Philosophy 20: Ethics

Pierce College

Department of History, Philosophy, & Sociology

Lecture Notes for Marquis' "Why Abortion Is Immoral"

Marquis and Abortion

A Potential FLO consists of "the goods of life are those items toward which we take a "pro" attitude.  They are completed projects of which we are proud, the pursuits of our goals, aesthetic enjoyments, friendships, intellectual pursuits, and physical pleasures of various sorts.  The goods of life are what makes life worth living."

His Potential FLO explains ...

1) why murdering the innocent is wrong,

2) "why killing is one of the worst crimes,"

3) many of our beliefs about euthanasia,

4) why we disagree with the suicidal,

5) the possibility we think exists that there are aliens,

6) why infanticide is wrong, and

7) why we think, when we do, that abortion is wrong.

It would be bad of Marquis if he had anything like the following premise in his argument: "If Xs have the right to Y, then potential Xs have the right to Y."

For us, it would be, "If adult humans have the right to life, then potential adult humans have the right to life."

You can take an interest in something, but this is different from having an interest in something. To take an interest, you must be aware, but to have something be in your interests, you need not be aware of it, or aware at all.

Since fetuses have a potentially longer future and the elderly have potentially shorter futures, then it seems that it is more permissible to kill the elderly and less permissible to kill a fetus–the FLO argument seems to imply.

Marquis:

1) We can come up with other reasons to show why the killing would be equal (since we can show how the murdered elderly person had an admirable past).

2) We could, for practical reasons, adopt a doctrine of legal equality since it is almost impossible to judge people's lives and the possible future life like ours that would be deprived in the case of murder. We don't know what the grouch's future would have entailed. This impossibility of weighing the different FLO's missing in different murders makes the project seem "difficult, if not impossible," and so we should adopt a doctrine of legal equality.

3) The deprivation of an FLO is bad in the elder, and we punish accordingly, and there's no reason to, and in deed we ought not, punish more for killing someone younger, since the punishment is already the severest.

If killing a fetus is bad because it robs what could have an FLO from that FLO, then isn't it also bad abstain from sex since that prevent things which could have an FLO from having that FLO?

Marquis argues that this doesn't work, since we cannot identify the thing that would have an FLO determinately. From there he basically argues that since there is no determinate individual wronged, there is no individual wronged:

"There seems to be no non-arbitrary determinate subject of harm in the case of successful contraception. But if there is no such subject of harm, then no determinate thing was harmed. If no determinate thing was harmed, then (in the case of contraception) no wrong has been done."