Abortion Is Prima Facie Morally Wrong

Allow me to begin by saying how pleased I am to be debating Josh Brahm. I'm sure that many of you will never get to read a more powerful case for the pro-life position than the case you will read in the course of this debate. And I only hope that I can do as well while I proceed to defend the pro-choice position. In this debate I'm going to argue that abortion is not morally reprehensible and should not be illegal, given the actual qualities that a human fetus possesses. Unlike a person, a fetus is not a self-conscious agent, and it is thus incapable of holding any desire to continue living. For this reason, a fetus cannot be said to possess a serious right to life. In short, there are simply no good reasons to think that a being can derive some sort of intrinsic moral value merely by being a member of a certain species. And when one properly looks at the qualities that could reasonably grant an entity a right to life, it is rational to conclude that a fetus does not possess this right. C1: It is not always 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 prima facie morally wrong. Many different versions of anti-abortion arguments have been created; however, they all seem to be unified under the same key premises. More often than not, these arguments seek to demonstrate that it's prima facie wrong to kill any member of the human community. Thus, as the argument goes, abortion is wrong because it always kills a member of the human community. If anti-abortion arguments are constructed in this way, strong objections can be raised against the notion that it's always wrong to kill a human being. For instance, a devastating counterexample can be brought against the notion that every human being has a serious right to life. As the philosopher Michael Tooley has indicated, an adult human with complete upper brain death does not possess a serious right to life; they are, for all relevant legal and moral purposes, already dead at that stage.[1] A brain-dead adult simply does not have a morally valuable life that it could possibly have a right to keep. Clearly, the notion that all human beings have a serious right to life is untrue. In philosophy, it's very rare that you can get a knockdown argument against someone's position. But here I think we have one. The position of the pro-life advocate is made incoherent by virtue of the fact that brain-dead humans don't have a right to life. Some pro-life philosophers such as Jim Stone have tried to avoid this objection by saying that a fetus' potential to become a person is what's morally important in determining if it has a right to life.[2] As I will demonstrate later on, that escape route simply is not viable. But the problems for the pro-life advocate don't end there. It is clearly possible to imagine that other species besides humans would qualify as people. In other words, the traditional views of most pro-life advocates are based on speciesism (i.e., an unjustifiable preference towards the members of one's own species). There is simply no reason to assume that membership in the species Homo sapiens is a necessary or sufficient component for personhood.[3] So, for example, members of a self conscious species of extra-terrestrial would certainly qualify as people, even though they aren't human. Because many pro-life advocates' views are too narrow in qualifying personhood, their views should be rejected. C2: 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, the 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.[4] Since a fetus does not possess any of these qualities, it can rightfully not be considered a person with a serious right to life. 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.[5] As was demonstrated earlier, this moral principle can be recognized in the way humans rightfully differentiate between fully conscious adults and those that have experienced a permanent loss of consciousness in brain death. It is within this ethical purview that it is possible to recognize that a fetus does not have a serious right to life, since, like a brain dead adult, it does not possess a significant mental life with thoughts and desires. This is why murdering most grown adults is wrong, whereas killing a fetus is not. C3: An entity's potentials cannot grant that entity rights. A fetus' potential to acquire characteristics like rationality, autonomy and self-consciousness is not a sound basis for granting it a right to life. As the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer points out, this principle simply cannot be adopted as a rights criterion since contraception and abstinence could be equally condemned by its own standards.[6] The logical implications of the potentiality argument, then, provides good grounds for one to reject its conclusions. Moreover, the potentiality argument isn't just undermined by its logical implications, but it is also completely unsupported by common sense. Rights are attained by having certain properties, not by the possibility of having certain properties sometime in the future. For instance, children do not have the same rights as adults because they have the potential to become adults. A child's ability to become an adult is not morally relevant in determining how that child is treated before he or she is actually an adult. For these reasons, the argument that rights can be determined purely on the basis of potentials is completely unsupported. | Conclusion | In summary, the human fetus is a biological member of the human species, but it does not possess the mental qualities that would grant it a serious right to life. In other words, the fetus is not a person. In light of this, then, abortion cannot be seriously wrong because the entity being destroyed in the process cannot reasonably have sufficiently strong interests or rights that could be violated. Accordingly, many of the arguments often raised in objection to abortion can rightfully be rejected as invalid. They either rely on false premises or principles that cannot survive sufficiently strong counterexamples. Indeed, many such arguments against abortion amount to little more than the tautological assertion that abortion is murder. But a slogan is no substitute for rational inquiry. Moral philosophy is based on reason, not dogmatism. Sources: 1. Tooley, Michael. "Philosophy 1100: Introduction to Ethics: Abortion - Lecture 4."Spot.colorado.edu. Web. 14 Jan. 2011. http://spot.colorado.edu... 2. Stone, Jim. "Why Potentiality Matters". Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17:4 (1987). pp. 815-30. 3. Mappes, Thomas. DeGrazia, David. Biomedical Ethics. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1996, pp. 434-440. 4. Warren, Mary Anne. The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. 1973. On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. Vol. 57. La Salle, Illinois: The Monist, 1973. pp. 97-105. 5. Gert, Bernard. Common Morality: Deciding What to Do. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. p. 30. 6. Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993. p. 182.