Why Abortion is Immoral

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Why Abortion is Immoral

• Don Marquis

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Attacking a Straw Man

• The whole point behind philosophical argument
  (and argument in general) is progress.
• If one does not address the strongest possible
  argument one can imagine, then no progress is
  possible.
• Attacking a straw man is attacking a version of
  an argument that is easy to knock over rather
  than the version of the argument that has some
  merit.

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False Dichotomies

• This is another way of misrepresenting an
  argument.
• Example
• Pompey If youre not for me, youre against me
• Caesar If youre not against me, youre for me
• (Note that not ALL dichotomies are false, however)

4
Some false starts

• As it happens, Marquis identifies a pair of
  arguments in the common abortion debate.
• As it happens, neither argument is really any
  good.

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The personhood arguments

• A fetus is human
• humans have rights
• abortion is impermissible
• in this case what is unclear is what connection
  biology has to morality

• A fetus is not a person
• non-persons have no rights
• abortion is permissible
• in this case the concept of personhood is
  question-begging.

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General Thesis

• Marquis One reason that we can plausibly give
  for the wrongness of killing adults (in most
  cases) applies equally well to most cases of
  abortion.

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Marquis on the right to life

• The right to life has a positive and a negative
  interpretation
• The positive right to life is the right to have
  others preserve your life.
• The negative right to life is the right not to be
  killed by others.
• Marquis, in discussing why it is wrong to end
  human life, argues for a negative right to life.

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Marquiss goal

• Marquiss goal is to describe one (among many)
  accounts of why killing in general is wrong and
  show that that principle applies to fetuses as
  well as adults.
• This is to be done in such a way that does not
  make voluntary euthanasia wrong (though it may be
  wrong for other reasons) and doesnt make
  contraception wrong and also doesnt invoke
  religions or the status of fetuses as persons or
  not.

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What is wrong with killing?

• It certainly seems that the wrongness of killing
  must be located in what it does to its victims.
  (as opposed to barbarizing the perpetrator after
  all, if nothing is in itself wrong with killing,
  how does doing it barbarize?)

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Deprivation

• The harm that killing seems to do is that it
  deprives someone of their lives, or rather, their
  futures.
• Simple enough, but the account is incomplete.

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Value

• A fetus has a future like ours, so abortion is
  wrong for the same reason that murder of innocent
  adults is, that is deprives the victim of the
  value of its future.
• This constitutes a prima facie reason for the
  wrongness of abortion, but it is possible for
  other ethical principles to intervene.

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voluntary euthanasia

• May be wrong for other reasons, but is
  permissible in the sense that if a persons
  future holds no value to them then they are not
  deprived of anything in losing it.
• This is different from the ordinary case of
  suicide, because a persons future in most cases
  has value to them even when they do not think
  that it does. Terminal illnesses change the story.

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contraception

• Is morally permissible because in preventing a
  conception, who is harmed?
• Does an individual egg or sperm cell have a
  future like ours?