Abortion and the Neo-Natal Right to Life

1. Abortion and the Neo-Natal Right to Life Gerald Paske

2. Marquis’s Argument • (1) What makes killing morally wrong is the deprivation ofeta future-life-like-ours • (2) Normal fetuses have a future like ours. • (3) Therefore, abortion is morally wrong.

3. Paske’s Critical Theses Paske sets out to prove the following: 1) That Marquis’s position presupposes the concept of personhood. 2) That having a future-like-ours is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the right to life. 3) That, given the concept of personhood, neonates, infants and children have a right to life.

4. Paske’s First Critique • The first thing we should notice about Marquis’s view is that it allows abortions of fetuses that will not have a future-like-ours. • Therefore, it finds morally permissible abortions of fetuses that are cognitively handicapped.

5. The Value of a Future-Like-Ours • What makes our future so valuable are the psychological characteristics that make up our mental, cognitive life. • Our conceptually based emotions make our mental life valuable. • We can think of the future. For instance, we can anticipate our children’s and grandchildren’s wedding, etc.. • We can experience joys of love and sorrows in a much more acute way than animals with less developed cognitive powers. • Our ability to think abstractly permits us to have this rich emotional life.

6. Personhood • However, is not this cognitive, mental life what we mean by persons? • If so, then a future-like-ours is the same as personhood. • Nonhuman rational beings can also be persons.

7. Marquis's view presupposes personhood • Paske argues that Marquis’s view falls back onto the conception he tried to avoid, namely, personhood. • Moreover, Paske introduces positive argument for the importance of personhood.

8. Moral Relevance of Psychological States • It is a basic moral principle that harming sentient life requires justification. • It is also en empirical fact that different kinds of harm can be done to various forms of sentient life depending ion the nature of their consciousness. • For example you can cause a snake physical pain but not psychological pain by insulting it. “You lazy no good, ugly-looking snake”.

9. Personhood and Psychological States • What is special about persons is that they have a very developed conscious state and can experience emotional based pain. • For instance, moral guilt, regret, hope, pride, failure, etc. • The base for the different treatment of humans and animals is that humans have more developed emotionally based concepts.

10. Personhood and Psychological States • Only persons can conceptualize a distant future in which they are in it. • Only persons can think about and formulate their own future. • Only persons have the sense of autonomy. • Only persons can have their planned future frustrated by an untimely death. • Thus the harm caused by the loss of our future presupposes that we are persons.

11. Paske New Argument • What is it that makes it morally wrong to kill someone? • That you deprive them of a future of value or that they are a person or both. • Marquis argues that what makes killing a person wrong is that you deprive the person of a future of value. • Paske claims that what makes killing a person morally wrong is that the being is a person: “for a person, what is an even more serious loss than the loss of a possible future is the loss of the actual, existent person.”

12. Empirically Intertwined • There is some confusion because having a future like ours and being a person are conceptually independent but empirically intertwined. • All persons have a future like ours so when a person is killed there future is also destroyed. • The question is what makes the killing wrong? • Is it the killing of a person or the taking away of of the beings future or both.

13. Argument 1 • If two persons, an 89 and a 9 year-old, are murdered, which act is morally worse? • According to Marquis killing the 9-year-old man is morally worse. In fact the moral wrongness of of murder is inversely related to the age of the person. • But this is not what our moral intuition tells us. • Rather the act of murder is equally wrong, even though the amount of harm is different. • According to Paske, this occurs because the moral wrongness is based on the killing of a person (in the present) and not from depriving the person of its future.

14. Argument 2 • Imagine that acat is injected with a person serum that will take effect in 2 months so that the cat will turn into a person in 2 months. • If 1 month and 29 days after the injection (1 day before the cat becomes a person) you inject it with an antidote, would you say that we have done something wrong? • What if you inject the antidote AFTER the cat has become a person (2 months after)? • According to Marquis’s view, both acts would be equally wrong. • However, this goes contrary to our basic moral intuitions, for it seems obvious that it is much worse to inject the antidote when the being is a person than when the being is a cat, even though the future loss is practically the same.

15. Paske’s Intuition • Paske is hoping that you will believe that we have done nothing wrong BECAUSE we have not killed a person. • In the second case you have done something wrong because you have killed a person. • The point is that he wants us to see that what is wrong in killing is not simply that we deprive a thing of a future like ours but also, and more importantly, that we have , in the present, killed a person!

16. Argument 3 • If we kill a person who has 1 minute left to live but wants to live it, have we done something wrong? • Imagine that in that last minute nothing of great importance will take place.

17. Paske’s Intuition • Paske would like us to think that yes, something morally wrong has transpired when the old man who had 1 minute left was killed. • Here, of course, what makes it wrong is not the future of the old man but rather that a person has been killed and his rights violated.

18. Argument 4 • What about a person that is terminally ill and will suffer in the future? • Would it be wrong to kill that person now in the present? • There seems to be too much emphasis in the future in Marquis’s view. • Euthanasia is justified not only because there horrendous suffering in the futureandalsobecause there is horrendous suffering in the present andalso because the person has made a decision to end his life.

19. Abortion • Paskeargues that it is not enough or sufficient to show that fetuseswill have a future like ours to prove that it is immoral to kill them. • Consider the cat example once again. There the cat was eventually going to become a person and have a future like our, but if we injected the antidote before it became a person to stop it from becoming a person, we would not hold that we have done anything morally wrong. This show that simply having a future like ours is not sufficient to prove that killing it is morally wrong. Its present personhood status makes a moral difference. • Therefore, it seems that Marquis’s has not, after all, avoided the question and irresolvable problem of personhood.

20. The Problem of Abortion • If Paske is right then Marquis is back to making abortion morally permissible because fetuses are not persons. • However, Paske argues that there is a false assumption in this way of thinking, namely, what gives the right to life of adult humans (i.e., their personhood) must be the same as what gives the right to life to fetuses.

21. Paske’s Argument • Instead of basing the fetus’s right to life on the concept of personhood, Paske argues that the fetus’s right to life is derived from SOCIAL RIGHTS. • Person right: human rights • Social rights: property rights

22. Social Rights of Fetuses • 1. Intrinsic Source of the Social Right to Life • 1.1 Genetic Humanness • 1.2 Potentiality for Personhood • 2. Relational Source of the Social Right to Life • 2.1 Is the fetus cared about • 2.2 Has a decision been made to allow it to develop

23. 1.1 Genetic Humanness • Being human gives a being some rights toward other humans beings to give it care, even if the human organism is not a person (does has yet have the cognitive mental states of persons). • Species bias, to a certain extent, is a moral duty, just as family bias, to a certain extent, is a moral duty.

24. 1.2 Potentiality • The potentiality of becoming a person has some moral weight but not very much. • It is not a person, nevertheless, the fact that it can become a person ought to give it value.

25. A Minimal Right to Care • At conception therefore, a fetus has Genetic Humanness and a Potentiality for Personhood and this does NOT give it a right to life but it does give it a minimal right to care. • This right to care is strengthen as the fetus develops and its potentiality for personhood is actualized.

26. 2.1 Fetus is cared about • Something that does not have objective value can have subjective value. • A family ring that is not worth very much, for instance. • Perhaps the value is derived from the relations and history the ring has had with past family members.

27. 2.2 Has a decision been made to allow it to develop • A woman’s decision not to terminate a fetus in its early stages gives the fetus implicit consent to use the woman’s body. • Consent for a fetus to develop in the woman increases the responsibility of woman to care for the fetus.

28. Conclusion • “Personhood is the primary source of the right to life. Until a human passes through the fetal and neonatal stages and develops personhood its rights depend on the other four sources of rights. Those sources generate a range of rights beginning with a minima and easily defeasible right to care during the early stages, of the pregnancy, through an increasingly significant right to care, and culminating in a full social right to life for neonates.”