Fetal Philosophy

Fetal Philosophy

What kind of philosophy would an intelligent fetus develop? We ourselves don’t have much active intelligence in the womb, but what if we did? What if instead of nine months we had nine years? What if the brain was fully formed by the second year of life, but we were still unborn? Surely our philosophy would reflect our situation. Let’s suppose that we received some input from outside in the form of muffled noises, as well as sensations of touch, taste, smell, and even vision—just very limited. We don’t know we are fetuses or that we have a mother and father; we have no idea that we will one day be born. Then I think it is obvious that we would be rationalist mysterians: we would think that most knowledge is a priori and innate, and that many problems are insoluble by us (despite our excellent reasoning capacities). For we have precious little in the way of sense experience, but full access to our innate endowments. We would be accomplished logicians, mathematicians, and conceptual analysts; but we would know hardly anything of the world beyond the womb by sensory means. Empiricism would not seem like an attractive doctrine. As to mysterianism, we would clearly lack most of the concepts by which we now understand the world. True, we would be womb experts and know a bit about our own bodies and minds, but we would be ignorant of the vast world existing outside the womb. We would be like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, only worse. We would be scientific ignoramuses: no physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc. We would be rational beings, by hypothesis, so we would recognize our highly limited range of knowledge. The history of fetal philosophy would accordingly be very different from the history of our normal human philosophy. It would be a history of thwarted knowledge.

What would our ethics be like? It would not include other people, except imaginatively. I conjecture it would be egoistic, i.e., not really ethical. We would have no ethics worthy of the name, because there would be no need for it. The womb-world is a pre-ethical world, i.e., ethical bliss. Fetal consciousness is not troubled by ethical concerns. What would the meaning of life be for the fetus? Being warm, cozy, and well-fed, presumably, that being the limit of fetal experience—though some restless souls might yearn for escape. I suspect life’s meaning wouldn’t be much of an issue for them, especially if they had no idea of death, having never seen it happen. In general, their emotional life would be free of anxiety, since they experience nothing to be anxious about. The bad things of life would have no reality for them, assuming they suffered no illness or physical trauma. These are non-issues for them, though all-consuming for us. Life inside the womb is not the gauntlet it is outside of the womb.

What about the problem of other minds? It too would not really exist, except as a speculative hypothesis. For the fetus encounters no being for whom the question could arise; it is the only mind so far as it is concerned. It has no problem of other-fetus minds. We could consider the question of inter-fetus contact, but assuming this not to exist in our thought experiment, we can take it that the question does not cross the solitary fetus’s mind. It is doubtful that the fetus is aware that it has a mother in whose womb it passes its days (the question of its origin is a mystery to it). It might just think this is the whole of reality—a womb universe. The fetus is a natural solipsist.

What is its philosophy of action and free will? These too are nugatory or negligible: action is very limited and freedom just a word. Does the fetus ever feel imprisoned? Doubtful, because it has no conception of a prison. Does it yearn to run free, climb mountains, ride a horse? Surely not. It isn’t being held against its will; on the contrary. But it does have a philosophy of mental action, as in imagining and thinking; so, the concept of intention enters its thoughts. Its philosophy of action is largely a philosophy of mental not bodily action, though we can suppose it moves its body a bit. It has no inclination to believe in behaviorism. The fetus is more of a mental being than a born creature is. It is disembodied before it is born. What is its philosophy of the afterlife? It finds this mystifying, but I suspect inclines to something like a cosmic mind theory. It has no attraction to materialism. It has no concept of its brain.

Does the fetus have any objective conception of the world? Can it transcend its subjective viewpoint? It will have a view of its immediate environment—warm, moist, and soft—but will this view be detached from its own modes of awareness? It will not: it won’t have a bleached-out abstract physical-biological conception of the enveloping womb. Indeed, it won’t have any objective conception of physical reality at all, given its sensory and intellectual resources. It will be totally immersed in its own subjectivity. It will have nothing like an empirical science. No distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or anything like that. It will be unable to transcend its own subjective viewpoint.

How different is our post-natal situation from the situation of the fetus? Isn’t it really a matter of degree? After all, we were all once fetuses who were removed from the womb. And isn’t planet Earth just another version of the womb, but bigger and less hospitable? The womb was once our environment, and then the Earth took over. There is no sharp line; consider the marsupial pouch. The mother feeds and protects the infant when it is no longer inside her body (we can call this the extended womb). And it isn’t as if the womb is proof against fatal catastrophe.[1]

[1] General lesson: our philosophy is not the only kind that would be produced by any intelligent being (this is not to say that philosophical truth is relative). Just as a caterpillar might have a different philosophy from a butterfly, so a womb creature might have a different philosophy from an ambulatory creature.