THE CASE FOR
THE IMMORALITY OF ABORTION

Moral Conversation Project Assignment:  Critically evaluate Justice Blackmun’s decision 
in Roe v. Wade.  What do you think the law on abortion should be and why?

I. Two different issues:

A. Is abortion morally permissible (under various circumstances)?
B. What should the law be regarding abortion?
C. B is also a moral question, but a different one.
D. The debate sometimes confuses these two questions.  E.g., someone who is 
“pro-choice” does not necessarily disagree with someone who is “anti-
abortion,” in the sense of thinking abortion morally wrong.  Usually being 
pro-choice means laws that makes abortions chosen by women legal.

II. Today and next Tuesday: the moral issue.  
Next Thursday: the legal issue.

III. Frequently, the moral issue is taken to depend on the issue of whether, or at what 
stage, the fetus is or becomes a person, a “human being,” or a “human life.”

A. This may seem a biological or medical question.
B. Probably misleading.  Two people can agree to all the biological or medical 
facts and still disagree about whether the fetus is a human being or person.
C. This is because the question of whether the fetus is a person or a human being 
is really a question of the fetus’s moral status or standing: How should the 
fetus be treated?  Does it have rights?

IV. How can this question be answered?

A. Extension of Cohen’s approach to this case.
B. Search for salient points, e.g., viability
C. Noonan’s answer:
1. Line drawing and slippery slopes.
2. Need for an objective criterion
3. The only sensible objective criterion is conception since:
a. Before then nothing exists with more than a tiny chance of becoming a 
“reasoning being”.  
b. After that something exists with a very good chance (~80%) of 
becoming a “reasoning being”.

V. Marquis’s Argument

A. Avoids the entire question of the fetus’s moral status.  
B. Begins “dialectically”: What makes it wrong to kill one of us?  
C. Marquis’s answer:  Because it deprives one of one’s future.  It deprives one of 
a “future-like-ours”.
D. Two parts to this answer:
1. It deprives one of a future-like-ours.
2. It deprives one of a future-like-ours.
3. Notice that the only the way the kind of being one is comes into this 
answer is indirectly rather than directly, i.e., through the kind of future one 
can be expected to have versus the kind of being one now is.  
4. But this would seem to be true in any case of abortion, regardless of the 
fetus’s stage of development.  At whatever stage, abortion robs the fetus of 
a future-like-ours.
5. Therefore, at any stage, abortion is morally wrong.

VI. This seems a very powerful and plausible argument.  Possible problems?

A. Is the future-like-ours account correct about why it is wrong to kill one of us?
B. Alternative possibilities:
1. Desire account—What makes it wrong is that one wants to keep living (or 
that one takes an interest in or values continued life).
a. Problem: It seems similarly wrong to kill someone who lacks this 
desire.
b. Problem:  We desire or value continued life because we think a future-
like-ours valuable, not vice versa.
2. Continuation account—What makes it wrong is that it interrupts the 
continuation of valuable experiences, etc.  But it would be no less wrong 
to kill someone whose current experiences are miserable if he could be 
expected to have a better future.
3. Is there another plausible possibility?  Is it a consequence of this account 
that suicide of a person with a promising future would be similarly wrong?

VII. How should we respond to this argument?

A. A correct account of what is bad for A about A’s death?  
If so, would it follow that it provides a correct account of what is wrong about 
killing A?  
1. Suicide?
2. What if A’s continued living makes a claim on another’s resources 
that A has no right to make?  (Thomson)
B.  More generally, note the absence of rights from the argument.  It is consistent 
with the future-like-ours account that although it would be wrong to kill A 
(because it deprives A of a future-like-ours), it nonetheless would violate no right 
of A’s.  Implications for the law?