of the loss to be a merely possible combination? Which one? This alternative does not yield an actual subject of harm either. Accordingly, the immorality of contraception is not entailed by the loss of a future‐like‐ours argument simply because there is no nonarbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the case of contraception.
VI
The purpose of this essay has been to set out an argument for the serious presumptive wrongness of abortion subject to the assumption that the moral permissibility of abortion stands or falls on the moral status of the fetus. Since a fetus possesses a property, the possession of which in adult human beings is sufficient to make killing an adult human being wrong, abortion is wrong. This way of dealing with the problem of abortion seems superior to other approaches to the ethics of abortion, because it rests on an ethics of killing which is close to self‐evident, because the crucial morally relevant property clearly applies to fetuses, and because the argument avoids the usual equivocations on “human life,” “human being,” or “person.” The argument rests neither on religious claims nor on Papal dogma. It is not subject to the objection of “speciesism.” Its soundness is compatible with the moral permissibility of euthanasia and contraception. It deals with our intuitions concerning young children.
Finally, this analysis can be viewed as resolving a standard problem – indeed, the standard problem – concerning the ethics of abortion. Clearly, it is wrong to kill adult human beings. Clearly, it is not wrong to end the life of some arbitrarily chosen single human cell. Fetuses seem to be like arbitrarily chosen human cells in some respects and like adult humans in other respects. The problem of the ethics of abortion is the problem of determining the fetal property that settles this moral controversy. The thesis of this essay is that the problem of the ethics of abortion, so understood, is solvable.
Notes
1 1 Feinberg, “Abortion,” in Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, Tom Regan, ed. (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 256–93; Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, II, 1 (1972): 37–65 [see chapter 1 in this volume], Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (New York: Oxford, 1984); Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist, 1. VII, 1 (1973): 43–61; Engelhardt, “The Ontology of Abortion,” Ethics, I. XXXIV, 3 (1974): 217–34; Sumner, Abortion and Moral Theory (Princeton: University Press, 1981); Noonan, “An Almost Absolute Value in History,” in The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives, Noonan, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1970); and Devine, The Ethics of Homicide (Ithaca: Cornell, 1978).
2 2 For interesting discussions of this issue, see Warren Quinn, “Abortion: Identity and Loss,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, XIII, 1 (1984): 24–54; and Lawrence C. Becker, “Human Being: The Boundaries of the Concept,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, IV, 4 (1975): 334–59.
3 3 For example, see my “Ethics and the Elderly: Some Problems,” in Stuart Spicker, Kathleen Woodward, and David Van Tassel, eds., Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1978), pp. 341–55.
4 4 See Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” and Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide.”
5 5 This seems to be the fatal flaw in Warren’s treatment of this issue.
6 6 I have been most influenced on this matter by Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (New York: Penguin, 1977), ch. 3; and Robert Young, “What Is So Wrong with Killing People?” Philosophy, LIV, 210 (1979): 515–28.
7 7 Feinberg, Tooley, Warren, and Engelhardt have all dealt with this problem.
8 8 Kant, “Duties to Animals and Spirits,” in Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infeld (New York: Harper, 1963), p. 239.
9 9 I am indebted to Jack Bricke for raising this objection.
10 10 Presumably a preference utilitarian would press such an objection. Tooley once suggested that his account has such a theoretical underpinning. See his “Abortion and Infanticide,” pp. 44–5.
11 11 Donald VanDeVeer seems to think this is self‐evident. See his “Whither Baby Doe?” in Matters of Life and Death, p. 233.
12 12 “Must the Bearer of a Right Have the Concept of That to Which He Has a Right?” Ethics, XCV, 1 (1984): 68–74.
13 13 See Tooley again in “Abortion and Infanticide,” pp. 47–9.
14 14 “Present Sakes and Future Prospects: The Status of Early Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, XI, 4 (1982): 322–6.
15 15 Note carefully the reasons he gives on the bottom of p. 316.
Introduction
Developments in reproductive medicine have, over the past 50 years, presented us with remarkable new options, giving us increasing control over our fertility. Effective contraception and sterilization procedures have separated sex from reproduction, while various infertility treatments, such as in vitro fertilization, have dramatically increased the possibilities for reproduction without sex. Fertile couples are now able to limit and space the number of children they are going to have, while those who were once considered infertile are able to have children.
There are also new opportunities to decide what our children will be like. Prenatal diagnosis of fetuses and testing of in vitro embryos allows prospective parents to decide not to bring a disabled child into the world, even without the use of abortion. (Those who accept the view defended by Patrick Lee and Rober P. George in the previous Part of this Anthology will not be mollified by a procedure that still involves the discarding of a viable human embryo.) The same techniques allow parents to select the sex of their child. Cloning and genetic modification of offspring are now possible for several species of mammals, and some think that it is only a matter of time before they take place in humans as well.
A wide range of different issues are covered in this Part of the Anthology. Two interrelated clusters of questions, whilst by no means exhaustive of the ethical issues raised, are central to many of the
