Abortion

Is it rational to both maintain that abortion is entirely morally permissible (on the grounds that a fetus is not a person, let's say) and to regret having had one?

Comments

There's no obvious inconsistency. The fact that something is morally permissible doesn't mean that there's never any reason to regret having done it. To take a very different sort of example: suppose I'm very busy, and I pass up an opportunity to go on a trip to some intriguing place, deciding instead to stick to my work. I might end up regretting my decision, even though it wasn't wrong of me to decide as I did. I might come to think I missed out on a valuable opportunity and that it would have been worth rearranging my work for the sake of it.

Perhaps this doesn't quite get at your worry. Perhaps what you have in mind is someone who thinks that abortion is morally permissible, but who come to have moral regrets about having had one. That sounds more like some sort of inconsistency, but it needn't be. If the thought is "It was morally permissible for me to do this, but it was wrong of me to do it," then perhaps we have an inconsistency. But it's possible to think that something is permissible in general, and yet to think that given one's own situation, the morally better thing for oneself would have been to decide differently. In other words, questions about what's permissible in general may not be fine-grained enough to decide what's best in one's own particular moral circumstances.

That set of attitudes wouldn't be irrational at all for a woman who discovers herself infertile or wanting to have had more children some time after the abortion. Even if a fetus is not a person, and it's entirely permissible to have an abortion, it's obviously true that fetuses eventually turn into persons. So an entirely permissible abortion can later on seem to have been a mistake.

And for yet another persepctive on this, it seems as if it is morally permissible not always to be a "good samaritan". But of course one might reasonably regret not having been a "good samaritan" on some particular occasion, i.e., regret not having gone out of one's way---beyond the call of moral duty---to do something for someone. It therefore seems perfectly reasonable, in general, to regret things one had, and knows one had, every moral permission to do.

A cognate point is made explicitly in Judith Jarvis Thomson's classic paper, "A Defense of Abortion". To say that something is morally permissible is simply to say that it isn't morally prohibited: It's a fairly weak claim in some ways. In particular, it doesn't at all follow that the thing in question is, all things considered, the best thing to do, nor even that it is, all things considered, a particularly nice thing to do. So, if I remember correctly, Thomson says she is quite willing to concede, so far as her argument is concerned, that it might always be the nice thing to do not to have an abortion. That, however, is not what is at issue.

That morality leaves a good deal open is so intuitive that utilitarianism's failure to leave a good deal open, in this sense, is often considered one of the more serious objections to it.

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