Greasley, Kate; (2018) Abortion, Feminism, and 'Traditional' Moral Philosophy. In: Herring, J and Philips, A, (eds.) Philosophical Foundations of Medical Law. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

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Abstract

A certain strain of feminist ethical thinking has long been critical of the way many moral philosophers do things when it comes to abortion. The criticism often voiced from feminist ethics quarters is, briefly put, that traditional philosophical approaches to the abortion problem suffer from a flawed methodology. That flaw, it is suggested, has certain unfortunate implications. In particular, it is responsible for a perennial failure to apprehend some of the most salient features of the abortion situation and their significance for the moral evaluation of abortion practice. This allegation levelled at ‘traditional’ abortion ethics implicates a wider dispute about the correct methodology for approaching complex ethical problems in general. ‘Traditional’ ethics, it is broadly claimed, is greatly impoverished by its preoccupation with abstract, general principles of morality, and resultant failure to acknowledge the ethical significance of ‘context’ in moral thinking. In such critiques, traditional philosophical analysis is then juxtaposed with feminist ethics in terms of its methodological orientation. Scholars who castigate traditional moral philosophy for paying inadequate attention to context take feminist ethics to be largely defined by its greater interest in the contextual details of the problems with which it concerns itself - details that are awarded higher value in its moral accounting. It is of course hardly correct to speak of ‘feminism’ as if it denotes a unified theory. There is no single feminist theory, but rather many kinds of feminisms, loosely held together. But assuming that there is some common thread which links all feminisms to one another, it is still sensible to ask what that thread is. Janet Halley has attempted to capture it by offering two essential components of feminist thought.1 The first is the descriptive claim that makes some distinction between M and F (whether this be ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘male’ and ‘female’, or ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’) and posits that F is disadvantaged relative to, and subordinated by, M. The second is the evaluative claim that F’s subordination is unjust and ought to be resisted. ‘Feminism is feminism because’, she says, ‘as between M and F, it carries a brief for F’.2 As far as feminism is identified only with these two core claims, the complaint against traditional moral philosophy cannot be ascribed to all feminists. However, since those levelling the complaint regard it as distinct to feminist ethics, I will, for the purposes of this discussion, describe it as the ‘feminist ethics’ position. In my discussion here, I would like to pitch a basic defence of the nature and methods of traditional abortion ethics against the feminist ethics challenge as I have described it. This of course means first getting a handle on exactly what proponents of the methodologically-based criticisms believe most moral philosophers are doing wrong in their exchanges on abortion, and why. In addition to (hopefully) getting clearer about this, I seek to show how those fielding such complaints have misunderstood or misjudged the practice and merits of conventional moral theorising about abortion ethics and that, in spite of such contentions, the methodological disagreement between the two approaches is in fact largely illusory.

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