Mary Anne Warren Personhood Analysis

Mary Anne Warren argued that fetus is a human being but not a person, which only persons have full moral rights. What is human being? What is person? Is it right for a woman to carry out abortion? In this essay, we will pinpoint at commenting her criteria on personhood.

It is useful to look beyond for us to decide whether other beings like aliens are a person or not. If we want to be sure of behaving morally towards these beings, we have to somehow decide whether they are people, and hence have full moral rights, or whether they are the sort of things which he need not feel guilty about treating them only as a mean. How should we make this decision? Warren suggested that the traits which are most central to the concept of personhood,
According Warren’s view, the following five criteria are the most central senses. First, consciousness is the state of understanding and realization. Consciousness means of objects and events external and/ or internal to the being, and in particular the capacity to feel pain. Reasoning means the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems. The second criterion is reasoning, which refers to the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems or challenges. Reasoning is a way which thinking comes from one idea to a related idea. It is the mean by which rational beings understand themselves to think about cause and effect, and what is good or bad. Third, it is the self-motivated activity. Self-motivated activity is relatively independence of either genetic or direct external control, in order words, a person's ability and willingness to work without being told what to do. The forth criteria is the capacity to communicate. The communication can be by whatever means with messages of an indefinite variety of type. Not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but also on indefinitely many possible topics. The communication process is complete once when the receiver has understood the message of the sender. Finally, it is the presence of individual or racial self-concepts self-awareness either. It is the totality of your thoughts and feelings with reference to yourself as an
However, she does not state which traits are crucial for the reward of personhood. Rather than looking for a definite definition for personhood, but a necessary condition. On the extreme, I proposed avoiding discussing personhood to solve the problem of definite personhood like Judith Thomson does not attempt to do this.

To sum up, in Mary Anne Warren's view on abortion that fetus is a human being but not a person and only persons have full moral rights. In other words, Warren believes that killing non-persons are just, thus she thinks it is nothing wrong for pregnant women to carry out abortion under any situations. However, her five senses to entitle a person cannot be applied justly under certain conditions including human in comma, infants, mentally challenged people, self-aware robots or other absurd cases. Therefore, we do not agree with Warren’s view on abortion. She should have given satisfactory responses to these cases in order to achieve strong and believable argument on ‘it is nothing wrong to for pregnant women to conduct abortion’ to the general