Moral Reasoning in a Pluralistic World by Marino Patricia;

Author:Marino, Patricia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

5 IS CASE CONSISTENCY A USELESS NORM?

It might be thought that this account of case consistency is too complex and open-ended to be useful. Can valences of moral obligations and beliefs about moral relevance ever be clear and specific enough that case consistency would help us figure out what to believe? But in fact a norm of case consistency forms the implicit basis for a range of work in applied ethics. I’ve already mentioned some reasoning on the “double standard” problem and how it makes use of a norm of case consistency. As a more representative sample of work in applied ethics, consider three papers on abortion that are so widely admired as to be included in virtually every anthology and taught in a vast array of courses on moral problems: Mary Anne Warren’s “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,”27 Don Marquis’s, “Why Abortion Is Immoral,”28 and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.”29

Warren responds to the traditional argument that abortion is killing an innocent human being and is therefore wrong. She argues that “being a human being” is not a morally relevant similarity between cases, while “being a person” is. One reason she gives for this is that we would judge the moral status of new beings we encountered not by their genetic similarity to us but by their consciousness, their abilities to communicate, and other like qualities. She thus deploys a strategy of “case consistency” to recommend a particular set of morally significant similarities and differences.

Don Marquis’s “future-like-ours” argument asks us to judge similarly cases that are morally similar and argues that having a certain kind of future is a morally relevant similarity. His strategy is as follows. Starting with the obvious fact that it is wrong to kill “us,” he asks why. The answer he gives is that killing us deprives us of a future. Since killing a fetus deprives it of a future as well, abortion is generally wrong. Again, this deploys a norm of case consistency, asking us to acknowledge a morally relevant similarity and to judge consistently in accordance with it.

In her much-discussed “violinist analogy,” Judith Jarvis Thomson presents the following thought experiment. Imagine you are kidnapped by the Society for Music Lovers, and attached to an ailing violinist. You are keeping him alive, and if you detach yourself he will die. Thomson argues that in such a case we would generally judge that one is not morally required to stay attached: it would be kind and perhaps decent to do so, but one is not violating anyone’s rights in getting up and walking away. Analogously, in certain circumstances a woman who is pregnant may also “detach herself” from her fetus, even if it means that the fetus will die. Again, case consistency explains the reasoning of the article: we are presented with a claim of morally significant similarity, and an absence of morally relevant differences, and asked to judge similar cases similarly.

None of these standard arguments rests on hypotheses about rich coherence or a single source of value.

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