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of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies figured prominently
in the wave of anti-German propaganda that accompanied
Britain's entry into the First World War. and it seemed
to be tacitly assumed that this was a greater atrocity than the
murder of adults would be.
I do not regard the conflict between the position I have taken
and widely accepted views about the sanctity of infant life as a
ground for abandoning my position. These widely accepted
views need to be challenged. It is true that infants appeal to us
because they are small and helpless, and there are no doubt
very good evolutionary reasons why we should instinctively
feel protective towards them. It is also true that infants cannot
be combatants and killing infants in wartime is the clearest
possible case of killing civilians, which is prohibited by international
convention. In general. since infants are harmless and
morally incapable of committing a crime, those who kill them
lack the excuses often offered for the killing of adults. None of
this shows, however, that the killing of an infant is as bad as
the killing of an (innocent) adult.
In thinking about this matter we should put aside feelings
based on the small. helpless, and - sometimes - cute appearance
of human infants. To think that the lives of infants are of special
value because infants are small and cute is on a par with thinking
that a baby seal. with its soft white fur coat and large round
eyes deserves greater protection than a gorilla, who lacks these
attributes. Nor can the helplessness or the innocence of the
infant Homo sapiens be a ground for preferring it to the equally
helpless and innocent fetal Homo sapiens, or. for that matter.
to laboratory rats who are 'innocent' in exactly the same sense
170
I
I I
(
Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus
as the human infant, and, in view of the experimenters' power
over them, almost as helpless.
If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly
irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby we can see that the
grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants.
The indirect, classical utilitarian reason does not apply, because
no one capable of understanding what is happening when a
newborn baby is killed could feel threatened by a policy that
gave less protection to the newborn than to adults. In this respect
Bentham was right to describe infanticide as 'of a nature not to
give the slightest inquietude to the most timid imagination'.
Once we are old enough to comprehend the policy, we are too
old to be threatened by it.
Similarly, the preference utilitarian reason for respecting the
life of a person cannot apply to a newborn baby. Newborn babies
cannot see themselves as beings who might or might not have
a future, and so cannot have a desire to continue living. For the
same reason, if a right to life must be based on the capacity to
want to go on living, or on the ability to see oneself as a continuing
mental subject, a newborn baby cannot have a right to
life. Finally, a newborn baby is not an autonomous being, capable
of making choices, and so to kill a newborn baby cannot
violate the principle of respect for autonomy. In all this the
newborn baby is on the same footing as the fetus, and hence
fewer reasons exist against killing both babies and fetuses than
exist against killing those who are capable of seeing themselves
as distinct entities, existing over time.
It would, of course, be difficult to say at what age children
begin to see themselves as distinct entities existing over time.
Even when we talk with two and three year old children it
is usually very difficult to elicit any ccherent conception of
death, or of the possibility that someone - let alone the child
herself - might cease to exist. No doubt children vary greatly
in the age at which they begin to understand these matters,
171
Pradical Ethics
as they do in most things. But a difficulty in drawing the line
is not a reason for drawing it in a place that is obviously
wrong, any more than the notorious difficulty in saying how
much hair a man has to have lost before we can call him
'bald' is a reason for saying that someone whose pate is as
smooth as a billiard ball is not bald. Of course, where rights
are at risk, we should err on the side of safety. There is some
plausibility in the view that, for legal purposes, since birth
provides the only sharp, clear and easily understood line, the
law of homicide should continue to apply immediately after
birth. Since this is an argument at the level of public policy
and the law, it is quite compatible with the view that. on
purely ethical grounds, the killing of a newborn infant is not
comparable with the killing of an older child or adult. Alternatively,
recalling Hare's distinction between the critical and
intuitive levels of moral reasoning, one could hold that the
ethical judgment we have reached applies only at the level of
critical morality; for everyday decision-making, we should act
as if an infant has a right to life from the moment of birth.
In the next chapter, however, we shall consider another possibility:
that there should be at least some circumstances in
which a full legal right to life comes into force not at birth,
but only a short time after birth - perhaps a month. This
would provide the ample safety margin mentioned above.
If these conclusions seem too shocking to take seriously, it
may be worth remembering that our present absolute protection
of the lives of infants is a distinctively Christian attitude
rather than a universal ethical value. Infanticide has been
practised in societies ranging geographically from Tahiti to
Greenland and varying in culture from the nomadic Australian