The Controversy Over Abortions By Judith Thomson And Don Marquis Essay

The goal of Judith Jarvis Thomson in her defense of abortion is to sway the ideas of those who are against abortion by challenging the arguments they give for thinking so. She begins by stating a premise. “For the sake of the argument” a human embryo is a person. This premise is one of the arguments most opponents of abortion use, but as she points out, isn’t much of an argument at all. These people spend a lot of their time dwelling on the fact that the fetus is a person and hardly any time explaining how the fetus being a person has anything to with abortion being impermissible. In the same breath, she states that those who agree with abortion spend a lot of their time

Don Marquis agrees with anti-abortionists that abortion is morally wrong, but finds that they are not making the right arguments to justify this. There is much debate over what comprises a human being or when a fetus becomes a person, and if only a human life is of great value, so I will use the general term “X” to present Marquis’s overall argument. If X has a future like ours which has great value, then depriving X of that future is immoral. X has a future like ours, thereby making it immoral to kill X. Obviously, this is a broad argument defending the anti-abortionist viewpoint. In this case, X is a fetus, so the argument becomes much more specific. If a fetus has a future like ours which has great value, depriving a fetus of this future is morally wrong. A fetus has a future like ours, so killing the fetus is morally wrong.

Marquis argument is superior to others as he avoids casuistry terms such as “human life,” or “human being” and rests on the ethics of killing, which also apply to the fetus (Gedge & Waluchow, 2012, p224). Killing a fetus denies it the right to a valuable life just as adult human beings have. This deems abortion morally wrong.

Judith Jarvis Thomson and Don Marquis both have different views on abortion. Thomson believes that in some cases, abortion is morally permissible, due to the life of the mother. Marquis believes that abortion is almost always morally impermissible, except in extreme circumstances, because the fetus has a future life. I will simply evaluate each of the authors reasoning’s that defend their belief, and give my argument for why I believe Judith Thomson’s essay is more convincing.

In Judith A. Thomson’s article, ‘A defense of abortion’ Thomson defends her view that in some cases abortion is morally permissible. She takes this stance even with the premise that fetuses upon the moment of conception are in fact regarded as persons. However one criticism of her argument would be that there is a biological relationship between mother and fetus however there is no biological relationship between you and the violinist. Having this biological relationship therefore entails special responsibility upon the mother however there is no responsibility in the case of the violinist. Thomson argues against those who are opposed to abortion with her violinist thought experiment.

In her article, “The Defense of Abortion”, Judith Jarvis Thomson states an analogy involving a violinist. She first states that you are allowed to unplug yourself in the violinist scenario, second abortion after rape is analogous to the violinist scenario, therefore, you should be allowed to unplug yourself and be allowed to abort after rape (Chwang, Abortion slide 12). In this paper, I will argue that abortion is morally acceptable even if the fetus is considered a person. This paper will criticize premise two from the traditional argument against abortion string that killing innocent persons is wrong (Chwang, Abortion slide 9). Following the violinist analogy will be an objection to this analogy and my respons to them. One of the

The debate about the legality of abortion involves debating the legal status of the fetus. If the fetus is a person, anti-choice activists argue, then abortion is murder and should be illegal. Even if the fetus is a person, though, abortion may have justified as necessary to women’s body self-govern but that wouldn’t mean that abortion is automatically ethical. Perhaps the state can’t force women to carry pregnancies to term, but it could argue that it is the most ethical choice.

Lastly, Marquis offers an analogy, the analogy with animals. He goes to show that humans are not the only living things that can suffer. That the suffering of non-human animals is wrong, and thus inflicting pain, whether it is towards a person or non-person is wrong. To deprive someone of a future value is a misfortune no matter whom the deprivation in inflicted on. This analogous argument goes to show that abortion is wrong by taking the same form of this argument for that causing pain and suffering to non-human animals is wrong.

In his essay Why Abortion is Immoral Don Marquis attempts to argue that abortion is almost always wrong except for a few special circumstances such as when the life of the mother is being threatened by the pregnancy. In his thesis Marquis asserts that abortion is in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being and the ethics of abortion is solvable. The strongest argument that Marquis presents to defend his thesis is the claim that what makes killing wrong is the loss of the victim’s future. In this paper, I will argue that this argument fails because aborting a fetus is not in the same moral category as killing an innocent adult human being.

In the article, “Why Abortion Is Immoral”, Don Marquis begins his discussion by arguing that standard arguments or standard explanations for and against abortion are rather similar and fairly unsophisticated. He states that the debate has become “intractable.” In the sense that the two sides of the issue have become a dug-in and no one is willing to listen to the other side at this point meaning that it is an entrenched opinion. He argues that we need a fresh start to the issue a better way to think about wrongful killing, in the philosophical literature is something debated that whether wrongful killing such as murder is bad because of the effect on the murderer or the effect on the society or the effect on the victim.

In the article 'A Defense of Abortion' Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that abortion is morally permissible even if the fetus is considered a person. In this paper I will give a fairly detailed description of Thomson main arguments for abortion. In particular I will take a close look at her famous 'violinist' argument. Following will be objections to the argumentative story focused on the reasoning that one person's right to life outweighs another person's right to autonomy. Then appropriate responses to these objections. Concluding the paper I will argue that Thomson's 'violinist' argument supporting the idea of a mother's right to autonomy outweighing a fetus' right to life does not

Abortion is one of the most controversial topics of all times. The definition most people associate with abortion is the termination of unwanted pregnancy. In their essay, “The Wrong of Abortion”, Patrick Lee and Robert P. George argue that intentional abortion is unjust and therefore objectively immoral no matter the circumstances. Also, they argue that “the burden of carrying the baby is significantly less than the harm the baby would suffer by being killed; the mother and father have a special responsibility to the child; it follows that intentional abortion (even in few cases where the baby’s death is an unintended but foreseen side effect) is unjust ” (24).

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” is a uniquely reasoned argument for the right to abortion that uses strong analogies to challenge pro-life arguments that are based on the premise that a human life begins at the moment of conception. In this paper I will argue that Thomson is correct in her view and that her analogies solidify her argument, which then becomes impervious to criticism from philosophers like Keith J. Pavlischek or David B. Hershenov who bring up other factors irrelevant to Thomson argument that are easily disputable by facts.

Judith Jarvis Thomson has argued that a woman surely can defend her life against the threat to it posed by an unborn child, even if doing so involves its death. In her view, it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the mother performs an abortion on herself to save her life. I will be explaining how Thomson’s arguments for this view are not compelling. I will defend the extreme view, the view that abortion is impermissible even to save the mother's life, by demonstrating that there are key points, which undermine her house analogy and by introducing concepts that are lacking in her ownership thesis. I will argue these points assuming that a fetus is a person, every person has a right to life, and therefore a fetus has a right to life.

Abortion has always been a controversial topic since the late 20th century. Why Abortion is Immoral by Don Marquis is the discussion of whether abortion should be acceptable in our society. In this paper, I will argue against his defense of anti-abortion. First, I will show that the fetus is not considered human, so Marquis’ strategy of determining what makes killing wrong in general and applying the same reasoning to the fetus does not work. Next, I will invalidate the argument, Marquis makes, is that abortion actually deprives the fetus’s “future-like-ours.” Because of these invalid premises, I assert that Marquis fails to establish the immorality of abortion.