"A New Defense of Abortion" by Kurt Liebegott

Kurt Liebegott's PhD in philosophy dissertation A New Defense of Abortion is available for free download from Google Drive and from Dropbox. 

ABSTRACT

Liebegott, Kurt Charles. Ph.D., Purdue University, August, 2010. A New Defense of Abortion. Major Professor: Martin Curd.

This dissertation is a new defense of the moral permissibility of abortion. 

The first chapter gives definitions, methodology, and an overview of the current abortion debate. The first chapter also addresses the Benefit of the Doubt Argument, which says that abortion should be treated as morally wrong on the chance that the anti-abortion position is correct and abortion is murder. This argument fails because it assumes a counterintuitive standard of doubt and parallel arguments outside of the abortion debate fail. 

The second chapter defends Judith Jarvis Thomson’s pro-abortion violinist argument against the Responsibility Objection, which says that a woman who becomes pregnant due to voluntary intercourse is responsible for the need of the fetus for her body and so cannot have a morally permissible abortion. The Responsibility Objection is circular because abortion fails to meet this responsibility only if abortion is already morally wrong, so the Responsibility Objection fails. 

The third chapter addresses the arguments of Patrick Lee and Francis Beckwith that abortion is morally wrong because fetuses are human substances with an essential right to life. These arguments fail because they cannot handle cases involving stored IVF zygotes or creating or transferring consciousness. In these cases the human substance proposal either is shown to support the pro-abortion position rather than the anti-abortion position or has highly implausible ethical implications that make it almost certainly false. 

The final chapter addresses the argument of Don Marquis that abortion is morally wrong because it robs fetuses of their valuable futures. This argument fails because the nature of time limits the plausible interpretations of what it means to rob a fetus of its future. Either the future is real, or it is not. If the future is real, then this argument gives wrong answers when applied outside of the abortion debate. If the future is not real, then this argument reduces to the argument addressed in the third chapter that abortion is morally wrong because a fetus is a human substance. 

The overall conclusion is that the pro-abortion position is stronger and the anti-abortion position is much weaker than is usually believed.