This article discusses what is involved in having full moral status, as opposed to a lesser degree of moral status and surveys different views of the grounds of moral status as well as the arguments for attributing a particular degree of moral status on the basis of those grounds.

Does birth make a difference to the moral rights of the fetus/infant? Should it make a difference to its legal rights? Most contemporary philosophers believe that birth cannot make a difference to moral rights. If this is true, then it becomes difficult to justify either a moral or a legal distinction between late abortion and infanticide. I argue that the view that birth is irrelevant to moral rights rests upon two highly questionable assumptions about the theoretical foundations of moral rights. (...) If we reject these assumptions, then we are free to take account of the contrasting biological and social relationships that make even relatively late abortion morally different from infanticide. (shrink)

Abortion has long been a central issue in the arena of applied ethics, but, the distinctive analysis of feminist ethics is generally overlooked in most philosophic discussions. Authors and readers commonly presume a familiarity with the feminist position and equate it with liberal defences of women's right to choose abortion, but, in fact, feminist ethics yields a different analysis of the moral questions surrounding abortion than that usually offered by the more familiar liberal defenders of abortion rights. Most feminists can (...) agree with some of the conclusions that arise from certain non-feminist arguments on abortion, but they often disagree about the way the issues are formulated and the sorts of reasons that are invoked in the mainstream literature. (shrink)

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 (...) itself a well supported proposition for accessing moral privileges, but rather, there must be a criterion which forms the basis of this differential treatment. I will endeavour to show that whatever this criterion is set to be, there will be a stage during pregnancy where the fetus will lack that attribute. It is by this deductive reasoning I will demonstrate that terminating pregnancy, before the fetus fulfills the criterion required for gaining moral privileges, is morally permissible. Holding any philosophical position on the debate inherits the burden to reason how that view will be translated in determining the legal status of abortion. For this, I will demonstrate how it follows that different rational individuals can have varying criterion for determining access to moral community, all of which must be respected by the legal practice. The only way to legally respect these gradation of criteria, and by extension the individual who sets them, is by making all cases of abortion legally permissible. (shrink)

This article surveys recent feminist contributions to moral philosophy with an emphasis on those works which engage with debates within mainstream ethics. The article begins by examining a tension said to arise from the two criteria a theory must meet if it is to count as feminist moral theory: the women's experience requirement and the feminist conclusion requirement. Subsequent sections deal with feminist relational theories of rights, feminist work on responsibility and feminist contractarian approaches to ethics. A final section looks (...) at the application of some feminist moral theories to the problem of abortion. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether moral status talk gets us anywhere in our search for answers to questions in the ethics of marginal cases. I consider the usefulness of moral status talk first on the assumption that an individual's possession of moral status is not a further fact about that individual, and then on the assumption that it is. Finally, I offer an expressivistic interpretation of moral status talk. In each case, I argue that such talk conveys nothing that cannot be (...) conveyed more clearly in other words. My conclusion is that we should stop using moral status and its cognates. (shrink)

One of the most famous, and most derided, arguments against the morality of abortion is the argument from potential, which maintains that the fetus' potential to become a person and enjoy the valuable life common to persons, entails that its destruction is prima facie morally impermissible. In this paper, I will revisit and offer a defense of the argument from potential.

The ethical theory underlying much of our treatment of animals in agriculture and research is the moral agency view. It is assumed that only moral agents, or persons, are worthy of maximal moral significance, and that farm and laboratory animals are not moral agents. However, this view also excludes human non-persons from the moral community. Utilitarianism, which bids us maximize the amount of good in the world, is an alternative ethical theory. Although it has many merits, including impartiality and the (...) extension of moral concern to all sentient beings, it also appears to have many morally unacceptable implications. In particular, it appears to sanction the killing of innocents when utility would be maximized, including cases in which we would deliberately kill and replace a being, as we typically do to animals on farms and in laboratories. I consider a number of ingenious recent attempts by utilitarians to defeat the killing and replaceability arguments, including the attempt to make a place for genuine moral rights within a utilitarian framework. I conclude that utilitarians cannot escape the killing and replaceability objections. Those who reject the restrictive moral agency view and find they cannot accept utilitarianism's unsavory implications must look to a different ethical theory to guide their treatment of humans and non-humans. (shrink)

Anti-abortion violence (‘AAV’) is anathema to almost everyone, on all sides of the abortion debate. Yet, as this article aims to show, it is far more difficult than has previously been recognised to avoid the deeply unpalatable conclusion that it can sometimes be justified. Some of the most frequently-occupied positions on the morality of abortion will imply precisely that conclusion, I argue, unless conjoined with an especially stringent and unattractive form of pacifism. This is true not only of strict anti-abortion (...) views, but also, more surprisingly, of some of the most familiar and influential moderate defences of abortion rights. The latter conclusion raises the question, which further work will be required to fully resolve, of what our account of abortion ethics and prenatal moral status must be if it is to enable reconciliation of the common-sense rejections of both pacifism and AAV. I end with reasons to expect that the path to an account that satisfies this demand, without generating further significant intuitive problems, will be far from straightforward. (shrink)

Debates on the moral status of human embryos have been highly and continuously controversial. For many, these controversies have turned into a fruitless scholastical endeavor. However, recent developments and insights in cellular biology have cast further doubt on one of the core points of dissent: the argument from potentiality. In this article we want to show in a nonscholastical way why this argument cannot possibly survive. Getting once more into the intricacies of status debates is a must in our eyes. (...) Not merely intellectual coherence but the standing and self-understanding of current stem cell research might profit from finally taking leave of the argument from potentiality. (shrink)

In “Abortion and Ownership” John Martin Fischer argues that in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case you have a moral obligation not to unplug yourself from the violinist. Fischer comes to this conclusion by comparing the case with Joel Feinberg’s cabin case, in which he contends a stranger is justified in using your cabin to stay alive. I argue that the relevant difference between these cases is that while the stranger’s right to life trumps your right to property in the cabin (...) case, the violinist’s right to life does not trump your right to liberty in the violinist case. (shrink)

Although the abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has become commonplace, infanticide is still widely rejected. Generally, there are three ways of justifying the differentiation between abortion and infanticide: by referring to the differences between the moral status of the fetus versus the infant, by referring to the differences of the moral status of the act of abortion versus the act of infanticide, or by separating the way the permissibility of abortion is justified from the way the impermissibility of infanticide (...) is justified. My argument is that none of these ways justifies the abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome while simultaneously rejecting infanticide. Either the justification for abortion is consistent with infanticide, or it is implausible to justify abortion while rejecting infanticide. I conclude the article by making some preliminary remarks about how one might manage the situation posed by my argument. (shrink)

The vagueness or imprecision of ‘the normal’ allows it to be exploited for various purposes and political ends. It is conspicuous in both medicine and athletics; I am going to try to say something about the normal in each of these areas. In medicine the idea of the normal is often deployed in understanding what constitutes disease and hence, as some see it, in determining the role of physicians, in determining what is or ought to be covered by insurance, and (...) in underwriting certain views on social justice. In athletics the use of performance enhancing substances raises different sorts of questions about the normal, especially when it comes to deciding what constitutes an enhancement and which enhancements, if any, are acceptable. (shrink)