Abstract

Consider the odd fact—later I will try to show how very odd it is—that the only popular views about the morality of abortion are also the most extreme. Philosophical views are no exception; indeed I will argue that this extremism has deeply philosophical roots. It follows directly from the insistence on “drawing a line” dividing persons from non persons. We can't, so the usual arguments go, draw such a line anywhere except at the very beginning or the very end of fetal development. But on the practical level, as most of us know first-hand, that extremism remains problematic: it yields a factious and clumsy casuistry. It is equally difficult—and, surely, equally inhumane—to believe that a conceptus two days old is the moral equivalent of a fully functioning human being and that a fetus just prior to birth is the moral equivalent of a tumor. The division between persons and non persons, however, is linked in turn with certain others. Not only may the possibility of dividing any concept's denotation from its neighbors' seem to be at stake here; the division between persons and non persons depends more particularly—so I will argue—on the contemporary division in moral theory between moral reasons and other kinds of reasons, and in particular on the division between the moral and the self-interested “points of view.” That division in turn I trace back, in part, to the Hobbesian picture of the social world, on which the most fundamental division of all runs between persons and other persons. So one division points beyond itself to others. The critic is launched on a kind of odyssey through the theoretical presuppositions of applied ethics.