Abortion Flashcards
Pro life argument
Pro life argument
1. Fetuses have a right to life - the moral status of a fetus
The same thing for adults and fetuses - morally in the same category and have the same claim to existence
2. If fetuses have a right to life, then abortion is wrong.
3. Therefore, abortion is wrong
Marry Anne Warren and Judith Jarvis Thomson rejections to the pro life argument
Pro-Choice replies:
Mary Anne Warren rejects the first premise - they are not persons and don’t have a right to life the same way adults do
There is a potential for something with a right to life in the future but when it is a fetus it is not a person
Judith Jarvis Thomson - Rejects the second premise
Thomsons pro choice argument - violinist thought experiment
- Wake up one morning, you were kidnapped. You are lying on a hospital gurney.
- Next to you there is a famous violinist
- You look down at your arms and there are tubes stuck into it
- Music appreciation society of canada. knew that the violinist was going to die
- Needed someone as a donor just for the next 9 months to make the violinist healthy again
Thomson’s pro choice argument
- Unplugging yourself from the violinist is morally permissible. - it’s not morally wrong to unplug. Not morally wrong because you didnt ask for this.
- If unplugging yourself is permissible, then abortion is permissible
- Therefore abortion is permissible
An argument for fetal right to life
- All human beings have a right to life
- Fetuses are human beings
- Therefore, fetuses have a right to life
Pro-choicer should reject fetal right to live
Warren’s rejection to the argument for the fetal right to life
Warren says not so fast - there is a subtle fallacy called equivication
Equivocation - A single word or phrase that appears in the premises that means one thing in one of the premises and means another thing in another premises this word being human being
In this argument, human being means two different things in the different premises
Two different senses of human being:
- Moral (person)
- Genetic (homo sapien)
- A person belongs to a moral category that human adult beings typically belong to
- Fetuses in some biological sense are human beings, but the biological sense is not the only thing you mean by humans
- If all we mean by a biological category, doesnt mean thai same biological category has the same moral status as you or i. In the moral category, sure, all of us have a right to life
- But do fetuses belong to the same moral category?
Capacities of a person
Consciousness
Reasoning
Self-motivated activity
Capacity to communicate
Self-awareness
- Life forms on another planet we have landed on. How should we think of our moral responsibilities to this life form?
- Is it the way we approach rocks, trees, dogs or cats? Or is it the way we approach other human beings
We don’t have moral responsibility or not as much towards insects and lizards. - Fetuses don’t have the things that humans have that give us moral significance such as rocks and other animals
Homo sapien vs person
A person does not equal homo sapien
Extraterrestrials
- Artificial intelligence - potential for non-biological persons to have moral status
- They could be morally in the same category as us but not the same biological category
- Being a person does not entail being a member of the species of homo sapien
Being a homo sapien does not automatically make you a person
- Persistent vegetative state - all capacity for consciousness is gone, but just enough brain activity to keep the heart and lungs working
- Fetuses - another example of biologically a human being but not a persons
- Difference between the two. The fetus will develop consciousness, but the vegetative state will never develop consciousness
- We think it’s wrong to kill someone in a coma.
- The potential personhood of a fetus gives it the right to life (objection to the pro choice argument)
Warrens objection to the argument that the potential personhood of a fetus gives it the right to life
- Being abducted by aliens, they have a cloning procedure, where every single cell in your body is a potential clone of you
- They are going to take all of your cells and make billions of clones
- Every single cell in your body is a potential person
- Do you have a moral responsibility to wait around and let your cells be harvested
- Even if the potential to develop into a person has some moral significance, it can’t be that much
- You are talking about billions of potential people that can live, and won’t if you escape. But you still have the right to escape.
- Warren is trying to deny the moral claim to a fetus’s life
Why is killing wrong? Marquis
Marquis says the main reason to not kill someone is because of the effect and the harm on the victim - you are depriving them of something - Victim denied “future like ours” (FLO)
- If you kill someone you are depriving someone of something they could have had if you didn’t kill them, a future.
- Experiences, activities, projects and enjoyments that the person could have had in the future
- Fetuses have just as much of a future as we do
- Advantage that marquis thinks his view has - is that his position is different from the sanctity of life ethics
Marquis is not claiming that every human life is the same and it’s wrong under every circumstance to kill
Marquis’ argument for fetal right to life
- Everything with a FLO has a right to life
- Fetuses have a FLO
- Therefore , fetuses have a right to life
Rival to FLO argument: Desire account
Desire account - killing is wrong because we desire to live
- We desire to live, if you kill me you are denying me something that i really want which is a necessary condition to why it is wrong to kill me.
- Michael Tooley’s version - right to X = wrong to deprive you of X if you desire X
- If I don’t want to live anymore, you are not depriving me of life when you kill me.
- A fetus cannot conceive continuity. It cannot choose between life and death, therefore you cannot violate the right to life with something that doesn’t/cannot conceive a right to life.
Objection to desire account
Counter examples
- Infants - a three month old infants cannot conceive of it’s two separate lives it may live and have a preference for one or the other - it can’t perceive the future - so it would seem like it’s ok to kill infants
- Michael Tooley counters this by saying it is morally permissible to kill infants
- Suicidal teenager - temporarily does not want to continue to live - it’s a phase they will grow out of - Marquis says that just because they don’t want it, you are still depriving them of a future, whether they realise it or not - and that is morally impermissible
- Desire account says otherwise therefore desire account is wrong
Sleeping person - does not currently want to keep on living
explanatory problem - objection to desire argument
- Death is bad because death deprives us of something we desire - bad to kill, tragic to die in car accident
- Marquise says the deisre to keep living rather than die isn’t an arbitrary preference, we have very good reason to want to keep living, because we actually have a future of tremendous value. We want to keep living bc we can see our future has a lot of valuable experiences. We want to keep living because it is desirable. The desire account gets it opposite.
- Life is desired because it’s valuable, not vice versa
- Our reason to want to keep living is actually because we have a future of tremendous value - we want to keep living because we can see our future has value in it
- not that our future is valuable because we want to life - not that its valuable because its desired
Objection to Marquis
- Contraception is permissible
- Marquis’ view says
a. Denying something a FLO is wrong
b. Abortion denies something a FLA - If abortion denies something a FLO, so does contraception
- Therefore marquis’ view is false
If his view was right and abortion denies something FLO according to (premise 3) this would mean contraception also denies something a FLO but according to A it is wrong. If premise 3 is true than his view says contraception is morally wrong, when it is not.
Marquis responds to this by arguing:
Denies premise 3
- In the case of abortion, you are denying something that exists a future
- In the case of contraception, that’s not true, there is nothing
Before conception, there isn’t anything that has a FLO
The sperm on its own doesn’t have a FLO, the sperm isn’t going to grow up to be a college student, the egg isn’t going to grow up to be a college student. It doesn’t destroy the eggs, but prevents them from being in a position to be fertilized.
Sperm and egg don’t jointly have FLO - they are just ingredients that could come together
Ingredients that could come together to have a FLO
- You have experiences, activities, projects and enjoyments, but a sperm doesn’t
Were you ever a fetus
you are connected to the fetus, but you are not the fetus
- A piece of clay has been around a long time
- a sculptor comes along and creates a statue
- the statue is sitting on the table and someone asks how long has it been around
- the clay has been around for years, but the sculpture was only made that morning
- it’s argued that there are two things on the table
- the statue and the lump of clay are not the same thing
- the statue is constituted by the lump of clay
- you destroy the statue, the lump of clay would still continue to exist
The clay can survive being squashed but not the statue
You have some pretty direct connection to a fetus
The thing that I am a person, that didnt exist when there was just a fetus, the PERSON came into existence from development. It is wrong to say the fetus is one in the same thing as an individual with a FLO. the persons origins may lie in fetal development but doesnt mean the person or person itself was the fetus or existed when the fetus was in development
