PHI 2301 Socrates on the Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice Debate
PHI 2301 Socrates on the Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice Debate
One of the most famous, and concurrently one of the most derided, arguments against the morality of abortion is the argument from fetal potential. This argument maintains that the fetus’ potential to become a human person and enjoy the valuable life common to human persons entails that its destruction is prima facie morally impermissible. It is important to note here that the term “person” is used here in the strict philosophical sense; it is not meant to denote any and all human beings, as it is normatively used, but rather any being, human or nonhuman, that has the mental capacity to be rational, self-conscious, autonomous, and a moral agent.
One of the reasons that this argument is so interesting is that it is simultaneously ridiculed by some philosophers, and lauded by others. Many who reject the argument do so because they believe that it results in what is often called the “sperm/ova problem”: if we regard the potential of a fetus to become a person as a morally relevant reason against killing it, we must also hold the same of human gametes, who also possess the potential to become persons. For example, Bonnie Steinbock writes:
The strongest objection to the argument from potential is that it seems to make contraception, and even abstinence, prima facie morally wrong. If the objection to abortion is that it deprives the zygote of a “future like ours,” why, it maybe asked, cannot the same complaint be made of contraceptive techniques that ill sperm, or prevent fertilization? Why don’t gametes have “a future like ours”?… so if abortion is seriously wrong because it kills a potential person, then the use of conceptive is equally seriously wrong. In using spermicide, one commits mass murder! [1]
L.W. Sumner makes a similar accusation:
… as far as the potentiality argument is concerned, abortion and contraception are both wrong, both equally wrong, and both wrong for precisely the same reason [2].
Conversely, other philosophers hold that the argument from potential is significant because it is the only thing that explains the stewardship that adult human beings have in regard to human neonates. Newborn infants lack the psychological maturity to possess goals, aims, beliefs, or purposes. This does not, however, exclude them from the moral community. The reason why it does not is because we realize that infants have the potential to develop these conscious goods, and it is this potential that, as Jim Stone argues, grounds the infant’s interest in growing up and realizing that potential [3]. Every single semester that I teach the issue of abortion in class, I put up a picture of two cells that look striking similar, almost identical. I then reveal to my students that one is a skin cell, and the other is a fertilized egg at the zygotic stage of development. “Do they have the same moral status”?, I ask them. When I scratch my arm and kill skin cells, is my action as morally problematic as abortion? My students always answer that the two cell types are morally different; that the zygote is of a different status than my skin cells. In defense of this distinction, they always give the same reason: the zygote, if implanted into a uterus, has the potential to become a baby who will then become a person, whereas my skin cells do not. Since the vast majority of my students, in my seven years of teaching, share this intuition, I think that it is an intuition that is worthy of being explored rather than cavalierly dismissed.