Abortion is Murder

Negative Case. There is an objection I should like to raise initially to Pro's case before I describe just what I mean by a 'person' and why killing a non-person should not be considered murder. Firstly, I actually have an objection to Pro's definition of murder apart from the use of 'human being' instead of 'person'. If one defines murder merely in terms of premeditated killing, the definition does encompasses soldiers killing enemy soldiers during wartime, some instances of self-defence and euthanasia. I assume we can circumvent this problem by adding something like 'morally unjustified' to the definition. I argue, then, that we should use the definition 'The morally unjustified killing of a person' as our definition for murder. I think a reasonable set of criterion for 'person' is listed by philosopher Mary Anne Warren. [1] They are as follows: 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. It is crucial to not that Warren does not believe something needs all these characteristics to be a person - even the first two alone might be sufficient, or a combination of several others. However this complication need not detain us since a developing embryo has none of them and thus would not be considered a person by any of the criteria. Why should we accept that personhood so defined is a necessary condition for it being morally wrong to kill? Pro says that this view is 'not at all universal' and that it is thus my burden to show this. I gave the example of an infant born with the condition Anencephaly where the infant is born with the absence of a forebrain. I pointed out that no-one would seriously want to sustain the life of an infant born that way, and that euthanising it would clearly not be morally impermissible. I take this to support my view - the reason we do not consider it murder of euthanise such an infant is precisely because severe brain damage has destroyed all its higher mental functions. It has none of the characteristics listed above, yet biologically it is a human being. The relevant moral difference between it and a healthy infant is that one is a person and the other is not. Furthermore, consider the opposite case - that of a person who is not a human. Imagine that sometime in the future we discovered a peaceful race of intelligent aliens residing on a nearby planet. They are conscious, rational, motivated, communicative, self-aware persons living in an advanced society. If we take merely being a human being as the criterion for having a right to life, then there would be nothing morally wrong with enslaving or destroying this race of aliens and plundering their technology or planet. However, this would obviously be morally abhorrent and we would be more likely to try to make contact with such a species and learn from and about them instead. The reasons we take personhood to be the crucial factor in determining whether something has a right to live should be obvious by now. If something is not a person, it does not have the qualities we value as a sentient being. It does not care about its own life, or even have a concept of self; it cannot feel pain, pleasure or emotion; it has no will; it cannot think. It's life is devoid of the things that give life any worth, and thus it makes no sense to say that killing it is morally wrong.Pro's objections. "This way of thinking is not unlike the thinking of Hitler's Nazis who deemed certain groups of people as not fully meeting the requirements of a human"I'm tempted to invoke Godwin's law here, but I think it's fairly obvious that this is little more than an emotional appeal. The Nazi's had no rational basis for declaring Jews inhuman. The fact that they did so was not as a result of reflective ethical contemplation, but racist bigotry and ignorance. This isn't really an argument, it's just an example of the guilt by association fallacy [2] although as Con admits my position isn't even the same, so the analogy doesn't fit in any case. [1] http://instruct.westvalley.edu...[2] http://www.nizkor.org...