Henry Marquis On Abortion

Perfectly Accurate – Boonin and Oddie encapsulate what Marquis argues in his paper “Why abortion is Immoral” in a concise way that puts the argument into perspective. However, the presentation of arguments in the Boonin book could be considered slightly misleading in not capturing Marquis’s attempt to address the nonhuman animals issue in his paper. Marquis’s argument involves abortion, or the termination of a fetus. A fetus being the unborn human baby more than eight weeks after conception. By showcasing that murder of an adult human is immoral, Marquis connects this to abortion that he terms as the killing of a fetus. Marquis decribes a standard fetus as: “loss of the future to a standard fetus, if killed, is however, at least as great a loss as the loss of the future to a standard adult human being who is killed”(Marquis.7). A standard fetus is a fetus that would lead
Marquis does go through the claim that the murder of an adult and the value of a human life can be transitively related to a fetus’s life. In his paper there is additional considerations such as Kant’s arguments to animal rights as well as additional objections. An objection raised in Marquis’s paper is that of alternative forms of human life valuations. One he tackles is the value of a life being defined by self worth. This falls short due to value being intrinsic regardless of views. A bar of gold has value not only because people have attributed it to be valuable, but because it has unique properties that give it a value. An additional objection that Marquis touches on is that if the prevention of future fate is immoral, then contraception could be considered immoral. However, he states that there is no future potentiality denied when contraception is used since there is no obligation to maximize to each human determination