Quiz Fifteen Flashcards
Noonan Jr. on abortion
fetuses are people at fertilization, for it is at conception that this “new being receives the genetic code which determines gis characteristics, which is the biological carrier of the possibility of human wisdom, which makes him a self-evolving being. A being with a human genetic code is man.”
most fundamental question is how do you determine the humanity of a being
the idea that a being who has had experience, has lived and suffered, who possesses memories, is more human than one who has not is dumb because an embryo is already experiencing and reacting
another distinction is that fetuses are called “it” up until month 4 usually when the mother can begin to feel fetal movements
fetus must be given value separate from the parents
doctrine of double effect here
christian have to love their neighbors and treat the fetus as a neighbor (wtf man acid trip)
abortion is never okay unless it’s self-defense
abortion violates the humanist tenet of the equality of human lives
Warren on abortion
abortion is always morally permissible because the unborn is not a person but merely a human—a creature with human DNA—which is not sufficient enough for personhood
to qualify as a human you must possess: 1) consciousness and the capacity to feel pain, 2) reasoning, 3) self-motivating activity, 4) the capacity to communicate, 5) “the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial or both”
a fetus has none of these things cannot be seen to have full moral rights
while it is not possible to produce a satisfactory defense of a woman’s right to obtain an abortion without showing that a fetus is not a human being, in the morally relevant sense of the term
doesn’t make sense to call the body property and that abortion is okay as it is a means of the woman to control and regulate her own property
B. A. Brody-
- none of the side effects of prohibiting abortion are bad enough to justify the wrongful taking of human life
author says this is wrong and that the “legal problem about abortion cannot be resolved independently of the status of the fetus problem” is wrong because he fails to realize that it is a questionable assumption that the fetus is a human being and that the right of a woman to terminate an unwanted pregnancy might override the right of the fetus to be kept
Noonan is wrong because he doesn’t question the assumption that if a fetus is human than abortion is wrong for exactly the same reason that murder is wrong
Judith Thomson-
-questions the above assumption, and argued that even if we grant the anti-abortionist his claim that a fetus is a human being and has the same right to life as any other human being, we can still demonstrate that in at least some and perhaps most cases a woman is under no moral obligations to complete an unwanted pregnancy
it is wrong to leave out the rights of the pregnant woman in the abortion decision but the first step to deciding the moral status of abortion is to decide what moral rights the fetus has
second step is balancing the rights of the fetus and the pregnant woman
