The debate about abortion often centers around premises about the nature and moral status of the fetus. This can lead to enormous frustration and seemingly irresolvable disagreement. For some people, it is obvious that the fetus is a full-fledged human being, in the richest moral sense, from the moment of conception. For others this is more or less unintelligible; that is, for some people, the idea that a newly conceived embryo is a person makes no sense at all.
Don Marquis makes a very distinctive contribution to the abortion debate. He argues for a strong pro-life position without appeal to the notion of personhood. And he also does without appeal to religious premises.
Marquis makes a very strong claim: "abortion is, except possibly in rare cases, seriously immoral ... it is in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being."
This is not to say that abortion is always wrong; Marquis simply sets certain hard cases to one side. He does not discuss abortion before implantation, abortion to save mother's life, abortion in case of rape.
In spite of the fact that Marquis does not rely on the notion of personhood, he shares a major assumption with those who do: whether or not abortion is wrong, in his view, depends on something about the fetus; it depends on "whether a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously wrong to end." He believes the fetus is such a being, and he offers an analysis of why.
Framed in its usual terms, Marquis believes that the abortion debate results in a stand-off between the two sides. In section I, he attempts to demonstrate this by reviewing certain typical features of the debate. At the most general level:
Pro-lifers point to facts that seem to count in favor of the humanity of the fetus. Then they conclude that abortion is not acceptable.
Pro-choicers point to facts that seem to count in favor of the non-personhood of the fetus, and go on to conclude that abortion is acceptable.
As Marquis points out, neither side can rest on such facts alone. Moral conclusions require moral premises. And indeed, each side can add plausible sounding premises.
Pro-lifers offer: it is always prima facie wrong to take a human life.
Pro-choicers offer: personhood is what matters for moral worth; killing a person is what's prima facie wrong.
Each side misses the mark. The pro-life principle is too broad. It might well show that killing a cancer-cell culture is immoral, or so Marquis claims. (Here we might note: the pro-lifer means that it is wrong to kill a human being; not a human cell. But if a newly-fertilized ovum counts as a human being, then the distinction is not so clear after all.) On the other hand, the pro-choice argument is too narrow. It doesn't show that killing infants or retarded individuals is wrong.
Again, each side can add to its position. The pro-lifer can shift to talk of human beings. But then it isn't clear that a fetus is a human being; "human being" doesn't mean "is human and is alive." "Human being" means something like "full-fledged human person." But then the pro-lifer is begging the question -- is assuming a premise that the pro-choicer would simply deny.
Pro-choicers, on the other hand, have to find a way of broadening their conclusion to deal with the cases of infants, children and the mentally retarded. These beings don't count as persons by typical pro-choice criteria. The pro-choice advocate can appeal to considerations of the consequences, but this will make the argument rest on delicate calculations that might not turn out the way the pro-choicer thinks they will. Most of us who think killing infants and retarded people is wrong would still think so even if it turned out that there are some overall "benefits" to such practices.
More generally, Marquis points out, the pro-lifer tends to rely on a biological category: something like "genetically human" or "conceived by human parents." This leaves us with the problem of explaining the moral relevance of the biological facts...
The pro-choicer avoids biology and typically appeals to psychological characteristics. This, again, creates a need to explain why these are morally relevant. The philosopher Joel Feinberg offers an explanation. The psychological characteristics are what make moral responsibility and moral reasoning possible. They also explain why we can value certain things, make plans, and care about our own futures. They "make sense out of rights and duties." But Marquis points out: the psychological characteristics that pro-choicers appeal to may be necessary conditions for having duties; it is much less clear that they are necessary for having rights -- especially such basic rights as the right to life.
Now a being who never will have these characteristics might well have no rights. (Thus, unconscious people get rights, since they once were conscious and may well be again.) But this won't help the pro-choicer, since the fetus typically will be conscious if it's allowed to develop. And if we insist that someone must already have had these characteristics to get rights, this may seem like a cheap trick tailor-made for ruling out fetuses.
II Marquis proposes a different way of approaching the problem. His strategy: examine what it is that makes killing wrong in the first place. Then look at abortion in light of that more general discussion
He begins with two wrong answers:
1. Killing is wrong because it brutalizes the killer; and
2. Killing is wrong because of the effects on the people left behind.
The first answer gets things the wrong way around. People who kill are brutes because killing is a terrible thing. The second doesn't deal with the case of people who live in isolation or whose friends are superficial and won't miss them. It is still wrong to kill such people. A better answer is this: killing is wrong because it deprives the victim of all possible future experience. "When I die," says Marquis, "I am deprived of all the value of my future."
Marquis offers two bits of intuitive evidence for this:
1. It explains why we regard killing as an especially evil crime: it deprives the victim of more than virtually any other crime.
2. It explains the regret and sense of loss felt by people who know they are dying.
He also points to four implications of this analysis that help make it plausible.
1. It allows that other -- even alien -- creatures may have a right to life as strong as ours; it doesn't rest on a merely biological basis.
2. It doesn't prejudge the animal rights debate; some animals might be sufficiently like us that it is wrong as things stand to kill them.
3. It doesn't prejudge the euthanasia debate; it allows that for some people, death may not be an evil compared to continued life.
4. It straightforwardly deals with the case of infants and children.
Notice that potential personhood isn't the issue. A fetus is the sort of being whose life it is normally wrong to end. But the reason for this is that it has the capacity for a valuable future like ours. If this amounts to saying it is a potential person, so be it. The point is that Marquis does not rely on an unanalyzed notion of "potential person." He spells out exactly what it is about the being that is morally relevant.
Marquis uses another case as a sort of test for this general approach. We believe it is wrong to inflict pain on other people wantonly. He suggests that there are strong parallels between what he -- and, he thinks, we -- would say about this and what he has to say about abortion. We believe it is wrong not because of some extrinsic considerations, such as what it does to the character of the person inflicting the pain, but because of its effects on the victim -- because the suffering of the victim is an evil. This is like what he has to say about killing; killing is wrong not because of its effects on the killer, but because of its effects on the victim -- the loss of all potential for value in his or her future...
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