(Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay)

I sometimes find myself wondering why exactly it is that people find it so hard to treat embryos and foetuses as persons. One answer I’m experimenting with is that the root of it is the fact that you can’t empathise with them.

Embryos and early foetuses are not conscious. They have no mental states. There is nothing that it is like to be them. If you try to “put yourself in the shoes” of an embryo or “imagine what it would be like to be them” you will either draw a blank or start constructing a fiction.

The reason why this is a bit puzzling to me, rather than being blindingly obvious, is that there are plenty of other non-conscious humans that people seem to have much less trouble empathising with. People in sufficiently deep comas, for example, have no conscious mental states either.

This points towards another puzzle about the abortion debate, and perhaps to a solution to it. When I’m  talking to a pro-choice person about the moral rights of the unborn, they’re often inclined to the view that  “having been conscious in the past” might mark a being as a rights-bearer in a way that “going to be conscious in the future” wouldn’t. From one point of view this can just look like total inconsistency or special pleading. If what matters is having a certain attribute, that of being conscious, then it seems totally arbitrary whether one had it in the past or not. If anything “going to be conscious in the future” seems much more morally relevant, because how you treat a being now could actually determine how its (conscious) future goes or whether it even has one.

But there’s a way of looking at things which isn’t about having consciousness as a “rights-grounding attribute” at all. It’s about the possibility of empathy.

You can’t empathise with what a comatose person is going through right now, because they are not feeling or experiencing anything right now. But it’s pretty easy to empathise with them in a broader sense. You can easily imagine how they would feel about it “if they were awake” (there’s something paradoxical about this of course but I think it’s getting at something), or if they’d known the coma was coming. If they’re a person you know, you know their personality, you know how they habitually react to situations: you know the shape of channels down which their thoughts and feelings run. You can, basically, empathise.

With a foetus, you don’t know any of this. And more than that, there is no “any of this”. The human being in question has no habitual reactions: the channels have yet to be carved, and are in any case still dry. There is no-one here whom it would really be coherent to empathise with.

When you think about it this way, the pro-choice distinction between “having been conscious” and “going to be conscious” makes a lot more sense.

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So what do I think about the implications for the abortion debate? Well, one easy response is that how much one is able to empathise with another being should have very little to do with their rights. But I think this is a bit too easy. I think pro-choice people are on to something with the idea that it should be possible to have the right kind of emotional response or attitude when confronted with a rights-bearer. Whether or not any individual has that response shouldn’t affect whether or not we think of a being as having rights. But if that response is actually impossible or incoherent then I think we should be worried. After all, everyone in the debate empathises (or should) with pregnant women dealing with the many real and serious difficulties that can result from unplanned pregnancies.


The right pro-life response to this, I think, is to question whether empathy is in fact always the appropriate attitude to take to the troubles and travails of rights-bearing humans. I want to speak up for the merits of its sister, sympathy.

Where the OED defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”, its first two definitions for sympathy are “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune” (“they had great sympathy for the flood victims”) and “understanding between people; common feeling” (“the special sympathy between the two boys was obvious to all”). Both of these capture something important.

First, let’s think about the first definition. One thing it implies is that you do not need to empathise with someone to sympathise with them. You don’t even need to be able to empathise with them. Think about the way that we might feel sorry for someone who is being deceived. Their spouse is cheating on them and they are completely oblivious. Here it’s pretty obvious that just empathising with their situation is somewhat incoherent. To say “imagine how they would feel if they did know” and then empathise with them on that basis is to empathise with a situation that’s different from the one they’re actually in. Their actual situation can’t be empathised with: only sympathised with.

Second, even when you can more easily empathise, it’s often not clear that it’s really the heart of the matter. Imagine a person who is shot in the head at a distance and killed instantly before they realise they are in any danger. Yes, one can empathise with them along the following lines “imagine how disappointed they would be to have their life come to an end”. But it’s not the disappointment that’s the source of the wrong. It’s the end of their life! The fact that they never had any negative attitude towards their impending murder, that it never disturbed even a fraction of their equilibrium, is beside the point. Again, one doesn’t need to tweak the scenario to make it empathisable-with in order to sympathise.

Taking the point further, we might notice that for most of us the reach of our sympathy far outstrips that of our empathy: even when empathy is completely possible and would be completely appropriate.

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Once you see that sympathy is at least as big a part of the moral life as empathy, it’s much easier to see how it could be the generally appropriate attitude to have to rights-bearers. And it’s also much easier to see how it’s possible to have it for the unconscious. A person in a coma is missing out on an awful lot; they are in a predicament; they are not flourishing. The fact that they don’t know this is beside the point. Similarly, an unborn baby would be losing an awful lot by being killed. They would be losing everything. The fact that they will never know this or be upset by it, that they can’t in fact know this, is just as beside the point.

This brings me to the second definition of sympathy: the idea of it as a certain kind of solidarity or fellow-feeling. The philosopher Cora Diamond writes that “A human being is someone who has a human life to lead, as do I, someone whose fate is a human fate, as is mine.” She adds “we expect to be able to see a sense of what human life is in people otherwise greatly different from ourselves.” I think we can see this in unconscious humans. And so we can, and should, have sympathy for the foetus.

Ben