Making Phenomenology Ethically Potent

Having recently concluded reading James Mumford’s Ethics at the Beginning of Life: a phenomenological critique, a work which expressly promises to bring phenomenology to bear on ethics, I have been thrown back upon an old question of mine: is there a moral obligation not to live in such a way that our perception of reality is impaired? Put positively, ought we to live in a way that fits us for knowledge?

There is something odd about the way I have put this question. For it may be that I am just asking, ‘ought we to know the truth?’. To which we must reply, yes, for it is the truth, and what else can we ‘know’? — we have thus hit upon a tautology that should go without saying, or at least without argument. If we ought to know the truth, then likewise we ought to do what we can to know it, and not do what would prevent us from knowing it. But in speaking of a ‘moral obligation’ it may be that I have introduced an alien element to the tautology. For that suggests that if we do not do what we can to know the truth then we will not only be ignorant, we will also be bad. And it would seem, to the contrary, that very ignorant people who are without aspirations for any great learning may still be very good.

What has all this to do with phenomenology? Well, phenomenology is a descriptive and not a prescriptive mode of philosophy. It can assist us to get the details of a case right, but then a judgement must be made which the phenomenological analysis itself cannot prescribe. Unless it is held that our descriptions bear moral weight of themselves — only then can phenomenology be a potent aid to ethics. Let me explain this by returning to Ethics at the Beginning of Life.

In his book, Mumford goes about critiquing various lines of pro-abortion arguments by exhibiting their inadequate fit with the emergence of each human life through conception and pregnancy. He blames this inadequacy on their dependence upon a ‘picture’ of pregnancy and of human encounters more generally which, invoking Wittgenstein’s expression, ‘holds us captive’. The thrust of his argument seems to be that the whole ‘worldview’ (or perhaps views) within which pro-abortion arguments are operative and compelling is fundamentally unequal to accounting for the objective phenomena of all human coming-to-be. Shattered against the hard wall of reality, they force us, he concludes, to turn to the inescapably religious framework of the imago Dei in their place—a framework which is hardly permissive of abortion.

There is much I like about this argument. The phenomenological literature on pregnancy is deftly handled by Mumford to provide a countervailing force to the ‘pictures’ upholding abortion. In some respects what he presents is just another version of the contrast—obvious to anyone with anti-abortion leanings—between the attitude of radical care upheld by our societies when the new one is ‘wanted’ and the exploitation of its vulnerability and dependence when it is not. But Mumford’s discussion draws our attention to the details we too easily miss concerning the marvel of the new human being’s manner of emergence through time, which he throws into relief through comparison to other types of origin such as those attributed to various Greek gods. Once we start to consider our origin in the womb not as bare material fact, but as a fact peculiar to the peculiar types of beings that we are, it becomes possible to ascribe it a new importance. Which is to say that it becomes possible to consider it an aspect of our nature which may have a bearing on how we ought to live and act towards one another. Mumford thus attempts, I take it, to make a natural law argument without invoking the controversial name of natural law in so doing, leaning on phenomenology in its stead.

Such are the strengths of the phenomenological approach Mumford takes. But there is a weakness. For another thing phenomenological analysis is very good at is helping us to assess the import of some change of conditions (such as a technological change) for our being-in-the-world. This very advantage demonstrates phenomenology’s ineptitude for the kind of use to which Mumford puts it: it does not, of itself, have the resources for identifying when such a change is placing us at odds with ‘reality proper’.

If, for example, the use of contraceptives simply has rendered the experience of pregnancy for many women a kind of invasion of bodily integrity and privacy (we can think here of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s illustration of a window being accidentally left open and admitting a burglar), the argument that the invasion motif doesn’t apply to pregnancy is not compelling unless it can also be established that contraceptive use does not set the norms for sexual acts. But the fact is that, for most people nowadays, it inescapably does so. It is no longer the sexual act itself that issues an ‘invitation’ for a new human individual to enter the world, but the sexual act combined with the intentional absence of contraception and a desire to conceive.

So, returning to my opening question, with this example in mind: could part of the grounds upon which we evaluate contraceptive use be epistemic, i.e. its effect on how reality presents itself to us, in making the truth of our nature more difficult discern? There are many other examples we could use, but the discussion around this one and its role in the sexual revolution is by now fairly familiar. Various authors who would otherwise be unlikely to object to contraception in and of itself have noted that something of a collective action problem has arisen from its widespread use, as sex is reconfigured around low-commitment encounters in place of high-commitment marriages—which turns out to be bad for everyone.

Because it is possible to imagine a world in which contraception is available and perhaps even widely used, and yet which is not openly licentious as ours is, the contingent connection between contraception and licentiousness does not make a very good case for restricting its use. It rests upon an argument from consequences which is limited at best: x leads to y, y is bad, therefore we should not permit x. And since it is not altogether clear that x does lead to y, the argument is especially weak.

So then, what about x itself? What if there were something in x which explains x’s contingently leading to y, but which renders x liable for condemnation irrespective of whether it does in fact lead to y? I posit that the ‘something in x’ is its tendency to obscure the natural order.1 This may be construed as a kind of wrong of dishonour against nature, or more particularly as a wrong done against ourselves by rendering us inferior moral subjects who are less capable of discerning the good than we otherwise might have been.

Mumford, as I have noted, does not really attend to how deeply intuitive is that ‘picture’ forged through contraceptive use, which cannot, I suspect, be fully dislodged until the contraceptives are themselves dislodged from their commonplace status. But this picture-forging is something which Oliver O’Donovan (who was, interestingly, Mumford’s advisor for the doctoral thesis which became his book) is very concerned about in his early assessment of IVF, Begotten or Made?. As I have discussed elsewhere, O’Donovan’s chapter on experimentation on human embryos does not proceed through a straightforward defence of the embryos’ personhood, but is an indictment of how experimental practices make embryos ‘appear’ to us. They make them to appear, in short, in such a way that their personhood is rendered impossible to discern.

One way to take O’Donovan’s observation is to infer from it a voluntaristic account of personhood-recognition: if we first reject those practices which treat human embryos as specimens for study and control, then we may perhaps encounter the unborn as persons; if we do not reject them, then we never will. And this makes for a difficult moral evaluation, since we cannot assert their personhood as clear grounds for rejecting the practice — we can only do so as an act of faith in a future, clearer manifestation of personhood which will occur because we have willed it to do so.

This voluntarism is something like a reading of the Good Samaritan parable in which one’s neighbour is ‘the one to whom I do good’; and therefore the status of neighbour is delimited by the extent of my charity rather than my charity issuing in response to the real-live neighbours who make claims upon me. On the voluntaristic account, there is no neighbour who can cry out to God against me that I did not feed him when hungry; because I did not recognise him in love, he does not count as my neighbour.

The voluntaristic account is, I think, the best that phenomenology can give us. Phenomenology can tell us that because we bear and feed and clothe and talk to our babies, we may one day encounter them in the full mutuality of personhood of a Buberian I-Thou relation. But if my obligations are only to a ‘thou’ and not to an ‘it’, and the eventual thou-status of the unborn depends upon my prior choice to take up a duty of care, it would seem to be up to me to decide whether I am under any obligation. And if I encounter an unwanted child as an invader of my body—around which I have attempted to erect walls of privacy—why ever would I consider myself under obligation to carry and care for it?

However, I do not think the voluntaristic reading is a good reading of O’Donovan’s argument. A better reading leans more heavily on his discussion of personhood as a ‘who’ with a history, the subsistence of a rational nature through time. Personhood is a metaphysical reality, whether this reality is evident to us on a particular occasion or not, and if we accept practices which make persons to appear otherwise than as persons then we are culpable for that and cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for the wrongs done to them.

Indeed, I believe we are culpable not only for the wrongs themselves, but for cultivating our own ignorance. For there is something terribly degrading about putting ourselves in a position where we are incapable of recognising the wrong we do. This degradation is at the heart of the collective action problem of contraception. It is a kind of habituation to vice through the light of the natural order being dimmed by our own making.

What Mumford’s phenomenological argument tells us, then, is not that abortion is wrong. It simply explains why for so many millions of women abortion has seemed an intuitive choice and the reality of the imago Dei so difficult to discern. Yes, we have become beholden to a ‘picture’. That was our first sin; killing babies was its predictable result.