Isaac Duarte
Homework #3
1. On page 116 Mary Anne Warren provides a list of “characteristics that are central to the
concept of personhood”. Pick two of these characteristics and explain what they are
using clear and specific examples.
First, moral agency will be described. For example, a wolf pack tracks down an elk, kills
it, and they start to consume it. The biggest wolves eat first until they are full because they have
the ability to throw their weight around and win. In a human setting, if a family unit had a
limited amount of food, more than likely the children would eat first due to moral agency: we
would declare it the right thing to do. Second, is sentience. For example, there is no evidence
plants, rocks, the ocean, bacteria etc. have sentience. However, it is clear that when you step on a
dogs tail, they are not pleased and visually seem discomforted. This makes sentience not unique
to humans, but definitely essential for defining it.
4. On page 114 Warren says: “It is perhaps only when a woman’s pregnancy is due to rape,
or some other form of coercion, that the situation is sufficiently analogous to the violinist
case for our moral intuitions to transfer convincingly from the one case to the other.”
Give a clear and specific example to illustrate her point. Do NOT recount the violinist
scenario. Say clearly whether you agree with her and defend your view.
If I strip a man naked and push him out of my car downtown, it is different than if a man decides
to take his own clothes off and streak naked through downtown. Although in both scenarios the
man is naked in public, only the latter would morally and legally probably be public indecency.
Only in one scenario is the man consensually and intentionally being naked in public. Tying this
to abortion, although an embryo is fertilized in both the cases of rape and consensual sex, only in
one case does no fault fall on the woman of unplanned pregnancy. So in this case, I agree with
Warren. Trying to analogize the violinist case with all pregnancies is unfair due to the
nonconsensual nature of the scenario. So if it is only used in the case of rape/coercion, a non
consensual scenario is being compared to another non consensual scenario, which makes sense.