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March 1, 2006
Abortion and philosophy
John Rawls was an important 20th century American philosopher. His most famous contribution was the "Veil of Ignorance". This veil suggests that that we should pretend a veil conceals our current talents, wealth, privileges, gender, race, height, and temperaments. Ignorant of all this, we should think about what social order, public policies, and other rules we would want to govern such a society. He assumed that man would be extremely risk adverse in such a situation, and developed the concept of maximin, where society should maximize the utility of the worst off members.
It occurred to me today that this would surely be an argument against legalized abortion. With the knowledge that a given zygote could just as easily be aborted by its mother as be a mother choosing an abortion. In utility modeling there isn't much worse than not being born at all, so the veil applied here would mean that we should avoid all abortions. This fascinates me because Rawls' ideas on distributive justice made him very solidly in the camp of America's liberals. Even more interesting is that Rawls seems to have gone in the other direction on this matter. He firmly supported a moral right to first trimester abortions.
Posted by OneEyedMan at March 1, 2006 6:02 PM
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