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Abortion and The Concept Of A Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jane English
Jane English*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Extract

The abortion debate rages on. Yet the two most popular positions seem to be clearly mistaken. Conservatives maintain that a human life begins at conception and that therefore abortion must be wrong because it is murder. But not all killings of humans are murders. Most notably, self defense may justify even the killing of an innocent person.

Liberals, on the other hand, are just as mistaken in their argument that since a fetus does not become a person until birth, a woman may do whatever she pleases in and to her own body. First, you cannot do as you please with your own body if it affects other people adversely. Second, if a fetus is not a person, that does not imply that you can do to it anything you wish. Animals, for example, are not persons, yet to kill or torture them for no reason at all is wrong.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , October 1975 , pp. 233 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1975

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References

* I am deeply indebted to Larry Crocker and Arthur Kuflik for their constructive comments.

1 We also have paternalistic laws which keep us from harming our own bodies even when no one else is affected. Ironically, anti-abortion laws were originally designed to protect pregnant women from a dangerous but tempting procedure.

2 Warren, Mary Anne “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” Monist 57 (1973), p. 55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Brody, Baruch “Fetal Humanity and the Theory of Essentialism,” in Baker, Robert and Elliston, Frederick (eds.), Philosophy and Sex (Buffalo, N.Y., 1975).Google Scholar

4 Tooley, Michael “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1971).Google Scholar

5 Ramsey, Paul “The Morality of Abortion,” in Rachels, James ed., Moral Problems (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

6 Noonan, John “Abortion and the Catholic Church: a Summary History,” Natural Law Forum 12 (1967), pp. 125–131.Google Scholar

7 Wittgenstein, has argued against the possibility of so capturing the concept of a game, Philosophical Investigations (New York, 1958), §66–71.Google Scholar

8 Not because the fetus is partly a person and so has some of the rights of persons, but rather because of the rights of person-like non-persons. This I discuss in part III below.

9 Aristotle himself was concerned, however, with the different question of when the soul takes form. For historical data, see Kimmey, Jimmye “How the Abortion laws Happened,” Ms. 1 (April, 1973), pp. 48ftGoogle Scholar and John Noonan, loc. cit.

10 Thomson, J. J. “A Defense of Abortion”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971).Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 52.

12 Rawls, John A Theory of justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), §§ 3–4.Google Scholar

13 On the other hand, if they can be trusted with people, then our moral customs are mistaken. It all depends on the facts of psychology.

14 Op. cit., pp. 40, 60-61.