4 2 0C H A P T E R 1 9 ■ M o r a l R e a s o n i n g- What exactly does Marquis mean by his claim that a fetus has a future like
ours? What is it to “have” a future? Do I already now have my future ill-
nesses and successes? When is a future “like ours”? Which similarities mat-
ter? Why? - Explain the contraception objection to Marquis’s argument and his response.
Is his response adequate? Why or why not? - Determine whether you think abortion is morally wrong in the following
cases:
a. Where the mother is in danger of dying if she does not have an abortion.
b. Where the pregnancy is due to rape.
c. Where contraception was used, but it failed.
d. Where the fetus has a disease that usually causes death within a year or
two.
e. Where the fetus has a disease that usually causes severe mental
retardation.
f. Where the pregnant woman is mentally or physically unable to be a
good mother.
g. Where the mother will suffer severe personal losses if the pregnancy
continues.
Now try to formulate principles and analogies to justify your positions in
these controversial cases. - Which underlying principles, if any, could protect human lives with only a
few exceptions, yet allow us to take lives of:
a. Contract killers sentenced to capital punishment.
b. Humans who are in irreversible comas.
c. Ourselves in suicide.
d. Children who live next to munitions factories that are bombed in a war.
e. Animals for food, clothing, and entertainment. - Describe a moral problem that you have faced in your personal life, and
apply the methods of moral reasoning that you have learned in this chapter.
NOTES
(^1) For a discussion of this approach, and for an excellent model of how to argue about a moral
principle, see Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” in
Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), 19–32.
(^2) Gradualism is discussed in more detail in Joel Feinberg, “Abortion,” in Matters of Life and
Death, 2nd ed., ed. Tom Regan (New York: Random House, 1986), 256–93; and Margaret Olivia
Little, “Abortion and the Margins of Personhood,” Rutgers Law Journal 39 (2008): 331–48.
(^3) Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Fall
1971): 47–66.
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