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Abortion and Tinkering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

George Schedler  and
Matthew J. Kelly
George Schedler
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Matthew J. Kelly
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
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Extract

Recent defences of abortion on demand have located the morally relevant difference between normal adult human beings and non-viable fetuses in the possession of personhood by the former but not by the latter. It is, so the story goes, morally wrong to kill innocent human beings because they are persons, but non-viable fetuses, though they be biologically human, are nevertheless not persons and may therefore be killed without doing anything morally wrong.

Type
Discussions/Notes
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 122 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1978

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References

Notes

1 Tooley, Michael utilizes this distinction in his “A Defense of Abortion and Infanticide,” which appeared originally in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 37–65Google Scholar. A greatly expanded version of the essay was published under the same title in Feinberg, Joel's The Problem of Abortion (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1973)Google Scholar. Engelhart, Tristam Jr. makes roughly the same distinction without explicitly utilizing Tooley's terminology in his “The Ontology of Abortion,” Ethics, Vol. 84, pp. 217–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, when he claims that only creatures with ‘social viability’ (that is, those who receive or respond to the attention of others) have a right to life.

2 We might imagine in addition that large numbers of such human offspring have been tinkered with to enable us to perform on them medical experiments which we would not otherwise perform on human persons and to free human persons from menial and highly repetitive tasks (by training such offspring to do work which human persons find distasteful).