Compilación de algunos textos relevantes en el debate sobre la permisibilidad del aborto

Autores (en orden de aparición):

Beckwith, Francis, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case against Abortion Choice,
Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Feinberg, Joel, “Abortion”, en Matters of Life and Death, Regan, Tom (ed.), McGraw-Hill, 1980,
y “The Child’s Right to an Open Future”, en Whose Child?: Children's Rights, Parental
Authority, and State Power, Aiken, William y Lafollette, Hugh (eds.), Rowman and Littlefield,
1980.

Marquis, Donald, “Why Abortion is Immoral”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 86, No. 4, 1989.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis, “Abortion”, en Boston Review, Dic/1994, y “A Defense of Abortion”,

Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1971.

Boonin, David, A Defense of Abortion, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Beckwith sobre el argumento en torno a la dificultad de prohibir el aborto:

Maybe the defender of the above argument is making the more subtle point that because there is
widespread disagreement on the abortion issue, enforcement of any laws prohibiting abortion
would be difficult. In other words, abortions are going to happen anyway, so we ought to make
them safe and legal. There are several problems with this argument.

First, it begs the question, because it assumes that the unborn is not fully human. For if the
unborn is fully human, this argument is tantamount to saying that because people will unjustly
kill other people anyway, we ought to make it safe and legal for them to do so. But unjust killing
is never justified, even if there is a social penalty in forbidding it.

Second, the evidence strongly suggests that the legalization of abortion has resulted in a dramatic
increase in the number of abortions, and that the number of women who died as a result of illegal
abortion has been greatly exaggerated. One sophisticated study concluded that “a reasonable
estimate for the actual number of criminal abortions per year in the prelegalization era [prior to
1967] would be from a low of 39,000 (1950) to a high of 210,000 (1961) and a mean of 98,000
per year.”47 On the other hand, Christopher Tietze, an abortion-choice advocate of some
standing, “had estimated that there were about 600,000 illegal abortions every year” and that
those numbers would remain roughly the same after the procedure was legalized.48 But as
Hadley Arkes points out, “the argument was quickly embarrassed . . . by the news – reported by
Tietze – that by 1974 [the year after Roe] the number of abortions had risen to 900,000 per year,
53 percent about their level in 1972.”49 The number rose to 1.2 million in 1977 and over 1.5

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million in 1982. 50 Bernard Nathanson, M.D., one of the original leaders of the American
abortion-choice movement and co-founder of N.A.R.A.L. (the National Association for the
Repeal of Abortion Laws) who has since become prolife, admits that he and others in the
abortion-choice movement intentionally fabricated the number of women who died as a result of
illegal abortions. Nathanson writes:

How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L. we generally
emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the
latter it was always “5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.” I confess that I knew the figures were totally
false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the “morality” of the
revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with
honest statistics. The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within
reason that had to be done was permissible.51

(…)

Third, if virtually all abortions are instances of unjust killing, perhaps a change in the law to
forbid virtually all abortions would have a teaching role in helping people to understand the
seriousness of abortion and the obligations we have to the most vulnerable and defenseless
members of the human family. After all, the function of law is not always to reflect the attitudes
and behavior of society but to serve as “a mechanism by which people are encouraged to do what
they know is right, even when it is difficult to do so.”58 David C. Reardon points out that
“studies in the psychology of morality reveal that the law is truly the teacher. One of the most
significant conclusions of these studies shows that existing laws and customs are the most
important criteria for deciding what is right or wrong for most adults in a given culture.”59
Citing legal philosopher John Finnis, Nathanson writes that “sometimes the law is ahead of
public morality. Laws against dueling and racial bias preceded popular support for these
attitudes.”60

If the abortion-choice advocate, in reply to this analysis, were to claim that the law cannot stop
all abortions, he makes a trivial claim, for this is true of all laws that forbid illegal acts. For
example, since hiring paid assassins and purchasing child pornography are forbidden by the law,
some people have no choice but to acquire them illegally. But there is no doubt that their
illegality does hinder a number of citizens from obtaining them. Should we then legalize child
pornography and the hitman profession because we can’t stop all people from obtaining such
“goods” and services? Such reasoning is absurd.

Beckwith sobre el argumento en torno los peligros de los abortos clandestinos:

Anyone who has witnessed an abortion-choice demonstration has likely seen on placards and
buttons a drawing of a coathanger. This symbol, according to the demonstrators, represents the
many women who were either harmed or killed because they either performed illegal abortions
on themselves (i.e., the surgery was performed with a “coathanger”) or went to unscrupulous
physicians (or “backalley butchers”). Hence, as the argument goes, if abortion is made illegal,

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then women will once again be harmed. Needless to say, this argument serves a powerful
rhetorical purpose. However, it is flawed in a significant way: it begs the question.

(…)

The question-begging nature of the coathanger argument is easy to discern: only by assuming
that the unborn are not fully human does the argument work. For if the unborn are not fully
human, then the abortionrights advocate has a legitimate concern, as one would have in
overturning a law forbidding appendectomies if countless people were needlessly dying of both
appendicitis and illegal operations. But if the unborn are fully human, this abortion-choice
argument is tantamount to saying that because people die or are harmed while killing other
people (i.e., unborn people), the state should make it safe for them to do so. This argument would
be advocating a state of affairs in which the government permits its citizens to kill innocent
human beings without providing any justification whatsoever. Hence, only by assuming that the
unborn are not fully human does this abortion-choice argument work. Therefore, it begs the
question.

Even some abortion-choice proponents, who argue for their position in other ways, admit that the
coathanger/backalley argument is fallacious. Mary Anne Warren, for example, writes that “the
fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side effects does not, in itself, show that the
restrictions are unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless of the consequences of prohibiting
it.”3 In other words, one must first show that the unborn is not a subject of rights.

Beckwith sobre el argumento en torno a la injusticia distributiva:

Abortion-choice advocates often argue that prior to abortion being legalized, pregnant women
who did not go to unscrupulous physicians or “backalley butchers” traveled to foreign nations
where abortions were legal. This was an option open only to rich women who could afford such
an expense. Hence, Roe v. Wade has made the current situation fairer for poor women.
Therefore, if abortion is prohibited it will not prevent rich women from having safe and legal
abortions elsewhere.4

This argument is fallacious. For it assumes that legal abortion is a moral good that poor women
will be denied if abortion is made illegal. But because the morality of abortion is the point under
question, the abortion-choice proponent assumes what he is trying to prove and therefore begs
the question. (…)

In the abortion debate the question of whether abortion entails the death of a being who is fully
human must be answered before the question of fairness is even asked. Because equal
opportunity to eliminate an innocent human person is not a moral good, the question of whether
it is fair that certain rich people will have privileged access to abortion if it becomes illegal must
be answered after we answer the question of whether abortion in fact is not the killing of an
innocent human person. For it is not true that the vices of the wealthy are virtues simply because
the poor are denied them.

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Beckwith sobre el argumento en torno a la interferencia en la carrera profesional:

This argument has been used by many abortion-choicers in popular debate. It has been put forth
in a scholarly forum by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott.17 She begins her article by pointing out the
perils of being a woman in today’s society. She cites the fact that even if a sexually active
woman uses the most effective contraceptives available, failure could occur and she could still
get pregnant. She then asks, “How is a married woman able to plan schooling or commit herself
to a career or vocation as long as her life is continually open to the disruption of unplanned
pregnancies?” Mollenkott then concludes, “Unless, of course, she can fall back on an abortion
when all else fails.”18

The fundamental problem with this argument, like all the others we have covered thus far, is that
it begs the question by assuming that the unborn are not fully human. For what would we think
of a parent who killed his two-year-old because the child interfered with the parent’s ability to
advance in his occupation? We would find such an act morally reprehensible. Therefore, the
abortion-choice position hinges on whether the unborn human being is a full-fledged member of
the human community, not on appeals to careers or occupations.

The Social Necessity of Abortion for Women’s Equality

In his famous dissent in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1990), Justice Harry A.
Blackmun claims that without freedom to choose abortion there will be no “full participation of
women in the economic and political walks of American life.”33 Blackmun is echoing the call of
popular abortion-choice rhetoric that asserts that women cannot achieve social and political
equality without control of their reproductive lives.

Laurence Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School:

Laws restricting abortion so dramatically shape the lives of women, and only of women, that
their denial of equality hardly needs detailed elaboration. While men retain the right to sexual
and reproductive autonomy, restrictions on abortion deny that autonomy to women. Laws
restricting access to abortion thereby place a real and substantial burden on women’s ability to
participate in society as equals. 34

Kate Michelman, President of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL):

We have to remind people that abortion is the guarantor of a woman’s . . . right to participate
fully in the social and political life of society.35

Nancy S. Erickson, abortion-rights attorney:

This right [to abortion], of necessity must be absolute, for if it is not, women will never truly
have the ability to plan and to control their own lives.36

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The assumption behind this rhetoric – that equality can only be achieved through special surgery
(abortion) – implies that women are naturally inferior to men, that they need abortion (a form of
corrective surgery) to become equal with men. This is hardly consistent with any feminism that
claims that men are not naturally superior to women. As one feminist publication has pointed
out: “How can women ever lose second-class status as long as they are seen as requiring surgery
to avoid it?... [This] is the premise of male domination throughout the millennia – that it was
nature which made men superior and women inferior. Medical technology is offered as a
solution to achieve equality; but the premise is wrong. Nature doesn’t provide for inequality, and
it’s an insult to women to say women must change biology in order to fit into society.”37

(…)

There is another reason to reject this argument: it begs the question as to the unborn’s full
humanity.

Singer sobre la importancia de abordar el argumento contra el aborto:

The first argument is that laws prohibiting abortion do not stop abortions but merely drive them
underground. Women who want to have abortions are often desperate. They will go to backyard
abortionists or try folk remedies. Abortion performed by a qualified medical practitioner is as
safe as any medical operation, but attempts to procure abortions by unqualified people often
result in serious medical complications and sometimes death. Thus, the effect of prohibiting
abortion is not so much to reduce the number of abortions performed as to increase the
difficulties and dangers for women with unwanted pregnancies. Moreover, when abortion was
illegal, some abortion providers bribed the police to turn a blind eye to what they were doing,
thus contributing to police corruption. This argument has been influential in gaining support for
more liberal abortion laws. It was accepted by the Canadian Royal Commission on the Status of
Women, which concluded that: ‘A law that has more bad effects than good ones is a bad law . . .
As long as it exists in its present form thousands of women will break it.’ In those Latin
American countries that prohibit abortion or allow it only in very limited circumstances, illegal
abortions are widespread and a major cause of death and injury in young women. The main point
to note about this argument is that it is not an argument against the view that abortion is morally
wrong, but rather an argument against prohibiting abortion. This is an important distinction,
often overlooked in the abortion debate. The present argument well illustrates the distinction,
because one could accept it and quite consistently advocate that the law should allow abortion on
request, while at the same time deciding oneself – if one were pregnant or counselling another
who was pregnant – that it would be wrong to have an abortion. It is a mistake to assume that the
law should always enforce morality. Attempts to enforce right conduct may lead to consequences
no one wants and no decrease in wrongdoing. If that is the case, they are better abandoned. So
this first argument is an argument about abortion law, not about the ethics of abortion. Even
within those limits, however, it is open to challenge, for it fails to meet the conservative claim
that abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being and in the same ethical
category as murder. Those who take this view of abortion will not rest content with the assertion
that restrictive abortion laws do no more than drive women to backyard abortionists. They will

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insist that this situation can be changed and the law properly enforced. They may also suggest
measures to make pregnancy easier to accept for those women who become pregnant against
their wishes. Conservatives may also say that there will be some deterrent effect of the law even
if it isn’t properly enforced and that the lives of the unborn saved by this deterrent effect
outweigh the harm done to women by backyard abortionists. If the initial conservative argument
against abortion is not contested, then these are reasonable responses, and for this reason the first
argument does not succeed in avoiding the central ethical issue of whether it is wrong to kill a
fetus.

Singer sobre el estatus moral del feto:

The weakness of the first premise of the conservative argument is that it relies on our acceptance
of the special status of human life. We have seen that ‘human’ is a term that straddles two
distinct notions: being a member of the species Homo sapiens and being a person. Once the term
is dissected in this way, the weakness of the conservative’s first premise becomes apparent. If
‘human’ is taken as equivalent to ‘person’, the second premise of the argument, which asserts
that the fetus is a human being, is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a fetus is
either rational or self-conscious. If, on the other hand, ‘human’ is taken to mean no more than
‘member of the species Homo sapiens’, then the conservative defence of the life of the fetus is
based on a characteristic lacking moral significance, and so the first premise is false. The point
should by now be familiar: whether a being is or is not a member of our species is, in itself, no
more relevant to the wrongness of killing it than whether it is or is not a member of our race. The
belief that mere membership of our species, irrespective of other characteristics, makes a great
difference to the wrongness of killing a being is a legacy of religious doctrines that even those
opposed to abortion hesitate to bring into the debate. Recognizing this simple point transforms
the abortion issue. The key question is no longer ‘when does a human life begin?’ because we
can now see that granting that the fetus is a living human being does not resolve the question of
whether it is wrong to kill it. We can look at the fetus for what it is – the actual characteristics it
possesses – and can value its life on the same scale as the lives of beings with similar
characteristics which are not members of our species. This change of perspective makes it
apparent that the ‘Pro Life’ or ‘Right to Life’ movement is misnamed. Those who protest against
abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves can hardly claim to have
concern for ‘life’ as such. Their concern about embryos and fetuses suggests only a biased
concern for the lives of members of our own species. On any fair comparison of morally relevant
characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure and pain and
so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any
stage 136 Practical Ethics of pregnancy – whereas if we make the comparison with an embryo,
or a fetus of less than three months, a fish shows much more awareness. My suggestion, then, is
that we accord the fetus no higher moral status than we give to a nonhuman animal at a similar
level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel and so on. Because no fetus is
a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Until a fetus has some capacity for
conscious experience, an abortion terminates an existence that is – considered as it is and not in
terms of its potential – more like that of a plant than of a sentient animal like a dog or a cow.
(The issue of the difference the potential of the fetus should make is still to be discussed.)

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Singer sobre la teoría de Tooley:

To put the matter as simply as possible – more simply than Tooley himself does and no doubt too
simply – if the right to life is the right to continue existing as a distinct entity, then the desire
relevant to possessing a right to life is the desire to continue existing as a distinct entity. But only
a being who is capable of conceiving herself as a distinct entity existing over time – that is, only
a person – could have this desire. Therefore, only a person could have a right to life.

Note that this formulation avoids any problems in dealing with sleeping or unconscious people; it
is enough that they, at one time, have had the concept of continued existence for us to be able to
say that continued life may be in their interests.

This is how Tooley first formulated his position, in a striking article entitled “Abortion and
Infanticide”, published in 1972. The problem of how precisely to formulate the connections
between rights and desires, however, led Tooley to alter his position in a subsequent book with
the same title, Abortion and Infanticide. He there argues that an individual cannot at a given time
– say, now – have a right to continued existence unless the individual is of a kind such that it can
now be in its interests that it continues to exist. One might think that this makes a dramatic
difference to the outcome of Tooley’s position, for although a newborn infant would not seem to
be capable of conceiving itself as a distinct entity existing over time, we commonly think that it
can be in the interests of an infant to be saved from death, even if the death would have been
entirely without pain or suffering. We certainly do this in retrospect. If my mother told me that
when I was a baby, my pram rolled into the path of a speeding train, and it was only the quick
action of a stranger that saved me, I might say that that stranger is my greatest benefactor, for
without her swift thinking I would never have had the happy and fulfilling life that I am now
living. Tooley argues, however, that the retrospective attribution of an interest in living to the
infant is a mistake. I am not the infant from whom I developed. The infant could not look
forward to developing into the kind of being I am, or even into any intermediate being, between
the being I now am and the infant. I cannot even recall being the infant; there are no mental links
between us. Continued existence cannot be in the interests of a being who never has had the
concept of a continuing self – that is, never has been able to conceive of itself as existing over
time. If the train had instantly killed the infant, the death would not have been contrary to the
interests of the infant, because the infant would never have had the concept of existing over time.
It is true that I would then not be alive, but I can say that it is in my interests to be alive only
because I do have the concept of a continuing self. I can with equal truth say that it is in my
interests that my parents met, because if they had never met, they could not have created the
embryo from which I developed, and so I would not be alive. This does not mean that the
creation of this embryo was in the interests of any potential being who was lurking around,
waiting to be brought into existence. There was no such being, and had I not been brought into
existence, there would not have been anyone who missed out on the life I have enjoyed living.
Similarly, we make a mistake if we now construct an interest in future life in the newborn infant
who in the first days following birth can have no concept of continued existence and with whom
I have no mental links. Hence, in his book Tooley reaches, though by a more circuitous route, a
conclusion that is practically equivalent to the conclusion he reached in his article. To have a

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right to life, one must have, or at least at one time have had, the concept of having a continuing
existence. Note that this formulation avoids any problems in dealing with sleeping or
unconscious people; it is enough that they, at one time, have had the concept of continued
existence for us to be able to say that continued life may be in their interests. This makes sense:
my desire to continue living – or to complete the book I am writing, or to travel to Nepal next
year – does not cease whenever I am not consciously thinking about these things.

Singer sobre el infanticidio:

There remains one major objection to the argument I have advanced in favour of abortion. We
have already seen that the strength of the conservative position lies in the difficulty liberals have
in pointing to a morally significant line of demarcation between an embryo and a newborn baby.
The standard liberal position needs to be able to point to some such line, because liberals usually
hold that it is permissible to kill an embryo or fetus but not a baby. I have argued that the life of a
fetus (and even more plainly, of an embryo) is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman
animal at a similar level of rationality, self-awareness, capacity to feel and so on, and that
because no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Now we have to face
the fact that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old
baby is not a rational and self-aware being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose
rationality, self-awareness, capacity to feel and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a
month old. If, for the reasons I have given, the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a
person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either. Thus, although my position on the
status of fetal life may be acceptable to many, the implications of this position for the status of
newborn life are at odds with the virtually unchallenged assumption that the life of a newborn
baby is as sacrosanct as that of an adult. Indeed, some people seem to think that the life of a baby
is more precious than that of an adult. Lurid tales of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies
figured prominently in the wave of anti-German propaganda that accompanied Britain’s entry
into the First World War, and it seemed to be tacitly assumed that this was a greater atrocity than
the murder of adults. I do not regard the conflict between the position I have taken and widely
accepted views about the sanctity of infant life as a ground for abandoning my position. In
thinking about ethics, we should not hesitate to question ethical views that are almost universally
accepted if we have reasons for thinking that they may not be as securely grounded as they
appear to be. It is true that infants appeal to us because they are small and helpless, and there are
no doubt very good evolutionary reasons why we should instinctively feel protective towards
them. It is also true that infants cannot be combatants, and killing infants in wartime 152
Practical Ethics is the clearest possible case of killing civilians, which is prohibited by
international convention. In general, because infants are harmless and morally incapable of
committing a crime, those who kill them lack the excuses often offered for the killing of adults.
None of this shows, however, that the death of an infant is as bad as the death of an (innocent)
adult. In attempting to reach a considered ethical judgment about this matter, we should put aside
feelings based on the small, helpless and – sometimes – cute appearance of human infants. To
think that the lives of infants are of special value because infants are small and cute is on a par
with thinking that a baby seal, with its soft white fur coat and large round eyes deserves greater
protection than a gorilla, who lacks these attributes. Nor can the helplessness or the innocence of

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the infant Homo sapiens be a ground for preferring it to the equally helpless and innocent fetal
Homo sapiens, or, for that matter, to laboratory rats who are ‘innocent’ in exactly the same sense
as the human infant, and, in view of the experimenters’ power over them, almost as helpless. If
we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby,
we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants. The indirect,
classical utilitarian reason does not apply, because no one capable of understanding what is
happening when a newborn baby is killed could feel threatened by a policy that gave less
protection to the newborn than to adults. In this respect, Bentham was right to describe
infanticide as ‘of a nature not to give the slightest inquietude to the most timid imagination’.
Once we are old enough to comprehend the policy, we are too old to be threatened by it.
Similarly, the preference utilitarian reason for respecting the life of a person cannot apply to a
newborn baby. Newborn babies cannot see themselves as beings that might or might not have a
future, and so they cannot have a desire to continue living. For the same reason, if a right to life
must be based on the capacity to want to go on living, or on the ability to see oneself as a
continuing mental subject, a newborn baby cannot have a right to life. Finally, a newborn baby is
not an autonomous being, capable of making choices, and so to kill a newborn baby cannot
violate the principle of respect for autonomy. In all this, the newborn baby is on the same footing
as the fetus, and hence fewer reasons exist against killing both babies and fetuses than exist
against killing those who are capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time.

It would, of course, be difficult to say at what age children begin to see themselves as distinct
entities existing over time. But a difficulty in drawing the line is not a reason for drawing it in a
place that is obviously wrong, any more than the notorious difficulty in saying how much hair a
man has to have lost before we can call him ‘bald’ is a reason for saying that someone whose
pate is as smooth as a billiard ball is not bald. Granted, where rights are at risk, we should err on
the side of safety. There is some plausibility in the view that, for legal purposes, because birth
provides the only sharp, clear and easily understood line, the law of homicide should continue to
apply from the moment of birth. Because this is an argument at the level of public policy and the
law, it is quite compatible with the view that, on purely ethical grounds, the killing of a newborn
infant is not comparable with the killing of an older child or adult.

Singer sobre el “especismo”:

Recall that there are intellectually disabled humans who have less claim to be regarded as self-
aware or autonomous than many nonhuman animals. If we use these characteristics to place a
gulf between humans and other animals, we place these less able humans on the other side of the
gulf; and if the gulf is taken to mark a difference in moral status, then these humans would have
the moral status of animals rather than humans. But none of us would want to use profoundly
intellectually disabled humans in painful experiments, or fatten them to satisfy some gourmets’
interests in tasting a new kind of meat. When faced with the objection that their position implies
that we would be entitled to treat profoundly intellectually disabled humans as we now treat
nonhuman animals, some philosophers fall back on defending speciesism, either because of its
instrumental value, or, more boldly, on the grounds that species membership is itself morally
significant. The instrumental defence of speciesism invokes the widely used ‘slippery slope’

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argument. The claim is that a first step in a certain direction will put us on a slippery slope, and
we shall not be able to stop sliding into a moral abyss. In the present context, the argument is
used to suggest that we need a clear line to divide those beings we can experiment on, or fatten
for dinner, from those we cannot. The species boundary makes Equality for Animals? 67 a nice
sharp dividing line, whereas levels of self-awareness, autonomy or sentience do not. Once we
allow that any human being, no matter how profoundly intellectually disabled, has no higher
moral status than an animal, the argument goes, we have begun to slide down a slope, the next
level of which is denying rights to social misfits, and the bottom of which is classifying anyone
we do not like as sub-human and eliminating them. In response to this slippery slope argument, it
is important to remember that the aim of my argument is to elevate the status of animals rather
than to lower the status of any humans. I do not wish to suggest that intellectually disabled
humans should be force-fed with food colourings until they get ill or die – although this would
certainly give us a more accurate indication of whether the substance was safe for humans than
doing this to rabbits or dogs. I would like our conviction that it would be wrong to treat
intellectually disabled humans in this way to be transferred to nonhuman animals at similar
levels of self-awareness and with similar capacities for suffering.

An argument that comes closer to making species a matter of intrinsic moral significance is that
profoundly intellectually disabled humans who do not possess the capacities that mark the
normal human off from other animals should nevertheless be treated as if they did possess these
capacities, because they belong to a species, members of which normally do possess them. The
suggestion is, in other words, that we treat individuals, not in accordance with their actual
qualities, but in accordance with the qualities normal for their species

It has also been argued that although profoundly intellectually disabled humans may not possess
higher capacities than other animals, they are nonetheless ‘us’ and for that reason we have
obligations to them that we do not have to those who are not ‘us’. This argument begs the
question about who we consider ourselves to be. Are we essentially members of the species
Homo sapiens, or are we essentially self-aware beings or perhaps essentially sentient beings?
Personally, I would feel that an intelligent alien with whom I could communicate and share
feelings would have more in common with me than a member of my own species who is so
profoundly disabled as to be unable to have any conscious experiences at all – even if the latter
looked much more like me.

It is understandable that human beings who look like us evoke warm feelings that aliens, or some
other animals, may not evoke. It would be a mistake, however, to tie morality too closely to our
affections. Of course some people may have a closer relationship with the most profoundly
intellectually disabled human than they do with any nonhuman animal, and it would be absurd to
tell them that they should not feel this way. They simply do, and as such there is nothing good or
bad about it. The question is whether our moral obligations to a being should be made to depend
on our feelings in this manner. Notoriously, some human beings have a closer relationship with
their cat than with their neighbours. Would those who tie morality to affections accept that these
people are justified in saving their cats from a fire before they save their neighbours? Even those
who are prepared to answer this question affirmatively would, I trust, not want to go along with
racists who could argue that if people have more personal relationships with, and greater
affection towards, others who have the same skin colour or the same kind of hair, it is all right

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for them to give preference to the interests of such people. Ethics does not demand that we
eliminate personal relationships and partial affections, but it does demand that, when we act, we
assess the moral claims of those affected by our actions with some degree of independence from
our feelings for them.

Feinberg sobre los criterios de la potencialidad y la posesión efectiva:

"All and only those creatures who either actually or potentially possess C (that is, who either
have C now or would come to have C in the natural course of events) are moral persons now,
fully protected by the rule against homicide." This criterion also permits one to draw the line of
moral personhood in the human species right at the moment of conception, which will be
counted by some as an advantage. It also has the undeniable advantage of immunity from one
charge of arbitrariness since it will extend moral personhood to all beings in any species or
category who possess C, either actually or potentially. It may also cohere with our psychological
attitudes, since it can explain why it is that many people, at least, think of unformed or unpretty
fetuses are precious. Zygotes and embryos in particular are treasured not for what they are but
for what they are biologically "programmed" to become in the fullness of time: real people fully
possessed of C.

The difficulties of this criterion are of two general kinds, those deriving from the obscurity of the
concept of "potentiality," which perhaps can be overcome, and the more serious difficulties of
answering the charge that merely potential possession of any set of qualifications for a moral
status does not logically ensure actual possession of that status. (…) It is a logical error, some
have charged, to deduce actual rights from merely potential (but not yet actual) qualification for
those rights. What follows from potential qualification, it is said, is potential, not actual, rights;
what entails actual rights is actual, not potential, qualification. As the Australian philosopher
Stanley Benn puts it, "A potential president of the United States is not on that account
Commander-in-Chief [of the U.S. Army and Navy]."4 This simple point can be called "the
logical point about potentiality." Taken on its own terms, I don't see how it can be answered as
an objection to the strict potentiality criterion. It is still open to antiabortionists to argue that
merely potential commonsense personhood is a ground for duties we may have toward the
potential person. But they cannot argue that it is the ground for the potential person's rights
without committing a logical error.

The Modified or Gradualist Potentiality Criterion

"Potential possession of C confers not a right, but only a claim, to life, but that claim keeps
growing stronger, requiring ever stronger reasons to override it, until the point when C is actually
possessed, by which time it has become a full right to life." This modification of the potentiality
criterion has one distinct and important advantage. It coheres with the widely shared feeling that
the moral seriousness of abortion increases with the age of the fetus. It is extremely difficult to
believe on other than very specific theological grounds that a zygote one day after conception is
the sort of being that can have any rights at all, much less the whole armory of "human rights"
including "the right to life." But it is equally difficult for a great many people to believe that a

11
full-term fetus one day before birth does not have a right to life. Moreover, it is very difficult to
find one point in the continuous development of the fetus before which it is utterly without rights
and after which it has exactly the same rights as any adult human being. Some rights in postnatal
human life can be acquired instantly or suddenly; the rights of citizenship, for example, come
into existence at a precise moment in the naturalization proceedings after an oath has been
administered and a judicial pronouncement formally produced and certified. Similarly, the rights
of husbands and wives come into existence at just that moment when an authorized person utters
the words "I hereby pronounce you husband and wife." But the rights of the fetus cannot
possibly jump in this fashion from nonbeing to being at some precise moment in pregnancy. The
alternative is to think of them as growing steadily and gradually throughout the entire nine-
month period until they are virtually "mature" at parturition. There is, in short, a kind of growth
in "moral weight" that proceeds in parallel fashion with the physical growth and development of
the fetus.

(…)

The modified potentiality criterion has the attractiveness characteristic of compromise theories
when fierce ideological quarrels rage between partisans of more extreme views. It shares one
fatal flaw, however, with the strict potentiality criterion. Despite its greater flexibility, it cannot
evade "the logical point about potentiality." A highly developed fetus is much closer to being a
commonsense person with all the developed traits that qualify it for moral personhood than is the
mere zygote. But being almost qualified for rights is not the same thing as being partially
qualified for rights; nor is it the same thing as being qualified for partial rights, quasi-rights, or
weak rights. The advanced fetus is closer to being a person than is the zygote, just as a dog is
closer to personhood than a jellyfish, but that is not the same thing as being "more of a person."
In 1930, when he was six years old, Jimmy Carter didn't know it, but he was a potential president
of the United States. That gave him no claim then, not even a very weak claim, to give
commands to the U.S. Army and Navy. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1930 was only two years away
from the presidency, so he was a potential president in a much stronger way (the potentiality was
much less remote) than was young Jimmy. Nevertheless, he was not actually president, and he
had no more of a claim to the prerogative of the office than did Carter. The analogy to fetuses in
different stages of development is of course imperfect. But in both cases it would seem to be
invalid to infer the existence of a "weak version of a right" from an "almost qualification" for the
full right. In summary, the modified potentiality criterion, insofar as it permits the potential
possession of C to be a sufficient condition for the actual possession of claims, and in some cases
of rights, is seriously flawed in the same manner as the strict potentiality criterion.

E. The Actual-Possession Criterion

"At any given time (t), all and only those creatures who actually possess C are moral persons at t,
whatever species or category they may happen to belong to." This simple and straightforward
criterion has a number of conspicuous advantages. We should consider it with respect even
before we examine its difficulties if only because the difficulties of its major rivals are so severe.
Moreover, it has a certain tidy symmetry about it, since it makes the overlap between
commonsense personhood and moral personhood complete -- a total correspondence with no
loose ends left over in either direction. There can be no actual commonsense persons who are not

12
actual moral persons, nor can there be any actual moral persons who are not actual commonsense
persons. Moral personhood is not established simply by species membership, associations, or
potentialities. Instead, it is conferred by the same characteristics (C) that lead us to recognize
personhood wherever we find it. It is no accident, no mere coincidence, that we use the moral
term 'person' for those beings, and only those beings, who have C. The characteristics that confer
commonsense personhood are not arbitrary bases for rights and duties, such as race, sex, or
species membership; rather they are the traits that make sense out of rights and duties and
without which those moral attributes would have no point or function. It is because people are
conscious; have a sense of their personal identities; have plans, goals, and projects; experience
emotions; are liable to pains, anxieties, and frustrations; can reason and bargain, and so on -- it is
because of these attributes that people have values and interests, desires and expectations of their
own, including a stake in their own futures, and a personal well-being of a sort we cannot ascribe
to unconscious or nonrational beings. Because of their developed capacities they can assume
duties and responsibilities and can have and make claims on one another. Only because of their
sense of self, their life plans, their value hierarchies, and their stakes in their own futures can
they be ascribed fundamental rights. There is nothing arbitrary about these linkages. For these
reasons I am inclined to believe that the actual-possession criterion is the correct one.

Feinberg sobre el derecho del niño a un futuro abierto (empleando un modo de

argumentación aparentemente contrastante con el que defiende en el debate sobre el
derecho a la vida del feto):

When sophisticated autonomy rights are attributed to children who are clearly not yet capable of
exercising them, their names refer to rights that are to be saved for the child until he is an adult,
but which can be violated "in advance," so to speak, before the child is even in a position to
exercise them.

The violating conduct guarantees that, when the child is an autonomous adult, certain key
options will already be closed to him. His right while he is still a child is to have these options
kept open until he is a fully formed, self-determining adult capable of deciding among them.

These "anticipatory autonomy rights" (…) are the children's rights in which I am most interested,
since they raise the most interesting philosophical questions. They are, in effect, autonomy rights
in the shape they must assume when held "prematurely" by children. Put very generally, rights-
in-trust can be summed up as the single "right to an open future" (…)

The child's right to an open future (in respect to religious affiliation) (…) sits side by side with
the right to walk freely down the public sidewalk as held by an infant of two months, still
incapable of self-locomotion. One would violate that right in trust now, before it can even be
exercised, by cutting off the child's legs. (…)

It is the adult he is to become who must exercise the choice, more exactly, the adult he will
become if his basic options are kept open and his growth kept "natural" or unforced. In any case,

13
that adult does not exist yet, and perhaps he never will. But the child is potentially that adult, and
it is that adult who is the person whose autonomy must be protected now (in advance).

Marquis sobre su argumento en torno a un futuro como el nuestro:

Note what each partisan will say. The anti-abortionist will claim that her position is supported by
such generally accepted moral principles as "It is always prima facie seriously wrong to take a
human life" or "It is always prima facie seriously wrong to end the life of a baby." Since these
are generally accepted moral principles, her position is certainly not obviously wrong. The pro-
choicer will claim that her position is supported by such plausible moral principles as "Being a
person is what gives an individual intrinsic moral worth" or "It is only seriously prima facie
wrong to take the life of a member of the human community." Since these are generally accepted
moral principles, the pro-choice position is certainly not obviously wrong.

(…)

Passions in the abortion debate run high. There are both plausibilities and difficulties with the
standard positions. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that partisans of either side embrace with
fervor the moral generalizations that support the conclusions they preanalytically favor, and
reject with disdain the moral generalizations of their opponents as being subject to inescapable
difficulties.

There is a way out of this apparent dialectical quandary. The moral generalizations of both sides
are not quite correct. The generalizations hold for the most part, for the usual cases. This
suggests that they are all accidental generalizations, that the moral claims made by those on both
sides of the dispute do not touch on the essence of the matter.

This use of the distinction between essence and accident is not meant to invoke obscure
metaphysical categories. Rather, it is intended to reflect the rather a theoretical nature of the
abortion discussion. If the generalization a partisan in the abortion dispute adopts were derived
from the reason why ending the life of a human being is wrong, then there could not be
exceptions to that generalization unless some special case obtains in which there are even more
powerful countervailing reasons. Such generalizations would not be merely accidental
generalizations; they would point to, or be based upon, the essence of the wrongness of killing,
what it is that makes killing wrong. All this suggests that a necessary condition of resolving the
abortion controversy is a more theoretical account of the wrongness of killing. After all, if we
merely believe, but do not understand, why killing adult human beings such as ourselves is
wrong, how could we conceivably show that abortion is either immoral or permissible?

In order to develop such an account, we can start from the following unproblematic assumption
concerning our own case: it is wrong to kill us. Why is it wrong? Some answers can be easily
eliminated. It might be said that what makes killing us wrong is that a killing brutalizes the one
who kills. But the brutalization consists of being inured to the performance of an act that is
hideously immoral; hence, the brutalization does not explain the immorality. It might be said that

14
what makes killing us wrong is the great loss others would experience due to our absence.
Although such hubris is understandable, such an explanation does not account for the wrongness
of killing hermits, or those whose lives are relatively independent and whose friends find it easy
to make new friends.

A more obvious answer is better. What primarily makes killing wrong is neither its effect on the
murderer nor its effect on the victim's friends and relatives, but its effect on the victim. The loss
of one's life is one of the greatest losses one can suffer. The loss of one's life deprives one of all
the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one's
future. Therefore, killing someone is wrong, primarily because the killing inflicts (one of) the
greatest possible losses on the victim. To describe this as the loss of life can be misleading,
however. The change in my biological state does not by itself make killing me wrong. The effect
of the loss of my biological life is the loss to me of all those activities, projects, experiences, and
enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted my future personal life. These activities,
projects, experiences, and enjoyments are either valuable for their own sakes or are means to
something else that is valuable for its own sake. Some parts of my future are not valued by me
now, but will come to be valued by me as I grow older and as my values and capacities change.
When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value which would have been part of my
future personal life, but also what I would come to value. Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of
all of the value of my future. Inflicting this loss on me is ultimately what makes killing me
wrong. This being the case, it would seem that what makes killing any adult human being prima
facie seriously wrong is the loss of his or her future.

(…) the claim that the loss of one's future is the wrong-making feature of one's being killed does
not entail, as sanctity of human life theories do, that active euthanasia is wrong. Persons who are
severely and incurably ill, who face a future of pain and despair, and who wish to die will not
have suffered a loss if they are killed. It is, strictly speaking, the value of a human's future which
makes killing wrong in this theory. This being so, killing does not necessarily wrong some
persons who are sick and dying.

(…) the account of the wrongness of killing defended in this essay does straightforwardly entail
that it is prima facie seriously wrong to kill children and infants, for we do presume that they
have futures of value. Since we do believe that it is wrong to kill defenseless little babies, it is
important that a theory of the wrongness of killing easily account for this. Personhood theories of
the wrongness of killing, on the other hand, cannot straightforwardly account for the wrongness
of killing infants and young children.7 Hence, such theories must add special ad hoc accounts of
the wrongness of killing the young. The plausibility of such ad hoc theories seems to be a
function of how desperately one wants such theories to work. The claim that the primary wrong-
making feature of a killing is the loss to the victim of the value of its future accounts for the
wrongness of killing young children and infants directly; it makes the wrongness of such acts as
obvious as we actually think it is. This is a further merit of this theory.

The claim that the primary wrong-making feature of a killing is the loss to the victim of the value
of its future has obvious consequences for the ethics of abortion. The future of a standard fetus
includes a set of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identical with the futures of
adult human beings and are identical with the futures of young children. Since the reason that is

15
sufficient to explain why it is wrong to kill human beings after the time of birth is a reason that
also applies to fetuses, it follows that abortion is prima facie seriously morally wrong.

This argument does not rely on the invalid inference that, since it is wrong to kill persons, it is
wrong to kill potential persons also. The category that is morally central to this analysis is the
category of having a valuable future like ours; it is not the category of personhood. The argument
to the conclusion that abortion is prima facie seriously morally wrong proceeded independently
of the notion of person or potential person or any equivalent.

Of course, this value of a future-like-ours argument, if sound, shows only that abortion is prima
facie wrong, not that it is wrong in any and all circumstances. Since the loss of the future to a
standard fetus, if killed, is, however, at least as great a loss as the loss of the future to a standard
adult human being who is killed, abortion, like ordinary killing, could be justified only by the
most compelling reasons. The loss of one's life is almost the greatest misfortune that can happen
to one. Presumably abortion could be justified in some circumstances, only if the loss consequent
on failing to abort would be at least as great. Accordingly, morally permissible abortions will be
rare indeed unless, perhaps, they occur so early in pregnancy that a fetus is not yet definitely an
individual. Hence, this argument should be taken as showing that abortion is presumptively very
seriously wrong, where the presumption is very strong-as strong as the presumption that killing
another adult human being is wrong.

(Boonin on this passage: “I should point out that Marquis himself specifically avoids asserting
that the future-like-ours argument entails that abortion is wrong from the moment of conception
onward. This acknowledgment that the argument might not succeed all the way back to the
moment of conception can be easily overlooked, since he mentions it only once, briefly and
tentatively, in the middle of a sentence, “morally permissible abortions will be rare indeed
unless, perhaps, they occur so early in pregnancy that a fetus is not yet definitely an individual”.
In any event, Marquis clearly maintains that if a new individual human being comes to exist at
conception, then the future-like-ours argument provides grounds for accepting the conception
criterion.)

(…)

One way to overturn the value of a future-like-ours argument would be to find some account of
the wrongness of killing which is at least as intelligible and which has different implications for
the ethics of abortion. Two rival accounts possess at least some degree of plausibility. One
account is based on the obvious fact that people value the experience of living and wish for that
valuable experience to continue. Therefore, it might be said, what makes killing wrong is the
discontinuation of that experience for the victim. Let us call this the discontinuation account.~'
Another rival account is based upon the obvious fact that people strongly desire to continue to
live. This suggests that what makes killing us so wrong is that it interferes with the fulfillment of
a strong and fundamental desire, the fulfillment of which is necessary for the fulfillment of any
other desires we might have. Let us call this the desire account.

(…)

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One problem with the desire account is that we do regard it as seriously wrong to kill persons
who have little desire to live or who have no desire to live or, indeed, have a desire not to live.
We believe it is seriously wrong to kill the unconscious, the sleeping, those who are tired of life,
and those who are suicidal. The value-of-a-humanfuture account renders standard morality
intelligible in these cases; these cases appear to be incompatible with the desire account.

(…)

It is worth noting that, if the desire account is modified so that it does not provide a necessary,
but only a sufficient, condition for the wrongness of killing, the desire account is compatible
with the value of a future-like-ours account. The combined accounts will yield an anti-abortion
ethic. This suggests that one can retain what is intuitively plausible about the desire account
without a challenge to the basic argument of this paper.

(…)

It is also worth noting that, if future desires have moral force in a modified desire account of the
wrongness of killing, one can find support for an anti-abortion ethic even in the absence of a
value of a future-like-ours account. If one decides that a morally relevant property, the
possession of which is sufficient to make it wrong to kill some individual, is the desire at some
future time to live-one might decide to justify one's refusal to kill suicidal teenagers on these
grounds, for example-then, since typical fetuses will have the desire in the future to live, it is
wrong to kill typical fetuses.

(…)

A different strategy for avoiding these anti-abortion consequences involves limiting the scope of
the value of a future argument. More precisely, the strategy involves arguing that fetuses lack a
property that is essential for the value-of-a-future argument (or for any anti-abortion argument)
to apply to them. One move of this sort is based upon the claim that a necessary condition of
one's future being valuable is that one values it. Value implies a valuer. Given this one might
argue that, since fetuses cannot value their futures, their futures are not valuable to them. Hence,
it does not seriously wrong them deliberately to end their lives. This move fails, however,
because of some ambiguities. Let us assume that something cannot be of value unless it is valued
by someone. This does not entail that my life is of no value unless it is valued by me. I may
think, in a period of despair, that my future is of no worth whatsoever, but I may be wrong
because others rightly see value-even great value-in it. Furthermore, my future can be valuable to
me even if I do not value it. This is the case when a young person attempts suicide, but is rescued
and goes on to significant human achievements. Such young people's futures are ultimately
valuable to them, even though such futures do not seem to be valuable to them at the moment of
attempted suicide. A fetus's future can be valuable to it in the same way. Accordingly, this
attempt to limit the anti-abortion argument fails.

(…) This analysis does not entail that contraception is wrong. Of course, contraception prevents
the actualization of a possible future of value. Hence, it follows from the claim that futures of
value should be maximized that contraception is prima facie immoral. This obligation to

17
maximize does not exist, however; furthermore, nothing in the ethics of killing in this paper
entails that it does. The ethics of killing in this essay would entail that contraception is wrong
only if something were denied a human future of value by contraception. Nothing at all is denied
such a future by contraception, however.

Candidates for a subject of harm by contraception fall into four categories: (1) some sperm or
other, (2) some ovum or other, (3) a sperm and an ovum separately, and (4) a sperm and an ovum
together. Assigning the harm to some sperm is utterly arbitrary, for no reason can be given for
making a sperm the subject of harm rather than an ovum. Assigning the harm to some ovum is
utterly arbitrary, for no reason can be given for making an ovum the subject of harm rather than a
sperm. One might attempt to avoid these problems by insisting that contraception deprives both
the sperm and the ovum separately of a valuable future like ours. On this alternative, too many
futures are lost. Contraception was supposed to be wrong, because it deprived us of one future of
value, not two. One might attempt to avoid this problem by holding that contraception deprives
the combination of sperm and ovum of a valuable future like ours. But here the definite article
misleads. At the time of contraception, there are hundreds of millions of sperm, one (released)
ovum and millions of possible combinations of all of these. There is no actual combination at all.
Is the subject of the loss to be a merely possible combination? Which one? This alternative does
not yield an actual subject of harm either. Accordingly, the immorality of contraception is not
entailed by the loss of a future-like-ours argument simply because there is no nonarbitrarily
identifiable subject of the loss in the case of contraception.

(…)

The purpose of this essay has been to set out an argument for the serious presumptive wrongness
of abortion subject to the assumption that the moral permissibility of abortion stands or falls on
the moral status of the fetus. Since a fetus possesses a property, the possession of which in adult
human beings is sufficient to make killing an adult human being wrong, abortion is wrong. This
way of dealing with the problem of abortion seems superior to other approaches to the ethics of
abortion, because it rests on an ethics of killing which is close to self-evident, because the crucial
morally relevant property clearly applies to fetuses, and because the argument avoids the usual
equivocations on 'human life', 'human being', or 'person'. The argument rests neither on religious
claims nor on Papal dogma. It is not subject to the objection of "speciesism." Its soundness is
compatible with the moral permissibility of euthanasia and contraception. It deals with our
intuitions concerning young children.

Finally, this analysis can be viewed as resolving a standard problem-indeed, the standard
problem-concerning the ethics of abortion. Clearly, it is wrong to kill adult human beings.
Clearly, it is not wrong to end the life of some arbitrarily chosen single human cell. Fetuses seem
to be like arbitrarily chosen human cells in some respects and like adult humans in other
respects. The problem of the ethics of abortion is the problem of determining the fetal property
that settles this moral controversy. The thesis of this essay is that the problem of the ethics of
abortion, so understood, is solvable.

(Boonin on Marquis and animals’ rights: “The proponent of the future-like-ours approach can
remain neutral about whether nonhuman animals’s futures are sufficiently like ours to warrant

18
inclusion within the scope of the principle, and this seems to me a merit rather than a defect of
this approach.”)

Thomson sobre el argumento en torno a la igual razonabilidad y la justificación de

restricciones a la libertad (en “Abortion”):

While I know of no conclusive reason for denying that fertilized eggs have a right to life, I also
know of no conclusive reason for asserting that they do have a right to life. (…)

If abortion rights are denied, then a constraint is imposed on women's freedom to act in a way
that is of great importance to them, both for its own sake and for the sake of their achievement of
equality; and if the constraint is imposed on the ground that the fetus has a right to life from the
moment of conception, then it is imposed on a ground that neither reason nor the rest of morality
requires women to accept, or even to give any weight at all. A legal regime that prides itself on
respect for liberty cannot in consistency constrain a deeply valued liberty on such a ground. We
should be clear why. When a deeply valued liberty is constrained on a ground that the
constrained are not in the least unreasonable in rejecting outright, then what is done to them
cannot be justified to them, and imposing the constraint on them is therefore nothing but an
exercise of force.

The point I make here is not just that anyone who wants to impose a severe constraint on liberty
has the burden of saying why it is permissible to do so. That hardly needs saying. The point here
is, more strongly, that discharging the burden requires more than merely supplying a reason for
the constraint: the reason for the constraint has to be one that the constrained are unreasonable in
rejecting.

(…)

This fact breaks what some people have said is a stand-off in the abortion controversy. One side
says that the fetus has a right to life from the moment of conception, the other side denies this.
Neither side is able to prove its case. The people I refer to ask: why should the deniers win? Why
break the symmetry by letting the deniers win instead of the supporters? The answer is that the
situation is not symmetrical. What is in question here is not which of two values we should
promote, the deniers' or the supporters'. What the supporters want is a license to impose force;
what the deniers want is a license to be free of it. It is the former that needs the justification.

In sum, my case here against restrictive regulation of abortion rests on three ideas. First,
restrictive regulation severely constrains women's liberty. Second, severe constraints on liberty
may not be imposed in the name of considerations that the constrained are not unreasonable in
rejecting. And third, the many women who reject the claim that the fetus has a right to life from
the moment of conception are not unreasonable in doing so. All three ideas seem to me very
plausible.

19
Beckwith sobre el argumento en torno a la igual razonabilidad y la justificación de
restricciones a la libertad:

Even if Thomson is correct about the equal reasonableness of the pro-life and abortion-choice
positions, it does not follow that the abortion-choice position must be the one that is reflected in
our laws. Thomson, however, maintains that because the arguments for the contrary positions on
the moral standing of the unborn are equally reasonable, and because the liberty of certain
citizens (i.e., pregnant women) hangs in the balance, we should err on the side of liberty and
grant the right to abortion. (…)

But this clearly begs the question, for Thomson has to show, rather than merely stipulate, that in
the debate over abortion’s permissibility reason requires us to conclude that liberty is the good
that is at stake. Or to conscript Thomson’s language for our purposes, it is not unreasonable to
reject the notion that we should err on the side of liberty when all sides in the abortion debate
hold equally reasonable arguments. (…)

If it is true that no one position on the unborn’s moral status wins the day, this is an excellent
reason not to permit abortion, because an abortion may result in the death of a human entity who
has a full right to life. If one kills another being without knowing whether that being is a person
with a full right to life, and if one has reasonable grounds (as Thomson admits) to believe that
the being in question is a person, such an action would constitute a willful and reckless disregard
for others, even if one later discovered that the being was not a person. (…)

Thomson writes that “while I know of no conclusive reason for denying that fertilized eggs have
a right to life, I also know of no conclusive reason for asserting that they do have a right to life.”
But if this is the case, then it is safe to say that the odds of the unborn being a human person are
50/50. Given these odds, it would seem that society has a moral obligation to err on the side of
life, and therefore, to legally prohibit virtually all abortions.

One may also employ Thomson’s own principle – “severe constraints on liberty may not be
imposed in the name of considerations that the constrained are not unreasonable in rejecting” –
to show that liberty is not the value at stake in the abortion debate. Consider the following
example. Suppose that there is a shooting range in Central Texas, located only 1,000 feet from
the playground of a local elementary school. The county commission, at the request of concerned
parents and teachers, prohibits the shooting range to operate when the students at the school are
on the playground, because there is a 1 in 100 chance that a bullet will ricochet off one of the
targets and hit a child. Imagine that the marksmen who practice at the range, with the support of
the range’s ownership, employ Thomson’s principle to rebut the commission’s policy: “severe
constraints on liberty may not be imposed in the name of considerations that the constrained are
not unreasonable in rejecting.” The response on the part of the commission would likely be:
“Yes, your principle may be correct, but you are in fact unreasonable in rejecting the policy’s
constraint on your liberty, for reason requires that you accept a public policy to protect the
innocent from unjust harm even if there is only a 1 in 100 chance of it occurring.”

20
Boonin sobre la objeción de la incertidumbre:

If you are only 51 percent convinced that abortion is morally permissible, then this extra
consideration may be enough to tip the balance in favor of opposing the practice. After all, in this
case you are only being asked to do something you think slightly more likely than not to be
wrong. But it is nonetheless a legitimate and substantial consideration that must be taken into
account. If you have not yet been convinced by arguments in favor of the claim that abortion is
morally impermissible and have been substantially swayed by some of the objections to them,
then the moral principle being appealed to here would be asking you deliberately to impose what
you strongly believe to be significant and wrongful harms on women in order to prevent what
you strongly believe not to be greater wrongs against fetuses. In short, it would be asking you to
act against your conscience. By requiring you to give equal weight to those considerations that
you believe to be compelling and those that you do not, it therefore requires you to sacrifice your
integrity, to abdicate your responsibility for making up your own mind about what principles you
should act on. This is something that a morally responsible person cannot do, and it is difficult to
imagine that a critic of abortion would be willing to deny this.

Thomson sobre su argumento del buen samaritano (en “A Defense of Abortion”):

Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from
the moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well. (…) I am inclined
to agree, however, that the prospects for "drawing a line" in the development of the fetus look
dim. I am inclined to think also that we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already
become a human person well before birth. Indeed, it comes as a surprise when one first learns
how early in its life it begins to acquire human characteristics. By the tenth week, for example, it
already has a face, arms and legs, fingers and toes; it has internal organs, and brain activity is
detectable.2 On the other hand, I think that the premise is false, that the fetus is not a person from
the moment of conception. A newly fertilized ovum, a newly implanted clump of cells, is no
more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. But I shall not discuss any of this. For it seems to me
to be of great interest to ask what happens if, for the sake of argument, we allow the premise.
How, precisely, are we supposed to get from there to the conclusion that abortion is morally
impermissible? Opponents of abortion commonly spend most of their time establishing that the
fetus is a person, and hardly any time explaining the step from there to the impermissibility of
abortion. (…)

I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How
does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life.
So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in
and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person's right to life is stronger and
more stringent than the mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so
outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.

21
It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and
find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist.
He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed
all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They
have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into
yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.
The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did
this to you-we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the
violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only
for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged
from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very
nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it?

In this case, of course, you were kidnapped; you didn't volunteer for the operation that plugged
the violinist into your kidneys. Can those who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned make
an exception for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say that persons have a right to
life only if they didn't come into existence because of rape; or they can say that all persons have
a right to life, but that some have less of a right to life than others, in particular, that those who
came into existence because of rape have less. But these statements have a rather unpleasant
sound. Surely the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have,
shouldn't turn on the question of whether or not you are the product of a rape. And in fact the
people who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned do not make this distinction, and hence
do not make an exception in case of rape.

(…)

Some won't even make an exception for a case in which continuation of the pregnancy is likely
to shorten the mother's life; they regard abortion as impermissible even to save the mother's life.
Such cases are nowadays very rare, and many opponents of abortion do not accept this extreme
view. All the same, it is a good place to begin: a number of points of interest come out in respect
to it.

(…)

Let us look again at the case of you and the violinist. There you are, in bed with the violinist, and
the director of the hospital says to you, "It's all most distressing, and I deeply sympathize, but
you see this is putting an additional strain on your kidneys, and you'll be dead within the month.
But you have to stay where you are all the same. Because unplugging you would be directly
killing an innocent violinist, and that's murder, and that's impermissible." If anything in the
world is true, it is that you do not commit murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you
reach around to your back and unplug yourself from that violinist to save your life. (…)

I should perhaps stop to say explicitly that I am not claiming that people have a right to do
anything whatever to save their lives. I think, rather, that there are drastic limits to the right of
self-defense. If someone threatens you with death unless you torture someone else to death, I
think you have not the right, even to save your life, to do so. But the case under consideration

22
here is very different. In our case there are only two people involved, one whose life is
threatened, and one who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is threatened is not
threatened because of any fault, the one who threatens does not threaten because of any fault.

(…)

The extreme view could of course be weakened to say that while abortion is permissible to save
the mother's life, it may not be performed by a third party, but only by the mother herself. But
this cannot be right either. (…) A third party who says "I cannot choose between you" is fooling
himself if he thinks this is impartiality. If Jones has found and fastened on a certain coat, which
he needs to keep him from freezing, but which Smith also needs to keep him from freezing, then
it is not impartiality that says "I cannot choose between you" when Smith owns the coat. Women
have said again and again "This body is my body!" and they have reason to feel angry, reason to
feel that it has been like shouting into the wind. Smith, after all, is hardly likely to bless us if we
say to him, "Of course it's your coat, anybody would grant that it is. But no one may choose
between you and Jones who is to have it."

(…)

Where the mother's life is not at stake, the argument I mentioned at the outset seems to have a
much stronger pull. "Everyone has a right to life, so the unborn person has a right to life." And
isn't the child's right to life weightier than anything other than the mother's own right to life,
which she might put forward as ground for an abortion?

This argument treats the right to life as if it were unproblematic. It is not, and this seems to me to
be precisely the source of the mistake. For we should now, at long last, ask what it comes to, to
have a right to life. In some views having a right to life includes having a right to be given at
least the bare minimum one needs for continued life. But suppose that what in fact is the bare
minimum a man needs for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If I am
sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry Fonda's cool hand
on my fevered brow, then all the same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda's
cool hand on my fevered brow. It would be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast
to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to the
West Coast and carried Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against anybody
that he should do this for me. Or again, to return to the story I told earlier, the fact that for
continued life that violinist needs the continued use of your kidneys does not establish that he has
a right to be given the continued use of your kidneys. He certainly has no right against you that
you should give him continued use of your kidneys. For nobody has any right to use your
kidneys unless you give him such a right; and nobody has the right against you that you shall
give him this right-if you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your
part, and not something he can claim from you as his due.

(…)

Some people are rather stricter about the right to life. In their view, it does not include the right
to be given anything, but amounts to, and only to, the right not to be killed by anybody. But here

23
a related difficulty arises. If everybody is to refrain from killing that violinist, then everybody
must refrain from doing a great many different sorts of things. Everybody must refrain from
slitting his throat, everybody must refrain from shooting him-and everybody must refrain from
unplugging you from him. But does he have a right against everybody that they shall refrain
from unplugging you from him? To refrain from doing this is to allow him to continue to use
your kidneys.

(…)

The difficulty I point to here is not peculiar to the right to life. It reappears in connection with all
the other natural rights; and it is something which an adequate account of rights must deal with.
For present purposes it is enough just to draw attention to it. But I would stress that I am not
arguing that people do not have a right to lifequite to the contrary, it seems to me that the
primary control we must place on the acceptability of an account of rights is that it should turn
out in that account to be a truth that all persons have a right to life. I am arguing only that having
a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be
allowed continued use of another person's body-even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to
life will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which they seem
to have thought it would.

(…)

There is another way to bring out the difficulty. In the most ordinary sort of case, to deprive
someone of what he has a right to is to treat him unjustly. Suppose a boy and his small brother
are jointly given a box of chocolates for Christmas. If the older boy takes the box and refuses to
give his brother any of the chocolates, he is unjust to -him, for the brother has been given a right
to half of them. But suppose that, having learned that otherwise it means nine years in bed with
that violinist, you unplug yourself from him. You surely are not being unjust to him, for you
gave him no right to use your kidneys, and no one else can have given him any such right. But
we have to notice that in unplugging yourself, you are killing him; and violinists, like everybody
else, have a right to life, and thus in the view we were considering just now, the right not to be
killed. So here you do what he supposedly has a right you shall not do, but you do not act
unjustly to him in doing it.

The emendation which may be made at this point is this: the right to life consists not in the right
not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly. This runs a risk of circularity, but
never mind: it would enable us to square the fact that the violinist has a right to life with the fact
that you do not act unjustly toward him in unplugging yourself, thereby killing him. For if you
do not kill him unjustly, you do not violate his right to life, and so it is no wonder you do him no
injustice.

But if this emendation is accepted, the gap in the argument against abortion stares us plainly in
the face: it is by no means enough to show that the fetus is a person, and to remind us that all
persons have a right to life-we need to be shown also that killing the fetus violates its right to
life, i.e., that abortion is unjust killing. And is it?

24
I suppose we may take it as a datum that in a case of pregnancy due to rape the mother has not
given the unborn person a right to the use of her body for food and shelter. (…)

But it might be argued that there are other ways one can have acquired a right to the use of
another person's body than by having been invited to use it by that person. Suppose a woman
voluntarily indulges in intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue in pregnancy, and then
she does become pregnant; is she not in part responsible for the presence, in fact the very
existence, of the unborn person inside her? No doubt she did not invite it in. But doesn't her
partial responsibility for its being there itself give it a right to the use of her body?7 If so, then
her aborting it would be more like the boy's taking away the chocolates, and less like your
unplugging yourself from the violinist-doing so would be depriving it of what it does have a right
to, and thus would be doing it an injustice.

And then, too, it might be asked whether or not she can kill it even to save her own life: If she
voluntarily called it into existence, how can she now kill it, even in self-defense?

(…)

It is not at all plain that this argument really does go even as far as it purports to. For there are
cases and cases, and the details make a difference. If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a
window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, "Ah, now he can stay, she's
given him a right to the use of her house-for she is partially responsible for his presence there,
having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things
as burglars, and that burglars burgle." It would be still more absurd to say this if I had had bars
installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got in
only because of a defect in the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar
who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or falls in. Again, suppose it were like this:
people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in
and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don't want children, so you fix up your windows
with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very
rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root.
Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not-
despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and
upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue
that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all
you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and
doors. But this won't do-for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by
having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.

It seems to me that the argument we are looking at can establish at most that there are some cases
in which the unborn person has a right to the use of its mother's body, and therefore some cases
in which abortion is unjust killing. There is room for much discussion and argument as to
precisely which, if any. But I think we should sidestep this issue and leave it open, for at any rate
the argument certainly does not establish that all abortion is unjust killing.

25
(…)

There is room for yet another argument here, however. We surely must all grant that there may
be cases in which it would be morally indecent to detach a person from your body at the cost of
his life. (…) suppose pregnancy lasted only an hour, and constituted no threat to life or health.
And suppose that a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape. Admittedly she did not
voluntarily do anything to bring about the existence of a child. Admittedly she did nothing at all
which would give the unborn person a right to the use of her body. All the same it might well be
said, as in the newly emended violinist story, that she ought to allow it to remain for that hour-
that it would be indecent in her to refuse.

Now some people are inclined to use the term "right" in such a way that it follows from the fact
that you ought to allow a person to use your body for the hour he needs, that he has a right to use
your body for the hour he needs, even though he has not been given that right by any person or
act. They may say that it follows also that if you refuse, you act unjustly toward him. This use of
the term is perhaps so common that it cannot be called wrong; nevertheless it seems to me to be
an unfortunate loosening of what we would do better to keep a tight rein on. Suppose that box of
chocolates I mentioned earlier had not been given to both boys jointly, but was given only to the
older boy. There he sits, stolidly eating his way through the box, his small brother watching
enviously. Here we are likely to say "You ought not to be so mean. You ought to give your
brother some of those chocolates." My own view is that it just does not follow from the truth of
this that the brother has any right to any of the chocolates. If the boy refuses to give his brother
any, he is greedy, stingy, callous-but not unjust. I suppose that the people I have in mind will say
it does follow that the brother has a right to some of the chocolates, and thus that the boy does
act unjustly if he refuses to give his brother any.

(…)

So my own view is that even though you ought to let the violinist use your kidneys for the one
hour he needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so-we should say that if you
refuse, you are, like the boy who owns all the chocolates and will give none away, self-centered
and callous, indecent in fact, but not unjust. And similarly, that even supposing a case in which a
woman pregnant due to rape ought to allow the unborn person to use her body for the hour he
needs, we should not conclude that he has a right to do so; we should conclude that she is self-
centered, callous, indecent, but not unjust, if she refuses.

(…)

Following the lead of the opponents of abortion, I have throughout been speaking of the fetus
merely as a person, and what I have been asking is whether or not the argument we began with,
which proceeds only from the fetus' being a person, really does establish its conclusion. I have
argued that it does not. But of course there are arguments and arguments, and it may be said that
I have simply fastened on the wrong one. It may be said that what is important is not merely the
fact that the fetus is a person, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of
responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother. And it might be argued that all my
analogies are therefore irrelevant-for you do not have that special kind of responsibility for that

26
violinist, Henry Fonda does not have that special kind of responsibility for me. And our attention
might be drawn to the fact that men and women both are compelled by law to provide support for
their children.

(…)

Surely we do not have any such "special responsibility" for a person unless we have assumed it,
explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an
abortion, and then at the time of birth of the child do not put it out for adoption, but rather take it
home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they
cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go
on providing for it. But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they
do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence
have a special responsibility for it. They may wish to assume responsibility for it, or they may
not wish to. And I am suggesting that if assuming responsibility for it would require large
sacrifices, then they may refuse. A Good Samaritan would not refuse-or anyway, a Splendid
Samaritan, if the sacrifices that had to be made were enormous. But then so would a Good
Samaritan assume responsibility for that violinist; so would Henry Fonda, if he is a Good
Samaritan, fly in from the West Coast and assume responsibility for me.

My argument will be found unsatisfactory on two counts by many of those who want to regard
abortion as morally permissible. First, while I do argue that abortion is not impermissible, I do
not argue that it is always permissible. There may well be cases in which carrying the child to
term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a standard we must
not fall below. I am inclined to think it a merit of my account precisely that it does not give a
general yes or a general no. It allows for and supports our sense that, for example, a sick and
desperately frightened fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose
abortion, and that any law which rules this out is an insane law. And it also allows for and
supports our sense that in other cases resort to abortion is even positively indecent. It would be
indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in
her seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad.
The very fact that the arguments I have been drawing attention to treat all cases of abortion, or
even all cases of abortion in which the mother's life is not at stake, as morally on a par ought to
have made them suspect at the outset.

Secondly, while I am arguing for the permissibility of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing
for the right to secure the death of the unborn child. It is easy to confuse these two things in that
up to a certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to survive outside the mother's body;
hence removing it from her body guarantees its death. But they are importantly different. I have
argued that you are not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the life of that
violinist; but to say this is by no means to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there is a
miracle and he survives, you then have a right to turn round and slit his throat. You may detach
yourself even if this costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some
other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him. There are some people who will feel
dissatisfied by this feature of my argument. A woman may be utterly devastated by the thought
of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adoption and never seen or heard of again. She may

27
therefore want not merely that the child be detached from her, but more, that it die. Some
opponents of abortion are inclined to regard this as beneath contempt-thereby showing
insensitivity to what is surely a powerful source of despair. All the same, I agree that the desire
for the child's death is not one which anybody may gratify, should it turn out to be possible to
detach the child alive.

At this place, however, it should be remembered that we have only been pretending throughout
that the fetus is a human being from the moment of conception. A very early abortion is surely
not the killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have said here.

Boonin sobre la estructura del argumento de Thomson:

To many readers, it seems obvious that the lesson of the [violinist’s] story is supposed to be that
in this case your right to control your body really does outweigh the violinist’s right to life. And
if that is the point of the story, then the good samaritan argument in defense of abortion will
have to rest on the parallel claim that a pregnant woman’s right to control her body outweighs a
fetus’s right to life. (…)

But this is a mistake. Thomson’s example is not meant to deny that the violinist’s right to life
outweighs your right to control your body. If there were a genuine conflict between your right to
control your body and the violinist’s right to life, Thomson would surely agree that his right to
life would trump your right to control your body. (…)

Thomson’s claim is precisely that there is no such conflict between these two rights in the case
she has presented, that unplugging yourself from the violinist does not violate his right to life in
the first place. Even though he has a right to life, that is, he has no right to the use of your
kidneys. So in unplugging yourself from him, you do nothing that conflicts with his right to life,
even though you do something that brings about his death. The lesson of the story, therefore, is
not that it is sometimes permissible for you to violate the violinist’s right to life, but rather that
the violinist’s right to life does not include or entail the right to be provided with the use or the
continued use of whatever is needed in order for him to go on living. (…)

Surely if the fetus has the same right to life as you and I, then that right does outweigh a
woman’s right to control her body, and if the two come into conflict, then it is the fetus’s right to
life that must prevail. Rather, the objection will turn on the claim that the fetus’s right to life
does not include or entail the right to be provided with the use or the continued use of whatever
is needed in order for it to go on living.

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Boonin sobre la objeción del consentimiento tácito:

In the case of you and the violinist, the situation in which you find that there is a violinist whose
life is dependent on you does not arise from any voluntary action of yours. But when a woman
becomes pregnant, except in cases where the pregnancy arises from rape, the situation in which
she finds that there is a fetus whose life is dependent on her does arise, at least in part, from a
voluntary action of hers. If she had not voluntarily engaged in sexual intercourse, she would not
have become pregnant. Moreover, the distinction between situations that arise from voluntary
actions and those that do not seems plainly to be a morally relevant one. And so, according to
this objection, even if the violinist analogy is successful in every other respect, it still establishes
only that abortion is permissible in cases involving rape.

(…)

Sometimes a person consents to a state of affairs not by explicitly agreeing to accept it, but by
doing some voluntary action that amounts to tacitly agreeing to accept it. (…) Because the
woman’s pregnancy in nonrape cases is the (foreseeable) result of a voluntary action of hers, she
should be understood as having tacitly waived her right to expel the fetus or (what amounts to
the same thing) as having tacitly granted the fetus a right to stay. I will call this the tacit consent
objection.

(…)

Langer, for example, motivates his defense of the tacit consent objection with the following
example: Imagine a person who freely chooses to join the Society of Music Lovers, knowing that
there was a 1 in 100 chance of being plugged into the violinist if she joins the society. She
certainly does not desire to be plugged into the violinist, but at the same time she desires to join
the society, and feels the one in one hundred odds are an acceptable risk. She goes ahead and
joins, and much to her chagrin, her name is selected as the person to be plugged into the violinist.
Is it unreasonable to say that she has waived her right to control over her own body?

(…)

[But] Let us suppose that the woman whose pregnancy arises from voluntary intercourse is
instead like you if you freely walk into the violinist’s room, sit down next to him, and
deliberately plug yourself in. I will take it that this implies that you have consented to the act of
becoming plugged into the violinist. But what follows from this? (…) We might say that freely
plugging yourself into the violinist constitutes consent to bear the costs of unplugging yourself.
But does it constitute consent to more, and in particular, does it, as the second claim made by the
objection maintains, constitute consent to remain plugged in for the nine-month period that the
violinist requires? This strikes me as extremely implausible.

29
Boonin sobre la objeción de la responsabilidad:

A person can acquire the right to your assistance when his need for your assistance
(foreseeably) arises from a voluntary action of yours on the grounds that you are responsible for
his state of need, even if in doing the action that led to his being in a state of need you did not
“give” him the right to your assistance either explicitly or tacitly. It is plausible, for example, to
maintain that an innocent bystander who is accidentally shot by a hunter and who as a result
now needs the hunter’s aid in order to survive has acquired a right to the hunter’s assistance
even if by voluntarily choosing to go hunting the hunter cannot reasonably be understood as
having agreed, even tacitly, to grant this right to those whose need for assistance arises from his
voluntary actions.
(…)

Presumably, as a first approximation, a proponent of the responsibility objection would say

something like this: “It is because if you hadn’t done the voluntary action that foreseeably led
him to be in need of your assistance, he wouldn’t be in need of your assistance in the first place.
Since your voluntary act foreseeably brought about the state of affairs in which he is in need of
your assistance, you are responsible for the fact that he is in need of your assistance. And since
you are responsible for the fact that he is in need of your assistance, you have acquired an
obligation to provide him with such assistance.” And this seems reasonable enough. But now
consider that there are two distinct ways in which the counterfactual proposition, “If you had not
done the voluntary action, then he would not now need your assistance in order to survive,” can
be true: (1) If you had not done the act, then he would not now exist (and so would not now need
your assistance in order to survive). (2) If you had not done the act, then he would now exist, and
would not need your assistance in order to survive. Assuming that your voluntarily doing the
action makes you responsible for the resulting state of affairs, we can recast this distinction as
one between two different senses in which you might be responsible for bringing about the state
of affairs in which another person now stands in need of your assistance in order to survive:
Responsibility (1): You are responsible for the fact that the other person now exists.
Responsibility (2): You are responsible for the fact that, given that the other person now exists,
he stands in need of your assistance.

(…) To see this, consider first the following variation on Thomson’s story: Imperfect Drug I:
You are the violinist’s doctor. Seven years ago, you discovered that the violinist had contracted a
rare disease that was on the verge of killing him. (This is a condensed and slightly modified
version of an example given by Silverstein). The only way to save his life that was available to
you was to give him a drug that cures the disease but has one unfortunate side effect: Five to ten
years after ingestion, it often causes the kidney ailment described in Thomson’s story. Knowing
that you alone would have the appropriate blood type to save the violinist were his kidneys to
fail, you prescribed the drug and cured the disease. The violinist has now been struck by the
kidney ailment. If you do not allow him the use of your kidneys for nine months, he will die. In
Imperfect Drug I, you are responsible in sense (1) for the fact that the violinist now stands in
need of your assistance. You are responsible, that is, for his existence. You did a voluntary action
such that had you not done it, the violinist would not now exist. If you had not given him the
drug, he would not now exist. But you are not responsible in sense (2) for the fact that the
violinist now stands in need of your assistance.

30
Boonin (atacando y defendiendo) su distinción entre dos nociones de responsabilidad:

In particular, there is the following difference between a woman who voluntarily conceives and
then aborts a fetus, and you when you voluntarily cure and then later refuse to save an ailing
violinist: In curing the violinist, you greatly benefit him, providing him with several more years
of valuable experiences that he would otherwise not have had. When the woman conceives the
short-lived fetus, she does not benefit it at all, since it will not go on to have any valuable
experiences that it would otherwise not have had. This fact can be used to undermine the sort of
example I have been borrowing from Silverstein in a few distinct ways. One could argue that
since you have already greatly benefitted the violinist, you have no duty to benefit him further,
while since the woman has not yet benefitted the fetus, she does have a duty to so benefit it. One
could argue that your motives in saving the violinst were benevolent, whereas the woman’s
motives in engaging in intercourse were not. And, most forcefully, one could argue that you were
morally obligated to cure the violinist, whereas the woman was not morally obligated to engage
in voluntary intercourse. The voluntary act that rendered you responsible for the fact that the
violinist now exists was the act of giving the violinist the only drug available that could save his
life, and it would have been morally impermissible for you to have failed to give the violinist the
drug. But the voluntary act that rendered the woman responsible for the fact that the fetus now
exists was the act of engaging in sexual intercourse. And the woman surely had no moral
obligation to do that.

So one could argue that the reason the violinist does not acquire the right to the use of your body
in Imperfect Drug I is not because you are only responsible in sense (1), but because of the way
in which it came to be the case that you are only responsible in sense (1). Because you were
morally required to give the violinist the drug, your giving him the drug cannot confer on him a
further right to your assistance that he would not otherwise have had. But because the woman
whose pregnancy results from voluntary intercourse was not morally required to engage in
voluntary intercourse, her engaging in voluntary intercourse can confer on the fetus a right to her
further assistance that it would not otherwise have had.

I believe that this objection to the examples I have appealed to is successful, and that the
argument against the responsibility objection as I have thus far developed it cannot be sustained
for that reason.

(…)

We can produce an analogy that vindicates the argument against the objection while avoiding the
problem that ultimately undermines Silverstein’s argument against it. For now consider you are a
hedonist who wishes to engage in a very pleasurable activity. The activity is such that if you
engage in it, there is a chance that it will cause some gas to be released that will result in adding
a few extra months of unconscious existence to the life of some already-comatose violinist in the
world. As things now stand, this violinist has no more conscious life ahead of him. But if the gas

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is released, and if he does have a few extra months of unconscious life added as a result, it will
then become possible for you to bring him out of his coma by giving him the use of your kidneys
for nine months. There are certain devices that you can use during the pleasurable activity which
reduce the chances of gas emission but do not eliminate them entirely, but you do not like the
way the use of such devices “makes you feel” when you engage in the pleasurable activity. So
you engage in the pleasurable activity, and without such devices. As a (foreseeable but not
intended) result, some gas escapes, causing some extra unconscious time to be added to the life
of an already comatose violinist, and making it possible for him to then be brought out of his
coma if you remain plugged into him for nine months. In this case, as in Imperfect Drug I, you
are responsible for the fact that the violinist now exists, but you are not responsible for his
neediness, given that he exists. There was no action available to you on which the violinist would
still exist at this point and not be in need of the use of your kidneys. In this respect, you are like
the woman whose pregnancy is the result of voluntary intercourse. And in this case, unlike
Imperfect Drug I, you did the voluntary act that caused you to be responsible for the violinist’s
existence not because it would greatly benefit the violinist, or because you were benevolent, or
because you were morally required to do it, but merely because doing the act would be
pleasurable.39 The case of the Hedonist, then, eliminates all of the differences that ultimately
undermine the sort of examples I have to this point taken from Silverstein.

Beckwith sobre la distinción defendida por Boonin:

According to Boonin, when one is responsible for causing someone’s neediness, one is specially
responsible for providing compensation and/or assistance to the one in need. Consequently, the
parents of the unborn are responsible for assisting it because they are in fact responsible for
bringing into existence a being who is needy by nature and thus are responsible for its neediness.

Boonin sobre la objeción en torno al contraste entre dejar morir y matar:

In the case of abortion, one does not merely allow the fetus to die. A person who performs an
abortion must either first kill the fetus and then remove it or kill it in the process of removing it.

(…)

The first thing that can be said is that even if one accepts the moral relevance of the distinction
between killing and letting die, there is at least one method of abortion, hysterotomy, that is more
plausibly described as a case of letting die rather than a case of killing. Hysterotomy involves
removing the living fetus through an abdominal incision of the uterus and then allowing it to
die.42 This procedure is more invasive and more dangerous to the woman than are other
procedures, and for this reason it is typically reserved for later stages of pregnancy when other
techniques are no longer feasible.43

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Now, of course, one could object to the characterization of a procedure such as hysterotomy as
an instance of letting die rather than killing. One might argue that since removing the fetus from
the uterus (or the fetus and the uterus from the woman) actively deprives the fetus of the support
it needs in order to survive, the remover causes the death and does not merely allow it to happen.
(…) On this understanding, the very act of doing the disconnecting is itself a killing. But if we
are to characterize hysterotomy as killing on these grounds, then by parity of reasoning we will
also have to say that unplugging yourself from the violinst kills him and does not merely let him
die, since it is equally true that unplugging yourself from him actively disconnects the violinist
from the support that he needs in order to survive.

(…)

Foot (…) argues that in the end the morally important difference we are inclined to insist upon
(…) is not between killing and letting die per se, but between initiating a fatal sequence of events
and allowing a fatal sequence of events to run its course. And she suggests that this distinction
does undermine the violinist analogy. When you unplug yourself from the violinist, that is, “The
fatal sequence resulting in death is not initiated but is rather allowed to take its course.” But the
case of abortion, she argues, is “completely different. The fetus is not in jeopardy because it is in
its mother’s womb; it is merely dependent on her in the way children are dependent on their
parents for food. An abortion, therefore, [even by hysterotomy] originates the sequence which
ends in the death of the fetus” (1984: 288–9).

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