that we set up the norm that it is wrong to kill our newborns and this explains why we care for their wants and needs.^vi

Does this account overlook the importance of reasoning one's way to a moral position?

It might be objected that my account places undue emphasis on our emotional attachments. A common moral failing is to act out of emotion rather than out of properly reasoned considerations. In making our capacity to form attachments to our offspring central to my account, am I not ignoring this common failing? Am I not also overlooking the role that reasoning rather than emotion should play in moral discussion?

My appeal to our instincts and emotional attitudes—such as our love for our offspring—to explain why we regard ourselves as owing moral responsibilities to a newborn is not equivalent to, or on the level of, an appeal to specific objective capacities in the infant. Rather, it is a more general elucidation of the meaning and place that childbirth and childrearing have in human life and the limits these phenomena place on the serious entertainment of some proposals from within our moral framework. My argument is that these phenomena—what I have called the background conditions of our moral norms—serve as disqualifying conditions for the serious entertainment of some proposals. For example, given the reaction of the Nowra women, the proposition that we should seriously entertain sacrificing our newborn healthy infant for the sake of a mouse, or the proposition that those women should care equally for the mouse as they do for their newborn son or daughter, are not ones we can take seriously.

Clearly this raises the question of how we draw the line between those fundamental background conditions of our moral framework (which disqualify the serious entertainment of some possibilities), and the kind of natural propensities and instinctive reactions we have that are the proper subject of moral scrutiny. This question is too large to address here, but a short reply is that it depends on the proposal concerned—but we know an example when we see it. The proposal that a mother ought to be allowed to kill a healthy newborn if she does not want it is, I am claiming, such a proposal. (On the difference between an embryo and a later-term fetus or newborn infant, see the conclusion below.)

Could the argument justify racism?

Does my emphasis on the role of instinct as a background condition of our moral norms mean that racism could be explained in the same way? For example, is it not instinctive for one tribe to mistrust another? This objection has partly been addressed in the last paragraph of the previous section, but two other points are noteworthy. First, instinctive mistrust does not always result in racist practices, as Australian Aboriginal norms for dealing with visitors from another tribe make clear.^vii Further, mistrust, if it is to endure, will be based on beliefs. Second, racism is not comparable to the instinct to preserve and look after our young, for it simply has not been as endemic. The response of the Nowra women whose children were taken from them does not merely exhibit an attitude or set of beliefs that, through education and rational reflection, can be changed. Their reactions are far too immediate, visceral and deep for that. Racism, by contrast, is different, often being backed up by utterly false beliefs about the superior capacities of one's race—beliefs that are therefore amenable to being changed.