An entertaining debate ensues over at The Economist, and in the comments at Marginal Revolution over whether the implications of applying of a zero discount rate in the Stern Report for the issue of abortion. Can it be consistent, asks the economist:
I am still chewing over the full import of the moral intuition that people born 100 years from now have just as much right to, say, live in Bangladesh, as those born today. But as one does, when one is chatting with economists, I became curious about what this moral intuition would mean if we actually applied it. The most obvious example is abortion. If we cannot discount the interests of the fetus simply because it is not yet with us as a person, then how can one morally justify legal abortion as a coherent national policy?
I won’t repeat many of the good comments from MR, except to say that a) I don’t believe why we need be absoutely consistent in the application of utilitarian ethics, and b) being consistent does NOT for me imply we give full rights to unborn foetuses, not least because the logical extension is that we encourage maximisation of pregnancy.
The more important point I wanted to make is about whether it makes any sense to apply economics to the abortion debate in this way. A oft-heard criticism of economists (heard by me, anyway) is that when all you possess is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When discussing the economics of climate change, I don’t see any great problem in assuming that future as-yet-unborn generations should be treated the same as current ones. But why does the abortion debate need to be consistent with this utilitarian approach? If we demand consistency, then surely if we do as Bush would like and ban stem cell research and abortion then presumely the anti-Sterns can’t have any complaint with the application of zero discount rates?
I don’t think the tools that do a reasonable job of attending to the issues in Stern are necessarily the best for understanding the abortion debate. And there is simply no need for consistency in approach between the two issues. Perhaps sometimes we just have to accept the limitations of our tools to some problems, or at least the limited application of them. Indeed, because this is ostensibly an economists debate, there is the possibilty that the discussion of discount rates/rates of time preference have been over-egged, and more important issues overlooked.
