Notes for Second Lecture on Abortion: The Personhood Debate and Marquis's Argument

1. Questions:

What exactly is a person? What is it about a person that gives rise to a right to life?

How does the embryo or fetus stand with regard to personhood, and what does that imply about its moral status (i.e. the moral rights or [weaker] claims it has)?

2. Two Concepts of Person:

A. PersonM (moral concept of a person)

B. PersonD (descriptive concept of a person)

3. Question: What is the relation between being a personD and being a personM?

One very plausible, but not very illuminating, claim:

(0) Being a personD is sufficient for being a personM.

Two problematic claims:

(1) Being a personD is necessary for being a personM. (If X is not a personD, X is not a personM.)

(2) Being a potential personD is sufficient for being a personM.

Can you identify the difficulties (at least for many people) with each?

4. Where does this leave us?

• On one hand, many who hold a moderate view reject both claims 1 and 2. But unless we have some better account to offer, this leaves us without anything concrete and illuminating to say about the relation between being a personD and being a personM! (But see section 9 for an attempt to fill this in.)
• On the other hand, some on the "liberal" side will bite the bullet and accept 1, rejecting 2 as being too broad, and some on the "conservative" side will go ahead and accept claim 2, rejecting 1 as too restrictive. This has led to a standoff between those two groups.

5. How can we move beyond this paralysis and/or standoff?

Marquis's suggestion: side-step the whole debate over personhood and the moral status of the embryo or fetus, and devise an independent argument against abortion.

6. Marquis's Strategy: look for what it is that normally makes killing an ordinary adult human being wrong. Then see if that same factor, whatever it is, is also present in the case of aborting an embryo or fetus. If it is, then it would equally seem to make abortion wrong.

Marquis thinks he can do all this without getting bogged down in the old controversial questions about the moral status of the embryo or fetus.

7. Marquis's Argument:

First argue for the following claim about what normally makes killing an ordinary person like one of us wrong:

Deprivation of Valuable Future Principle: What normally makes killing an ordinary human being wrong is that it deprives the victim of a valuable "future like ours" (containing valuable forms of activity, experience, enjoyments, etc.).

Then the general argument goes like this:

(1) Deprivation of Valuable Future Principle (above).

(2) If this wrong-making feature (i.e., depriving the victim of a future like ours) also holds true for the killing of an embryo or a fetus, then killing an embryo or fetus will likewise normally be wrong, for exactly the same reason.

(3) But this wrong-making feature DOES hold true for the killing of an embryo or a fetus: to kill an embryo or a fetus IS to deprive it of a valuable future like ours.

___________________

(4) Therefore, the killing of an embryo or a fetus is normally wrong as well.

8. Criticism: Is premise 1 (the 'Deprivation of Valuable Future' Principle) really true?

There are reasons to suspect that something has gone wrong here (despite many sensible points made in the article). I will focus on one issue.

Suppose a terrorist demands that you murder 1 innocent person whom he wants dead but cannot get to; otherwise, he will murder 5 others. Should you do it?

Most of us think not: the good end of saving the 5 from the terrorist does not justify the means of murdering an innocent person yourself. (Recall Foot's position and her argument about negative vs. positive rights or duties.) But now consider what Marquis's Deprivation of Valuable Future Principle would say about this case. Does it get the intuitively right answer?

I will argue in lecture that it does not, given that it is focused simply on the badness of loss of potential futures. That focus does not explain why it is wrong to kill the 1 in order to stop the terrorist from killing the 5. So the Deprivation of Valuable Future Principle seems inadequate. We need a better principle that explains why killing someone is wrong both in ordinary cases and in cases like this.

Suggestion:

Destruction of a Person with Valuable Future Principle: What normally makes killing an ordinary human being wrong is that it constitutes the destruction of A PERSON(M) who would otherwise have a valuable future life like ours, to which that person was entitled by virtue of his or her moral personhood (such that this person has a strong negative right not to have that future taken away).

Unlike Marquis's principle, this principle would properly explain why it is wrong to murder the 1, even for a good end such as saving 5. It is not just about minimizing the loss of valuable futures, but about respecting the rights of persons not to be deprived of their valuable futures.

Notice that everything that Marquis says in support of his principle (the Deprivation of Valuable Future Principle) is equally consistent with the Destruction of a Person with Valuable Future principle. So he has given us no reason to think that his principle is correct, rather than this one. And the above argument suggests that this one is superior.

Lesson: we seem to need MORE than just the idea of the value of potential futures to explain the wrongness of killing: we need the idea of the intrinsic value and dignity and rights of the beings whose futures we're talking about. But again, that leads us away from Marquis's argument, to the alternative principle above.

What matters is not just the values of the potential futures, but WHAT KIND OF ENTITY we're depriving of such a future, and the kinds of rights it has. It's that consideration that brings out why you may not murder 1 even to save the valuable futures of 5 others.

BUT if this is right, then Marquis's argument is in deep trouble. Here is how his argument would now have to be reformulated:

(1) Destruction of a Person with Valuable Future Principle: What normally makes killing an ordinary human being wrong is that it constitutes the destruction of A PERSON(M) who would otherwise have a valuable future life like ours, to which that person was entitled by virtue of his or her moral personhood (such that this person has a strong negative right not to have that future taken away).

(2) If this wrong-making feature also holds true for the killing of an embryo or a fetus, then killing an embryo or fetus will likewise normally be wrong, for exactly the same reason.

(3) But this wrong-making feature DOES hold true for the killing of an embryo or a fetus.

___________________

(4) Therefore, the killing of an embryo or a fetus is normally wrong as well.

The problem is that now premise 3 is completely unsupported! Make sure you see why.

In order to support premise 3, what would you first have to establish? ________

But has Marquis given any argument for that? (No, and indeed, this was precisely the issue he was trying to side-step in the first place!)

So if the correct principle and starting point is not Marquis's Deprivation of Valuable Future principle, but instead my suggested Destruction of a Person with Valuable Future principle, then Marquis's argument does not get off the ground. And again, nothing in his argument supports his principle over the alternative one I've suggested.

Even worse, his principle fails to explain what is wrong with our killing the 1 in the terrorist case above, whereas the alternative principle does. So if anything, the alternative principle seems better. But again, the argument gets us nowhere in that case: we can't make the argument go through unless we have somehow independently established the personhood of the embryo or fetus, which Marquis never did.

Another consideration: Does Marquis have a satisfactory explanation for why killing an elderly person or a severely handicapped baby is fundamentally just as morally reprehensible as killing me--equally murder? (Is what he says about other reasons for condemning the murder of old people, really enough? Is it really just a useful convention to treat murders as equally wrong at a fundamental level?)

Also, does Marquis's really have a good enough answer to escape the contraception objection he considers near the end?

9. What now?

If you agree that Marquis's argument is not convincing, we seem to be back to the question of personhood and the moral status of the embryo or fetus, which brings us back to the problem of how to delineate the class of personsM (section 3 above). Here's a suggestion that may better capture our intuitions about who counts and why, avoiding both of the extremes we considered in section 3 above:

The PersonSpecies-Membership Criterion of PersonhoodM + the Gradualist View of Species Membership

(a) Any genuine, individual member of a species which is such that its normal mature members are personsD, is a personM (regardless of whether or not or to what degree this individual actually or even potentially possesses the properties relevant to being a personD).

(b) Any potential genuine, individual member of such a species actually possesses at least some claim to life.

(c) The strength of this claim, for a being that is not yet a genuine individual member of the species (i.e. an embryo), depends on the degree of development, since that determines how close the being in question is to being a genuine individual member of the species. The claim is weakest at the earliest stages and grows stronger as it approaches becoming a genuine, individual member of the species, at which point the claim becomes a full right. (Note: the claim is not that moral status continues to grow even after birth, until one is fully developed at maturity. By birth, if not sooner, one is clearly a genuine individual member of the species, and that's sufficient for full moral status.)

• This therefore implies a moderate position, between liberal and conservative extremes.