Abortion

The Traditional Pro-Life Argument P1) It is morally wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. P2) The fetus is an innocent human being. P3) Abortion intentionally kills the fetus. C) Abortion is morally wrong. Premise 1 I disagree with this premise, of all premises in this argument this one needs the most justification. For ending a life to be immoral it must violate the organisms preference to stay alive, it is not simply because something consist of living cells or carries the human genome with it. I outlined in my opening statement that fetuses do not poses the capacity to feel pain or have any kind of preference, hence any "harm" done to them is not really harm at all. For this reason the argument fails. Premise 2 The second premise is undoubtedly correct, but supporting it with a Singer quote is first of all unnecessary since my definition of human being ("Any living creature that carries human genes in its cells. ") already includes fetuses and secondly it might give the reader the misleading impression that a significant bioethicist like Singer is an opponent of abortion and thinks that this is a justification for the pro-life position. In fact Singers position is quite similar to mine in that we would both accept this premise to be true but make an important distinction between "human being" and "person", as explicated in my opening statement. In Practical Ethics Singer says in the subsequent paragraph: "There is another use for the term 'human', one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a major figure in the development of bioethics. Fletcher compiled a list of what he called 'Indicators of Humanhood' that includes the following: self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication and curiosity"(1) The argument fails for it equivocates what we, reading this, experience as the "life of a human being" and the life of a human being in the pure biological sense of "a great number of living cells that carry human genes with them". The Future-Like-Ours Argument P1) Intentionally killing an innocent being with a future-like-ours (FLO) is morally wrong. P2) A human being in utero is an innocent being with FLO. P3) Abortion intentionally kills the human being in utero. C) Abortion is morally wrong. Premise 1 In his defence of this premise my opponent equivocates two things, firstly the abstract property of a human being in utero to experience a future life and secondly the actual preferences of living persons to have a future life. I can only quote David Boonin myself:"To say that an action of mine is morally permissible is to say that no one has a valid claim against my doing it, that doing it violates nobody's moral rights"(2) Killing us certainly deprives us of our future, but this is only bad since we can want to live on. A fetus cannot. Premise 2 If we are to say that a fetus has a FLO then we can surely say that it is an actual property of the fetus, but it is not a property we share with it, to illustrate this consider the following: A fetus has a future-like-ours. It will mature until it has capacities similar to that of average adults. We have a future-like-ours. We (the average human adults) will mature until we have capacities similar to that of average adults. It should be pretty clear why this might be a property of fetuses but not of beings who already reached that "future". Hence the argument does not show that a fetus shares a property with us such that ending its life is immoral. The Substance View P1) It is morally wrong to intentionally kill an innocent adult human being because they are members of an intrinsically valuable kind of being. P2) Human beings in utero are members of an intrinsically valuable kind of being. C1) Therefore, it is morally wrong to intentionally kill human beings in utero. P3) Abortion intentionally kills human beings in utero. C2) Abortion is morally wrong. If someone is to propose that adult humans and human beings in utero are a intrinsically valuable kind of being, then one needs to show what this intrinsic value consist of, which was not done by my opponent. What is it that makes an adult intrinsically valuable? Is it the preference to continue living? I guess one could speak of that as an intrinsic value. What is it that makes a human being in utero intrinsically valuable? Is there a similar preference such that we could speak of parallels between ending the life of an adult and ending the life of a fetus? No there is not. Value is attributed by the parents and others close to the fetus but that is extrinsic value not intrinsic value. The Constitutive Property ArgumentP1) If an individual being has a constitutive property at one point in time, then it has that property at every in its existence. P2) You are the same individual living being or organism as the fetus from which you developed. P3) You are a human person constitutively. C) The zygote from which you developed was a human person. My opponent gives no actual defence for any of the premises, especially premise two needs justification, since I cannot point at any property of myself that was present when I was only a zygote. Furthermore premise three needs a solid definition of personhood. Conclusion In this first rebuttal I have refuted all of the arguments put forward by my opponent. In my second rebuttal I will defend my opening statement and the objections to Cons arguments I gave above. (1)Peter Singer, Practical Ethics P73 (Third Edition, Cambridge University Press) (2) David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion P5