Moral Issue Behind Murder Essay Example

L.E. Goodman poses a great point in his article “The Good Society.” He implies that certain things are simply wrong. For example, Goodman (2010) states, “Murder is wrong because it destroys a human subject” (p 3). We will discover in this essay that there are several types of murder. Then, we can decide given the circumstances if Goodman’s statement holds to be true. Abortion is one of the most debated issues amongst Americans. The advocates for decriminalization of contraception and abortion, both in the early twentieth century and among second wave feminist, first built their cases on radical ethical and social values; universal rights of privacy, of control over one’s own body, of women’s citizenship as well as social equality(Burns, 2010). But antiabortion advocates think of abortion as being like the Holocaust. Being that the fetus is considered a human being even in the womb, abortion is technically murder; or is it? Chris Kaposy (2010) says in his article, “Proof and Persuasion in the Philosophical Debate about Abortion” that in order to show that abortion is wrong; one must first establish that fetuses have full moral standings (Kaposy, 3). Susan Sherwin argues that pregnant women can justifiably refuse to view their fetus as having full moral standing because of the ontological dependence of the fetus on the pregnant woman. She goes on to say that the fetus would not even exist without this unique and intimate dependency on the pregnant woman (Kaposy, 6). Given these facts, I feel that fetus is a human and that abortion is in fact murder. On the other hand, if a person is threatened by death themselves, then it is morally excusable. As with abortion, the death penalty is a moral issue that the whole world is concerned with. In the book Intoduction to ethics and social responsibility, Mosser believes that the death penalty raises questions both about its morality and its effectiveness (Death Penalty, para. 2). As far as the state is concerned, the