The “Future Like Ours” Argument Against Abortion

Both pro-lifers and pro-choicers make claims about their positions that they take to be quite obvious and sufficient for establishing abortion as either an immoral or a moral practice. On one side, pro-lifers claim that human life begins at conception. Since this can be established scientifically by looking at the nature of the chromosomes present in a fertilized egg, it is enough for the pro-lifer to conclude that abortion (at any stage of pregnancy) is morally akin to murder. On the other side, pro-choicers claim that fetuses are quite obviously not persons. Since fetuses lack certain psychological properties of personhood (e.g., reason, mentation, etc.), it is enough for the pro-choicer to conclude that most abortions (esp. early ones) are not wrongful killings. Generally speaking then, each side wants to utilize a governing moral principle that will allow for their particular position to stand as correct.

Examining the respective positions more closely, we find that both make a similar move and suffer from a similar difficulty. When pro-lifers claim “it is wrong to kill an innocent human being” they utilize a biological category to establish their moral standpoint. That is, invoking the biological category of “human being” in reference to the fetus is enough to establish that abortion is morally wrong. When pro-choicers claim “it is only wrong to kill persons, rational beings, etc.” they utilize a psychological category to establish their moral standpoint. That is, the category of “personhood” understood by way of psychological criteria does the job of establishing that abortion is not immoral. The difficulty with these is explaining why either a biological category or a psychological one should make a moral difference, as both seem to rely on circular reasoning. For example: why should I not kill a human being? …because all human life is morally valuable. Or: why should I not kill a person? …because being a person, reasoning, etc. is what gives an individual moral worth. It seems that no matter what category I prefer for making a moral claim about abortion, I am already presuming that my preferred category makes the moral difference. But in doing so, it is difficult to avoid resorting to circular reasoning.

Don Marquis, in his article “Why Abortion is Immoral,” The Journal of Philosophy (1989), proposes that we may bypass the above difficulties by addressing the question of abortion in light of the more general discussion on the ethics of killing. That is, before we address the morality of abortion, we should ask: what makes killing wrong in the first place? According to Marquis, killing is wrong not because it brutalizes the killer nor because of the effects on friends and relatives left behind, but because of the effect it has on the victim. The loss of one’s life is the greatest possible loss anyone can suffer because it “deprives one of all the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one’s future.” It is not merely changing the biological state of a victim from alive to dead that it is wrong, but the effect of that change on the victim’s future. In Marquis’ own words, “When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value which would have been part of my future personal life, but also what I would come to value.” His conclusion: what makes killing any adult human being wrong is “the loss of his or her future.”

Marquis thinks this explanation for the wrongness of killing should be preferred if it fits with our natural intuitions on the matter and if there is no other better explanation. In addition, he finds this explanation to be supported by several considerations: (1) it explains why we regard killing as one of the worst crimes; (2) it is incompatible with the view that it is wrong to kill only beings that are biologically human (e.g., aliens and some animals); (3) it does not entail that euthanasia is wrong (since those who face an incurable future of pain would not lose a future of value); and (4) it accounts for the wrongness of killing newborns and infants (since they indeed have futures of value like adults; personhood theories cannot easily account for why it is morally wrong to kill infants).

So, if the primary reason for the wrongness of killing is that it deprives one of his or her future, then this has obvious implications for abortion. Every normal fetus has “a set of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identical with the futures of adult human beings and are identical with the futures of young children.” Since fetuses have a “future like ours” then it follows that abortion is a serious moral wrong. Thus, it is not the category of “being human” or “being a person” that makes the moral difference; it is the category of having “a valuable future like ours.” What is more, under this theory abortion could only be justified if another life (e.g., the life of the mother) was threatened by not aborting.

The “future like ours” argument is the best non-religious argument against abortion that I know of. What are your thoughts on it?