On Patheos, pro-choice blogger Bob Seidensticker has formulated an argument for abortion that he calls the “Spectrum Argument” for abortion. First, I’d just like to take a moment to say that it’s refreshing to find a pro-choice blogger who actually attempts to make a logical argument for his position, rather than the rhetoric, demonizing of […]
I have previously explained two good arguments for the pro-life position, the Substance View and the Future of Value arguments. I would like to share with you a third. It’s an argument that Alexander Pruss has termed an identity-based argument. Stephen Napier defends a similar argument which he has termed the Unity argument, but my exposition of this argument […]
I have spent four parts in this series responding to Warren’s argument that the unborn cannot be considered persons. Warren wrote her essay in 1973 in a publication called The Monist, but in 1982 she re-published the essay with an added postscript. One of the objections she was receiving to her paper is that it would also justify infanticide as […]
In part one, I examined Warren’s claim about humanity, in part two I examined Warren’s qualifications for personhood and showed why the unborn qualify, and in part three I examined Warren’s two questions about personhood and showed that her position fails to disqualify the unborn from personhood. In this article, I will examine her argument […]
In part one of this series, I examined Warren’s definition of humanity, and in part two I examined her argument about what a person is and showed why the unborn certainly qualify. This article will be the third part of five, in which I’ll examine Warren’s claims about the right to life. 3. Fetal Development […]
[Today’s guest post by Timothy Hsiao is part of our paid blogging program.] Pro-choice philosophers have offered various laundry lists of criteria that all purport to list the properties relevant to being a person, i.e. an intrinsically valuable being worthy of moral concern and protection. One such proposal holds that the possession of a brain […]
In part one of this examination, I showed that the pro-life position is not logically incoherent in considering the unborn to be human beings, both in the genetic sense and the moral sense. In this article, I’ll examine Warren’s criteria for personhood and show how the unborn certainly qualify. 2. Defining the moral community. Warren […]
I recently gave an in-depth critique of one of the most important articles ever written on the abortion issue. I would like to turn my attention now to another popular essay written by Mary Anne Warren called On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. Whereas Thomson argued that pro-choice people can assume the unborn […]
[Today’s post by Prayson Daniel is part of Secular Pro-Life’s paid blogging program.] Tracking Baruch Brody’s view, brain-life theorists claim that in order to be fully human, a being must possess properties “such that their loss would mean the going out of existence (the death) of a human being” (Brody 1975, 102). The property of […]
In my previous article on Personhood, I explained that what makes us “persons” (if you must use the term) is our inherent nature as rational, moral agents. While I tend not to focus on personhood arguments unless the topic is broached by the other person, I can only see one reason for disqualifying the preborn […]
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