The Ethics of Abortion

The Ethics of Abortion: A Philosophical Argument

• The author aims to present an argument demonstrating that abortion is wrong in the same circumstances as killing an adult.
• The argument has three parts, with the first part being the most challenging, involving the author's personal experience as a fetus and an embryo.
• The author asserts that killing a fetus is wrong for the same reasons that killing an adult is wrong.
• The argument rests on simple considerations of the metaphysics of identity.
• The author contends that it would have been equally wrong to have killed them before they were born as it would be to kill them now.
• The guiding intuition is that killing earlier deprives the victim of more life, making the harm greater.
• The author acknowledges that arguing that abortion is always wrong would require showing that it is always wrong to kill an adult, which is beyond the scope of the paper.
• The author asserts that most abortions are wrong based on the uncontroversial notion that it is wrong to kill an adult human being for the sorts of reasons for which most abortions are performed.
• The argument aims to demonstrate that most abortions are ethically problematic based on the harm inflicted and the metaphysical nature of identity.
• The paper does not address whether it is always wrong to kill an adult or whether the circumstances that make killing an adult permissible never befall a fetus.
• The author uses the metaphysical concept of identity and the notion of harm to argue against the permissibility of most abortions.
• The author's argument centers on the idea that the harm inflicted by killing a fetus is greater, as it deprives the individual of more life.