Here’s a question prompted by a seminar discussion today. (The speaker
was my colleague Robert Sprinkle.) Would it be possible to consider the
moral status of a human fetus without analogizing it to something
else? The standard way to think about the morality of abortion is to ask
what fetuses are most like—babies, organisms (fairly simple
ones at first), or tumors. We know that babies cannot be killed, that
simple organisms can be killed for important reasons, and that tumors
can be removed and destroyed without regret. So an analogy can help us
to answer the fundamantal moral question about abortion. (It’s not necessarily
the end of the matter. Judith Jarvis Thomson, and many others, have argued
that you may kill a fetus even if it is like a person, because
it is inside another person.) But a fetus isn’t something else; it’s a
fetus. So could you simply consider it and reach moral conclusions?
One might reply: "There is no way of reasoning about this entity;
there is nothing to say to oneself about its moral status—unless
one compares it to another object whose moral status one already knows."
But how do we know the moral status of (for example) human beings? Presumably,
experience and reason have rightly driven us to the conclusion that human
beings have a right to life. Similarly, most of us have decided that insects
do not have rights. Couldn’t we reach conclusions about the moral status
of fetuses without analogizing them to anything else?
(Some religious readers may say: "Experience and reason are not
the basis of our belief in human rights—we get this belief from
divine revelation." But there is no explicit divine revelation about
fetuses, so the question arises even for religious people: Could we think
morally—and perhaps prayerfully—about fetuses, without analogizing
them to other things?)