CPHL406 Contemporary Moral Issues II

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CPHL406Contemporary Moral Issues II

• Abortion

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M.A. Warren, On the Moral and Legal Status of
Abortion

• What is a person?

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Warren, Abortion

• Warren argues for the following criteria
• Consciousness / capacity to feel pain
• Reasoning
• Self-motivated activity
• The capacity to communicate
• Self-awareness, either individual or racial

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Warren, Abortion

• P1. Only persons have moral rights.
• P2. Fetuses satisfy none of the criteria for
  personhood.
• _____________
• C. Fetuses have no moral rights.

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Warren, Abortion

• It is true that the more a being resembles a
  person (with respect to the above five criteria)
  the stronger its case becomes for being granted
  moral rights.
• How closely does a fetus resemble a person?
• What about its potential personhood? Is that
  morally relevant?

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Marquis, Why Abortion is Immoral

• Why is it wrong to kill adults?

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Marquis, Why Abortion is Immoral

• Because of its effect on the victim
• P1 the loss of ones life is the greatest
  loss that one can suffer. The loss of ones life
  deprives one of all the experiences, activities,
  projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise
  have constituted ones future. p. 465

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Marquis, Why Abortion is Immoral

• P1 implies that it would be wrong to kill even
  non-humans who have futures of value like ours.
• It also has obvious consequences for the ethics
  of abortion
• P2 The future of a standard fetus includes a
  set of experiences, projects, activities, and
  such which are identical with the futures of
  adult human beings and are identical with the
  futures of young children.

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Marquis, Why Abortion is Immoral

• Thus we get Marquis conclusion
• C The overwhelming majority of deliberate
  abortions are seriously immoral p.461
• This argument manages to avoid the usual debate
  over whether fetuses count as persons, Marquis
  claims.

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Marquis, Why Abortion is Immoral

• Rival accounts of the wrongness of killing
• The discontinuation account
• The desire account