Adequacy Over Accuracy: A Novel Take on the Abortion Debate Stalemate

Abstract: I will argue that the moral deadlock in the abortion rights debate derives from the treatment of adequately constructed moral beliefs as accurately observed moral facts. To support this claim, I will sketch a novel metaethical view grounded in moral conservationism that remains agnostic regarding the existence of a natural moral fabric. I will then address how, despite lacking direct access to natural moral facts, we are rationally motivated to form moral beliefs and regard them as true, settling for adequacy over accuracy. Consequently, I will demonstrate how this behavior renders the tactics and targets of interlocutors of abortion set on evangelizing largely ineffective. While primarily descriptive, this argument supports the normative conclusion that rather than debating the accuracy of moral conclusions, it is more reasonable for such interlocutors to target the ideological frameworks against which opposing agents determine the adequacy of their moral beliefs.

Keywords: abortion, moral conservationism, empirical adequacy.

Introduction

A hallmark of the debate over whether or how access to abortion should be maintained as an element of reproductive healthcare is the apparent failure of well-reasoned moral arguments from either side to shift opposing views. That is, the debate appears ideologically deadlocked. Even when some arguments attempt to shift focus away from the walls of opposing moral fortresses and toward supposedly more empirical—perhaps biological—claims, preconceived moral opposition seems to prevail. How are we to explain this deadlock? Does one side have an accurate grasp of the moral facts and the other an inaccurate grasp? Can we hope, through continued discourse, to shift those misunderstandings toward the side possessing the accurate moral truth of the matter and, in so doing, develop a mutually agreed-upon solution?

I propose that this deadlock in the moral debate over abortion rights stems from neither side being right nor wrong. Neither side, I will argue, has the kind of direct access to the agent-independent moral facts—whether they exist or not—necessary to demonstrate an indisputable, naturally-carved moral truth. Despite this, agents involved in everyday discourse regard their moral claims as occupying the seat of facts. That is, when a member of this debate says, “abortion is wrong,” they do not append a silent “or so it seems” or “as best I can reason” to the end. I will argue that this is a logical consequence of our motivation to form beliefs about the world and regard them as facts coupled with our difficulty accessing in nature the naturally carved facts relevant to that end. To fill the seat left empty by the difficult- or impossible-to-reach moral facts, moral agents construct substitutions that they deem adequately suited for the role according to the ideological and pragmatic models framing their analysis. The moral deadlock in the debate over abortion rights, I will argue, ultimately derives from this misalignment in the treatment of adequately constructed moral beliefs as accurately observed moral facts. To demonstrate this, I will distinguish a novel metaethical view called adequate conservative moral conservationism and offer it as the best explanation for why well-reasoned arguments from either side of the debate seem to fail in their efforts to shift opposing positions.

In section one, I will sketch the existing view known as moral conservationism and situate it in the greater expanse of moral skepticism to which it belongs. In section two, I will develop and offer my titular novel take on the theory: adequate conservative moral conservationism. I will use that view to demonstrate how we rationally regard constructed, adequate—not necessarily accurate—moral conclusions as facts. In section three, I will show how this treatment of adequate conclusions as accurate facts leads interlocutors of abortion toward deploying the wrong sort of argumentative strategy for their intended aims, contributing to the failure of members from either side to change their opponents’ minds. I will also address how acknowledging the role of this view in the abortion debate reveals the possibility of more nuanced and targeted approaches to its resolution. In section four, I will address the objection that moral discourse is not frustrated by its very nature, as I claim, since we routinely revise our moral assessments. Finally, I will conclude that our misaligned treatment of fiction as fact, while a generally rational reaction to our imperfect or impossible access to natural moral facts, provides the best explanation for why fact-focused arguments have failed to bridge and close the abortion debate.

While this project is largely descriptive, it also results in the normative, secondary conclusion that an interlocutor of abortion set on evangelizing must do more than elucidate or rationally justify their moral position: they must appeal to and engage with the larger framework against which their opponents determined the adequacy of their beliefs. It is worth clarifying that my aim in this paper is not to offer a full-throated defense of this novel metaethical view; instead, I intend to sketch it in enough detail to demonstrate its power to explain the apparent longstanding stalemate in the reproductive healthcare debate. The view navigates a narrow path that borrows from the intelligible features of moral conservationism, constructivism, and instrumentalism. Notably, this view is agnostic as to whether there is an agent-independent moral fabric or whether that fabric, if it exists, is theistically formed. There may be objective moral facts in that strict realist sense, or there may not be. This argument stands and functions independently of that assessment. Instead, it is premised on the more conservative notion that even if a natural moral fabric exists, our claims about moral facts fall short of directly accessing it.

I. Moral Conservationism

Before I present my novel view, prudence dictates that I locate moral conservationism in the greater expanse of moral views. Foremost, moral conservationism is a type of moral skepticism—a body of views linked by a common doubt as to whether there exists in the world one single, true, observable, objective morality or set of moral facts. To locate these views in relation to one another, consider first moral error theory, whose proponents hold that there are no agent-independent moral facts in the world. If that is true, they argue, then all moral claims are necessarily untrue. In other words, according to error theorists, both of the propositions ‘killing babies is wrong’ and ‘killing babies is right’ are necessarily false because there are no corresponding agent-independent facts in the world against which the purported truth values of the propositions can be measured. This is the point at which moral abolitionists take up the torch, arguing that if moral error theory is true, then we should do away with moral beliefs and moral talk altogether as they may do more harm than good.

Moral fictionalists enter the stage here. As detailed by Friend (2008), the moral fictionalist agrees with the error theorist and the abolitionist that we should be skeptical of the existence of an agent-independent morality or moral law, but they object to each for different reasons. The fictionalist agrees with the abolitionist that we are better off doing away with moral belief but thinks we should hold onto moral talk on the grounds that we gain tremendous practical utility from using it in everyday discourse. Relatedly, Friend (2008) explains that the fictionalist objects to the error theorist by arguing that a person engaged in moral discourse is not asserting real claims about the world to begin with; instead, they only “make as if to assert” or “quasi-assert” the truth values of their propositions (p. 14). For example, when announcing the claim that abortion is right or wrong, Friend holds that “the fictionalist neither believes nor asserts what she says” but treats the proposition as “somehow good or interesting or useful independently of its truth value” (p. 14). The fictionalist path diverges here between revolutionary moral fictionalism (RMF) and hermeneutic moral fictionalism (HMF). According to Shafer-Landau, RMF takes the position that we should acknowledge the fictional nature of our claims while engaging in everyday moral discourse because we would benefit from transparency. Meanwhile, HMF takes the position that we are already doing that; that when we make moral claims, we are already aware that we are only making as if to propose their truth values (Shafer-Landau, 2011).

Moral conservationism is strikingly similar to moral fictionalism. Machua (2018) observes that the relevant difference between the two is that the conservationist wants to acknowledge that there is no objective morality but retain the practices of moral talk and moral belief in everyday discourse and reflection. In other words, where the fictionalist finds too great a utility in everyday moral talk to discard it, the conservationist finds too great a utility in both everyday moral talk and everyday reflection on moral beliefs to discard either. Machua explains that for the person aware of conservationism, attending to this view requires partitioning first-order beliefs and discourse from the second-order conservationist views. While conservationism might be argued to place an extra burden on the philosopher in that sense, it has the benefit of requiring no change on the part of non-philosophers who already attend to moral talk and beliefs. Olson (2014a) highlights this, clarifying that “conservationism recommends moral belief in morally engaged and everyday contexts and reserves attendance to the belief that moral error theory is true to detached and critical contexts, such as the philosophy seminar room” (p. 192).

II. Adequate Conservative Moral Conservationism

The view I will offer in this section is grounded in the normative conclusions of conservationism that I addressed above while remaining agnostic as to the existence of objective moral facts. Once constructed, I will incorporate it and Bas van Fraassen’s notion of adequacy into our everyday understanding of moral inquiry. I will address 1) why the purported moral facts claimed by agents in the debate over abortion access often differ such as to fully oppose one another, and 2) why, if it is possible that some or all of our moral propositions fall short of the truth, so many of the individuals engaged in moral discourse regard their claims as facts.

2.1 Introducing and Distinguishing the View

Where moral conservationism is premised on there being no moral facts, I offer conservative moral conservationism (CMC) as a more cautious—perhaps somewhat Pyrrhonist—take premised on the belief that whether or not there are agent-independent moral facts, we lack direct access to them. It is possible that our lack of access is due to the non-existence of those facts, as the conservationist claims. Or as is often the case in various sciences, our lack of access may be due to our lacking some capacity, skill, or technology required to identify and chart them. I ground this view in conservationism on the shared grounds that, despite our lack of direct access to any natural moral law, the utility we derive from moral talk and moral belief is too great for us to discard. This seems true even if in more critical spaces—like a philosophy seminar room—we readily question whether or how accurately moral propositions attach to something objectively and agent-independently real.

Additionally, I attach to my presentation of CMC Bas van Fraassen’s notion of empirical adequacy, which Friend (2008) describes as follows: since many of the truth values dealt with in science seem to fall somewhere between difficult and impossible to ascertain with absolute certainty, “science aims at empirical adequacy rather than truth, and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is empirically adequate” (p. 20). In the midst of competing theories with no clear-cut answer as to which is true, empirical adequacy offers “a way of measuring, or otherwise appraising, the relative epistemological contributions” (Hanna, 1983, p. 2). Van Fraassen holds that scientists believe their theories are true and that they treat the expression of those theories as expressions of fact even if they acknowledge when pressed in more critical spaces that adequacy is the actual aim of their inquiry, not truth (Friend, 2008. P. 20). According to Van Fraassen (1980), acceptance of a theory involves both epistemic and pragmatic considerations. Additionally, adequacy is context-dependent. According to van Fraassen, “To present a theory is to specify a family of structures, its models,” and “to specify certain parts of those models…as candidates for the direct representation of observable phenomena.” (p. 64).

2.2 Incorporating Adequacy & CMC into our Understanding of Moral Inquiry

As with scientists, moral agents have no shortage of competing theories from which to choose. To parse those competing theories, adequate CMC forwards the notion above to suggest that moral agents rely not on the truth of a moral proposition but on its adequacy. In other words, a moral claim is adequate if it 1) accounts for the perceived phenomena and 2) fits within the structure or model outlined by the moral agent at the outset of their inquiry. Also as above, and as provided for by CMC, the fact of this process does not preclude moral agents from believing their moral propositions or treating expressions of them as expressions of fact. Recall that consideration of the view from a second-order perspective, as mentioned by Olson, has no need to—nor should it—extend beyond the philosopher’s desk.

How, then, do moral agents determine adequacy? And how do those determinations contribute to interlocutory deadlock, as suggested by the focal argument of this paper? As mentioned above, agents seeking to fill moral knowledge gaps adopt or reject moral propositions according to how they fit within their larger ideological framework. Agents operating from within markedly different frameworks (e.g., Protestant, Catholic, atheist, agnostic, conservative, progressive, egalitarian, individualist, hierarchist, fatalist, etc.) can reasonably be expected to make different determinations of adequacy based on the ability of the moral proposition on offer to positively interact with those complex social and ideological structures. So, what counts as an adequate moral conclusion for a conservative parochial vicar who is heavily engaged in the dogmas and practices of their faith is likely to differ from what counts as an adequate moral conclusion for a progressive atheist activist who is heavily engaged in the advancement of access to reproductive healthcare.

Why do we treat these merely adequate moral conclusions as objectively true? Would it not be apparent to the investigating moral agent that they are parsing and adopting views in this way? Indeed, we seem to regard moral claims as not merely adequate but categorically true; we regard them as occupying the seat of truth. Based on what I have outlined thus far about adequate CMC, we seem to have no other choice. Whether we take them to exist or not, we lack the kind of direct, immediate access to the agent-independent moral facts necessary to demonstrate with certainty the natural truth value of any given moral claim. So, our options are either to forego truth-seeking or construct something to serve as the truth and regard it as such. Even if we accept that we are limited to those choices, why opt for truth-constructing over truth-forgoing? I suggest that we have no lack of motivation to behave this way. As Shafer-Landau (2011) writes, we are powerfully motivated to acquire and hold beliefs and to rely on their truth values: “A person about to eat a poisonous fruit better believe that the fruit is poisonous and attend to that belief” (p. 193). That motivation to form practical beliefs about the world, coupled with our frustrated or non-existent access to the objective truth values that would ideally form the basis of those beliefs, seems like a recipe for unassailable disappointment. I suggest that to satisfy that motivation and protect against the frustration of its going unmet, we demonstrate a rational preference for leveraging our van Fraassenian adequate moral conclusions despite their imperfection and proneness to inter-agent contradiction.

For example, I have no objective, agent-independent, discovered-in-nature evidence for a moral claim that the consensual euthanasia of terminally ill humans is either right or wrong. Still, if I was the close relative of a terminally ill patient or the doctor attending to one, it is reasonable to assert, as Shafer-Landau might, that I should form a belief on the question and regard it as true. I can form an adequate van Fraassenian substitution for that missing truth data from any number of observations or recommendations and discriminate among them based on a desire to satisfy pragmatic interests and to fix truth content that is consonant with my existing ideological leanings. Observations might include the testimony of the patient, their prognosis, their pain behavior, recollections of times I was in extreme pain, and so forth. Framing might include the position claimed by the clergy of my religion, or—if I am the doctor—my desire not to lose my practice or deference to my Hippocratic oath. Once arrived at, I can rationally justify using my newly formed adequate belief as a substitute to occupy the otherwise vacant seat of truth and attend to it as such.

Before moving on, I want to stress again the particular way in which this view is conservative about the existence or non-existence of agent-independent moral facts. As mentioned above, just as with scientists, moral agents have no shortage of competing theories from which to choose. Those theories are in competition because, also as in science, we lack direct access to the natural stuff necessary to prove one over the other. That is as far as this view goes on the matter of natural facts. That we do not have access to the natural stuff necessary to perfectly distinguish the correct theories from the others is enough to motivate my argument, and this view is premised on that much alone. It does not serve the issues I will address here to argue as to whether we cannot grasp the natural facts because we do not yet know how or because they do not exist. That question is relevant to other arguments, but not this one. As long as we lack immediate access to the natural facts—for whatever reason—our moral determinations are, at best, adequate; and until we achieve immediate access to the natural facts—if we can—our moral determinations cannot be known to be statements of fact.

III. The Impact of Adequate CMC on the Abortion Debate Deadlock

3.1 The Source of the Deadlock

Consider two common positions on abortion by recalling our parochial vicar and progressive activist. The vicar holds that it is morally right and permissible to abort a fetus only when doing so is necessary to save the life of the pregnant person. The activist holds that it is morally right and permissible to abort a fetus for most reasons at the discretion of the pregnant person up to 24 weeks and for medical reasons thereafter. Suppose the activist accuses the vicar of arriving at an inaccurate moral conclusion. The activist regards their own claim as a moral fact and logically reasons that by sharing the factors that led to their determination with the vicar, the vicar—if rational and following along—should have no trouble arriving at the same fact.

If we take our moral claims to be facts, then that tactic strikes us as rational because it is how we are accustomed to treating other encounters with individuals making false statements of fact. But in a system in which we use different models to determine the adequacy of a conclusion and then treat those merely adequate conclusions as facts, that tactic is not likely to work. For example, suppose the vicar had told the activist that the number of fingers on two typical human hands adds up to 101. The activist, holding the true total to be ten, might try to bring the vicar to see the truth by displaying their fingers and counting them out loud. The vicar, if rational and following along, could reasonably be expected to see the truth and join the activist in holding that the correct number of fingers is ten. However, if the activist is counting using a base-10 number system and the vicar a base-3 number system, then even if the vicar is openly and diligently following along, the evidence presented to him will still add up to 101.

According to adequate CMC, the reason that this show-them-the-light tactic fails in moral cases like abortion is that, in those cases, what we take to be correct or true is merely a substitution for truth and can be better understood from a second-order perspective as adequate. The same observations judged against different pragmatic and ideological frameworks can result in different conclusions about the adequacy of a moral claim and justify different content in the seat of a moral fact. Therefore, two agents can, from their individual perspectives, correctly (qua adequately) arrive at two different or opposing correct (qua adequate) conclusions and each rationally regard their conclusion as a fact. That, in the simplest sense, is the deadlock: opposing moral propositions rationally determined as adequate according to differently framed ideological utility models regarded and defended as facts by the agents who determined them.

So, the activist, by detailing the factors about abortion access that contributed to their progressive position (negative health impacts on the pregnant person, contribution to cycles of poverty for the economically disadvantaged, etc.), is unlikely to elicit a matching conclusion from the vicar. Those same factors, when applied to the vicar’s differently framed model for determining the adequacy of a conclusion, will likely contribute to a different position. If adequate CMC is correct, then from that second-order perspective, we cannot judge whether the vicar or the activist offers an accurate or inaccurate take on the matter. At best, we can only judge whether they arrived at a conclusion that comports with the pragmatic and ideological interests framing their consideration. But that is not how we regard this process from a first-order perspective: we treat our conclusions as facts and hold that someone is right and someone is wrong.

Hermeneutic moral fictionalists will claim that these interlocutors are aware of this process—aware that they are placing something other than a plain fact in the seat of facts—but that does not seem to be the case. It seems that when pressed, interlocutors of abortion are not likely to give up the ruse, as it were; rather, they are likely to double down. That is the nature of the deadlock. At best, when pressed, they might acknowledge that they are operating from different models to arrive at those “facts,” but it seems reasonable and correct to observe that such an acknowledgment is not followed by a further acknowledgment that a fact of the matter is hard to find and they are doing the best they can within their respective models. Instead, each is more likely to accuse the other or hewing to an ideological model that produces the wrong conclusion—the wrong “facts.” Accordingly, interlocutors of abortion seeking to evangelize by meticulously laying out the observations that they factored through their ideological frameworks are likely to fail in their efforts if their opposing agents’ ideological frameworks are too remarkably different from their own. That is, they can agree on all the observed data—the dangers of pregnancy, the economic impact of unintended births, and so forth—but disagree entirely on the most adequate conclusion to derive from those observations.

3.2 The Key to the Deadlock

First, if that which I addressed in the previous section seems to suggest that moral debates are practically unresolvable, then I succeeded in a sense. My intent, as declared at the outset, was to demonstrate how the second-order moral view of adequate CMC accounts for the apparent unresolvability, or deadlock, in the first-order moral debate over abortion. Still, one might argue that my claim is too strong, that it seems to preclude any adoption of opposing moral views or changing of minds. That is not the case. To be clear, the demonstrations above do not show that interlocutors of abortion are doomed to all-but-never change their opponents’ minds about moral claims; rather, merely that they are unlikely to change their opponents’ minds if they focus narrowly on observed factors of abortion instead of the pragmatic and ideological models against which each agent judges those factors.

So, how do evangelists on either side of the abortion debate—or any moral debate—move forward? It seems like there are a few options. Perhaps the most obvious is for an agent to convince their interlocutor to restructure their ideological framework such that it produces a different determination of adequacy and permits them to arrive at a different conclusion. There is room for an entirely separate analysis concerning a project of that kind, and some might prima facie declare it untenable based on the perceived difficulty of such a task. But that does not mean that those ideological restructurings do not happen. For example, people can and do change or leave religions and political parties—or even develop new ones. Moreover, it is reasonable to expect that most people’s models for determining moral adequacy involve more than deference those stock, pre-packaged institutions. The impact and interpretation of personal experiences could play a major role, like previously having received abortion care or having miscarried a pregnancy. Economic considerations may be part of the model. Convincing someone to reconsider Catholicism may seem difficult but convincing them to reinterpret something that happened to them once seems more accessible. Start there.

Alternatively, instead of attempting to alter their interlocutor’s model for moral determination, an agent could work to learn how that model is structured—what sorts of things matter to the opposing interlocutor and to what degrees—and tailor their arguments to function within that framework but toward a different end. In other words, the agent would appeal to their interlocutor’s model instead of flinging at them the observed factors that satisfied their own. So, if an opponent opposes abortion largely because of their Christian faith, learn about that faith and develop a Christian argument for abortion.

Abolitionist error theorists would suggest that we discard first-order moral belief and discourse altogether. I noted already in justifying CMC that, given the apparent social and structural utility of moral behavior, this abolitionist route seems to do more harm than good. However, there is a further reason against this tactic that arises from my more conservative conservationist view. Recall that, according to this view, it remains possible that agent-independent moral facts exist, and that our access to them is simply frustrated by lack of human capacity or inadequate technology. Suppose that turns out to be the case and we manage at some point to gain direct, incontrovertible access to the relevant natural facts necessary to determine absolute moral truth. Abolishing moral structure would be, in that case, a premature and perhaps wasteful act. Moreover, if we abolish morality, then it seems to follow that the search for those natural moral facts would also be called off, and prematurely so, potentially preventing us from ever accessing them.

These are merely suggestions of ways one might approach the deadlock over abortion from an adequate CMC perspective. While my intention was primarily descriptive—showing how adequate CMC accounts for the deadlock—developing normative conclusions for putting the view into practice seems to be the natural next step and is worth pursuing. Ultimately, it seems reasonable to assert that the real key to unlocking the abortion debate deadlock is to shift away from treating opposing adequate claims as accurately observed facts and hammering opposing interlocutors with them.

IV. Degrees of Utility and Defense: the Instrumental Foundation of Belief

A challenger might argue that everyday moral debate can be successful at changing minds. They might offer specific examples of instances when opposing interlocutors have ‘seen the light’ and dropped their opposition. Alternatively, they might appeal more generally to an observation they take to be apparent in most of us that we routinely develop and revise moral beliefs in everyday discourse. If so, can the failure to reach a consensus in the abortion debate truly be the fault of our treatment of and process for arriving at moral claims? I grant—as I did to a degree in the previous section—that such examples exist; however, we have reason to believe that those changes occur less frequently and with considerably less ease in more complex, high-stakes, polarized debates like that over access to abortion. It seems that our degree of adherence to and defense of a given claim tracks with the degree to which we are likely to insist on it having a truth value—on its being a fact. To demonstrate this, it helps to consider the range of moral claims we make and the varying degrees to which we are willing to defend our practice of regarding them as accurate facts. Consider the following moral claims:

1) Murder is morally wrong.
2) Abortion is morally wrong.
3) Drinking coffee that is not fair-trade is morally wrong.
4) Tracking your children’s location via mobile device is morally wrong.
5) Putting chewed gum on the underside of a movie theatre seat is morally wrong.

These statements seem likely to elicit different degrees of adherence and defense. If that is so, then what distinguishes them to that end? Why do we hold fast to our truth designation of some moral claims, such as ‘killing babies is wrong,’ while demonstrating a comparable non-interest in protecting our truth designation of fictional claims like the other two? If confronted by someone arguing that our claim about baby killing lacks facticity, we are likely to defend it as the truth. On the other hand, if pressed on our claim about tracking a child’s location, we are likely to fold to its being the kind of claim that is open to interpretation. Why would we treat those statements differently if they are all of the same kind?

The relevant difference between those statements is not a matter of kind but of the degree of utility that the proposition holder perceives as a benefit of holding onto their treatment of the claim as a fact (or the degree of disutility they perceive as a consequence of parting with their treatment of the claim as a fact). For example, if I propose the fifth claim above and you counter with “the rightness or wrongness of putting gum on a chair is not the kind of thing that can be factually determined [yet]/[ever],” I will have little difficulty assenting because maintaining my treatment of the claim in truth terms—as opposed to opinionative terms, perhaps—offers remarkably little to no utility. Still, had I been raised in an isolated community whose elders told me from childhood that movie theatre seats are sacred objects and that only those who do not defile sacred objects are granted access to heaven and eternal afterlife, I would not assent so willingly to your claim about facticity. Given that particular religious component of my model for determining adequate moral facts, holding fast to the truth value of my initial claim offers too great a utility for me to discard on a whim—even in the face of reasonable evidence to the contrary.

So, we defend by degree. If we defend by degree, then it is not enough to point at any given weakly defended, forgone, or flip-flopped moral claim—such as claim number five—as evidence that all moral claims are so easily revisable. Van Fraassen’s (1980) empirical adequacy is sensitive to this distinction: the virtues of holding fast to an adequate claim “do not concern the relation between the theory and the world, but rather the use and usefulness of the theory; they provide reasons to prefer the theory independently of questions of truth” (p. 88). Claims to which we ascribe less pragmatic value are claims for which we will be less willing to offer a full-throated defense. Likewise, the greater the utility we perceive from holding a view, the more likely we are to defend and treat that view with all the reverence reserved for statements of truth or fact. “To accept a theory is to make a commitment, a commitment to the further confrontation of new phenomena within the framework of that theory…and a wager that all relevant phenomena can be accounted for without giving up that theory” (Van Fraassen, 1980, p. 88).

For some, the facticity of the rightness or wrongness of abortion may not be something to which they are committed. However, finding such people in significant numbers seems unlikely given the high-stakes nature and treatment of abortion access. As such, the objection raised at the outset of this section—that people change their minds on other kinds of moral claims all the time—is more relevant to lower-stakes claims and does not apply so strongly to higher-stakes claims like access to abortion.

V. The Theist’s Objection

Finally, I will briefly address a theistic challenge to moral skepticism views like conservationism and fictionalism, referenced before me by Kevin Jung (2018): “Why God would let us ground all normative facts in our evaluative attitudes instead of God’s if God is understood as omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent enough to care about what we ought to value and do?” (p. 179). First, I must reassert that I do not deny the possibility that there exist agent-independent moral facts or even that they may be theistically formed. I am arguing more conservatively that even if those facts do exist, and even if they are theistically formed, we are not helped by their existence in the immediate term because we lack direct access to them.

A long history of philosophers and theologians have addressed this notion of there being a plane of truth to which we have no direct access in this life. Copleston (1962/1950) elucidates how Anselm, for example, made much of the inaccessible light of God but was motivated nonetheless to develop and defend his understanding of that inaccessible nature using the limited and earthly tools of human reason. Aquinas more explicitly acknowledged that all we can know in this life comes to us through the senses—from material experiences of some sort or other. Still, he argued that we can reason about that to which we lack access by treating of its effects (Copelston, 1962/1950). In each case, the philosopher-theologians did not claim that the rigorous reasoning they committed to on Earth could give them direct access to the inaccessible truth values that they sought, only that they were accessing and offering that which that could from their limited position. As such, my suggestion that moral facts are grounded in agent- and context-dependent evaluative reasoning is not counter to religious teaching but entirely consonant with the teachings of at least two of the Titans of early Christian thought.

Many have attempted to account for and pry open the deadlock in the debate over access to abortion, yet it seems to remain deadlocked to this day—perhaps more divisively than before. According to the view I presented here, it seems that our failure to agree on a single, accurate determination of the moral rightness or wrongness of abortion is the result of our wrongly assessing that abortion is the kind of thing for which there can be a single, indisputably accurate determination of rightness or wrongness. As mentioned at the outset and demonstrated above, we react to our lacking the kind of direct access to the agent-independent moral facts necessary to demonstrate an indisputable, naturally carved moral truth by substituting them with adequate moral conclusions. According to adequate CMC, any given agent’s finding of adequacy is subject to and determined by the practical and ideological interests against which they frame their inquiry, such that the same observations filter down to different conclusions for different agents.

Still, because we are motivated to avoid going about the world without facts on which to depend, particularly concerning high-stakes matters, we rationally place these adequate conclusions in the seat of accurate moral facts and regard them as such. As a consequence of regarding our claims about the rightness or wrongness of abortion as facts in moral discourse, we debate their content as we would more straightforward factual claims—like claims about mathematical facts. In so doing, we often depend on less unhelpful, fact-based tactics for debate. This elucidation of adequate conservative moral conservationism appears to be the best explanation for why interlocutors of abortion so consistently fail to bring into unity the opposing sides of their debate.

As I mentioned at the outset, the primary aim of this argument is descriptive, and that has largely been my focus in the sections above; still, a normative conclusion arises for evangelizing interlocutors of abortion. To alter a moral agent’s determination that abortion is right or wrong, one must target and alter the pragmatic and ideological interests framing the agent’s determination of the adequacy of that moral claim. I anticipate that this revision of the task at hand will seem less practical or surmountable than the interlocutor of abortion anticipated; unfortunately, that does not bear on the accuracy of the assessment. It may even be read that adopting this take on the matter effectively dooms any attempt to end the debate and bring the two sides together. On the contrary, I put it to the reader of that interpretation that knowing the structure of an opposing interlocutor’s armor allows for the development and refinement of the proper tools for breaking through or altering that structure. Insurmountable though the task may seem, it is undeniably more worthwhile than endlessly deploying the wrong tool and aiming it at the wrong target.

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