Abortion

Introduction I will now respond to the various objections that Pro raised to my arguments. With that said, let me begin. The Traditional Pro-Life ArgumentThe Future-Like-Ours ArgumentPro says that it's true that killing us deprives us of our future but that this is only bad because we can want to go on living. The fetus, on the other hand, clearly is not able to do this. However, as I already showed in my objections to his argument, this view of the wrongness of killing has many difficulties and thus is an unsatisfactory answer to why ending life is wrong. For that reason, this is not a good objection to the FLO argument. Pro objects to premise 2 claiming that what separates adult human beings from the fetus is that we have already reached our future-like-ours whereas the fetus has not. However, I think this is a misunderstanding of the argument, partly due to my fault. The FLO argument claims that what makes killing certain beings wrong, is that it deprives them of a valuable future. This is why Marquis sometimes refers to this argument as a future of value. Adult human beings have not reached their future of value so to speak, rather they continue to have a future that could be valuable to them. Thus, killing adult humans is considered a wrong doing. In the same way, killing the fetus is wrong because it deprives that human being of its future of value. So Pro's claim that the fetus has not reached his future-like-ours is a misunderstanding of the argument because future-like-ours simply means a future of value. Again, this misunderstanding is my fault. The Substance ViewPro asked what makes adult human beings and human beings in utero intrinsically valuable. I maintain that what makes them valuable is the fact that they have a rational nature. It's true that not all human beings possess the immediate exercisable capacity to act rational, but nevertheless they are still the same kind of being who can, in certain circumstances, perform actions specifically defined as rational. An adult human being in a temporary coma may not have the immediate exercisable capacity to act rational, but it would still be wrong to kill him because he has a rational nature. And the same would be true of the human being in utero. The Constitutive Property ArgumentPro says that I provided no defense of the premises of this argument and that premise 2 especially needs justification since there are no properties he has now that were present when he was a fetus. I also did not provide a definition of personhood of premise 3. I will now defend these premises and respond to Pro's objection to premise 3. Defense of Premise 1If you remember correctly, P1 says: "If an individual being has a constitutive property at one point in time, then it has that property at every in its existence. " This premise is true by definition, since what a being has constitutively must always be a characteristic of that being, otherwise it is not a constitutive characteristic but an accidental one. [2] Defense of Premise 2Pro misunderstands this premise. He said: "I cannot point at any property of myself that was present when I was only a zygote. " But premise 2 doesn't even mention the word property in it. The premise says: "You are the same individual living being or organism as the fetus from which you developed. " And this is clearly true. We were all once a fetus that later developed and was born. So premise 2 should be accepted. Defense of Premise 3As far as the definition of personhood, I would like to use the concept of a person offered by the philosopher Boethius. Under this view, a being is a person if they are an individual substance with a rational nature. This concept of a person is the same as The Substance View in that it focuses on having a rational nature as the basis of being a person. This idea of a person would not just apply to human beings but also to other beings as well. For example, there might exist intelligent aliens that have a rational nature. Under this view of a person, they would be entitled to the same basic rights that human beings have. So if we define person in this way, then premise 3 is true. Since what is by nature is constitutively a feature of the being in question. Conclusion Pro raises a number of reasonable objections to my arguments, but ultimately they are unsuccessful. Source: (1) Christopher Kaczor. The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice (Routledge Annals of Bioethics) P102