Why Abortion is Immoral
Don Marquis
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.
False Dichotomies
• This is another way of misrepresenting an
argument.
• Example:
– Pompey: “If you’re not for me, you’re against
me”
– Caesar: “If you’re not against me, you’re for
me”
• (Note that not ALL dichotomies are false,
however)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Marquis’s goal:
• Marquis’s 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 doesn’t make
contraception wrong and also doesn’t invoke
religions or the status of fetuses as persons or
not.
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?)
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.
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.
voluntary euthanasia:
• May be wrong for other reasons, but is
permissible in the sense that if a person’s
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 person’s future in most
cases has value to them even when they
do not think that it does. Terminal illnesses
change the story.
contraception:
• Is morally permissible because in
preventing a conception, who is harmed?
• Does an individual egg or sperm cell have
a future like ours?