Can abortion be wrong even if ‘personhood’ is unsettled, and what do moral realism and parental obligations imply about bodily autonomy arguments?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Christopher Kaczor is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and his work has focused on bioethics, theology, and more.
2. Interview Summary
Christopher Kaczor argues that the abortion debate leans heavily on competing accounts of ‘personhood’, but that settling personhood isn’t strictly necessary for evaluating abortion: the discussion can proceed using arguments that don’t presuppose a verdict about fetal personhood (for example, a ‘future like ours’ approach). He also notes the lack of consensus among defenders of abortion on what personhood consists in, and he surveys influential proposals that place personhood only after birth (or later, given psychological capacities). In parallel, he presses a biological/moral baseline: embryos, fetuses, and newborns count as human beings, and Kaczor defends the claim that all human beings have basic rights, centrally including a right to life, while distinguishing that status from gametes (living cells but not human beings).
Friction then explores a gradualist or developmental picture, where moral status increases across gestation and reaches “full” standing at birth. Kaczor labels this the gradualist view and rejects it as implausible: physiological or psychological development is not ordinarily treated as what makes it more permissible to kill younger humans than older ones. He also challenges “cumulative-threshold” reasoning (the “rope” idea): if birth, viability, and sentience are each irrelevant to basic moral status, piling them up doesn’t generate moral standing. Kaczor allows that some rights sensibly track maturity (driving, voting), but he contrasts these with basic immunities—like not being intentionally killed, tortured, or enslaved—that don’t depend on the agent’s developed capacities. He reinforces the point with a historical warning about dividing humanity into those with basic dignity and those without, and he treats birth as an arbitrary line for that purpose.
On bodily-autonomy arguments, Friction asks about Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist-style reasoning, and Kaczor argues that the analogy breaks because parents have special obligations toward their own dependent children that don’t apply to strangers; he extends the critique to the “burglar” analogy by emphasizing the difference between an innocent dependent child and a culpable intruder. To support the idea that obligations aren’t always voluntarily assumed, he offers cases where moral responsibility arises from circumstance (for example, encountering a newborn in danger) and discusses parental responsibilities (including an adoption example) as responsibilities that can bind even without a chosen commitment. The interview also detours into metaethics: Friction articulates a stance/attitude-based way of hearing moral claims, while Kaczor diagnoses this as emotivism and defends moral realism—some acts are wrong independently of anyone’s preferences—and he argues that thoroughgoing subjectivism struggles to make sense of widespread moral condemnation (e.g., of rape or racism).
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:08 - Persons
02:59 - Other categories
05:50 - Vagueness
07:27 - Choosing a precisification
09:40 - Argument from history
12:14 - Gradual view
17:23 - My preferences
22:36 - Connection to the mother
25:53 - Duties to others
28:42 - Responsibilities
34:35 - Moral realism
35:07 - Preferences and morality
39:20 - Understanding the claims
43:07 - Moral naturalism
45:18 - Subjectivist commitments
47:32 - Moral facts and motivation
51:40 - Consistency
53:40 - Variation on the violinist
56:01 - Issues for the violinist argument
59:50 - Double-effect
1:03:20 - Arbitrariness
1:07:23 - A Defense of Abortion
1:11:05 - Aggressors
1:13:51 - Framing problems
1:18:05 - Restatement of my view
1:22:51 - Value of philosophy
1:24:20 - Conclusion
