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. Others warn that overreliance on scientific evidence could erode the strong moral logic at the center of their cause. The biggest threat of all, however, is not the potential damage to a particular movement.
When scientific research becomes subordinate to political ends, facts are weaponized. Neither side trusts the information produced by their ideological enemies; reality becomes relative. Abortion has always stood apart from other topics of political debate in American culture. It has remained morally contested in a way that other social issues have not, at least in part because it asks Americans to answer unimaginably serious questions about the nature of human life.
But perhaps this ambiguity, this scrambling of traditional left-right politics, was always unsustainable. Yet physicians often support abortion, even late into fetal development. Malloy is one of many doctors and scientists who have gotten involved in the political debate over abortion. She has testified before legislative bodies about fetal pain—the claim that fetuses can experience physical suffering, perhaps even prior to the point of viability outside the womb—and written letters to the U.
Senate Judiciary Committee. Her career also shows the tight twine between the science and politics of abortion. In addition to her work at Northwestern, Malloy has produced work for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a relatively new D.
Anthony List, a prominent pro-life advocacy organization. Prentice spent years of his career as a professor at Indiana State University and at the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group founded by James Dobson.
Some pro-life advocates worry about the potential consequences of overemphasizing the authority of science in abortion debates. He was horrified that prenatal diagnosis of the disease often led women to terminate their pregnancies, however, and spent much of his career advocating against abortion. For example: Some people believe emergency contraception, also known as the morning-after pill or Plan B, is an abortifacient, meaning it may end pregnancies.
Therefore 5 Abortion is morally wrong. Pecorino All Rights reserved. Web Surfer's Caveat: These are class notes, intended to comment on readings and amplify class discussion.
They should be read as such. They are not intended for publication or general distribution. We rarely talk about how difficult pregnancy can be. Even if you are blessed with an easy pregnancy, some reports say as many as 95 percent of first-time mothers experience vaginal tearing. Btw, I don't oppose what some call 'abortion' for bonkers religious reasons. I oppose it because innocent babies are just that - innocent. A solution already exists and it's called adoption. Lots of couples who can't have kids for many reasons that would love to adopt.
If you don't want to parent the child, there are other options aside from abortion. There are SO many families who can't have a child and choose to adopt.
Put the baby up for adoption, but don't be so selfish to take a innocent child's life. There is a reason those pro-birth ads show a fetus magically suspended in darkness, as though it just appears painlessly and does not necessitate the bodily sacrifice of another human.
Happily carrying a fetus to term is an act of the most profound, generous love precisely because it does entail pain and sacrifice. That should never be forced on anyone. Hell, to paraphrase famous penis exposer and former comedian, Louis C.
They—and all their parts—belong to them in perpetuity, even after they have ceased to live. Doctors in the U. And presumably, the removal of those organs would not endanger the wellbeing of the person, who is already brain dead. We might do better to consider whether what is being asked of women is grossly unreasonable.
And frankly, if, rather than the government, any individual were to force a woman to have a baby against her will, it would be clear how unreasonable that request was.
My husband and I are trying to have a child. Of course. That would be a wonderful blessing. No, because we are not sociopaths who think other people exist solely for our benefit.
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