Here’s a question prompted by a seminar discussion today. (The speaker<\/p>\n
was my colleague Robert Sprinkle.) Would it be possible to consider the<\/p>\n
moral status of a human fetus<\/b> without analogizing it to something<\/p>\n
else? The standard way to think about the morality of abortion is to ask<\/p>\n
what fetuses are most like<\/i>—babies, organisms (fairly simple<\/p>\n
ones at first), or tumors. We know that babies cannot be killed, that<\/p>\n
simple organisms can be killed for important reasons, and that tumors<\/p>\n
can be removed and destroyed without regret. So an analogy can help us<\/p>\n
to answer the fundamantal moral question about abortion. (It’s not necessarily<\/p>\n
the end of the matter. Judith Jarvis Thomson, and many others, have argued<\/p>\n
that you may kill a fetus even if it is <\/i>like a person, because<\/p>\n
it is inside another person.) But a fetus isn’t something else; it’s a<\/p>\n
fetus. So could you simply consider it<\/i> and reach moral conclusions?<\/p>\n
One might reply: "There is no way of reasoning about this entity;<\/p>\n
there is nothing to say to oneself about its moral status—unless<\/p>\n
one compares it to another object whose moral status one already knows."<\/p>\n
But how do we know the moral status of (for example) human beings? Presumably,<\/p>\n
experience and reason have rightly driven us to the conclusion that human<\/p>\n
beings have a right to life. Similarly, most of us have decided that insects<\/p>\n
do not have rights. Couldn’t we reach conclusions about the moral status<\/p>\n
of fetuses without analogizing them to anything else?<\/p>\n
(Some religious readers may say: "Experience and reason are not<\/p>\n
<\/i>the basis of our belief in human rights—we get this belief from<\/p>\n
divine revelation." But there is no explicit divine revelation about<\/p>\n
fetuses, so the question arises even for religious people: Could we think<\/p>\n
morally—and perhaps prayerfully—about fetuses, without analogizing<\/p>\n
them to other things?) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}