The author addresses speech restrictions on campuses, the axiom “A is A” as it applies to men and women, Roe v. Wade and its effect on examining the definition of personhood, and how this examination may have contributed to the anti-conceptual mentality that was already under way on campuses and elsewhere.

This essay explicates and evaluates the roles that fetal metaphysics and moral status play in Rosalind Hursthouse’s abortion ethics. It is motivated by Hursthouse’s puzzling claim in her widely anthologized paper Virtue Ethics and Abortion that fetal moral status and (by implication) its underlying metaphysics are in a way, fundamentally irrelevant to her position. The essay clarifies the roles that fetal ontology and moral status do in fact play in her abortion ethics. To this end, it presents and then develops (...) her fetal metaphysics of the potential and actual human being, which she merely adumbrates in her more extensive treatment of abortion ethics in her book Beginning Lives. The essay then evaluates her fetal ontology in light of relevant research on fetal neural and psychological development. It concludes that her implied view that the late-stage fetus is an actual human being is defensible. The essay then turns to the analysis of late-stage abortions in her paper and argues that it is importantly incomplete. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article defends the following argument: what makes you and I valuable so that it is wrong to kill us now is what we are (essentially). But we are essentially physical organisms, who, embryology reveals, came to be at conception/fertilisation. I reply to the objection to this argument (as found in Dean Stretton, Judith Thomson, and Jeffrey Reiman), which holds that we came to be at one time, but became valuable as a subject of rights only some time later, (...) in virtue of an acquired characteristic. I argue against this position that the difference between a basic, natural capacity and some degree of development of such a capacity is a mere difference in degree, that this position logically implies the denial of equal personal dignity, and that the selection of the required degree of development of a capacity is necessarily arbitrary. (shrink)

If we distance ourselves from the content of the debate for and against the destruction of human embryos for scientific research purposes, we may be struck by its rhetorical form. Each side thinks not only that it has the superior argument, but that its conclusion is wholly obvious, while the other side’s position is obviously mistaken. Those who defend splitting embryos to obtain stem cells say that it is ridiculous to claim that a tiny zygote or blastocyst without a brain (...) is the same sort of being as we, while those who oppose this research claim it to be clear as day that each of us is the same being we were when newly conceived, though now .. (shrink)