Chapter 41 Chapter Summary

Marquis begins by observing that arguments over abortion based on claims about the human personhood or nonpersonhood of the fetus tend to result in a standoff. The strategies typically employed to resolve it are unsuccessful because they either embrace too much (e.g., the anti-abortionist’s claim that it is seriously immoral to kill anything living and human) or too little (e.g., the pro-choicer’s claim that it is seriously immoral to kill only rational agents or persons). Hoping to shift the debate away from the question of personhood, Marquis first attempts to explain why killing an adult human being is wrong. The wrong-making feature of killing, he argues, is that it deprives the victim of a valuable future. Now, just like an adult human being or a young child, a fetus has a future that includes valuable experiences, projects, and activities. Because it would inflict the loss of that future, abortion is almost always immoral, just as killing an adult or a child is almost always immoral.