In the wake of the Dobbs decision, many philosophers are left wondering how the changed landscape should impact their behavior. What are our obligations in and outside the classroom? In what ways might philosophers be uniquely situated to impact public discourse and policy on this matter? I asked a series of related questions to four philosophers who regularly write and teach on this topic: Dr. Jill Delston, Dr, Nathan Nobis, Dr. Amanda Roth, and Dr. Jennifer Scuro. They generously provided their thoughts.
Robison-Greene: Some of the topics that philosophers discuss are quite abstract and one might question their relevance to our everyday engagement with the world. On other occasions, the topics we often discuss only in papers become relevant to daily life in ways that have serious implications. What do you think a philosopher’s role is in these cases?
Scuro: I would like to speak to my own philosophical practices primarily. In my philosophy classes, I work dutifully to show students that there is a necessity to philosophy in examining one’s quality of life in relation to others, in managing ethical crises, in imagining a more engaged democratic society, in finding and building sustainable, loving communities. Even before they get to my classroom, students are already engaged in some heavy intellectual labor with just an ‘abstract’ idea like ‘debt’ and how that informs their present and future sense of self in a powerful but often uncritical way – to the point at which an ‘abstraction’ can be a tool of coercion, a source of forced compliance, and a forfeiture of free thinking and free association. It is important that philosophy be localized, directly tethered to current needs, and there be an operative rigor in the way we think through and about the world around us. Taking a line from bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, I wrote a chapter on how ‘theory can heal’ – especially when we anchor attention and sustained inquiry to those aspects of everyday life that are full of silence, shame, despair, and alienation.
When it comes to the issue at hand, I put my personal experiences through a kind of philosophical grinder because I was desperate for meaning. I am alive today because I had an abortive procedure to terminate a pregnancy at 19 weeks that was going to kill me. It was a wanted pregnancy, and yet, I had ‘failed’ in every sense (or in every ‘everyday’ sense) and the shame that followed also almost killed me. I found profound and deep solidarity with anyone pregnant whose pregnancy did not lead to a ‘baby’ and became fiercely protective over the ambivalence that comes with pregnancy as an ‘expectation,’ describing it as a ‘plot’ and a setup, especially for those who don’t want to be pregnant and yet find themselves in that (“exceptional”) situation.
When it comes to abortion politics, we are in a time of great threat to philosophy as a truth-bearing practice, because these conversations are dominated by those who are committed to fantastic, unrealistic abstractions like the ‘unborn.’ A concept like this can neither be validated nor serves any real purpose except as a tool of proselytization and authoritarian control over the lives of others. I don’t think philosophers are the ones with the abstraction problem as much as those who now have the power to decide what is criminal and what is worth celebrating, especially when that is decided on patently anti-philosophical grounds.
I do take some comfort in the case of Ireland where a movement started on social media – ‘In her shoes’ that chronicled anonymously the experience of being pregnant where abortion has a strong ideological and legal prohibition – and it successfully worked as a grassroots campaign to ‘repeal the Eighth,’ repealing a constitutional amendment, reversing years of precedent and allowing for there to be reproductive rights in a cultural context that had none prior. Clara Fischer does a revealing examination of this revolutionary political shift here, where ideas radically changed the future of policy and position.
Delston: This relevance to daily life is part of what I love about my profession. Even when I teach applied ethics and topics like abortion, war, and affirmative action, which may have obvious relevance, I often require my students to write on or discuss how the topics we cover relate to their daily lives and I still think that is a valuable exercise in every class. A philosopher’s role is to show the long legacy of work on these cases so that others do not have to reinvent the wheel and so that we can work outside our comfort zones, to demonstrate the philosophical skills and tools we need to navigate those issues, and to make progress on them through careful and rigorous work.
Nobis: If there’s a very important problem and people have special skills that enable them to help respond to it, they should. The political legal issues about abortion are rooted in philosophical and ethical problems that philosophers are uniquely skilled to help respond to; nobody else teaches classes on the ethics of abortion; nobody else teaches classes where they try to teach people how to better evaluate ethical arguments on the issues.
Unfortunately, many—probably most—people have very poor understandings of the issues and very poor senses of which arguments are good and bad and why. The general level of knowledge about the ethical issues here—which drives the legal and political efforts—makes it clear that our efforts to teach philosophy, ethics, and critical thinking have had too little impact on our society, which is unfortunate, although it’s hard to guess what our best impact could be: obviously, people believing and doing things for no good reason seems endemic to the human condition.
Overall, I think philosophers’ role is to try to help people overcome their mistaken, simplistic impressions on the issues. I also think that it is appropriate and justified to inform people that most (at least 80-85%, according to the PhilPapers Survey) of philosophers do believe that the broadly pro-choice perspective is justified by better arguments, and try to help them understand why philosophers would tend to accept that judgment.
Roth: I’m not sure I can speak for a role for philosophers generally-speaking, such that all philosophers ought to be doing anything in particular. I think it depends on the individual. But here are some things for which I think philosophers are particularly well-suited: framing questions rather than providing clear answers, pointing out ways in which every day thinking or the reasoning/rhetoric of a particular political/SCOTUS decision/policy goes wrong, drawing important distinctions that tend to be overlooked in popular discussion/debate, and relating real-life experience to theory and vice versa.
Robison-Greene: What do you think a philosopher’s role is when it comes to the abortion debate in particular? What, in your view, ought the connection to be between philosophy and activism? If you do think activism is called for, what ought that to look like?
Delston: When it comes to abortion, the conversation has suffered from too much emphasis on the moral status of the fetus. The policies that govern reproductive health are united much more by their medical sexism than by any commitment to the fetus. In my book, I define medical sexism as a gendered hierarchy in the medical context. I agree with those who point out that if these restrictive policies were about the fetus, then we would see more policies to help born babies. Exceptions for rape and incest also bely this point: the moral status of the fetus does not change based on the circumstances of conception, but the implication is that the moral status of the pregnant person does. By rejecting sex, pregnant people in this situation retain enough bodily autonomy to reject pregnancy, at least in theory. The same is true before conception. If abortion were about the moral status of the fetus, then we wouldn’t see the same arguments, attitudes, and policies used to restrict contraception access before the fetus even exists. But we do.
These positions only appear inconsistent or hypocritical if we think they are about the fetus. It is perfectly consistent to restrict birth control in the absence of any fetus (and to prevent an unwanted pregnancy) and then turn around and restrict abortion, too. That’s because abortion is not about the fetus; abortion is about medical sexism. Sexist control over behavior, especially behavior around sex, not only explains both contraception restrictions and abortion restrictions, but also explains why we don’t see more of those policies to help newborns. Anything that helps newborns implicitly helps their parents. And anything that is too helpful to parents, such as higher minimum wage, universal pre-kindergarten, affordable day care, and affordable health care, and affordable housing, lessen the “consequences” of sex.
In fact, abortion bans and the medical sexism that underlies them are putting all medical care at risk. Abortion bans don’t just require a positive right to life on the part of the fetus; they require the government to enforce the use of organs of certain individuals to support that life. I might have a right to life despite my liver failure, but I otherwise don’t have a claim on your particular liver, and I can’t imprison the doctor that refuses a transplant. Is it really true that the fetus has such strong claims? Claims that disappear upon birth? No: a fetus is not more valuable than a baby, as these laws would suggest. But, once the fetus is born, it cannot be a used as a justification to monitor the behavior of the pregnant person and its value in upholding medical sexism dissipates. Rather, it is the diminished autonomy of the pregnant person to make decisions that govern their bodies and not the rights of the fetus at all that justify these claims. And, if the bodily autonomy of pregnant individuals can be erased to prevent abortion, then it doesn’t exist in the first place.
This same medical sexism that leads to restrictions on contraception and abortion while resisting help for new parents and newborns also explains the oppression we see against LGBTQIA+ rights going on right now, including rights in the medical context. Upholding a gendered hierarchy is taking the place of protecting human and civil rights. And, understanding these patterns is crucial in addressing the underlying cause of a vast and varied pool of restrictions.
What to do about it? The connection between philosophy and activism is a deep one already, and I recently held a conference at my university to explore just this topic. By discussing life’s biggest questions, philosophy is inherently engaged in the world, and much of the work we do is normative already, concerning how things should be.
Activism can save our discipline from obsolescence and point the way towards demonstrating our value. Every field faces their share of budget threats and has to demonstrate their value to their university. In philosophy, that problem is particularly acute. We often cannot point to concrete reasons to keep ourselves around, like a STEM-field could point to its contribution to a life-saving drug or vaccine or technological advance. It’s obvious to me why the humanities fit into those missions. “Vaccines don’t save lives; vaccinations do.” Communication matters, trust matters, and research ethics matter enough that they can spell the difference between a lifesaving vaccination and an expired bottle. Not to mention the scientific method driving these STEM advances itself, after all, has its origin in our humble profession. But philosophy is uniquely placed to contribute to activism. Some problems in society are philosophical by their very nature. Some problems are created by oppression and prejudice and others go unsolved because these forces go unchecked. Since we have valuable work to contribute to this area, I see it as a duty to act, and activism is part of that. And, through that engaged philosophy, we can change laws, protect others, vote in representatives, use activism to improve the conversation on controversial issues, and explain and justify our value in part through these incremental changes to the public sphere.
Scuro: I do think it is complicated to have academics also be activists because, to a degree, our students are a captive audience. There are forms of collective resistance that I think we, as philosophers should engage in within the academy while also always challenging our community as a profession. We should be consistent in our defense of those most marginalized in academia and prioritize those who don’t abuse what power they might have over the beliefs and ideas up for debate.
Having been in the position in which I failed to meet any of those social and psychological expectation(s) about what pregnancy is or should be, I found that it was also a rich but underdeveloped epistemological position – full of latent knowledge and experiential understanding – even if there was no corresponding language or defense for my position, in part, because it was not transferrable in any way. When I told people about my miscarriage(s), (and then wrote a graphic novel narrating and analyzing my alienating and trauma-inducing experiences), it was quite moving to discover how many other women in my life knew the depth and complexity of my despair and shared with me their experiences, sometimes eerily familiar in circumstance, sometimes radically different than mine. One dear friend told me, “Now you walk with the rest of us” – which, at the time, made me feel like I had been rescued. I called this epistemological position a ‘privilege that’s not a privilege’ which, although easily devalued as if it is not a place of privileged knowing, could instead provide ground for new sources of solidarity.
So, perhaps our role as philosophers is to collect these stories and validate knowledge like this as it may be or become transferrable. What will now be a generational loss, we will need to archive this knowledge for those who will need this as reference for their future, as reserves to access later in the defense of a world that ought to be humane and habitable. This is the real time, dialectic quality to philosophy that needs reinvigoration, and the profession should urgently distance itself from resembling ideological blowhards that only seem to be motivated by agenda and spectacle but do real damage to the pluralization of positions and ideas. The more popular ethicists today are known for this latter practice as well, and it might be time for those who have established reputations and are perceived as ‘representative’ of the relevant fields to yield the floor so to speak. Much of the pseudo ethical discourse informing policy is just a form of mayhem-making and grandstanding, so that many of us who now have their sense of autonomy and dignity under threat, we will have to suffer the consequences.
Philosophers do have a history for screwing up when we directly engage politics. So, it is worth caution when we commit or champion particular political positions, but that is not to say that this caution should interfere with our more global commitments, and activism related to injustice, systemic harm, creating space, making time, devoting energy to movements for solidarity and pluralist communities. I recently read Namita Goswami’s Subjects That Matter, and she advocates for a ‘non-antagonistic philosophy of difference’ – I think it is worth taking heed of her charge in how we might think of developing a sound relationship between professional philosophy and political activism.
Nobis: I think that people can and should do different things, given their temperament and interests. For me, one of my emphases has been getting across the message that abortion is actually a complex issue, and there are things to learn about it–there’s actual expertise involved in understanding ethical issues, and you might come to learn that your arguments are actually poor arguments!
I’ve had this emphasis because many people think abortion is just obviously wrong, or obviously not wrong, and both of these positions cause problems. Obviously, the folks who think that abortion is obviously wrong are problematic since they are the source of the current injustice on these issues. But pro-choice people who think abortion is obviously not wrong can be unhelpful also since they are sometimes unwilling to learn more about the issues to become more persuasive about them; and they are unwilling to come to really understand some of the anti-abortion objections to abortion, some of which are indeed plausible, even if ultimately ill-founded (e.g., concerns about fetal pain; concerns about far later abortions).
Obviously, what an “activist” is and is not is a somewhat controversial question. But I see myself as someone who is trying to be a genuinely fair and balanced public educator on these issues. But the issue is important and it would just be false to say that “both sides” have equally strong cases for their point of view, so I try to make that known, with an emphasis on promoting understanding and deeper learning and engagement. Is that activism? Well, at the very least, people and organizations who are definitely pro-choice activists don’t (yet) seem much interested in this type of activity, which anti-abortion activists have been engaged in for decades. Perhaps pro-choice activists will change their mind on their set of strategies now though and want to engage in ethics-educational outreach.
Roth: I know that there are folks who are doing philosophical work about what the connection between activism and philosophy should be in a more general sense. I think they are better positioned to speak to that more general question. (E.g. the folks involved in the Public Philosophy Network, the folks behind https://www.engagedphilosophy.com/, those publishing in the 2020 special issue of Essays in Philosophy that focused on activism and philosophy, etc.) I think as the diversity of approaches among those folks show, I suspect activism within philosophy can take many, many different forms.
So I can only speak for myself. For me, I certainly see philosophy as (hopefully) helping us to get at justified moral conclusions and motivating us to act to bring about moral progress. I have a split position in philosophy and women’s & gender studies, and within women’s & gender studies the attention to activism is very explicit: e.g. assigning course projects that require engagement in activism, internships with advocacy organizations and so on.
That women’s & gender studies influence led me to this image, which hangs in my home office. I also sometimes share it with students. It’s been something I’ve directed my attention to very often in the hard times of the last few years when I have felt distraught about the state of the world and what feels like utter powerlessness in the face of so much horribleness.
The image reminds me to think about what I am positioned to do. In some cases, this just means teaching and mentoring and reminding myself that this is something that can have positive effects on the world. Or it might mean using philosophical skills/methods to try to intervene in a public debate. I think all of that can count as activism in the broadest sense if one looks at it from the point of view of the image: giving the world what it needs by doing what one is good at and what one loves.
Robison-Greene: The Dobbs decision will have serious consequences for many of our students. At the same time, in many of the states in which college classes are taking place, abortion is now illegal. What are your thoughts on how to navigate that environment?
Scuro: Because of my work in Critical Disability Studies, I have discovered how important and urgent maximizing access to resources can be for students, especially as they may be or become vulnerable. I think the pandemic also prepared many of us to be a ready resource to assist students who may trust us with counsel in how to intellectually shore themselves up for whatever personal challenges they may face. There is a concept that author and disability justice activist Mia Mingus describes as “access intimacy,” in which the environments one is in, especially if one doesn’t fit the norms and expectations of most ‘bodyminds,’ are made sustainable when there is an intimate knowledge and receptivity to each person’s specific access needs, collectively building those resources as they may be needed and as they might change. When I make my coursework accessible generally, students who are not disabled or who don’t identify as disabled still find great benefit in the flexibility and the customization tailored to what interests and skills they have, and they can freely take on what challenges or risks seem most rewarding and worth their energy. This is sometimes also called ‘disability gain.’
I am working right now on research into what exists at the intersection of trauma and disability. Many of our students experience trauma over the course of their college career and some come in with trauma experience. I’ve advocated that philosophy pedagogy needs to be trauma informed, and as pandemic teaching may have set the tone for us in how we will need to make classrooms and course work a form of threat de-escalation, we may be the ‘front line’ in providing basic intellectual equipment so that vulnerable students can self-advocate against trauma-inducing or trauma-amplifying environments. No doubt, with arbitrarily enforced state mandated restrictions like these, I know there are and will be students who have urgent need for some kind of armor for the battles to come and for their basic self-defense.
Nobis: I don’t know. Questions about obeying just and unjust laws are relevant, as is the possibility of conscientous objection to these laws. Yesterday on Twitter I saw a person who works as a counselor expressing concerns about clients telling her they are considering an abortion, or had an abortion, and about whether she would be legally obligated to report that to any authorities. Would instructors and academic advisors (and campus counselors) have the same worries, if students share these types of personal concerns? Obviously, that would be bad for students and their relations with all sorts of what should be trusted and trustworthy people at their institutions.
Delston: We need to do what we can to protect abortion access and reproductive freedom when it falls under attack. Nobody should be forced to undergo a pregnancy and universities can support their students by resisting this decision. To support our students, universities should provide students funds, housing, rides, class time off, and exam extensions so that they can go out of state to get abortions. We can also put Plan B and condoms in bathrooms as well as give students free birth control to protect reproductive autonomy.
Robison-Greene: The practice of providing and responding to reasons is one of the things that many people value the most about philosophy. At the same time, reducing a person’s challenges to a debate topic looks like an affront to their dignity. Is there a way to have productive conversations about abortion outside of the classroom? What about in online environments?
Nobis: It’s very hard to measure what’s “productive” in an interaction–online or in real life — but we do have a good sense for what’s not productive, such as name-calling and insults, appealing to mere slogans, groupthink, and more, and those are very common responses with these topics.
At least I think I have developed a way of responding to people, using a rather developed set of online resources at Thinking Critically About Abortion, that–I hope–encourage people to learn more about the issues. Common responses that I offer up include the observation that some term is ambiguous and so someone is misunderstanding what someone else is saying and talking past them; that they are begging the question and so would need to really support what they are saying; that their argument involves a false, unstated premise or one that would need serious defense; and that they are overlooking contrary explanations. So I have seen this an opportunity to share basic, but powerful, philosophical methods, and have gotten a lot of indicators that people really appreciate both the content and the calm, fair way I try to encourage people to engage.
About discussing these issues being an afront to anyone’s dignity, I guess I am ultimately just pragmatic on this. For a few years, we heard things like “abortion rights are not up for debate,” and similar slogans, and that all didn’t turn out well: slogans and question-begging assertions didn’t make the problems go away. So while solving these problems will require all sorts of skills and strategies from lots of different people–I don’t naively think that philosophy is the sole solution here or anything–it seems to me that making the philosophical case that, no, abortion is generally not a great evil, no, it’s not murder, no, it’s not an injustice would far likely do more good than not making that case, and so respecting anyone’s dignity requires that be done.
Delston: I completely agree that providing and responding to reasons is central. I also think it’s often more helpful and effective than responding to the conclusions people come to. I understand that it seems like an affront to someone’s dignity to debate their rights and autonomy, but the fact is, our rights and autonomy are under debate whether we choose to enter the fray or not. Scholars and activists whose work I have always admired do not and did not shy away from these debates just because they had to justify their humanity to their oppressors. It may be a tragedy that they had to do this work, it may have been anguishing for them to do so, and it is certainly a hardship that their pursuits remain unfinished, but I am grateful for that work every day. Of course, there are problematic ways to do this, and philosophers can be exploitive if they investigate others’ existence or humanity as a merely hypothetical exercise without understanding the implications in individual lives. We are also wrong to leave it to those whose humanity is at stake to justify their existence. Many have to limit their contributions to the debate for their own mental health and wellbeing.
As for how to have productive disagreements in general, I aspire to the “change conversation cycle”: I prefer to view conversations in which we disagree as planting a seed and playing the long game. Sometimes it has taken me years to be convinced of an argument or to change my behavior accordingly once I am convinced. You may think you have lost an argument or failed to reach someone, but it’s entirely possible it will sway them later.
Roth: I wrote a piece that came out a few days ago in response to the Dobbs decision, and one set of questions I tried to ask myself and be cognizant of was about who the audience is that I am trying to reach and what, if anything, I might be particularly well-positioned to offer. Just because we philosophers have profound philosophical points to make doesn’t mean anyone else is going to care. And if they don’t, then what’s the point of doing public philosophy?
The answers I came up with is that there are plenty of people who are unreachable on the issue of abortion and also plenty that are part of the “choir” and it does little help to preach to them. So while I teach women’s & gender studies and often personally take the perspective of focusing on oppression and the role of gender, race, class, and so on in making sense of this politically, it didn’t seem to me to likely be effective to offer an analysis of overturning Roe from a structural inequality or bodily autonomy perspective. The readers I imagined as my audience are people who might not be moved by those kinds of concerns–or at least might not find them decisive–but perhaps who are also not firmly committed to an anti-abortion stance in all cases. Essentially, I was aiming for the people in the middle in red and purple states whose votes will determine how severe the restrictions on abortion in those states will be in the coming months and years.
I think gradualism is the best philosophical approach to thinking about fetal status and I suspect it is something that appeals intuitively to people across the spectrum of views about abortion. So my hope was to give people a way of making sense of their likely intuitions and share my own life experience in a way that I hope is relatable. That meant, given the need to be concise and to the point, that I could not make my full moral perspective. And in particular, I felt very uneasy about publishing something that did not center pregnant people (or those able to become pregnant) and that did not primarily address bodily autonomy and gender, race, and class.
So a related question that I haven’t fully contended with is about how to be responsible in doing public philosophy and in trying to reach a particular audience where one cannot add tons of caveats and distinctions to try to be as careful and precise as possible as one would do in a typical philosophical publication.
Scuro: I think it is one of the proper tasks in our profession to engage in advocacy for the most marginalized positions in our society – validating and echoing the forms of communal self-defense that comes from on-the-ground movements. We do have the power to give platform and add philosophical substance to claims and arguments for minoritized interests that challenge the white supremacy and settler colonialism wounding and still scarring the landscape.
Philosophy can be of service; I think many of us can be quite useful in that way. The only agenda, I would think would be to understand why there are new states of alarm and anxiety and despair and how they are valid. We could alleviate the conditions that induce trauma and do some of the emotional and environmental preconditioning so that the labor of these conflicts is proportionally distributed, disburdening those rendered most vulnerable in these hostile political conditions. As a service, we need to engage in readiness for service too, because, as a friend of mine very recently said, “I think things are going to get worse.”
Nathan Nobis
Nathan Nobis is a professor of philosophy at Morehouse College in Atlanta GA. He is the Lead Editor of 1000-Word Philosophy and co-author of Thinking Critically About Abortion.
Amanda Roth
Amanda Roth is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's & Gender Studies at SUNY Geneseo and Coordinator of Women's & Gender Studies. She teaches primarily about applied ethics, bioethics, feminist philosophy, gender & sexuality, feminist theory, and carceral issues. Her research focuses on reproductive ethics, and she is currently writing a book about lgbtq family-making. Amanda lives outside of Rochester, NY with her daughter, dog, and cat.
Jennifer Scuro
Jennifer Scuro is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Molloy University in New York. She is the author of The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Rowman & Littlefield International, Feb 2017) and Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books, Oct 2017). She has recently contributed to the volume, Representing Abortion, (R.A. Hurst, ed., Routledge, 2021), “‘What you do hurts all of us!’: When Women Confront Women Through Pro-life Rhetoric,” and is currently developing a manuscript on the intersection between trauma and disability with her co-author, Sara María Acevedo (Miami University, OH).
Rachel Robison-Greene
Rachel Robison-Greene is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University where she regularly teaches courses in ethics, metaphysics, and logic. She earned her PhD in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2017. Rachel was the 2019 Tom Regan Animal Rights Fellow and serves as a board member and Secretary of the Culture and Animals Foundation. She is the author of Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations and the co-author of Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Coronavirus. Her research interests include the nature of personhood and the self, animal minds and animal ethics, environmental ethics, and ethics and technology. Rachel also dedicates much of her time to public philosophy projects. She has written over 120 articles in public philosophy, including articles for the BBC, The Philosopher’s Magazine, The Prindle Post, and 1,000 Word Philosophy. She enjoys traveling and spending time in nature.
Jill Delston
Jill B. Delston has published on feminism, social and political philosophy, and bioethics, among other topics. Her monograph, Medical Sexism: Contraception Access, Reproductive Medicine, and Health Care, is out now (Lexington Books, 2019). She co-edited a textbook entitled Applied Ethics: A Multicultural Approach, Editions 5 and 6. Her teaching awards include UMSL's Legendary Triton Award, the Emerson Excellence in Teaching Award, and the College of Arts and Sciences NTT Faculty Member of the Year. She received her B.A. from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis.
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