Abortion Is Morally Permissible

I want to begin by saying how pleased I am to debate Trent on this most important of moral issues. Like my opponent, I have a deep interest in bioethics. So I'm very much looking forward to discussing the philosophical aspects of abortion with such a capable and passionate contender. In this debate I'm going to defend two basic contentions. First, there are no good reasons to think that abortion is morally wrong. And secondly, there are good reasons to think that abortion is morally permissible. Before I construct my argument for the permissibility of abortion, I'll offer a brief critique of a common pro-life argument. Let me outline some of the reasons why I don't think this argument is valid. C1: It is not always prima facie wrong to kill an innocent human being. Despite what many deeply moral people may believe, there are very strong grounds to conclude that abortion is not morally wrong. More often than not, arguments against the moral permissibility of abortion seek to demonstrate that it's wrong to kill an innocent human being. Stated formally, this argument may be put as follows: P1: Fetuses are human beings (i.e., members of the biological species Homo sapiens). P2: All human beings have the same basic rights, especially the right-to-life. P3: Human fetuses have a right to live. (from 1 and 2) P4: Abortion directly kills an innocent human being. C: Abortion violates the fetus' right to life and is therefore immoral. (from 3 and 4) If anti-abortion arguments are constructed in this way, strong objections can be raised against the notion that all human beings have a right to life. Professor Michael Tooley, a distinguished philosopher at the University of Colorado, has pointed out that humans with complete upper brain death do not possess a serious right to life: they are, for all relevant legal and moral purposes, already dead at that stage.[1] In other words, killing a brain-dead human is not prima facie seriously wrong, since a brain-dead human doesn't have a right to life in the first place. C2: Brain death is not always the death of the human being. Opponents of abortion who defend the substance view of persons may try to respond to the brain death counterexample by stating that brain death is synonymous with the death of the human being as a whole. But recent discoveries in neurology have shown that this view is flatly contradicted by the facts. Dr. Alan Shewmon, a neurologist at the UCLA medical center, explains: "With respect to organism-level vitality, the brain's role is more modulatory than constitutive, enhancing the quality and survival potential of a presupposedly living organism. Integrative unity of a complex organism is an inherently nonlocalizable, holistic feature involving the mutual interaction among all the parts, not a top-down coordination imposed by one part upon a passive multiplicity of other parts. Loss of somatic integrative unity is not a physiologically tenable rationale for equating BD with death of the organism as a whole."[2] While conducting his research, Shewmon documented 175 case studies where brain-dead individuals survived for significant periods of time demonstrating that brain death is not always the end of bodily integration.[3] The conclusion he draws from these data is quite penetrating. Shewmon writes, "Although some personhood-consciousness reductionists might try to argue that these are not human persons, no one can seriously claim that they are not living human organisms, living human beings."[4] In fact, the evidence for this position is so strong that even prominent pro-life philosophers such as Don Marquis have come to accept this view.[5] After reviewing the work of Alan Shewmon and others, Scott Henderson, a bioethicist at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, indicates that "... under the substance view, brain-dead patients do not lose their substantial identity. They neither "become members of another species" by virtue of severe brain damage, nor are they mere aggregates of persons who were once associated with bodies."[6-7] Patrick Lee, a pro-life philosopher and defender of the substance view, agrees on this point.[8] Accordingly, the substance view entails that brain-dead individuals do have a right to life. But surely brain-dead individuals don't have a right to life. Given how completely counterintuitive (and seemingly absurd) it is to affirm that brain-dead individuals do have a right to life, it is reasonable to reject this position. Moreover, there is a good basis for this conclusion. As philosopher Dean Stretton points out, killing individuals that lack any mental life does not harm them because it does not frustrate their desires (they have none), and it does not deprive them of a valuable future.[9] Consequently, the second premise of the anti-abortion argument is false. Not all human beings possess a right to life. So then let us turn to my second contention that there are good reasons to think that abortion is morally permissible. C3: A fetus is not a person and thus cannot have a serious right to life. A fetus may be a human in the biological sense (i.e., belonging to the species Homo sapiens), but it is not a person. In her book On The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, philosopher Mary Anne Warren details five psychological criteria for personhood. According to Warren, these qualities include consciousness and in particular sentience, the capacity to reason, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate messages, and lastly, the presence of self-concepts.[10] Since a fetus does not possess any of these qualities, it can rightfully not be considered a person with a serious right to life. My argument can thus be summed up as follows: P1: Only a person has a right to life. P2: An entity is a person if it has (1) consciousness, (2) the capacity to reason, (3) self-motivated activity, (4) the capacity to communicate messages, and (5) the presence of self-concepts. P3: A human fetus does not have properties (1-5). P4: Therefore, a human fetus is not a person. (from 2 and 3) C: Therefore, a human fetus does not have a right to life. (from 1 and 4) The only controversial aspect of the argument is the criteria outlined for personhood. Like Warren, I think that these criteria should be self-evident, but they also have several other advantages.[11] First, these criteria explain the intuitions most people have that brain-dead individuals and anencephalic fetuses lack a right to life. Second, these criteria offer a non-arbitrary and species free account of personhood for various beings, both real and imaginary. Finally, it is plausible that rights function to protect interests. And the only sorts of beings that are capable of holding a desire to continue living are those beings who happen to have the capacity for self-consciousness. Bernard Gert, the Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College, has explained how simply being alive does not have inherent value in itself. It is, rather, the ability to have a conscious experience of the world that is important.[12] This moral principle can be recognized in the way humans rightfully differentiate between fully conscious adults and those who have experienced a permanent loss of consciousness in brain death. Unlike conscious adults, a fetus has never had any desire to continue living. Killing a fetus, therefore, cannot be seriously wrong. | Conclusion | In conclusion, the human fetus is a biological member of the human species, but it does not possess the mental qualities that would qualify it as a person. In light of this, then, abortion cannot be seriously wrong because the entity being destroyed in the process cannot have sufficiently strong interests or rights that could be violated. For these reasons, abortion is morally permissible. Sources: http://tinyurl.com...