Abortion, Beginnings

Flashcards about Abortion, Beginnings by Jeff McMahan

Embodied Mind Account of Identity

According to McMahan's Embodied Mind Account of Identity, we begin to exist when our organisms develop the capacity to generate consciousness.

Early Abortion

An abortion performed before the fetal brain develops the capacity to support consciousness.

When the Fetal Brain Develops the Capacity to Generate Consciousness

Between the twentieth and twenty-eighth week of gestation, according to McMahan.

Speciesist

The view that it groundlessly attributes greater value to a human organism than to an otherwise comparable organism belonging to another biological species.

Late Abortion

An abortion performed later than twenty weeks after conception; involves the killing of someone rather than merely something.

Developed Fetus

The individual who is killed by a late abortion, according to McMahan.

Harm-Based Account

Argues that what is essentially wrong with killing people is that it deprives the victim of a future that would have contained a great deal of good.

Identity

Presupposes that our moral concern should be with what is better or worse for individuals, taking account of their lives as wholes.

Capacity Condition

An individual cannot have an interest in continuing to live, and therefore cannot be harmed by dying, unless it is capable of desiring to continue to live.

Life Comparative Account

If a developed fetus's future life would be worth living, the truncated life it will have if it dies will be a less good life than the longer life it will have if it does not die. Death would therefore be worse for it because it would cause it to have the less good of two possible lives.

Time-Relative Interest Account

According to the Time-Relative Interest Account, what is fundamentally wrong about killing is that it thwarts or frustrates the victim's time-relative interest in continuing to live; and the degree to which an act of killing is wrong varies, other things being equal, with the strength of the victim's time-relative interest in continuing to live.

Two-Tiered Account

The wrongness of killing beings who are above the threshold of respect is governed by a requirement of respect. It is only in the case of beings that fall below the threshold of respect that the morality of killing is governed by the Time-Relative Interest Account.

Gradualism

The coming to be of substantial individuals may be a genuine process in time in the course of which the prospective individual comes into existence gradually, entering the world by degrees