Marquis on the Immorality of
Abortion
Getting Right to It.
Marquis's purpose is to provide a
defensible anti-abortion position which is
free from "irrational religious dogma" or
"philosophical confusion."
 His position is that abortion is in the
same moral category as killing an
innocent adult human being.

 "…[A]bortion is, except possibly in rare
cases, seriously immoral…" (292).
An Important Assumption

Marquis acknowledges that he makes an
assumption that he doesn't defend in the
paper:
"If fetuses are in the same category as adult
human beings with respect to the moral value of
their lives, then the presumption that any
particular abortion is immoral is exceedingly
strong. Such a presumption could be overridden
only by considerations more compelling than a
woman's right to privacy" (292-3).
Getting At Abortion



Somewhat surprisingly, Marquis does not
begin by trying to establish the basis for the
shared DMS of innocent adults and fetuses.
Instead, he begins by trying to establish the
moral status of murder by providing an
account of why murder is wrong.
The answer that he comes up with is that the
immorality of murder lies in the effect that it
has on the victim, not in the mere loss of life,
but in the loss of the value of my future (cf.
293c2).
What's With the Future?

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Of course, Marquis cannot just assert that his
account of the wrongness of murder is preferable,
he has to give us some reasons to accept it.
Marquis points to our common moral intuition that
murder is more serious than other crimes and to
the accounts of some people facing death.
His more (philosophically) interesting claim is that
in futurity he has located a natural property that
both fits our intuitions about the matter and that it
is the only one that does so.
Other Advantages

There are various advantages to the
futurity theory that Marquis identifies.
1.
2.
3.
4.
It undermines the claim that it is wrong to kill only
biological humans.
Entails that it is wrong to kill any being that has this
sort of futurity (including perhaps some non-human
animals).
Does not rule out active euthanasia.
Establishes the moral impermissibility of infanticide
(advantage over personhood theories like Warren's).
How Does this Help with Abortion?

Marquis specifies futurity as the property that
establishes DMS.
 Works in the case of murder, but what about other cases?



If the fetus has a future, then it is wrong to
kill it for the same reason that it is wrong to
kill any other futural being.
What about this "If?"
Marquis thinks that this is the place where his
theory has the most advantage over one like
Thomson's.
 He insists that futurity is not like potential, and is thus by
implication immune to the sort of arguments Thomson
offered.
What about Contraception

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A possible (and possibly important) counterclaim to Marquis's account of the wrongness of
abortion is it's consequences for
contraception.
Contraception can be understood as a loss of
futurity (this is, for example, one way of
understanding the Catholic Church’s
objections).
Marquis rejects this argument on the grounds
of the difference between an actual as
opposed to merely potential futurity.
 There is a possible contradiction here with Marquis’s
rejection of counter-arguments like Thomson’s.
The Final Analysis
"Clearly it is wrong to kill adult human
beings. Clearly it is not wrong to end the
life of some arbitrarily chosen single human
cell. Fetuses seem to be like…human cells
in some respects and like adult humans in
other respects. The problem of the ethics of
abortion is the problem of determine the
fetal property that settles this moral
controversy" (296c2).
 Marquis: Futurity.
