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?)