| Reading:
Mary Anne Warren: On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion
fetus is similar to a "guppy" for a person to be a member of a moral
community there must be 5 traits:
consciousness, reasoning, self motivating, communicative and possessed of
self concept
Commentaries:
http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/ae/php/phil/mclaughl/students/phil433/warren1.htm
http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/ae/php/phil/mclaughl/students/phil433/warren2.htm
http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/ae/php/phil/mclaughl/students/phil433/warren3.htm
Outline by Don
Berkich, University of Texas, Corpus Christi
(by permission)
| Synopsis: |
We began our investigation into abortion by
evaluating what most people consider to be the key premise in the
abortion debate: the "the fetus is a person" premise. What we found, of
course, was that arguments against the personhood status of the fetus
were unsound - at least those that we considered were unsound - and
arguments for the personhood status of the fetus were also unsound. We
concluded that we simply didn't know whether or not the fetus is a
person. Preferring to err on the side of caution, we decided to
assume, just for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person.
Assuming that the fetus is a person, we found that abortion is
permissible in the vast majority of cases: cases where the pregnant
woman's life is endangered, cases where the pregnancy was due to rape,
cases where contraception failed, and, perhaps (!), cases where
pregnancy results from having unprotected sex while in a state of
diminished capacity - while drunk, for instance. The conclusion was if
the fetus is a person, then abortion is morally permissible in all cases
except, possibly, those cases where the mother has explicitly assumed a
special responsibility for the life of the fetus, as in cases where the
mother intentionally becomes pregnant. This, note, is a profound result
which does not at all concur with the intuitions of those who appear to
think that if the fetus is a person, then abortion is clearly morally
impermissible.
What if the fetus isn't a person?
According to Warren, it is possible to show that the fetus in fact is
not a person and thus abortion is in all cases permissible. Her argument
has the advantage over Thomson's of being quite straightforward, even
though some found her conclusions to be morally unpalatable. The problem
for Warren is whether in fact the fetus fails to meet the criteria she
provides for personhood, even granting that these are the correct
criteria. Some argued that we simply don't know and that it is a matter
for science. There are two problems with this. First, the question of
which properties are essential for personhood is a non-empirical
question. No experiments will uncover these properties. The only way to
get at them is to try to understand, a priori, what the property of
being a person is, and that is an ongoing chore for philosophy. The
second problem is that, even if we have a list of properties essential
for a thing to be a person, they tend not to be empirically testable.
Perhaps, then, there is a problem with our conception of personhood? |
Warren's Theses:
-
Noonan is correct in holding that the key
issue in the abortion debate is whether or not the fetus is a person.
-
Thomson's arguments are helpful, but it's
not clear that we should share Thomson's intuition about, for example, the
permissibility of unhooking oneself from the Famous Unconscious Violinist.
-
Abortion is neither an extremely
unfortunate nor a morally serious act, as it would be--even when
justifiable vis-a-vis Thomson's arguments--if the fetus were a person.
-
The fetus is not a person.
-
Abortion is morally permissible even in the
case of late term abortion of a pregnancy which might inconvenience a
vacation.
5 Necessary Conditions on Personhood
-
Consciousness (of objects and events
external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to
feel pain.
-
Reasoning (the developed capacity to solve
new and relatively complex problems).
-
Self-motivated activity (activity which is
relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control).
-
The capacity to communicate, by whatever
means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with
an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many
possible topics.
-
The presence of self-concepts, and
self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both.
Claim: No being which fails to meet all
5 conditions can possibly be a person, although it may be the case that a
being could meet only some of the 5 conditions and still be a person.
|
1. |
If X fails to meet all five conditions
on personhood, then X is not a person. |
|
|
2. |
The fetus fails to meet all five
conditions on personhood. |
|
|
Therefore |
3. |
The fetus is not a person. |
1&2 |
Question: Since the fetus is clearly
not a person, perhaps the supposed moral wrong in abortion derives from the
killing of a potential person?
|
1. |
If abortion is morally wrong then the
killing of a potential person is morally wrong. |
|
|
2. |
It is not the case that the killing of a
potential person is morally wrong. |
|
|
Therefore |
3. |
It is not the case that
abortion is morally wrong. |
1&2 |
Justification for Premise 2: Consider the case
of the space explorer captured by aliens who want to use his tissue to
produce clones of himself. Surely he has the right to escape and refuse
these potential persons (his clones) life.
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