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Why abortion is immoral

Journal of Philosophy 86 (4):183-202 (1989)

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  1. Your Mother Should Know: Pregnancy, the Ethics of Abortion and Knowledge through Acquaintance of Moral Value.Fiona Woollard - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3):471-492.
    An important strand in the debate on abortion focuses on the moral status of fetuses. Knowledge of the moral value of fetuses is needed to assess fetuses’ moral status. As Errol Lord argues, acquaintance plays a key role in moral and aesthetic knowledge. Many pregnant persons have acquaintance with their fetus that provides privileged access to knowledge about that fetus’ moral value. This knowledge is (a) very difficult to acquire without being pregnant and (b) relevant for assessing the moral status (...)
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  • Why inconsistency arguments fail: a response to Shaw.Bruce P. Blackshaw, Nicholas Colgrove & Daniel Rodger - 2022 - The New Bioethics 28 (2):139-151.
    Opponents of abortion are commonly said to be inconsistent in their beliefs or actions, and to fail in their obligations to prevent the deaths of embryos and fetuses from causes other than induced...
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  • The Impairment Argument Against Abortion.Perry Hendricks - 2022 - In Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce P. Blackshaw & Daniel Rodger (eds.), Agency, Pregnancy and Persons: Essays in Defense of Human Life. Oxford, UK: Routledge.
    I provide an updated version of The Impairment Argument against abortion and respond to numerous objections that can be (and have been) raised to it.
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  • A More Liberal Public Reason Liberalism.Roberto Fumagalli - 2023 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 10 (2):337-366.
    In recent years, leading public reason liberals have argued that publicly justifying coercive laws and policies requires that citizens offer both adequate secular justificatory reasons and adequate secular motivating reasons for these laws and policies. In this paper, I provide a critical assessment of these two requirements and argue for two main claims concerning such requirements. First, only some qualified versions of the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular justificatory reasons for coercive laws and policies may be justifiably regarded as (...)
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  • Killing and Impairing Fetuses.Prabhpal Singh - 2022 - The New Bioethics 28 (2):127-138.
    Could it be that if a fetus is not a person abortion is still immoral? One affirmative answer comes in the form of ‘The Impairment Argument’, which utilizes ‘The Impairment Principle’ to argue that abortion is immoral even if fetuses lack personhood. I argue ‘The Impairment Argument’ fails. It is not adequately defended from objections, and abortion is, in fact, a counterexample to the impairment principle. Furthermore, it explains neither what the wrong-making features of abortion are nor what features of (...)
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  • The Moral Significance of Abortion Inconsistency Arguments.William Simkulet - 2021 - Asian Bioethics Review 14 (1):41-56.
    Most opponents of abortion (OA) believe fetuses matter. Critics argue that OA act inconsistently with regards to fetal life, seeking to restrict access to induced abortion, but largely ignoring spontaneous abortion and the creation of surplus embryos by IVF. Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rodger call such arguments inconsistency arguments and contend they do not matter. They present three objections to these arguments — the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objection. Previously, I argued these objections fail and threaten (...)
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  • The intractable problems with brain death and possible solutions.Ari R. Joffe, Gurpreet Khaira & Allan R. de Caen - 2021 - Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine 16 (1):1-27.
    Brain death has been accepted worldwide medically and legally as the biological state of death of the organism. Nevertheless, the literature has described persistent problems with this acceptance ever since brain death was described. Many of these problems are not widely known or properly understood by much of the medical community. Here we aim to clarify these issues, based on the two intractable problems in the brain death debates. First, the metaphysical problem: there is no reason that withstands critical scrutiny (...)
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  • Animal Ethics.Cheryl Abbate - 2023 - In Andrew Knight, Clive J. C. Phillips & Paula Sparks (eds.), Routledge handbook of animal welfare. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, Earthscan from Routledge. pp. 353-365.
    What do we owe to non-human animals? How should we respond to the many injustices they face? Answering these questions requires philosophical attention to complicated questions about moral reasoning, moral status, and ethical theory. This first part of this chapter provides an overview of what both good and bad moral reasoning look like in the context of discussions about animal ethics. The second part of this chapter provides an overview of competing approaches to moral status, including anthropocentric, rationality, and sentio-centric (...)
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  • Strengthening the impairment argument against abortion.Bruce Blackshaw & Perry Hendricks - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (7):515-518.
    Perry Hendricks’ impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on two premises: first, impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, and second, if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. He calls this the impairment principle. Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than FAS, it follows from these two premises that abortion is immoral. Critics have focussed on the ceteris paribus (...)
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  • On the margins: personhood and moral status in marginal cases of human rights.Helen Ryland - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    Most philosophical accounts of human rights accept that all persons have human rights. Typically, ‘personhood’ is understood as unitary and binary. It is unitary because there is generally supposed to be a single threshold property required for personhood. It is binary because it is all-or-nothing: you are either a person or you are not. A difficulty with binary views is that there will typically be subjects, like children and those with dementia, who do not meet the threshold, and so who (...)
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  • The inconsistency argument: why apparent pro-life inconsistency undermines opposition to induced abortion.William Simkulet - 2022 - Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (7):461-465.
    Most opposition to induced abortion turns on the belief that human fetuses are persons from conception. On this view, the moral status of the fetus alone requires those in a position to provide aid—gestational mothers—to make tremendous sacrifices to benefit the fetus. Recently, critics have argued that this pro-life position requires more than opposition to induced abortion. Pro-life theorists are relatively silent on the issues of spontaneous abortion, surplus in vitro fertilisation human embryos, and the suffering and death of born (...)
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  • My body, not my choice: against legalised abortion.Perry Hendricks - 2022 - Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (7):456-460.
    It is often assumed that if the fetus is a person, then abortion should be illegal. Thomson1 laid the groundwork to challenge this assumption, and Boonin2 has recently argued that it is false: he argues that abortion should be legal even if the fetus is a person. In this article, I explain both Thomson’s and Boonin’s reason for thinking that abortion should be legal even if the fetus is a person. After this, I show that Thomson’s and Boonin’s argument for (...)
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  • A Sperm and Ovum Separately! Contra Marquis on Abortion and Contraception.Tim Burkhardt - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1):1-15.
    Don Marquis argues that abortion is prima facie seriously wrong because it deprives the foetus of a valuable future. This paper argues that there is no morally relevant difference between the relations that foetuses stand in to valuable futures and those that gametes stand in to such futures. Therefore, Marquis’ account implies that contraception is prima facie seriously wrong. My argument for this conclusion has a significant advantage over existing criticisms of Marquis based on controversial accounts of personal identity. It (...)
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  • Why Composition Matters.Andrew M. Bailey & Andrew Brenner - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8):934-949.
    Many say that ontological disputes are defective because they are unimportant or without substance. In this paper, we defend ontological disputes from the charge, with a special focus on disputes over the existence of composite objects. Disputes over the existence of composite objects, we argue, have a number of substantive implications across a variety of topics in metaphysics, science, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Since the disputes over the existence of composite objects have these substantive implications, they are (...)
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  • Liberal utilitarianism – yes, but for whom?Joona Räsänen - 2021 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30 (2):368-375.
    The aim of this commentary is to critically examine Matti Häyry’s article ‘Just Better Utilitarianism’, where he argues that liberal utilitarianism can offer a basis for moral and political choices in bioethics and thus could be helpful in decision-making. This commentary, while generally sympathetic to Häyry’s perspective, argues that Häyry should expand on who belongs to our moral community because, to solve practical ethical issues, we need to determine who (and what) deserves our moral consideration. Challenging Häyry’s principle of actual (...)
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  • It’s Complicated: What Our Attitudes toward Pregnancy, Abortion, and Miscarriage Tell Us about the Moral Status of Early Fetuses.K. Lindsey Chambers - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8):950-965.
    Many accounts of the morality of abortion assume that early fetuses must all have or lack moral status in virtue of developmental features that they share. Our actual attitudes toward early fetuses don’t reflect this all-or-nothing assumption: early fetuses can elicit feelings of joy, love, indifference, or distress. If we start with the assumption that our attitudes toward fetuses reflect a real difference in their moral status, then we need an account of fetal moral status that can explain that difference. (...)
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  • Incoherent Abortion Exceptions.M. Scarfone - 2020 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (1):127-140.
    There has recently been an expansion of anti-abortion measures in the United States. Within these various measures there is a divide over certain exceptions: some States permit abortion for pregnancies caused by rape while other States do not. This paper explores the underlying moral justification for such exceptions. I argue that within the dominant moral framework for reproductive ethics these exceptions are incoherent by their own lights. But this is not a defense of an exceptionless anti-abortion position. Rather, because the (...)
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  • The Relevance (and Irrelevance) of Questions of Personhood (and Mindedness) to the Abortion Debate.David Kyle Johnson - 2019 - Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry 1 (2):121‒53.
    Disagreements about abortion are often assumed to reduce to disagreements about fetal personhood (and mindedness). If one believes a fetus is a person (or has a mind), then they are “pro-life.” If one believes a fetus is not a person (or is not minded), they are “pro-choice.” The issue, however, is much more complicated. Not only is it not dichotomous—most everyone believes that abortion is permissible in some circumstances (e.g. to save the mother’s life) and not others (e.g. at nine (...)
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  • Um Embrião não é um Indivíduo (An Embryo is not an Individual).Danilo Fraga Dantas - 2019 - Dissertatio 49:133-145.
    Um argumento recorrente contra a liberalização do aborto parte do pressuposto de que, desde o momento da fertilização, seres humanos são indivíduos (no sentido de serem algo que necessariamente ocorre em uma entidade apenas). Nesse artigo, argumento que esse não é um caso a partir da possibilidade de geminação monozigótica e do fato de identidades serem necessárias. Defendo as premissas do argumento e discuto as possíveis interpretações de sua conclusão. Argumento que a interpretação completa da conclusão desse argumento está em (...)
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  • Schrödinger’s fetus examined.Bruce P. Blackshaw - 2019 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy:1-3.
    Joona Räsänen has proposed a concept he calls Schrödinger’s Fetus as a solution to reconciling what he believes are two widely held but contradictory intuitions. I show that Elizabeth Harman’s Actual Future Principle, upon which Schrödinger’s Fetus is based, uses a more convincing account of personhood. I also argue that both Räsänen and Harman, by embracing animalism, weaken their arguments by allowing Don Marquis’ ‘future like ours’ argument for the immorality of abortion into the frame.
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  • Continuing conversations about abortion and deprivation.Anna Christensen - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (4):275-276.
    In ‘Abortion and deprivation: a reply to Marquis’, I argued that Marquis’ argument about abortion encounters the Epicurean Challenge. In this essay, I continue the conversation begun there. I aim to motivate the Challenge further by examining Marquis’ argument on his own terms and responding to objections about whom death deprives, whether we should focus on the action of killing or the result of death, and how harms suffered before existence compare to harms suffered after death. Finally, I suggest that (...)
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  • Meeting the Epicurean challenge: a reply to ’Abortion and Deprivation'.Nick Colgrove - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (6):380-383.
    Anna Christensen argues that it is implausible to claim that abortion and murder are morally impermissible given that they deprive individuals of a future like ours. In this essay, I provide two responses to Christensen’s argument. First, I show that the premises upon which Christensen’s argument relies have implausible implications. Second, I provide a direct response to Christensen’s challenge, showing that abortion and murder are morally impermissible given that they do deprive individuals of an FLO. Doing so involves drawing a (...)
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  • The Two tragedies argument.William Simkulet - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (5):304-308.
    Opposition to induced abortion rests on the belief that fetuses have a moral status comparable to beings like us, and that the loss of such a life is tragic. Antiabortion, or pro-life, theorists argue that it is wrong to induce abortion and it is wrong to allow others to perform induced abortion. However, evidence suggests that spontaneous abortion kills far more fetuses than induced abortion, and critics argue that most pro-life theorists neglect the threat of spontaneous abortion and ought to (...)
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  • Just choice: a Danielsian analysis of the aims and scope of prenatal screening for fetal abnormalities.Greg Stapleton, Wybo Dondorp, Peter Schröder-Bäck & Guido de Wert - 2019 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 22 (4):545-555.
    Developments in Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) and cell-free fetal DNA analysis raise the possibility that antenatal services may soon be able to support couples in non-invasively testing for, and diagnosing, an unprecedented range of genetic disorders and traits coded within their unborn child’s genome. Inevitably, this has prompted debate within the bioethics literature about what screening options should be offered to couples for the purpose of reproductive choice. In relation to this problem, the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) and (...)
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  • Is There an Obligation to Abort? Act Utilitarianism and the Ethics of Procreation.Leonard Kahn - 2019 - Essays in Philosophy 20 (1):24-41.
    Most Act-Utilitarians, including Singer are Permissivists who claim that their theory usually permits abortion. In contrast, a minority, including Hare and Tännsjö, are Restrictionists who assert that Act-Utilitarianism usually limits abortion. I argue that both Permissivists and Restrictionists have misunderstood AU’s radical implications for abortion: AU entails that abortion is, in most cases in the economically developed world, morally obligatory. According to AU, it is morally obligatory for A to do F in circumstances C if and only if A’s doing (...)
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  • Abortion and deprivation: a reply to Marquis.Anna Christensen - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (1):22-25.
    In ‘Why Abortion is Immoral’, Don Marquis argues that abortion is wrong for the same reason that murder is wrong, namely, that it deprives a human being of an FLO, a ‘future like ours,’ which is a future full of value and the experience of life. Marquis’ argument rests on the assumption that the human being is somehow deprived by suffering an early death. I argue that Marquis’ argument faces the ‘Epicurean Challenge’. The concept of ‘deprivation’ requires that some discernible (...)
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  • Three Errors in the Substance View's Defense.Rob Lovering - 2018 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 32 (3):25-58.
    According to the theory of intrinsic value and moral standing known as the “substance view,” all human beings have intrinsic value, full moral standing and, with these, a right to life. The substance view has been defended by numerous contemporary philosophers who use the theory to argue that the standard human fetus has a right to life and, ultimately, that abortion is prima facie seriously wrong. In this paper, I identify three important errors committed by some of these philosophers in (...)
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  • Health, Moral Status, and a Minimal Speciesism.David Hershenov & Rose Hershenov - 2018 - Res Philosophica 95 (4):693-718.
    The potential for healthy development is the key to determining the moral status of mindless and minimally minded organisms. It even provides the basis for a defense of speciesism. Mindless and minimally minded human beings have interests in the healthy development of sophisticated mental capacities, which explains why they are greatly harmed when death, disease, and other events frustrate those interests. Since the healthy development of members of non-human species doesn’t produce the same sophisticated mental capacities, mindless and minimally minded (...)
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  • Even if the fetus is not a person, abortion is immoral: The impairment argument.Perry Hendricks - 2019 - Bioethics 33 (2):245-253.
    Much of the discussion surrounding the ethics of abortion has centered around the notion of personhood. This is because many philosophers hold that the morality of abortion is contingent on whether the fetus is a person - though, of course, some famous philosophers have rejected this thesis (e.g. Judith Thomson and Don Marquis). In this article, I construct a novel argument for the immorality of abortion based on the notion of impairment. This argument does not assume that the fetus is (...)
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  • Early and Later Abortions: Ethics and Law.Nathan Nobis - 2019 - In Bob Fischer (ed.), Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues that Divide Us. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Most abortions occur early in pregnancy. I argue that these abortions, and so most abortions, are not morally wrong and that the best arguments given to think that these abortions are wrong are weak. I also argue that these abortions, and probably all abortions, should be legal. -/- I begin by observing that people sometimes respond to the issue by describing the circumstances of abortion, not offering reasons for their views about those circumstances; I then dismiss “question-begging” arguments about abortion (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, Part 4.Michael Huemer - manuscript
    A four-part series of dialogues between two philosophy students, M and V. The question: is it wrong to eat meat? M and V review the standard arguments plus a few new ones. Part 4 discusses what products one should renounce, the value of abstract theory, why people who accept the arguments often fail to change their behavior, and how vegans should react to non-vegans.
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  • The Ethical Basis for Veganism.Tristram McPherson - 2017 - In Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter examines the ethical case that can be mounted for veganism. Because there has been comparatively little discussion in ethics focused directly on veganism, the central aim of this chapter is threefold: to orient readers to (some of) the most important philosophical literature relevant to the topic, to provide a clear explanation of the current state of the ethical case for veganism, and to focus attention on the most important outstanding or underexplored questions in this domain. The chapter examines (...)
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  • Why I Am a Vegan (and You Should Be One Too).Tristram McPherson - 2016 - In Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo & Matthew C. Halteman (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments on the Ethics of Eating. Routledge. pp. 73-91.
    This paper argues for what I call modest ethical veganism: the view that it is typically wrong to use or eat products made from or by animals such as cows, pigs, or chickens. The argument has three central parts. First, I argue that a central explanation for the wrongness of causing suffering rests upon what it is like to experience such suffering, and that we have good reasons to think that animals suffer in ways that are relevantly analogous to humans. (...)
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  • Cursed lamp: the problem of spontaneous abortion.William Simkulet - 2017 - Journal of Medical Ethics 43 (11):784-791.
    Many people believe human fetuses have the same moral status as adult human persons, that it is wrong to allow harm to befall things with this moral status, and thus voluntary, induced abortion is seriously morally wrong. Recently, many prochoice theorists have argued that this antiabortion stance is inconsistent; approximately 60% of human fetuses die from spontaneous abortion, far more than die from induced abortion, so if antiabortion theorists really believe that human fetuses have significant moral status, they have strong (...)
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  • Rationality and Moral Risk: A Moderate Defense of Hedging.Christian Tarsney - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Maryland
    How should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain not just about morally relevant empirical matters, like the consequences of some course of action, but about the basic principles of morality itself? This question has only recently been taken up in a systematic way by philosophers. Advocates of moral hedging claim that an agent should weigh the reasons put forward by each moral theory in which she has positive credence, considering both the likelihood that that theory is (...)
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  • The Explanatory Power of the Substance View of Persons.Francis J. Beckwith - 2004 - Christian Bioethics 10 (1):33-54.
    The purpose of this essay is to offer support for the substance view of persons, the philosophical anthropology defended by Patrick Lee in his essay. In order to accomplish this the author presents a brief definition of the substance view; argues that the substance view has more explanatory power in accounting for why we believe that human persons are intrinsically valuable even when they are not functioning as such, why human persons remain identical to themselves over time, and why it (...)
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  • The Moral Status of a Human Fetus: A Response to Lee.Stephen Griffith - 2004 - Christian Bioethics 10 (1):55-62.
    It is an undeniable empirical fact that a human fetus is a member of the species homo sapiens from the moment of conception. There is thus an important sense in which it is a human being in itself, and not simply part of a pregnant woman’s body, despite what defenders of abortion on demand might want us to think. It is also reasonable to suppose that all human beings, and thus human fetuses, are persons, with all that entails, but this (...)
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  • “You Ain’t a Person, and We’ll Keep It That Way”: A Reply to Berkich.Daniel Propson - 2012 - Dialogue 51 (4):563-573.
    Don Berkich has argued that the so-called Trajectory Argument for the moral impermissibility of abortion falls short because it fails to establish that an embryo that never becomes a person has the same rights as an embryo that becomes a person. I argue that Berkich’s argument fails to be convincing, since aborting a particular embryo itself causes the embryo not to become a person, and the premise that abortion would be wrong if it were done with the intention of preventing (...)
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  • Abortion and Kant’s Formula of Universal Law.Lara Denis - 2007 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (4):547-579.
    The formula of universal law (FUL) is a natural starting point for philosophers interested in a Kantian perspective on the morality of abortion. I argue, however, that FUL does not yield much in the way of promising or substantive conclusions regarding the morality of abortion. I first reveal how two philosophers' (Hare's and Gensler's) attempts to use Kantian considerations of universality and prescriptivity fail to provide analyses of abortion that are either compelling or true to Kant=s understanding of FUL. I (...)
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  • Abortion, Persons, and Futures of Value.Donald Wilson - 2007 - Philosophy in the Contemporary World 14 (2):86-97.
    Don Marquis argues that his “future of value” account of the ethics of killing affords us a persuasive argument against abortion that avoids difficult questions about the moral status of the fetus. I argue that Marquis’ account is missing essential detail required for the claimed plausibility of the argument and that any attempt to provide this needed detail can be expected to undercut the claim of plausibility. I argue that this is the case because attempts to provide the missing detail (...)
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  • Fanciful Examples.Ian Stoner & Jason Swartwood - 2017 - Metaphilosophy 48 (3):325-344.
    This article defends the use of fanciful examples within the method of wide reflective equilibrium. First, it characterizes the general persuasive role of described cases within that method. Second, it suggests three criteria any example must meet in order to succeed in this persuasive role; fancifulness has little or nothing to do with whether an example is able to meet these criteria. Third, it discusses several general objections to fanciful examples and concludes that they are objections to the abuse of (...)
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  • Qualifying choice: ethical reflection on the scope of prenatal screening.Greg Stapleton - 2017 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 20 (2):195-205.
    In the near future developments in non-invasive prenatal testing may soon provide couples with the opportunity to test for and diagnose a much broader range of heritable and congenital conditions than has previously been possible. Inevitably, this has prompted much ethical debate on the possible implications of NIPT for providing couples with opportunities for reproductive choice by way of routine prenatal screening. In view of the possibility to test for a significantly broader range of genetic conditions with NIPT, the European (...)
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  • Metaphysics and the Future-Like-Ours Argument Against Abortion.Eric Vogelstein - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (4):419-434.
    Don Marquis’s “future-like-ours” argument against the moral permissibility of abortion is widely considered the strongest anti-abortion argument in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address the issue of whether the argument relies upon controversial metaphysical premises. It is widely thought that future-like-ours argument indeed relies upon controversial metaphysics, in that it must reject the psychological theory of personal identity. I argue that that thought is mistaken—the future-like-ours argument does not depend upon the rejection of such a theory. I suggest, (...)
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  • The Wrongness of Killing.Rainer Ebert - 2016 - Dissertation, Rice University
    There are few moral convictions that enjoy the same intuitive plausibility and level of acceptance both within and across nations, cultures, and traditions as the conviction that, normally, it is morally wrong to kill people. Attempts to provide a philosophical explanation of why that is so broadly fall into three groups: Consequentialists argue that killing is morally wrong, when it is wrong, because of the harm it inflicts on society in general, or the victim in particular, whereas personhood and human (...)
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  • The Moral Rules of Trash Talking: Morality and Ownership.Stephen Kershnar - 2015 - Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 9 (3):303-323.
    This paper argues that an instance of trash-talking is permissible if and only if the relevant sports organization’s system of rules permits the expression. The argument for this position rests on the notion that if there is no relevant side-constraint on trash-talking, then if the player commits to a moral boundary on trash-talking then that is the moral boundary on trash-talking. I then argued that there is no relevant side-constraint on trash-talking and that the players commit to the ownership theory (...)
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  • The Ethics of Embryonic Stem Cell Research.Katrien Devolder - 2015 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Embryonic stem cell research holds great promise for biomedical research, but involves the destruction of human embryos. Katrien Devolder explores the tension between the view that embryos should never be deliberately harmed, and the view that such research must go forward. She provides an in-depth analysis of major attempts to resolve the problem.
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  • Drawing a line on the moral and legal permissibility of abortion.Sarthak Sinha - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    Induced abortion continues to be a subject of ethical and moral debates, with the hope that reaching an agreement on what is deemed morally permissible will guide how the society ought to respond by legislating appropriate legal guidelines. The aim of this essay is to examine who constitutes moral privileges in society and more specifically, the criterion on which membership in the moral community is granted. In this paper, I will argue that membership to the human race is not in (...)
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  • The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe.Evan G. Williams - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (5):971-982.
    This article gives two arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. First is an inductive argument: most other societies, in history and in the world today, have been unknowingly guilty of serious wrongdoing, so ours probably is too. Second is a disjunctive argument: there are a large number of distinct ways in which our practices could turn out to be horribly wrong, so even if no particular hypothesized moral mistake strikes us as very likely, (...)
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  • Personhood, Vagueness and Abortion.Justin Mcbrayer - 2007 - Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 9 (1).
    In a recent paper, Lee Kerckhove and Sara Waller (hereafter K & W) argue that the concept of personhood is irrelevant for the abortion debate.1 Surprisingly, this irrelevance is due merely to the fact that the predicate ‘being a person’ — hereafter ‘personhood’ — is inherently vague. This vagueness, they argue, reduces ‘personhood’ to incoherency and disqualifies the notion from being a useful moral concept. In other words, if ‘personhood’ isn’t a precise notion with well-defined boundaries, then it cannot be (...)
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  • Broadening the future of value account of the wrongness of killing.Ezio Di Nucci - 2015 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 18 (4):587-590.
    On Don Marquis’s future of value account of the wrongness of killing, ‘what makes it wrong to kill those individuals we all believe it is wrong to kill, is that killing them deprives them of their future of value’. Marquis has recently argued for a narrow interpretation of his future of value account of the wrongness of killing and against the broad interpretation that I had put forward in response to Carson Strong. In this article I argue that the narrow (...)
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