Abstract
Don Marquis (1989) has argued most abortions are immoral, for the same reason that killing you or me is immoral: abortion deprives the fetus of a valuable future (FLO). Call this account the FLOA. A rival account is Jeff McMahan’s (2002), time-relative interest account (TRIA) of the wrongness of killing. According to this account, an act of killing is wrong to the extent that it deprives the victim of future value and the relation of psychological unity would have held between the victim at the time of death and herself at a later time if she had lived. The TRIA supposedly has two chief advantages over Marquis’s FLOA. First, unlike the FLOA, the TRIA does not rely on the controversial thesis that identity is what matters in survival. Second, the TRIA yields more plausible verdicts about cases. Proponents of the TRIA use the account to argue that abortion is generally permissible, because there would be little to no psychological unity between the fetus and later selves if it lived. I argue that advocates of the TRIA have failed to establish its superiority to the FLOA, for two reasons. First, the two views are on a par with respect to the thesis that identity is what matters in survival. Second, Marquis’s FLOA does not yield the counterintuitive implications about cases that advocates of the TRIA have attributed to it, and the TRIA yields its own share of implausible judgments about cases.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Jeffrey Reiman (1996) distinguishes between metaphysical identity and moral identity. I discuss this distinction in footnote 20.
Marquis (2007, p.137) claims that an embryo does not acquire a FLO until it is approximately two weeks old—the point beyond which twinning is no longer (biologically) possible.
Marquis appears to be making the assumption that if x and y have identical futures, then x and y are identical. This assumption fails in fusion cases, but Marquis has claimed in correspondence that he is only concerned with ordinary cases.
McMahan (2002) intends his version of the TRIA to provide an account of the wrongness of killing nonpersons, a point I explain in this section.
Note that this phrasing, which follows McMahan’s, presupposes the holding of the identity relation. I discuss this issue in section 3.
Some deny that we can account for the wrongness of killing primarily in virtue of the concept of harm, but that dispute does not affect the current debate.
McMahan is assuming the truth of his “Embodied Mind” account of personal identity; on some theories of personal identity, the Cure would cause one to go out of existence and be replaced by a distinct person.
An additional worry for the TRIA, which I lack the space to pursue here, is the tension between the second criterion of the TRIA, which does not assume that identity is what matters in survival, and the first criterion, which appears to assume this.
McMahan (2002, p.271) argues that Marquis’s view generates (b) because it is committed to the following assumption: “[I]f an act of killing is wrong…at least in part because it harms its victim, then another act that is the same in all relevant respects except that it harms its victim to an even greater extent will be wrong…to a greater degree.” This argument relies on the false claim that Marquis’s view entails claim (a).
McMahan also concedes that “[Marquis’s] position can…be adjusted to accommodate the view that we begin to exist only after twenty weeks. It would then hold that only late abortions are wrong” (2002, p.270).
Bernard Williams (1970) used a very similar sort of case to argue that our intuitions about what matters are unreliable.
The TRIA can probably yield the right result here as well.
DeGrazia (2007, p.77) endorses this response.
Liao (2007) also advances this criticism.
DeGrazia also endorses this response (2007, p.79).
Perhaps Marquis has confused metaphysical identity with moral identity. According to Jeffrey Reiman (1996), “Metaphysical identity from conception on means that the being is the same individual in all its temporal phases. Moral identity would mean that it has the same moral status in all its temporal phases, or, at least, that earlier phases have a moral claim on the properties…possessed at later phases” (186). One might try to distinguish between the TRIA and FLOA by claiming that the latter illicitly infers moral identity between the fetus and adult from the metaphysical identity between the two.
To claim that Marquis illicitly infers moral identity from metaphysical identity would be to misunderstand his argument. According to Reiman, in order to establish moral identity, “[W]e must look for the (morally relevant) property that makes it wrong to take a human life, and see when the human individual starts to have that property” (1996, p.186). But this is precisely what Marquis does; in fact, he is quite explicit throughout his article about his strategy: to identify the morally relevant property in virtue of which it is wrong to kill ordinary humans like you and me, and to determine whether fetuses now possess that very same property.
Perhaps the defender of the TRIA can invoke the distinction between metaphysical and moral identity in order to better respond to the infanticide objection. The strategy would be to argue that a newborn infant, but not a fetus, is morally identical with the adult into which it will develop. But according to the TRIA, one of the properties that makes it wrong to kill fully-functioning humans—psychological unity with future selves—is absent in the case of infants. If so, then a newborn infant is not morally identical with its later, adult stages.
After a brief discussion of the objections that Marquis’s view “implies that a late abortion is more seriously wrong, if other things are equal, than the killing of an older child or adult” and that “it presupposes that identity is what matters,” McMahan says “I will assume that these objections are decisive,” and gives the view no further consideration (2002, p.271, emphasis added).
References
Bradley B (2008) The worst time to die. Ethics 118(2):291–314
Bradley B (2009) Well Being and Death. Oxford University Press, Oxford
DeGrazia D (2003) Identity, killing, and the boundaries of our existence. Philos Public Aff 31:413–442
DeGrazia D (2005) Human Identity and Bioethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
DeGrazia D (2007) The harm of death, time-relative interests, and abortion. Philos Forum 31(1):57–80
Liao SM (2007) Time-relative interests and abortion. J Moral Philos 4(2):242–25
Marquis D (1989) Why abortion is immoral. J Philos 86(4):183–202
Marquis D (2007) An Argument that Abortion is Wrong. In: LaFollete (ed) Ethics in Practice. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp 137–147
McMahan J (2002) The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Norcross A (1990) Killing, abortion, and contraception: a reply to marquis. J Philos 87(5):268–277
Parfit D (1971) Personal identity. Philos Rev 80(1):3–17
Parfit D (1984) Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Reimann J (1996) Abortion, infanticide, and the asymmetric value of human life. J Soc Philos 27(3):181–200
Shoemaker S (1970) Persons and their Pasts. American Philosophical Quarterly 7.
Williams B (1970) The self and the future. Philos Rev 79(2):161–180
Acknowledgements
For valuable discussion of the ideas in this paper, I would like to thank Don Marquis, Howard Nye, and Michael Tooley. For valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I would like to thank John Basl, Alan Sidelle, and Robert Streiffer. Finally, for assistance with proofs, I would like to thank Michael Goldsby.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nichols, P. Abortion, Time-Relative Interests, and Futures Like Ours. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 493–506 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9305-8
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9305-8