consequences Archives - Prindle Institute

April 13, 2023

Consequence and Intention in Abortion Law

Unsafe abortions are the leading cause of preventable maternal deaths world-wide. At least some of the laws that restrict access to abortion also, unavoidably probably, make it less safe. If pursuing more restrictive abortion laws makes it less safe, but we believe abortion is immoral, we might wonder how to balance the health and safety of women who pursue abortions against the goal of reducing the number of abortions. Which raises the question, do restrictive abortion laws reduce the number of abortions?

They do not. The restrictiveness of abortion laws and policies has no overall effect on the number of abortions performed. Given this, even if we suppose that abortions are morally problematic, why make them illegal?

Since we know that these laws will result in more harm to women without preventing fetuses from being aborted, why do it?

We might be tempted to think that everything that is immoral should be illegal. But this is not plausible. One deep reason to deny that everything immoral should be illegal is that our society is founded on the idea that we should each be allowed to pursue our own good, as we understand it, in our own way. At most, the law represents a kind of ethical ground floor that must leave room for citizens’ reasonable disagreement over fundamental matters. What form should that take in the specific case of abortion? That’s a contentious matter. Certainly some would argue that the conflict in the abortion case pits the life of the fetus against the liberty of the mother, and so (as they say) we should choose life.

However, another reason not to criminalize all immoral behavior is that it’s just not possible. Could society function and not go broke, if we policed, arrested, tried, and punished everyone for any lie they told or every time they broke a promise? Perhaps, we should make only seriously immoral things illegal – and abortion, some would argue, is seriously immoral in a way most everyday lying is not. But why bother if making something illegal does not prevent people from doing these things – and at roughly the same rate?

Maybe, seriously immoral things should be illegal, even if that doesn’t prevent them. Perhaps we can justly punish people for their bad behavior, even if such punishment does not increase the overall good and instead makes everyone worse-off. It makes the punished worse-off, obviously, but since, again, it also costs time and social resources to police, arrest, try, and punish crimes, it makes the punishers worse off too. Some people, including most famously the philosopher Immanuel Kant, believe in what is called the “retributive theory of punishment.” We should punish people for doing bad things without regard to the consequences. Punishing people appropriately, and proportionally, for the wrongs they have done does, in fact, make them, and us, better off in some metaphysical sense, retributivists say, even if it doesn’t increase our welfare.

The trouble with taking this view in this context is that American anti-abortion activists have long dismissed as insulting the suggestion that they are mainly interested in punishing women. Instead, defenders of restrictive abortion laws often argue the point is not to punish women, but doctors and other abortion providers. Arguably, this is inconsistent. They both participated in the same crime, on this account, and both have to bear serious consequences. Given the impact on maternal health coupled with the ineffectiveness in curbing abortion’s frequency, it’s hard to see the point of criminalizing abortion as anything other than the punishment of women.

Perhaps, some things should be illegal because they are wrong and we need to send a message to society as a whole that we will not endorse such behavior. In other words, maybe making abortion illegal is a kind of virtue signaling or moral grandstanding. Marking something as wrong symbolically, however, can be done symbolically. We could just send a message.

But some might think that more than a message is needed. We might think that, at a minimum, we have a moral duty to avoid providing any sort of aid or assistance to others doing what we regard as wrong. In the United States, the Hyde Amendment has forbidden the government from financially supporting abortion-related care for over twenty years. Given its impact on maternal health, this might not be a good thing. But it does suggest that the debate over who pays for abortion-related healthcare is not the same as the debate concerning whether abortion should be outright illegal.

There are other crimes that are not reduced by prohibition, but were, or still are, illegal. Prohibition, for example, prohibited (or, really, limited) alcohol consumption. But that only lasted thirteen years, mostly because it increased violent crime more than it reduced alcohol consumption. Similarly, the U.S.’s “war on drugs” has been going on for fifty-years and seems to have produced unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, especially of people of color, without limiting drug consumption. In fact, the government is starting to give up on marijuana prohibition. So, rather than thinking that abortion, like alcohol, or other drugs should be illegal, this analogy might actually support less restrictive abortion law. We might think that the lesson of the analogy is not that we should criminalize abortion care, but that is time to call a truce in the war on drugs.

Why is it that restrictive abortion laws do not lower the abortion rate? It’s no doubt partly that, like alcohol and other drugs, the demand is high and doesn’t change. As economists say, the demand is inelastic. However, it’s also because societies with more restrictive abortion laws also typically have more laws restricting access to contraception. In theory, we could reduce the abortion rate by making access to contraception easier. Though anti-abortion activists have increasingly been arguing that many kinds of contraception are actually forms of abortion. Unfortunately, this is a problem we can’t take on here.

But you can read other great Prindle Post articles on the moral and legal issues surrounding abortion, and check out my article “’Persons’ in the Moral Sense.”

March 22, 2022December 14, 2022

Considered Position: Thinking Through Sanctions – Do Sanctions Work?

This piece begins a Considered Position series investigating the purpose and permissibility of economic sanctions.

In this series of posts, I want to investigate some of the ethical questions surrounding the use of sanctions. Each post will be dedicated to one important ethical question.

Part 1: Do sanctions work to change behavior?

Part 2: Do sanctions unethically target civilians?

Part 3: What obligations do we as individuals have with regard to sanctions?

In this first post I want to address a particularly fundamental question. Do sanctions even work?

Why It Matters if Sanctions Work

If sanctions are ineffective, then there are very strong reasons to reject their use. That is because sanctions cause massive harm to innocent civilians. We can already see this happening in Russia.

In the Spring 2010, the high school debate community debated whether or not it is permissible to use economic sanctions to achieve foreign policy objectives. I remember that at the time, it was widely accepted that sanctions directed against Iraq had killed over half a million children. And while we now know that the number was almost entirely fabricated by the Iraqi government, the very fact it was widely accepted by the United Nations shows just how plausible it is that sanctions can cause incredible amounts of harm. Even so-called “smart sanctions” — such as the choice to freeze the banking assets of a nation’s leaders — can sometimes be circumvented with harms passed onto civilians.

Because sanctions are accompanied by high costs to civilians, it is therefore important that sanctions work. Otherwise, we cannot possibly justify the harm they cause to innocent people.

How Sanctions Don’t Work

This raises a problem, however. Because at first blush it looks like sanctions are generally ineffective. If you look at the various times in the past that the United States and United Nations have imposed sanctions, they do not seem to really change a nation’s behavior.

Indeed, some studies suggest that sanctions are actually counterproductive — resulting in an increase in repression and human rights abuses.

Why would this be? There seem to be a couple of mechanisms.

First, economic sanctions often lead the populous of a nation to think they are being victimized by the international community. This can often produce a ‘rally around the flag’ effect where the populace comes to support national leaders more strongly in response to an external threat.

Second, sanctions decrease economic and information exchange between a nation and the wider community. This, at least historically, meant that sanctions made it easier for a government to control the information available to a citizenry (though this is changing in the world of modern computers).

Third, sanctions often cause the sanctioned government to crack down and increase control over the populace (as we are currently seeing in Russia), and this can result in the prosecution of opposition parties or free media. Thus solidifying the government’s control.

This forms the foundation for the standard objection to sanctions. Imposing sanctions does not actually work to change behavior. So, given the harms they cause, we should not use them.

However, there are good reasons to doubt this argument. The problem is that these studies find that sanctions are ineffective because they misunderstand how sanctions work in the first place.

I tend to think that sanctions are actually fairly effective. So, it is worth looking at the two mechanisms by which they actually seem to change behavior.

The Primary Mechanism: Threats

Most people critical of sanctions assume that sanctions work by changing behavior once the sanction is imposed. However, it is actually the preliminary threat of sanctions that changes behavior. Elizabeth Rogers makes this point in a discussion paper for the Belfer Center:

The literature focuses on the ability of imposed sanctions to compel the target to change its behavior, but does not systematically study whether the threat of sanctions can deter the target from taking a certain action. Hence the literature asks if sanctions can achieve compliance (which is difficult) without asking if they can achieve deterrence (which is easier). Deterring an untaken action is easier than compelling a policy reversal because leaders do not face the higher political costs that accompany reversing course.

Sanctions can deter in two ways. Target states can be threatened with sanctions directly, or sanctions can deter indirectly, by example. States seeing the economic damage sustained by sanctioned states may decide to avoid actions that will make them the targets of similar sanctions. Press accounts imply that this logic was part of the rationale for sanctioning Haiti in 1991 and Niger in 1996 after military coups in those states.

If sanctions work via a credible threat then you should not expect sanctions to change behavior once they are imposed. Once you issue a threat of sanctions, then the other nation decides if it is still worth performing the triggering action. Normally, the sanction will tip the balance against the action. But where it doesn’t, the other nation has already factored in the chance of sanctions, and so is unlikely to change just because the sanction is actually imposed.

That does not mean that sanctions don’t work. It just means when you impose sanctions, then they have already failed. As such, if you try to test the efficacy of sanctions by looking at where imposed sanctions change behavior, you are basically trying to assess if sanctions work by only evaluating sanctions that failed.

So is the threat of sanctions effective? It turns out this is a really difficult empirical question to study. Nevertheless, we can get some indirect evidence that these threats are effective. For instance, it does seem as though one reason that Russia was willing to invade Ukraine now is because there was a fairly weak international response to the original invasion of Crimea in 2014. This would suggest that it was partly because Russia thought that serious threats were uncredible that they were willing to begin a larger invasion.

At this point you might wonder. If it is the threat of sanctions that does all the work, why actually ever impose sanctions? After all, imposing them won’t actually do much once the threat has failed.

The problem, however, is that to have a credible threat in the future you need to be willing to follow through with it even when deterrence has failed. For example, if we want China to think that there is a credible threat of sanctions should they invade Taiwan, then we need to sanction Russia even if we don’t expect it to change Russia’s actions (or even if we think it will increase Russian aggression).

The Secondary Mechanism: Norm Internalization

Sanctions also seem to work by reinforcing clearer international norms.

There is a big difference between a real social norm, and merely something that everyone in society pays lip service to. For instance, most highways have a speed limit of 55 miles per hour; but that is not the norm for how fast we drive. Most people drive 5 to 10 miles above the ‘official’ speed limit.

Why? At least in part because no one ever enforces the actual speed limit. The norm tends to get solidified where the punishment kicks in, not where a piece of paper says the norm should be. This also occurs with social norms that are not imposed by the government. Things that our social norms consider rude, are pretty much those things that might get other people to respond to you negatively.

Sanctions, in the broad sense, help to define norms.

Not only that, but when other nations impose sanctions because of the violation of some value, it tends to deepen that value in the sanctioning nations. So, nations that come together to sanction Russia, are likely to have a renewed commitment to certain international norms (if for no other reason than to not look like hypocrites).

So, one way that sanctions seem to work is providing a non-military form of punishment by which international norms are solidified.

This would also explain why sanctions are effective, even if they don’t tend to change behavior after they are imposed. After all, the nations who violate the sanctions tend to also be the ones that don’t care about the norms in the first place. That does not mean the sanctions don’t have an important effect on most other countries, however.

February 18, 2019December 14, 2022

Considering the Consequences: Withdrawing from the INF Treaty

Photograph of Reagan and Gorbachev shaking hands and holding a document

In a very dramatic speech on February 1, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the US is suspending its obligations under the INF Treaty effective February 2 due to Russia’s continuous violation of the Article XV of the treaty, which obligates parties “not to produce, possess, or flight-test a ground-launched intermediate-range cruise missile system with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.” Russia followed the US decision just hours after the Secretary Pompeo’s speech.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 in order to prevent both the US and then the Soviet Union from developing an entire class of nuclear weapons, leading to a gradual removal and destruction of more than 2600 missiles. The Treaty was celebrated as one of the most advanced and consequential agreements between the two world powers that aimed to bring more security to the North Atlantic Area, and most importantly to calm down the tensions caused by the Cold War. The purpose of these missiles was to threaten the possibility of nuclear war in Europe, as they were not easily noticeable on radars due to their short flight times and unpredictable flight patterns. Notably, this treaty was not only important for Europe, as it also imposed a ban on using “all types of ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles” anywhere in the world.

The US has first warned about Russia’s violation of the treaty in 2014, and since then has been imposing various policies and sanctions trying to leverage Russia to comply with the treaty. Russia has rebutted those claims, asking that the US provides evidence, while also giving a list of US violations. As time passed the US allies started to increasingly align with the US assessment and ultimately “concluded that Russia has developed and fielded a missile system.” The Euro-American front seemed to be clear in their position towards Russia, but some of the first reactions coming from Europe seem hesitant to completely side with President Trump, as most of those countries view this treaty as a pillar of their security architecture. Several questions arise after the withdrawing from the treaty: what are the major consequences of the withdrawal, and was the decision to withdraw more opportune then the policy of trying to leverage Russia back to compliance?

The array of consequences are still debated, especially the results of this decision on the peace and security in the world. America’s European allies have already expressed their disaffection with President Trump’s decision as they fear that Russia is once again going to be able to target all parts of the European territory. Another fear also accompanies that of the Russian attack: the decoupling of US and European security. European allies have relied for a long time on US interest in keeping Europe safe, but President Trump has often emphasized that this responsibility is now on Europeans themselves. The transatlantic area has been under a strain for a quite some time, and the withdrawal is going to provide just another kick in the already tense relationship. There is a lot of discussion on whether NATO is going to be able to balance between the allies as the new challenges arise, but the next steps have yet to be seen.

Another important factor is that the US will now be free to develop intermediate range missiles as a deterrence mechanism against China, but this might also indicate a beginning of a new arms race. China has not been part of the INF, and as such was not restrained to develop intermediate-range missiles which led to China’s missile arsenal consisting of approximately 95% of intermediate-range systems. However, the fact remains that if US and China commence the arms race, the chances of a potential new INF treaty that would include China, Russia, and European allies seems less likely especially as the US will need to ensure support both from Europeans and Russians in order to compel China to join.

The previous administration pursued the approach of targeted policy and sanctions to try to convince Russia to get back to compliance to the INF Treaty. Although this approach did not result in Russia’s policy reversal and decision to comply, one question remains open: why did the US withdraw without a readily available alternative, and would remaining a party to the treaty make any future negotiations easier? In case of the START I Treaty, Russia and US readily replaced the expiring treaty with its refreshed version New START, just half a year after its expiry. Exiting the treaty obligations while the treaty was still in force, despite the fact it had been violated by one party, makes it much harder to renegotiate as it opens space for potential disagreements on things that the previous agreement had established and clarified, and most importantly allows for a period of arms race before any new potential agreement is reached. Consequently, one must take into account the long lasting process that goes into negotiating any kind of arms deal, especially between two world powers. In evaluating the consequences of the withdrawal one ought to take into account the possibility of renegotiating the status quo.

The full range of consequences of the US and Russian withdrawal are not yet clear, but we can only hope that we are not going to repeat the mistakes of our past.