Abortion, Marriage and Cognate Problems

Speaker:

Professor Cécile Laborde (Oxford University)

Series: 

Institute of Law, Political Science and Philosophy

About the paper:

Liberal neutralists claim that controversial issues of political morality can and should be resolved by appeal to abstract political values that stand free from comprehensive ethical conceptions. One such value is the ideal that all persons must be treated according to principles of freedom and equality. As critics have observed, however, this formulation itself presumes an uncontroversial definition of what a person is. The problem is that, in debates about the legality of abortion or euthanasia, or the rights of non-human animals, it is precisely the ethical status of living beings that is at issue. There is no liberal neutralist solution to what Kent Greenawalt has called ‘borderlines of status’ , as appeal to neutral political values cannot settle the prior question of the ontological and moral status of living beings.

In his new book, Matthew Kramer explores ‘cognate problems’ to abortion, mentioning euthanasia and animal rights, as well as – more unexpectedly – same-sex marriage. Many neutralists would balk at the latter suggestion. They might well concede that neutrality cannot adjudicate the question of whether fetuses are persons, but they would insist that no such uncertainty surrounds the status of LGBTQ citizens. Kramer is aware of this, yet he says little about the sense in which same-sex marriage is a ‘cognate problem’ to abortion. The aim of this essay is to tackle precisely this question. I show that both types of controversy raise a similar issue for liberal neutralists, namely, the identification of the types of relationships and practices that are justice-apt in the first place. Liberal neutralism is indeterminate about the natural ontology of the fetus, just as it is indeterminate about the social ontology of marriage. Nor is this all: I hypothesize that many other areas of political-moral controversy depend on contested social ontologies – claims about the nature and moral status of the particular groups and relationships that individuals form – and I illustrate this claim by reference to the rights of religious association. The upshot is that borderline-of-status problems are more endemic than liberals have recognized.

About the author:

Cécile Laborde holds the Nuffield Chair of Political Theory at Oxford University.

Before she joined Oxford in January 2017, she was a Professor of Political Theory at University College London, and a Lecturer at King’s College London and the University of Exeter. She holds a DPhil in Politics from Oxford. She was the founding director of UCL’s Religion and Political Theory Centre. She has held visiting positions in Paris and Princeton, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

She has published extensively in the areas of republicanism, liberalism and religion, theories of law and the state, and global justice. She has published 5 monographs and has written articles in major journals of political science and political theory. She is notably the author of Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France and Critical Republicanism. The Hijab Controversy in Political Philosophy(OUP 2008). Her most recent monograph, Liberalism’s Religion, was released with Harvard University Press in 2017.

About the Institute:

The Institute brings together political and legal theorists from Law, Political Science and Philosophy and organises regular colloquia in terms 2 and 3.

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