Abortion might seem to prevent a fetus from experiencing its valuable future, just like killing us does, even if it is not yet a person.6 But our futures might be valuable, in part, because we can, presently, look forward to them. Fetuses have no awareness of their futures whatsoever, and this is one important difference between their futures and our futures.
Further, an egg-and-a-sperm-that-would-fertilize-it arguably has a future akin to that of a fetus. Contraception (even by abstinence!) keeps this future from materializing.7 But contraception and abstinence aren’t wrong. Thus, it is not wrong to perform some action that prevents such a future from materializing.
5.1.5 Abortion prevents fetuses from experiencing their valuable futures
The argument against abortion that is likely most-discussed by philosophers comes from philosopher Don Marquis.[14] He argues that it is wrong to kill us, typical adults and children, because it deprives us from experiencing our (expected to be) valuable futures, which is a great loss to us. He argues that since fetuses also have valuable futures (“futures like ours” he calls them), they are also wrong to kill. His argument has much to recommend it, but there are reasons to doubt it as well.
First, fetuses don’t seem to have futures like our futures, since—as they are pre-conscious—they are entirely psychologically disconnected from any future experiences: there is no (even broken) chain of experiences from the fetus to that future person’s experiences. Babies are, at least, aware of the current moment, which leads to the next moment; children and adults think about and plan for their futures, but fetuses cannot do these things, being completely unconscious and without a mind.
Second, this fact might even mean that the early fetus doesn’t literally have a future: if your future couldn’t include you being a merely physical, non-conscious object (e.g., you couldn’t be a corpse: if there’s a corpse, you are gone), then non-conscious physical objects, like a fetus, couldn’t literally be a future person.[15] If this is correct, early fetuses don’t even have futures, much less futures like ours. Something would have a future, like ours, only when there is someone there to be psychologically connected to that future: that someone arrives later in pregnancy, after when most abortions occur.
A third objection is more abstract and depends on the “metaphysics” of objects. It begins with the observation that there are single objects with parts with space between them. Indeed almost every objectis like this, if you could look close enough: it’s not just single dinette sets, since there is literally some space between the parts of most physical objects. From this, it follows that there seem to be single objects such as an-egg-and-the-sperm-that-would-fertilize-it. And these would also seem to have a future of value, given how Marquis describes this concept. (It should be made clear that sperm and eggs alone do not have futures of value, and Marquis does not claim they do: this is not the objection here). The problem is that contraception, even by abstinence, prevents that thing’s future of value from materializing, and so seems to be wrong when we use Marquis’s reasoning. Since contraception is not wrong, but his general premise suggests that it is, it seems that preventing something from experiencing its valuable future isn’t always wrong and so Marquis’s argument appears to be unsound.[16]
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