Marquis on the Immorality of Abortion

Getting Right to It.  Marquis's purpose is to provide a defensible anti-abortion position which is free from "irrational religious dogma" or "philosophical confusion."  His position is that abortion is in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being. "…[A]bortion is, except possibly in rare cases, seriously immoral…" (292).

An Important Assumption  Marquis acknowledges that he makes an assumption that he doesn't defend in the paper: "If fetuses are in the same category as adult human beings with respect to the moral value of their lives, then the presumption that any particular abortion is immoral is exceedingly strong. Such a presumption could be overridden only by considerations more compelling than a woman's right to privacy" (292-3).

Getting At Abortion  Somewhat surprisingly, Marquis does not begin by trying to establish the basis for the shared DMS of innocent adults and fetuses.  Instead, he begins by trying to establish the moral status of murder by providing an account of why murder is wrong.  The answer that he comes up with is that the immorality of murder lies in the effect that it has on the victim, not in the mere loss of life, but in the loss of the value of my future (cf. 293c2).

What ' s With the Future?  Of course, Marquis cannot just assert that his account of the wrongness of murder is preferable, he has to give us some reasons to accept it.  Marquis points to our common moral intuition that murder is more serious than other crimes and to the accounts of some people facing death.  His more (philosophically) interesting claim is that in futurity he has located a natural property that both fits our intuitions about the matter and that it is the only one that does so.

Other Advantages  There are various advantages to the futurity theory that Marquis identifies. 1. It undermines the claim that it is wrong to kill only biological humans. 2. Entails that it is wrong to kill any being that has this sort of futurity (including perhaps some non-human animals). 3. Does not rule out active euthanasia. 4. Establishes the moral impermissibility of infanticide (advantage over personhood theories like Warren's).

How Does this Help with Abortion?  Marquis specifies futurity as the property that establishes DMS. Works in the case of murder, but what about other cases?  If the fetus has a future, then it is wrong to kill it for the same reason that it is wrong to kill any other futural being.  What about this " If? "  Marquis thinks that this is the place where his theory has the most advantage over one like Thomson ' s. He insists that futurity is not like potential, and is thus by implication immune to the sort of arguments Thomson offered.

What about Contraception  A possible (and possibly important) counter- claim to Marquis's account of the wrongness of abortion is it's consequences for contraception.  Contraception can be understood as a loss of futurity (this is, for example, one way of understanding the Catholic Church’s objections).  Marquis rejects this argument on the grounds of the difference between an actual as opposed to merely potential futurity. There is a possible contradiction here with Marquis’s rejection of counter-arguments like Thomson’s.

The Final Analysis  "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…human cells in some respects and like adult humans in other respects. The problem of the ethics of abortion is the problem of determine the fetal property that settles this moral controversy" (296c2).  Marquis: Futurity.