Why is abortion immoral

These principles are often too broad. The pro-choicer will deny that fetuses are human beings in the moral sense. There seems to be no non-question-begging way in which either side can establish a definition of moral personhood that suits their interests. The solution: An analysis of the wrongness of killing.

Killing is wrong because it results in the loss of a future of value like ours. Points in favor of the analysis according to Marquis :. It makes sense that killing is fundamentally wrong for the same reason that death is bad. Whether it is wrong depends on the expected value of the future of the patient. Can support abortion only if having desires is a necessary condition for having the right not to be killed.

Worse, it puts the cart before the horse: we desire life because we value it, not the other way around. Objection: Killing a person may be wrong because a person has a future of value. The category that is morally central to this analysis is the category of having a valuable future like ours; it is not the category of personhood. Is there a problem in determining which things can be said to have a future?

Thought experiment. Suppose there is a drug that can be injected into kittens to cause them to grow into cat people. It is morally okay not to inject the kittens. There is no morally relevant distinction between actions and omissions The Moral Symmetry Principle, a. Therefore, it is okay to neutralize the development of a PCP once you have injected the kitten e. CPs have the same rights as HSPs. Therefore, it is okay to neutralize the development of a PHSP—abortion is morally permissible.

Notice that PCPs are not merely potential persons, they are also things with futures of value. Thomson assumes, just for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person from conception. She then tries to show that, even given that the fetus has a right to life, it does not follow that abortion is morally impermissible.

The anti-abortion argument:. For the sake of argument, Thomson assumes that 1 and 2 are true. She then argues that 4 does not follow from 3. This much is easy to see, since most of us agree that it is not wrong to kill in self-defense. But Thomson argues that the gap between 3 and 4 is much wider than this. Along these lines, one suggestion is that a mother has a right to decide what happens in and to her body, and that this might outweigh the fetuses right to life.

Instead, she argues that the right to life has been misunderstood. Once it is understood correctly, it will be seen that 4 does not follow from 3. Thomson proposes a thought experiment:. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help.

They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.

No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. I agree. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons.

Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him. Thomson concludes that i it is not true that the violinist has a right to your body, and so, by analogy ii it is not true that a fetus that is a product of rape has a right to your body, but iii there is no easy way for the anti-abortion argument to be amended to account for this.

Presumably, if they are persons, then they will have futures that are sufficiently like ours so that it would be wrong to kill them. The FLO account of the wrongness of killing shares this feature with the personhood views of the supporters of choice.

Classical opponents of abortion who locate the wrongness of abortion somehow in the biological humanity of a fetus cannot explain this. The FLO account does not entail that there is another species of animals whose members ought not to be killed.

Neither does it entail that it is permissible to kill any non-human animal. On the one hand, a supporter of animals' rights might argue that since some non-human animals have a future of value, it is wrong to kill them also, or at least it is wrong to kill them without a far better reason than we usually have for killing non-human animals. On the other hand, one might argue that the futures of non-human animals are not sufficiently like ours for the FLO account to entail that it is wrong to kill them.

Since the FLO account does not specify which properties a future of another individual must possess so that killing that individual is wrong, the FLO account is indeterminate with respect to this issue. The fact that the FLO account of the wrongness of killing does not give a determinate answer to this question is not a flaw in the theory. A sound ethical account should yield the right answers in the obvious cases; it should not be required to resolve every disputed question.

A major respect in which the FLO account is superior to accounts that appeal to the concept of person is the explanation the FLO account provides of the wrongness of killing infants. There was a class of infants who had futures that included a class of events that were identical to the futures of the readers of this essay. Thus, reader, the FLO account explains why it was as wrong to kill you when you were an infant as it is to kill you now.

This account can be generalized to almost all infants. Notice that the wrongness of killing infants can be explained in the absence of an account of what makes the future of an individual sufficiently valuable so that it is wrong to kill that individual. If the FLO account is the correct theory of the wrongness of killing, then because abortion involves killing fetuses and fetuses have FLOs for exactly the same reasons that infants have FLOs, abortion is presumptively seriously immoral.

This inference lays the necessary groundwork for a fourth argument. Why do we believe it is wrong to cause animals suffering? We believe that, in our own case and in the case of other adults and children, suffering is a misfortune.

It would be as morally arbitrary to refuse to acknowledge that animal suffering is wrong as it would be to refuse to acknowledge that the suffering of persons of another race is wrong. It is, on reflection, suffering that is a misfortune, not the suffering of white males or the suffering of humans. Therefore, infliction of suffering is presumptively wrong no matter on whom it is inflicted and whether it is inflicted on persons or nonpersons.

Arbitrary restrictions on the wrongness of suffering count as racism or speciesism. Not only is this argument convincing on its own, but it is the only way of justifying the wrongness of animal cruelty. Cruelty toward animals is clearly wrong. This famous argument is due to Singer, The FLO account of the wrongness of abortion is analogous. We believe that, in our own case and the cases of other adults and children, the loss of a future of value is a misfortune.

It would be as morally arbitrary to refuse to acknowledge that the loss of a future of value to a fetus is wrong as to refuse to acknowledge that the loss of a future of value to Jews to take a relevant twentieth-century example is wrong.

To deprive someone of a future of value is wrong no matter on whom the deprivation is inflicted and no matter whether the deprivation is inflicted on persons or nonpersons. Arbitrary restrictions on the wrongness of this deprivation count as racism, genocide or ageism. This argument that abortion is wrong should be convincing because it has the same form as the argument for the claim that causing pain and suffering to non-human animals is wrong.

Since the latter argument is convincing, the former argument should be also. Thus, an analogy with animals supports the thesis that abortion is wrong. The four arguments in the previous section establish that abortion is, except in rare cases, seriously immoral. Not surprisingly, there are objections to this view. There are replies to the four most important objections to the FLO argument for the immorality of abortion.

The FLO account of the wrongness of abortion is a potentiality argument. To claim that a fetus has an FLO is to claim that a fetus now has the potential to be in a state of a certain kind in the future.

It is not to claim that all ordinary fetuses will have FLOs. Fetuses who are aborted, of course, will not. To say that a standard fetus has an FLO is to say that a standard fetus either will have or would have a life it will or would value. To say that a standard fetus would have a life it would value is to say that it will have a life it will value if it does not die prematurely. The truth of this conditional is based upon the nature of fetuses including the fact that they naturally age and this nature concerns their potential.

Some appeals to potentiality in the abortion debate rest on unsound inferences. For example, one may try to generate an argument against abortion by arguing that because persons have the right to life, potential persons also have the right to life.

Such an argument is plainly invalid as it stands. The premise one needs to add to make it valid would have to be something like: "If Xs have the right to Y, then potential Xs have the right to Y. Potential presidents don't have the rights of the presidency; potential voters don't have the right to vote. In the FLO argument potentiality is not used in order to bridge the gap between adults and fetuses as is done in the argument in the above paragraph.

The FLO theory of the wrongness of killing adults is. Potentiality is in the argument from the very beginning. Thus, the plainly false premise is not required. Accordingly, the use of potentiality in the FLO theory is not a sign of an illegitimate inference. A second objection to the FLO account of the immorality of abortion involves arguing that even though fetuses have FLOs, non sentient fetuses do not meet the minimum conditions for having any moral standing at all because they lack interests.

Steinbock , p. Beings that have moral status must be capable of caring about what is done to them. They must be capable of being made, if only in a rudimentary sense, happy or miserable, comfortable or distressed. Whatever reasons we may have for preserving or protecting non sentient beings, these reasons do not refer to their own interests. For without conscious awareness, beings cannot have interests. Without interests, they cannot have a welfare of their own.

Without a welfare of their own, nothing can be done for their sake. Hence, they lack moral standing or status. Medical researchers have argued that fetuses do not become sentient until after 22 weeks of gestation Steinbock, , p. If they are correct, and if Steinbock's argument is sound, then we have both an objection to the FLO account of the wrongness of abortion and a basis for a view on abortion minimally acceptable to most supporters of choice. Steinbock's conclusion conflicts with our settled moral beliefs.

Temporarily unconscious human beings are nonsentient, yet no one believes that they lack either interests or moral standing. Accordingly, neither conscious awareness nor the capacity for conscious awareness is a necessary condition for having interests.

The counter-example of the temporarily unconscious human being shows that there is something internally wrong with Steinbock's argument. The difficulty stems from an ambiguity. One cannot take an interest in something without being capable of caring about what is done to it. However, something can be in someone's interest without that individual being capable of caring about it, or about anything. Thus, life support can be in the interests of a temporarily unconscious patient even though the temporarily unconscious patient is incapable of taking an interest in that life support.

If this can be so for the temporarily unconscious patient, then it is hard to see why it cannot be so for the temporarily unconscious that is, non sentient fetus who requires placental life support. Thus the objection based on interests fails. The FLO account of the wrongness of killing seems to imply that the degree of wrongness associated with each killing varies inversely with the victim's age. However, we believe that all persons have an equal right to life.

Thus, it appears that the FLO account of the wrongness of killing entails an obviously false view Paske, However, the FLO account of the wrongness of killing does not, strictly speaking, imply that it is worse to kill younger people than older people.

The FLO account provides an explanation of the wrongness of killing that is sufficient to account for the serious presumptive wrongness of killing. It does not follow that killings cannot be wrong in other ways. For example, one might hold, as does Feldman , p.

Now the amount of admirability will presumably vary directly with age, whereas the amount of deprivation will vary inversely with age. This tends to equalize the wrongness of murder. However, even if, ceteris paribus , it is worse to kill younger persons than older persons, there are.

Suppose that we tried to estimate the seriousness of a crime of murder by appraising the value of the FLO of which the victim had been deprived. How would one go about doing this? In they first place, one would be confronted by the old problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility.

Second place, estimation of the value of a would involve putting oneself, not into the shoes of the victim at the time she was killed, but rather into the shoes the victim would have worn had the victim survived, and then estimating from that perspective the worth of that person's future. This task difficult, if not impossible. Accordingly, there are reasons to adopt a convention that murders equally wrong.

Furthermore, the FLO theory, in a way, explains why we do adopt the doctrine of the legal equity of murder. The FLO theory explains why we murder as one of the worst of crimes, since depriving someone of a future like ours deprives more than depriving her of anything else.

This gives us a reason for making the punishment for younger victims very harsh, as harsh as is compatible with civiliazed society. One should not make the punishment younger victims harsher than that. Thus, the doctrine of the equal legal right to life does not seem incompatible with the FLO theory. The strongest objection to the FLO argument immorality of abortion is based on the claim that, because contraception results in one less FLO, the FLO argument entails that contraception, indeed, abstention from sex when conception is possible, is immoral.

Because neither contraception nor abstention from sex when conception is possible is immoral, the FLO account is flawed. There is a cogent reply to this objection. If argument of the early part of this essay is correct, then the central issue concerning the morality of abortion is the problem of whether fetuses are individuals who are members of the class of individuals whom it is seriously presumptively wrong to kill.

The properties of being human and alive, of being a person, and of having an FLO are criteria that participants in the abortion debate have offered to mark off the relevant class of individuals.

The central claim of this essay is that having an FLO marks off the relevant class of individuals. A defender of the FLO view could, therefore, reply that since, at the time of contraception, there is no individual to have an FLO, the FLO account does not entail that contraception is wrong. The wrong of killing is primarily a wrong to the individual who is killed; at the time of contraception there is no individual to be wronged.

However, someone who presses the contraception objection might have an answer to this reply. She might say that the sperm and egg are the individuals deprived of an FLO at the time of contraception. Thus, there are individuals whom contraception deprives of an FLO and if depriving an individual of an FLO is what makes killing wrong, then the FLO theory entails that contraception is wrong. There is also a reply to this move. In the case of abortion, an objectively determinate individual is the subject of harm caused by the loss of an FLO.

This individual is a fetus. In the case of contraception, there are far more candidates see Norcross, Let us consider some possible candidates in order of the increasing number of individuals harmed: 1 The single harmed individual might be the combination of the particular sperm and the particular egg that would have united to form a zygote if contraception had not been used.

This is modeled on the double homicide of two persons who would otherwise in a short time fuse. Which should be chosen? Should we hold a lottery? There seems to be no non-arbitrarily determinate subject of harm in the case of successful contraception.

But if there is no such subject of harm, then no determinate thing was harmed. If no determinate thing was harmed, then in the case of contraception no wrong has been done.

Thus, the FLO account of the wrongness of abortion does not entail that contraception is wrong. This essay contains an argument for the view that, except in unusual circumstances, abortion is seriously wrong.

This is Marquis' argument, which is the argument we considered today. According to Marquis, abortion is seriously morally wrong because it is an act of killing a being with a right to life and killing a being with a right to life is seriously morally wrong because it robs such a being of its future--a future, in particular, of great value like ours. Marquis presents reasons for thinking that his account of the wrongfulness of killing is superior to any other account.

It seems, though, that there are reasons to reject Marquis' account of wrongfulness of killing. In particular, anything which is potentially a person has a future of great value like ours. Reliable cloning procedures ensure that nearly every cell in my body is a being having a future of great value like mine. But then it follows that every time I intentionally kill cells, I am depriving these cells of their possible future of great value.

Surely the absurdity of this implication shows that something is amiss in Marquis' argument.