Ectopic Pregnancy and Intend/Foresee
I think that in the case of the ectopic pregnancy, if the doctor were to kill the fetus in order to save the woman’s life the intend/foresee distinction dissolves. Say there was a chance for the fetus to come to term and survive, and say that there was no other way of saving the woman other than to remove the fetus from the tube. This would end up killing the fetus. It is, in a way, a side effect. The doctor could claim that it is permissible to save the woman and kill the fetus on the claim that he did not intend the death; he merely foresaw it as a side effect. But putting the action’s actual permissibility aside, I feel that in foreseeing the death of the fetus as a side effect of removing it to save the woman’s life the doctor takes on the responsibility of the death of the fetus. In consciously knowing it would happen he becomes responsible for it happening. At this point I think that the intend/foresee distinction fades because while he may not have wanted the fetus to die, he still went ahead with a procedure that would end its life. I am not arguing if his action was the morally right choice or not, just that in consciously knowing he accepts the responsibility and culpability of the death of the fetus. In a case like this, and like the hysterectomy case in McIntyre, the distinction fails to be the most weighty thing on the board.
posted by Jen Ming at
11:18 PM
1 Comments:
I think that the intend/foresee distinction is doing something fishy in cases like this. It's a fine line one can walk with "collateral damage" or merely foreseen consequence and actual intention. There is a certain ad hoc flavor to it, in providing an ability to allow for certain actions in retrospect, or to dodge responsibility in the glaring facts of causing death. This is not to say that "merely foreseen harm" is not at all plausible, but that in cases like the ectopic fetus and chopping up chuck to save five (or several other variations thereof)...I find it hard for me to believe someone can do those things without truly having intentions or means to some end in mind. They may, it seems to me, justify themselves through this distinction; but as far as truly moral weighty matters are concerned, it is (like I thought with the do/allow distinction) not actually what does the moral work. I wrote this very thing in the margin in response to something Alison McIntyre said, when she is talking about the "reticence" of the intend/foresee distinction "about what constitutes a sufficient condition of the permissibility of bringing about a harmful but unintended side effect" (221). It merely "declares the existence of a class of exceptions" (221) and does not define under what cases it is actually okay for them to occur. This is what makes the principle feel the most ad hoc to me. Again, and as I stated in class, I think there is another more important element on the periodic table of morality at work here: character. This is the thing that I think takes on, and is most effected by the "responsibility" that Jen is talking about. It takes a certain character to chop up chuck or surgically destroy the ectopic fetus, and this is what really, for me, takes the moral weight of the situation; NOT either distinction of "do/allow" or "intend/foresee".
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Tommy G!, at 9:50 PM
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