Abortion- Marquis

Core Argument and Thesis

Thesis: abortion is, except in rare cases, seriously immoral — in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human.
Approach: establishes a general argument without relying on religious dogma or personhood theories.
Key assumption: whether abortion is permissible depends on whether a fetus is the being whose life it is seriously wrong to end.
Scope limitation: does not address hard cases (rape, life-threatening pregnancy); targets the overwhelming majority of deliberate abortions.
Section I premise: resolving the abortion controversy requires a theoretical account of why killing adult humans is wrong.

Why killing is wrong: not its effect on the murderer or others, but the loss inflicted on the victim — deprivation of all future experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments.
"Future like ours": what makes killing a human wrong is depriving the victim of the value of their future — a future containing experiences and projects valuable to them.
Prima facie wrong: any killing where the victim had a valuable future is presumptively seriously wrong.
Supporting considerations:
- Explains why killing is among the worst crimes (deprives more than most harms).
- Consistent with attitudes of terminal patients (AIDS/cancer): they regard loss of future as the bad thing about dying.
Merits over rival theories:

Feature	FLO Account	Sanctity-of-Life	Personhood Theory
Applies to fetuses	Yes (directly)	Yes	Requires ad hoc additions
Applies to infants/young children	Yes (directly)	Yes	Needs extra argument
Compatible with euthanasia permissibility	Yes	No	Varies
Avoids speciesism	Yes	No	No

Euthanasia compatibility: persons who are severely ill and face only pain/despair do not have a valuable future; hence killing them is not necessarily wrong under this theory — this is a strength, not a weakness.
Application to fetuses: a standard fetus has a future of experiences, projects, and activities identical in kind to those of adult humans; therefore the reason sufficient to make post-birth killing wrong applies equally to fetuses → abortion is prima facie seriously morally wrong.
No personhood required: the argument proceeds independently of whether a fetus is a "person"; calling fetuses "persons" would state the conclusion, not generate the argument.

Parallel structure: the anti-abortion argument mirrors the argument against wanton infliction of pain on animals — both start from an obvious wrong done to "me," identify the natural property that makes it wrong, then extend to other beings.
Pain case: suffering is what makes wanton pain infliction wrong → applies to animals → wanton pain on animals is wrong.
Killing case: loss of valuable future makes killing wrong → applies to fetuses → abortion is prima facie wrong.
Kant's rival view rejected: Kant denied direct duties to animals (they are not persons); but this requires accepting a claim with no independent support, making it implausible. Rejecting Kant's account supports accepting the FLO-parallel account.
Conclusion: the argument for the immorality of abortion is as sound as the argument against wanton animal cruelty.

Discontinuation account: killing is wrong because it discontinues the victim's experience of living.- Does not support anti-abortion position: fetuses have no ongoing experiences to discontinue.
- Ultimately must reference the value of future experiences to avoid making it permissible to kill those who beg for death; once it does, it collapses into the FLO account.
Desire account: killing is wrong because it frustrates the strong desire to continue living.
- Must provide a necessary condition for wrongness of killing to generate a pro-choice conclusion (fetus lacks strong desire to live → not wrong to kill).
- Fails: we consider it seriously wrong to kill the unconscious, sleeping, suicidal, or those who no longer desire life — desire is not a necessary condition.
- Deeper problem: goodness of life is not secondary to desire for it; eliminating the desire would not make premature death acceptable.
Modified desire account: if desire is only a sufficient (not necessary) condition, it is compatible with FLO and yields an anti-abortion ethic anyway.
Future desires: typical fetuses will have the desire to live in the future; a desire-based account using future desires also supports anti-abortion conclusions.

"Value requires a valuer" objection: fetuses cannot value their futures, so their futures are not valuable to them.
- Fails: a future can be valuable to someone even if they do not currently value it (e.g., suicidal person rescued and going on to achievement).
Tooley's capacity-to-desire objection: right to life requires capacity to desire continued existence; fetuses lack this capacity.
- Rejected on grounds that lack of capacity to desire X does not remove the right to X — counterexampled by drugged/unconscious persons who temporarily cannot form desires.
Bassen's mentation/sentience requirement: embryos lack sentience → cannot be victims → cannot be wronged.
- Plants and the permanently unconscious also lack mentation, yet the real reason we don't consider them victims is they lack a future like ours — not the absence of mentation.- Counterexample: a person rendered totally unconscious for a month is still victimized by being killed during that time — mentation is not necessary for victimizability.
- Bassen's defense (children's case relies on "prospects") is question-begging: what counts as secured victimizability is exactly what is at issue.
General conclusion: all attempts to restrict the FLO argument so that fetuses fall outside its scope fail.

Objection: if depriving a future of value is wrong, contraception (which prevents a future of value) should also be wrong.
Response: contraception does not deprive any identifiable subject of a future:
- Candidates — sperm, ovum, sperm+ovum together — are all arbitrary; no nonarbitrarily identifiable individual is deprived.
- At contraception there is no actual combination; no actual subject of the loss exists.
Contrast with abortion: a fetus is an actual, identifiable individual with a future of value — the subject of the loss is clearly defined.

Central result: a fetus possesses the same property that makes killing adult humans wrong → abortion is presumptively as seriously wrong as killing an adult human.
Superiority over other approaches:
- Rests on a near self-evident ethic of killing.
- The morally relevant property (valuable future) clearly applies to fetuses.
- Avoids equivocation on "human life," "human being," or "person."
- Rests on no religious claims, no Papal dogma, not subject to "speciesism" objection.
- Compatible with moral permissibility of euthanasia and contraception.
- Handles intuitions about killing infants/young children without ad hoc additions.
The standard problem: ethics of abortion = determining the fetal property that settles the moral controversy; Marquis argues this problem is solvable via the FLO account.

Moral Loss and Neutral Loss

Moral Loss- Losing something that is intended to be your rights.

Neutral Loss- Losing something that you do not have a rights over.

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