No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Sumner on Abortion: Sentience and Moral Standing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
Much of the abortion debate has revolved around questions of the ontological status of the fetus: many liberals and conservatives agree that if the fetus is a person in the fullest sense of “person”, it would require very weighty reasons to justify killing it; if, on the other hand, the fetus is not a person in the fullest sense, considerations of less moment should suffice to justify killing it. Resolution of questions about the morality of abortion, thus, should be quite straightforward: stipulate criteria of personhood and determine whether fetuses, in general, or some particular fetus satisfies those criteria. If a fetus satisfies them, it is a person in the fullest sense and has the same right to life as any other person; if it fails to satisfy those criteria, it is not a person in the fullest sense and, thus, does not have the same right to life as a person. Unfortunately, such a programme is easier envisaged than achieved. The literature is laden with controversial analyses of personhood, none of which are acceptable to all parties to the abortion controversy, and, thus, discussions of the morality of abortion continue at a shrill level; unable to find any common ground from which to initiate reasoned discourse the two sides talk past each other and no progress is made.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Etudes Critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , Winter 1985 , pp. 683 - 690
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1985
References
1 To be sure, many participants in the abortion debate have tried to proceed by avoiding discussions of fetal personhood. Such manoeuvres, however, seem to many to be motivated by nothing but the inability to make serious progress on the central issue. For many people concerned about abortion, the question of whether the fetus is a person in the morally relevant sense is the fulcrum upon which the morality of abortion turns; to simply bracket that question is to avoid the crux of the matter. Sumner's account is interesting because, while it argues that questions about the personhood of the fetus need not be resolved, it addresses itself to, and will be most attractive to, those persons who feel the force of the personhood issue most strongly.
2 Sumner, L. W., Abortion and Moral Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). References to this work are provided in the body of the textCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Sumner, L. W., “A Third Way”, in Feinberg, Joel, ed., The Problem of Abortion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1984), 72Google Scholar. In “A Third Way” Sumner provides a more succinct statement of the position he develops in his book. Except for succinctness, the characterization of moral standing in “A Third Way” does not differ from that of Abortion and Moral Theory. “A Third Way” also has been reprinted in Narveson, Jan. ed., Moral Issues (Toronto and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 194–214Google Scholar.
4 The weakened version is appropriate because of the “parasitic” nature of the fetus (152).
5 Sumner, “A Third Way”, 93Google Scholar.
6 It is not clear that we should grant Sumner the claim that an infant has no greater capacity for sentience than does a full-term fetus. In commenting upon this paper, an anonymous referee has pointed out to me that “[t]he experience of pain (as opposed to irritability) centres in the parietal cortex, whose axons, dendrites, and mylenation of incoming neurons occurs immediately after birth”.
7 Since sentience, itself, is characterized as a capacity, the criterion of moral standing would be a capacity to acquire a capacity.
8 Feinberg, Joel, “Abortion”, in Regan, Tom, ed., Matters of Life and Death (New York: Random House, 1980), 194.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., 193.