What Makes Killing Wrong?
The Beginning and End of Life
This is the first class of Unit #2 of our course. We've finished learning a bit about what philosophy is and how to use arguments, and now we will be digging into topics concerning the beginning and end of life, focusing especially on the case of abortion - one of the most perpetually politically divisive moral issues in American life over the last sixty years or more.
Course Video #5: Criticizing Arguments
Pay close attention - criticizing arguments is central to what you will be asked to do for Assignment #2, due before your sections this week. Make sure that you get a head start on the assignment and don’t leave it to the last minute, as it is worth 5% of your course grade.
Don Marquis
Our reading for today's class is by Donald Marquis. Don Marquis is a retired philosopher who taught for his entire career at the University of Kansas. He is most famous for the article that we are reading for this class, 'Why Abortion is Immoral', which was originally published in 1989, and has since then been reprinted over 80 times. The vast majority of courses like this one at universities around the country assign this very same article, and many people believe that it gives the best or one of the best arguments for the conclusion that killing a fetus is in the same category with killing an adult human being.
As you will see, Marquis is a clear example of someone who is in some sense against abortion. But you should pay very close attention to what makes Marquis's argument more careful and sophisticated than most of the arguments that you will already be familiar with that abortion is wrong. Marquis's argument is also limited in scope. Pay very close attention to exactly what conclusion he says that he is arguing for, and spend some time thinking about what this conclusion says about typical controversial examples of abortion, including cases in which the mother's life is threatened by the pregnancy, the pregnancy resulted from rape, or the fetus has a developmental abnormality that may prevent it from living a normal human life.
Key Concepts
Marquis' article uses several important concepts that we haven't yet introduced in class. These include the ideas of necessary and sufficient conditions, and the concept of something being prima facie wrong. Watch out for other terms that you don't recognize or understand, so that we can make a list of them for class.
necessary condition - To say that A is a necessary condition for B means that in order to be B, you have to be A. Or put differently, it is impossible for something to be B without being A. Or rephrased again, it is necessary that if something is B, it is also A.
sufficient condition - To say that A is a sufficient condition for B means that being A guarantees that you are also B. Or put differently, it is impossible for something to be A without being B. Or rephrased again, it is necessary that if something is A, it is also B.
Note that you can see from these definitions that A being necessary for B and B being sufficient for A are the same thing. So if A is necessary for B and B is also necessary for A, we sometimes say that A is both necessary and sufficient for B. The idea of conditions that are both necessary and sufficient will come up again periodically throughout the course.
prima facie wrong - Marquis talks about the idea that abortion is prima facie wrong. 'Prima facie' means 'on the face of it'. So to say that abortion is prima facie wrong is to say that on the face of it, or by default, it is wrong. This leaves open the possibility that not all abortions are wrong, because in some cases there are extenuating circumstances. In fact, we'll see later that it is possible that there could be many kinds of extenuating circumstances, even if abortion is prima facie wrong.
In case you're interested...
This is not assigned for class, but in case you're interested, the video below is Don Marquis debating Peter Singer about the morality of abortion: