Preview

Why Abortion Is Immoral Don Marquis Summary

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
895 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Why Abortion Is Immoral Don Marquis Summary
In “Why abortion is immoral,” by Don Marquis, Marquis sets out an argument that abortion is “seriously immoral that it is in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being.” Marquis first wants us to understand why killing a person is wrong. He presents us with an argument that the loss of one’s life is one of the greatest losses one can suffer. Because this prevents a person from having a valuable human future, a future like ours. What makes killing any adult human being wrong? If a person is killed all the experience, activities, projects, and enjoyment would be deprive from a person future. Therefore, Marquis believe that killing is one of the worst of crimes because their future is taken away along with their life. Many people who agree with abortion would disagree with Marquis that abortion is the same as killing a person, as much as killing the fetus that would later become a …show more content…
This is where she introduce her famous violinist story. Thomson ask us to imagine “that you were kidnapped by the society of music lovers and that you woke up to find that the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours and you were sharing your kidneys. The director of the hospital then tell you that if you unplugged the cord the violinist will die, and you will be plugged for only nine month and by then you will recover. You also come to find out that by saving the violinist, its killing you because its making your kidney weak. The doctor then tells you that it’s not nine months but nine years. What would you do? Because Thomson believes that all persons have the right to live and violinist are person. We assume that they have a right to life. Thomson then state “ that you have the right to decide what will happen to and in your body, but a person right to live outweighs your right to decide what happens to and in your

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    1 )The relationship between Thompson’s and Marquis’ arguments are very different, but I believe both are compatible with each other. They both take the personhood out of the question, so there is no debate on if the fetus is a human in the womb. Marquis discusses voluntary conception and Thompson does not really discuss that. Thompson’s conclusion deals more with the exceptional cases that Marquis doesn’t explain at all. Thompson weighs the rights of the individuals involved in the pregnancy like the mother and fetus against each other. Marquis, on the other hand, focuses on the concept of what makes killing wrong thus killing a fetus that could possibly have a future like ours is bad. His conclusion focuses on the rights of the victim in the mother/fetus situation. The mortality of the situation in both arguments deals with which person’s rights out ways the other’s. In Marquis, the fetus’ rights outweigh the mother’s rights. In Thompson’s argument, the mother’s rights can trump the fetus’ rights in certain circumstance.…

    • 420 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    PHL 292 - Exam 1 Study Guide

    • 2595 Words
    • 11 Pages

    According to Don Marquis, author of ‘The Immorality of Abortion’, the reason abortion is wrong is:…

    • 2595 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Don Marquis believed that abortion was impermissible. He wrote a paper titled Why Abortion is Immoral which he argues about how abortion is seriously immoral and is in the same category as killing an innocent adult human being. Marquis’s arguments are the opposite of what it is that I am arguing. Marquis believes that a fetus is a person, so a fetus has a right to life. He believes that unless it is extreme circumstances it is immoral to kill a normal adult human because it causes “the loss to the victim of the value of its future” (Marquis, 192) and this is the equivalent to what happens when someone has an abortion.…

    • 218 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    After reading “A defense of Abortion” by Judith Jarvis Thomson and what he had to say with his violinist analogy involving the kidney replacement. I agree with what he has to say on not only abortion itself but, whether or not a fetus should have the right to the women’s body. I don’t think that the fetus should be given the right to use the women’s body because what if she does not what to have a baby and ends up getting pregnant anyway. Also, each time a woman engages in sexual intercourse, she is not inviting the fetus to live inside her body. This is why birth control and other contraceptives are not a sure deal when dealing with sexual intercourse. What if the birth control method fails and the women end's up getting pregnant? She did…

    • 404 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Abortion has always been a controversial topic in America. People have been separated into “pro life” and “pro choice” groups who support completely opposite topics. In “When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense”, Frederica Mathewes-Green successfully persuades readers why she is against abortion by utilizing personal anecdotes when switching from pro choice to pro life, alarming statistics and exposing a baby’s humanity using sympathetic language.…

    • 1021 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In this argument, right to life is closely connected with the future- a future like ours concept. We might be tempted to ask what is so unique about our future?! What does the future hold for us?! Our future consists of unique experiences- either good or bad, different activities, pleasures and accumulation of knowledge and etc. All of these experiences have value to us. Sometimes we might not value things that are going to happen in our future because we might think that our future is unknown. For Marquis, the future has value independent of whether or not it is recognized by the person or the fetus. For instance, a suicidal teenager might not see any value to her future but Marquis would maintain that her future has value. Having a future like ours alone is enough of a reason for Marquis to put human fetus under the umbrella of morality, which in this case is, in fact, connected to the issue of killing or aborting the embryo. He is approaching the morality of abortion from the future like ours perspective but not from genealogical or biological factors about the embryo. So a being can have a future like ours but not be a person. For instance, we can also apply this concept to a newborn baby or a toddler. A newborn baby or a toddler doesn’t have the conceptual capacity of an adult human but he/she has a future like ours. So Marquis holds that one can have a future like ours even…

    • 1468 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Marquis believes that abortion is “morally unjustified” (525). His argument is that “it is wrong to kill us because such killing deprives us of all the value of our futures” (525). He also argues that fetuses are close enough to being like us and that is it just as wrong to kill them as it is to kill us. The conclusion of his argument is that not all abortions are wrong since there may be other conditions in some cases such as “abortion before implantation, when the life of the woman is threatened by a pregnancy or abortion and abortion after rape”…

    • 1058 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Marquis gives a definition of abortion as being “an action intended to bring about the death of a fetus for the sake of the woman who carries it.” Marquis says that both sides of the argument can agree that everyone has a right to life. His question then becomes what it is that makes a person be identified as a person. He gives the criteria for being a person is simply being identified as biologically human. He argues that statement saying that, that criteria is too broad and his example of that is human cancer cells being identified under that criteria. Human cancer cells are obviously not something given rights thus making the criteria too broad. An example of a narrow definition consists of the points that personhood consists of “having a concept of self that persists through time, desires its continued existence, and is can set goals for future life and how to achieve those goals.” Obviously a fetus is not developed to have those abilities so it crosses that argument as too…

    • 1830 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Warren states that the anti-abortionist must show that the fetus is a person in the full moral sense, not just in a genetic sense. The moral community, she believes, consists of all and only people, rather than merely human beings. She finds a distinction between a human being (someone genetically human) and a person (someone we have included in our moral community). She gives the example of finding life forms on another planet, and questions how humanity would decide if they should be treated as persons, or as potential sources of food. The determining factors she decides on are five traits of personhood: consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate, and self-awareness.…

    • 1359 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Marquis stated in his writing “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.” (Wolff pg. 361). Marquis thus suggest that a proper contention for an anti-abortionist (Value of the future account) must be founded on the theory that if someone is not afforded the ‘opportunity’ to experience certain gains or projects due to the negligence/actions of others then whomever is responsible for the loss of that person’s life is in fact morally…

    • 656 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Thomson Abortion

    • 860 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Johnson starts off by going back to history telling the audience Roe v. Wade was announced during the "Dark Ages" stating "In the ensuing decades, knowledge regarding the development of unborn humans, and their capacities at various stages of growth, has advanced in quantum leaps." (Johnson), putting an example of why doctors should administer anesthesia into an unborn child around twenty weeks of pregnancy. Thomson's article starts off by explaining the alteration between baby rights and mother's rights coming from her very own perspective. She begins with how a woman has the right to choose her own lifestyle and how they want to live as long as it does not take away someone else's right to live and jumping straight to facts explaining her reasons. A difference between Johnson's and Thomson's articles is that Thomson gives her own analogy for her choice and debate on abortion and describes it as "...someone waking up strapped to a famous, but unconscious violinist." (Thomson). She uses this analogy to give the audience a different and better view on abortion. Thomson also uses number of rebuttals on her arguments and debates after each one of her paragraphs from each content. The two articles contrast in using examples. Thompson brings out more examples and has a bigger argument with abortion and the…

    • 860 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    According to Don Marquis, abortion is seriously morally wrong because it is an act of killing a being with a right to life and killing a being with a right to life is seriously morally wrong because it “deprive[s] all the value of [it’s] future” (Marquis, 2009). Marquis presents reasons for thinking that his account of the wrongfulness of killing is superior to any other account. He offers an analogy that the suffering of other animals…

    • 689 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    John Marquis On Abortion

    • 1032 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Marquis argues that killing a fetus deprives it of a valuable future/future like ours, and concludes by saying abortion is not morally permissible. I agree with Marquis’s argument that it is wrong to kill a fetus through abortion because I believe that they have a valuable future as all humans do. Abortion is defined as the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy, which is most often performed during the first 28 weeks of pregnancy. (dictionary.com) Furthermore I do agree with Marquis that majority of deliberate abortions are seriously immoral, however I do believe that in some cases it is permissible, for instance choosing to have an abortion after being sexually assaulted or due to life threatening circumstances.…

    • 1032 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The fetus’s potential of what it will be in the future (Lee 2015). Killing a fetus is killing an adult human being due to the potential of what it could be. According to this logic, killing an adult human being is wrong, therefore, it is wrong to kill a fetus. Killing an innocent person because their existence in the world would make the killer’s life miserable is homicide and can’t be justified (Lee 2015). A proposed way to look at it is, to kill our boss because he makes your life miserable and intolerable and you can’t find another job is not a justified reason to kill your boss(Lee 2015). In this example, your boss is the fetus and just because the fetus will make your life intolerable is not grounds for having an abortion (Lee 2015). To abort a fetus is the loss of that person’s future, specifically, all the value of that future. A fetus can be said to have a future and potential therefore, killing a fetus is wrong. It is just as bad as killing an adult human being which is illegal (Marquis 2014).…

    • 2145 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Why Abortion Is Immoral

    • 491 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Professor Marquis starts off the main body of his essay by dissecting the major arguments for the pros and cons of abortion. He basically simplifies the arguments down to the fact that Anti-abortionist tend to believe that fetuses are people so abortion is murder and pro-choicer views tend to rely on the idea that fetuses are not people and abortion is not a wrongful killing. According to him there is a standoff. In order for abortion to be proven either immoral or permissible he suggests that it must first be fully understood why killing is wrong.…

    • 491 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays