My favourite things that I taught this semester: Fiona Woollard

 

 

Last semester I had my 'Feminist Philosophy' students read Woollard's prize-winning 2021 paper, 'Mother knows best: Pregnancy, applied ethics, and epistemically transformative experiences.' 

Woollard utilizes Laurie Paul's innovation regarding the epistemic consequences of transformative experiences. As I wrote back in 2013, Paul attempts to capture exactly how ineffable the experience of becoming a parent is. The ineffablity is so profound, she argues, that you cannot understand what it is like, until after it has happened.  When combined with another key feature of the transition - its tendency of altering the identity of the parent - there is an important consequence: There is no way to access knowledge about whether you will enjoy being a parent, in advance of its being too late to back out. You can't know what it will be like, nor what *you* will be like - what preferences you'll have, for example. So there is no way to make rational decisions about whether or not to enter that state.

Paul's argument has received a large amount of interest and some push-back. But Woollard's is one of the first papers, as far as I'm aware at least, that puts it to further conceptual work. And big work it is! For Woollard argues that Paul's conclusions have consequences for the permissibility of abortion. In fact, it goes even further than that. If Woollard is right, then there might be consequences for the very idea of objective moral truths. Big news.

So how do we get there? First off, Woollard focusses on the ineffability of pregnancy, rather than parenthood more generally. There might be a few reasons for this. For one thing, in abortion debates it is typically assumed that the costs of actually raising a child aren't relevant, because a woman might avoid those by giving a child up for adoption. For another, its important to Woollard's point that only certain members of the population actually experience pregnancy, whereas many more will experience parenthood. The people who experience pregnancy will overwhelmingly be women.

Woollard argues that pregnancy is sufficiently unlike any other experience that only those who have been pregnant can grasp what it is like. A friend of mine fairly recently had a sky diving accident in which he broke both ankles. It was a near-death experience which left him changed, with large amounts of metal pins now holding him together. Although he now enjoys a fairly normal life, there are certain things he now can't do, and it has affected his identity. We agreed that his experience might be the closest a man can get to pregnancy and childbirth. It hurt, his body changed in unexpected ways, it was frightnening and left him with reduced options open to him, in unanticipated ways. Of course there are also lots of differences - pregancy is far more common, and often results in very big gains as well as losses.  Pregnancy also involves the experience of a life growing within you, and in the potential generation of an incredible intimacy - an emotional attachment to the thing growing, which is very hard to put into words. 

A crucial presupposition here is that there are limits to the obligations that may be reasonably demanded of moral agents. This means we may only require a person to do something if we understand what it would cost them. If only people who have experienced pregnancy can  understand what it is like to be pregnant, then only such people can understand what it can cost - the burden it can impose. Of course, some people experience pregnancy as enjoyable overall, or as having negligible costs. Nonetheless, Woollard argues that even someone who experienced a low-cost, high-gain pregnancy has a better grasp of what it would be like to have a very costly, awful pregnancy, compared to someone who has not been pregnant at all. Crucially, Woollard argues that someone who has never been pregnant can have only a very limited understanding of what it's like to be pregnant, and therefore of what they would be demanding if they required someone to continue a pregnancy against their will.

Woollard stops short of concluding that only people with experience of pregnancy may judge the permissibility of abortion. But she does say that the permissibility of abortion can only be determined after the right kind of engagement with the perspectives of people who have experienced pregnancy. That pregnancy-experiencers have a sort of privileged epistemic status, when it comes to abortion ethics.

One reason why this paper is a big deal is because it speaks to the intuition that there is something deeply uncomfortable about photos like this of US lawmakers campaigning against abortion rights.

Another reason, however, is its potential impact on other ethical issues. Does one always need relevant experience of an event or action in order to be qualified to judge its permissibility? Perhaps child sex abuse, for example, should only be litigated by former victims of such abuse? Perhaps famine relief ought to be organised only by former victims of famine? 

Woollard tries to head off such conclusions by arguing that pregnancy is a special case - that's why she focuses so much on the details and weirdness of pregnancy. but this doesn't foreclose the worry that we might need even more finegrained categories. Perhaps the permissibility of abortion in cases of rape should be determined only by people who have experiences abortion as a consequence of rape, for example? This slope slips into relativism however. We want to avoid saying that matters of right and wrong depend too much on where one stands.

Paul's critics were largely unconvinced that transformative experiences are a discrete category. It seems more plausible that we can grasp things more or less, and that very transformative experiences are on a continuum with less transformative experiences. And Woollard allows that people aren't entirely trapped in the solipsism of their own experiences. We can use narrative, imagery, poetry, metaphor and the like to approach an understanding of what other people experience.

But in a world where women's narratives tend already to be ignored and minimised, I really welcome this paper which calls for us to give more space, more priority, to the views of those people who have relevant experience.