[Peace-discuss] Whose life is it, anyway? (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

I think the argument proceeds as follows:

	[1] What makes killing someone wrong?

	[2] Does the answer to [1] apply to the fetus?

If the answer to [2] is "yes," then the ethical rules we normally apply
(self-defense, etc.) apply there as well.

I can't look at Demetrius at last night's meeting and think that such
rules as they apply to him changed radically ten days ago.

Regards, Carl

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, Ricky Baldwin wrote:

> Actually, I appreciate the reasonableness of this argument, because
> it’s sometimes hard to have this argument rationally.  But the
> argument is flat wrong.  I haven’t seen Don Marquis’s original, but
> this summary has some serious flaws.
> 
> Right off the bat, the argument is framed too conveniently.  While it
> is true that virtually all the anti-abortion arguments center on
> claims about the fetus, the same cannot be said for abortion rights
> arguments -- and in my experience (without poll data) these aren’t the
> most important arguments for most abortion rights supporters.  
> Assuming this summary is accurate, Marquis completely ignores the
> arguments we’ve probably heard most often: a woman has a right to
> control her body, limits on reproductive freedom make women into
> second class citizens, etc.  In other words, abortion rights arguments
> tend to center on claims, not about the fetus, but about the pregnant
> woman.  Marquis, or at least the summary here, doesn’t give us any
> reason to choose one of those starting points over the other.  That’s
> a pretty serious omission, especially if you consider that the
> ‘personhood’ of pregnant women is not in dispute (at least not
> openly).
> 
> Related to this omission, further down, there’s a claim that abortion
> is usually pretty much the same as killing an “innocent adult human
> being.” The omission of some troublesome cases is noted.  But a
> crucial difference between fetuses and adult human beings is not
> mentioned, at least in this summary: total dependence, drain on and
> risk to a pregnant woman.  I would hope that I would be willing to
> donate a vital organ to save one of my siblings, but am I morally
> obligated to do so?  Am I guilty of murder if I don’t?
>  A better analogy, from a biomedical ethics textbook, has one adult
> attached to another in such a way that the other is totally dependent
> for oxygen, nutrition, and so on, which he or she drains from his or
> her ‘host’.  Disentangling the two would mean death for the dependent
> one in this analogy.  Certainly we’d admire anyone who is willing to
> support someone else this way for months, even weeks, but is anyone
> morally obligated to do so?  We might disagree about these questions
> and their answers, but the difference is serious, as is its omission.
> 
> I also think Marquis, at least as portrayed here, is a little too
> quick to dismiss the arguments about ‘personhood’ as “too narrow.” I
> think we all pretty much operate on the assumption that there are
> degrees of personhood and each degree comes with different rights.  
> My two year olds cannot vote, for example, and I don’t let them drive
> a car or cook their own meals.  Treating most adults that way would be
> a serious infringement on their rights.
> 
> At any rate, the crux of the argument comes at the end: it’s the idea
> that killing someone (assumed to include a fetus) is wrong because it
> deprives them of “all the value of [his or her] future.” The summary
> says Marquis doesn’t rely on an “unanalyzed notion of ‘potential
> person,’” but in fact he only redirects his “unanalysis” a bit, we
> might say (at least, if this summary is any indication): from
> “potential person” to “future”.  Is it okay, then, to go around
> killing just anybody who is about to die?  Can we solve our suicide
> problem by shooting people off high-rise ledges?
> 
> What does it mean to deprive someone of the value of his or her
> future, anyway?  When someone has to choose one career path instead of
> another, isn’t that person “deprived of the value” of one future?  
> What about moving to one location as opposed to another?  Hanging out
> with one group of friends as opposed to another?  Going to see one
> movie as opposed to another, or something completely different?  
> Unfortunately, people aren’t able to exercise free choice very much of
> the time, but are all the limits on our freedoms morally equivalent to
> murder?  I doubt that many people think so, but where is Marquis’s
> answer?
> 
> This summary points out that one implication of this “value of my
> future” argument is that “some animals might be sufficiently like us
> that it is wrong as things stand to kill them”.  But why assume they
> need to be “like us”?  Where is that in Marquis’s argument?
>  Don’t dandelions have futures (albeit short ones)?  E. coli?  Are
> their futures, um, less valuable?
> 
> Is “value of [one’s] future” the criterion we want to use, say, when
> one future is incompatible with another?  (Maybe there can even be
> degrees of incompatibility?)  Or weren’t we better off with the
> ‘personhood’ debate?
> 
> Or maybe, as I suspect, all this analysis of the fetus is doomed to
> absurdity, because it is improperly narrow.  It is deprived of its
> most immediate and most certain context.  It omits, prejudicially, one
> whose personhood is not in doubt (at least not openly).  It ignores
> the woman, who may or may not have much of a choice.  It turns a blind
> eye to the psychological, social and economic pressures on her.  It
> doesn’t ask by what authority someone can intervene to block her
> decision -- to have an abortion, to have a baby, to get pregnant in
> the first place, or to avoid pregnancy.  Such pressures and such
> authority are not to be assumed lightly, I think, but questioned
> closely before they are allowed to persist.  Abortion -- or
> reproductive freedom, as we say -- is certainly not the only area
> where such things come into play, but it can’t be understood without
> them.
> 
> That’s enough from me for now.
> 
> Ricky
>