Dr Matthew Flannagan presents Does Abortion Benefit the Fetus? A Critique of Himma Part 1 posted at MandM, … sets out an objection articulated by Mark Murphy, which appeals to the common law doctrine of novus actus interveniens….

The question of foreseeable consequences and God’s role as a free agent is discussed in Part 2 of this blog post.

I doubt that many people are pure consequentialists; it’s contrary to common sense to think that our personal decisions have no moral value, as long as everything turns out all right in the end. On the other end of the spectrum, I don’t think many people are pure intentionalists, either; it’s also contrary to common sense to think that the most moral lifestyle is that of a self-righteous purist who doesn’t care if he hurts everyone around him.

What we think of as morality is a hybrid theory that usually blends good intentions with good results. Therefore, it’s relevant whether you think you know the fate of someone’s soul (the “result” of their death).

Some Christians believe it is their moral duty to convert others to Christianity to help them get “saved,” even though technically it’s God who does the saving. Isn’t it at least plausible, then, that someone could believe it is their moral duty to kill someone to help them go to Heaven, even though it’s God who does the saving?

The scenario of breaking a friend’s leg to confer a benefit upon him is not so fanciful as it may sound. People have maimed their friends (with their consent) to help them avoid being conscripted as soldiers. In this case, I don’t think it’s fair to foist all responsibility onto the draft board, claiming that the draft board has ultimate say on who stays and who goes. Realistically, if you broke your friend’s leg, you knew full well he wouldn’t be fighting on the front lines, and if that was your intention, you have accomplished it. The connection is obvious enough that the government might even hold you accountable for helping someone evade the draft, despite the fact that the government was ostensibly the one who made the decision not to take the maimed man. The draft board is made up of people who have “free will,” but since you influenced their decision to such a degree that you basically forced them to choose a certain way, you have moral responsibility for what they decided.

I agree witht his Matt. The reason why others might not, of course, is that they are thinking purely in consequentialist terms, and given that line of thought, as has been said by Jonathan Glover, “It makes no difference whether or not I do it.” As long as we know what will happen in the end, the actual awfulness of our actions makes no moral difference, which seems enormously counter-intuitive to me (and hopefully a few other people!).
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I am inclined to think this is false, you do not “send the fetus to heaven” God does this, You simply kill the fetus.

“ there is a competition at hospital, where the next person who comes in with a broken leg gets a billion dollars. If I break my friends leg, with the knowledge that he will get a billion dollars, I am doing something good for him, because the billion dollars is a given (same as getting into heaven).”

Again I am inclined to think not for the reasons outlined in the post above. The person who donates the a million dollars does something good for your friend. It’s really up to him not you whether your friend is benefited. What you do is break your friend’s leg, you do this knowing someone else will benefit him, but you yourself do not confer this benefit on him someone else does.
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(1) Pascalian / Rawlsian
Himma’s scenario blends a version of Pascal’s wager (a person making rationally-guided choices with implications for the afterlife based solely on self-interest on accessing Heaven and avoiding Hell) with a neutral, disembodied perspective recommended in Rawls’s Theory of Justice (“Assume that you have no idea whatsoever of what your post-natal circumstances will be”) and then leaps to the assumption that making a life-or-death decision for a fetus is morally equivalent to making that decision for oneself. It equates abortion and suicide.

(2) Is Heaven guaranteed, or isn’t it?
I had the same reaction as the commenter Jerry. Himma’s thought experiment assumes that the person — whether it is a fetus, child, or adult facing death is irrelevant for the following objection — knows the choice is between instant death and guaranteed Heaven on one hand or a chance at life and a concomitant chance at Hell on the other hand. Therefore, Murphy’s objection doesn’t quite fit the scenario. Murphy says that “the causal chain from act to effect is broken by the intervention of a free agent”–in this case, killing does not lead to annihilation because God intervenes to send the victim to Heaven. Well, if the fact that God is ready to give another angel its wings is known to the murderer as well as the martyr, then we might say that the murderer actually kindly intends to send the victim to Heaven and not to annihilation.

(3) Euthanasia
Countless people actually have killed their family members in extreme circumstances such as illness or persecution, often with the conviction that the dead person would go to “a better place.” By making the basic assumption relevant to euthanasia (that the person is better off dead), this argument equates abortion and euthanasia.

(4) Does God have free will?
Does God have free will to choose to send a fetus to Hell? If He does, it is impossible for us to calculate the fetus’s rational self-interest as Himma’s scenario requires, since we can’t know for certain whether the dead fetus will really go to Heaven. If, on the other hand, God does not have free will in this situation, then we have contradicted Donagan’s claim that God’s manumission of the fetus to Heaven is “a free reaction to an action”. God is just a cog in the cosmic wheel and the ultimate responsibility for the fetus’s eternal welfare lies with the person who killed it.

(5) Consent and Moral Dignity
The consent of the victim usually carries moral weight. In Himma’s example, the fetus is magically granted a mature consciousness in order to consent to die based on its own rational self-interest. This is supposed to illustrate why other people should make the decision for the fetus. But there is a moral distinction here. Simply identifying the rational choice does not mean it is irrelevant who makes the choice. For example, it is in my rational self-interest to save part of my income for retirement, but should I choose not to do so, no one else has the right to steal my paycheck and invest it for me. There is a moral dignity in being allowed to make bad decisions; moral dignity is a value that is therefore distinct from rational self-interest. Granted, the fetus is not yet conscious or competent to make any decisions. But is there not more moral dignity accorded to the fetus in allowing it to live so that it will eventually be able to make its own moral choices, including poor or irrational ones, rather than assuming the right to make those decisions for it? This is not to say that a person’s moral dignity is the sole object of all moral decisions, only that it is one possible factor, and so we should not assume that rational self-interest is the object of all moral decisions, either.

(6) Slippery Slope
Just as moral permission for abortion of early-stage embryos may create a slippery slope for the age at which abortion or infanticide is no longer acceptable, the assumption that all embryos go to Heaven may create a slippery slope for the age at which a person is finally responsible for his or her eternal welfare. (You made a related observation in Part 2 of your blog post.) If we do not know when people become responsible for themselves, neither do we know when we cease to be responsible for them.

(7) Foreseeable result
In Augustine’s hypothetical situation, a man threatens to kill himself if a woman does not submit to sex with him. Is she responsible for his foreseeable death if she declines? Most would say no; the suicidal man bears full responsibility. But consider a real-world variant of this situation: There is a violent uprising and a leader must decide whether to take police or military intervention to restore peace. If military action is taken, some collateral damage is expected, but if nothing is done, possibly even more innocents will suffer at the hands of the mob. It is not enough for the leader to say, “Whatever violence the mob commits is its own fault; I bear no responsibility for it.” The leader has to make the difficult choice whether or not to send the army to forcibly shut down the riot, knowing that casualties are foreseeable either way. The leader has been placed in that situation through no personal fault yet nevertheless shares the moral burden. The moral burden is not attached solely to the “free choice” of the mob. To return to the main topic: If the fate of another person’s soul is foreseeable, then the person who foresees it bears some moral responsibility for it. I do not personally believe that we can know or foresee anything about the afterlife, but that is different than saying that we foresee someone’s fate yet bear no moral responsibility for it.

e.g., there is a competition at hospital, where the next person who comes in with a broken leg gets a billion dollars. If I break my friends leg, with the knowledge that he will get a billion dollars, I am doing something good for him, because the billion dollars is a given (same as getting into heaven).