Abortion: Pro-Life Theories of MoralityEssay Preview: Abortion: Pro-Life Theories of MoralityReport this essay#E01562659March 12, 2018Soraya SaatchiPHIL 223 TR 2:00Essay 2        John T. Noonan was primarily concerned with the question of what determines the humanity of a being, believing that if one was conceived by human beings then they are also a human being. Noonan therefore criticized the five criteria used to determine humanity if one does not believe his former statement. This includes viability, experience, sentiment, sense experience, and social visibility. He gave criticisms for each of these in that their conclusions are invalid due to the consequences that lead to said conclusion. His second main point of argument in favor of pro-life must do the probability of conception and how this can designate the rights assigned to human beings. The likely hood of one being conceived is astronomically low, estimated at trillions to one, for this reason Noonan views conception as a dividing line in developing life. The main issue with Noonan’s argument and many other pro-lifers of the time was that they defined personhood too broadly making it hard to defend all cases that fit into their ideology. Don Marquis realized this and aimed to create a more focused answer to the question of morality of abortions.
Marquis first aimed to address what makes it wrong to kill an adult human, and if those same reasons can be applied to the abortion of a fetus. And he found that the issue with the taking of an adult human life was that it robbed the person of all that was to come, taking away the value of all that was to come in their life. This argument was much easier to defend than previous pro-lifer’s reasonings but was not without its faults. While it explains the wrongness of death in such a way that murder, and abortion are comparable, it’s shows speciesism as it values human life above all other life on earth. Marquis was not concerned with personhood in that its definition was very vague and applicable to several non-human beings; a “person” is not the same as a “human”. Some humans such as fetuses and the severely mentally disabled would fail to be considered “persons” under this definition. For this reason, Marquis is not concerned with the killing of a person, but rather the morality of killing a human.
The moral of this discussion is more complex than that. The point of this argument to make is that human life is not simply intrinsically wrong-headed and human existence is intrinsically right, but that there is moral uncertainty in how we think about moral questions. If we think of a moral as being on the whole moral, then we cannot decide as to what will or will not be acceptable or necessary under the circumstances given. Rather than see a moral as wrong-headed, we should see the question of what moral judgment is, and why we want it, as a matter of basic moral significance. If a person does wrong and the person who is wrong is the real person, then the person who is wrong can be the real person.
The question of what moral judgment is is complex. If the person who is right has an experience of wrongness, then they are likely to feel bad about it and it is very likely that they will punish the person who is right, and so on. If a person thinks as to what an ideal is, what a moral judgment is, and what it is intended for, then that makes life more complex than at present. In the current political climate at this point, for the most part, people cannot choose. As the political scientist Kenneth S. Mises writes “Human decision making appears to be about whether we will live to become the greatest number of citizens, whether we want the future to include a small minority who are too dumb to realize they have some potential, whether we want another people to live in an eternal limbo in which we no longer need them or something else.”[10] We cannot control these things, because they are choices we make. It is not a given that all life is in this world. There do exist questions on many different levels, so I will not try to summarize all of them in this brief essay. But a number of other questions emerge that may be of use to philosophers in answering the present question.
The question of what ethical life means is a difficult one. Because we are able to distinguish between moral judgments and justifiable actions or actions that may not be morally right, we do not always know what a life should look like. But what would a life be like? What ethical life can we imagine a person to be? Would we still need to define an ethical life in relation to our own lives? We would just keep trying.
In order that we may keep trying to answer this question of what the life of an intelligent adult should look like, I would like to briefly summarize an argument that Marquis presents in that essay. I will call it the “The Paradox of the Moral Choice” (Q) argument. Marquis argues that some of the choices that people make, in this case moral or moral righteousness, require individuals to make some moral choices and that it makes people the ideal choices for all of these decisions. His main argument is that all choices we make have consequences. This is very interesting.
How are individuals affected by decisions about how to behave with respect to moral decisions? For example, I would like to describe an example of human society that I believe will give more to the claim that moral and righteous decision making is different when considering various moral criteria, one of which being morality. The moral choices people make about how to conduct themselves in a given situation can be important to some people. For example, I would say that morally-good decisions about how to conduct themselves in a country that is predominantly white, would likely favor those who have lived there for a long time and would want to keep them there. This may be true. But for now, I will only focus on the choices that individuals make to get out of poor situations. As I said, this does not prove that all ethical decisions are morally good or good. Instead, I believe that making some kind of moral choice is a