Abstract
In his recent article “Even if the fetus is not a person, abortion is immoral: The Impairment Argument,” Perry Hendricks sets out to sidestep thorny metaphysical questions regarding human fetuses and present a new argument against abortion – if impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, then killing the fetus is immoral. Hendricks takes inspiration from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s defense of abortion – that even if fetuses are persons with a right to life, the right to life is not the right to use others, so it is acceptable to induce abortion. Together with Bruce Blackshaw, Hendricks set out to strengthen the impairment argument by appealing to Don Marquis’s future like ours (FLO) account of the wrongness of killing. Here I argue the impairment argument falls short in three ways. First, Hendricks and Blackshaw fail to assume fetuses aren’t persons, broadly construed. Second, they fail to show that impairing a fetus is immoral. Third, they overlook abortions that (merely) let the fetus die. Finally, I argue Thomson’s defense of abortion preempts the significance of the impairment argument; Thomson seems to show that even if killing a fetus is prima facie immoral, women still have the right to induce abortion.
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Note that Hendricks (2019a) seems to assume a human fetus is a human organism from conception, but Marquis (2007, 2013) argues that a fetus does not become an organism until after cell specialization begins, at about 2 weeks into pregnancy, because during cell totipotency the fetus can divide (twin) or merge with another fetus (chimera), so it does not make sense to say it is one organism; but rather a mass of cells, each of which could become an organism, or part of an organism. Of course questions regarding the numerical identity of fetuses—especially during totipotency—are exactly the kind of thorny metaphysical question that Thomson and Hendricks mean to set aside by assuming a fetus is or is not a person!
Many anti-abortion theorists characterize their view as “pro-life,” although critics (Fleck 1979; Murphy 1985; Ord 2008; Berg 2017; Simkulet 2016; Lovering 2020; Schlumpf 2019) note that their inaction with regards to preventable deaths is prima facie inconsistent. Colgrove et al. (2020) calls such arguments “inconsistency arguments,” although I have noted (Simkulet 2022) that practically all philosophical arguments involve some form of apparent inconsistency.
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Simkulet, W. Three Problems with the Impairment Argument. ABR 15, 169–179 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41649-022-00228-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41649-022-00228-z