Phil 104 – Fall 09 Second Writing Assignment

Anderson

Chapter 4 – Abortion

1. Mary Anne Warren maintains that a person – as opposed to a merely biologically human organism – must have at least one of the following abilities: reasoning, self-awareness, ability to communicate, agency (the capacity to initiate deliberate action), or consciousness of the external world (the world outside one’s own mind).

(a) One of Warren’s arguments in defense of her analysis is this: If we were to encounter a race of alien beings (extraterrestials) on another planet, the question would immediately arise whether they were persons like ourselves and therefore have the same moral status as ourselves. Warren maintains that we would use the criteria that she has listed to decide the question. Is she right? If not, how should we decide whether they were persons or not?

(b) An implication of Warren’s analysis is that some non-human animals may actually be persons; something we may discover once we learn more about their cognitive abilities and how to communicate with them. Among the most likely possibilities here would probably be the higher apes, dolphins and whales. Is the fact that the human race has not, to date, taken this idea very seriously itself evidence that Warren’s criteria for personhood must be mistaken?

(c) Warren dismisses mere sentience (the capacity to feel pleasure/pain, light/dark, warmth/coldness and other basic kinds of sensations) as not a sufficient condition for personhood. Others, such as Bonnie Steinbock (Chapter 6), disagree with her on this. For Steinbock, a sentient being has interests of its own and any human being with interests ought not, other things being equal, to be destroyed. What could Warren say in reply?

(d) Using Warren’s criteria together with the current state of our knowledge of fetal development and early infancy, approximately when would personhood begin, or is that simply undecidable at this time?

2. Some opponents of abortion (e.g. Marquis and Quinn) argue that even if a fetus (or embryo) isn’t a person, it is certainly a potential person and no potential person, other things being equal, should be killed.

(a) What is their argument for this position?

(b) What can be said in objection to their argument?

3. A commonly heard but faulty argument in the abortion debate is this:

A fetus is a (innocent) human being.

Every innocent human being has a right to life.

Therefore, it is wrong to kill a fetus and therefore, abortion is impermissible.

In what way is this argument faulty?

Chapters 5 and 6 – Assisted Reproduction and Stem Cell Research

4. Is it wrong to allow IVF for infertile couples when one side-effect of that technology is thousands of embryos must either be destroyed or kept indefinitely in a freezer? You should respond to Peter Singer’s argument (p. 136) somewhere in your answer.

5. The new reproductive technologies such as IVF, pre-natal testing for harmful genes, egg and sperm sales and whatever else awaits us down the road of medical research raise questions of eugenics. Some cultures, for example, favor boy babies over girl babies. These new technologies make selection for male babies all the more accessible. And in all cultures, parents who can afford it will use these technologies to select against embryos that carry very harmful genes. This could eventually result in a two-class society in which the affluent have babies that are free of defective genes while the less well off will have to contend with infants that suffer horrible defects and diseases. Is this a serious worry and can anything be done about it?

6. Is surrogate motherhood baby selling or just womb renting (or neither)? And does it run the risk of exploiting young women who will do it “just for the money”, despite the fact that any pregnancy carries special risks to the gestational mother’s health?

7. Allan Buchanan rejects the arguments that biomedical enhancements (a) are wrong because they may change human nature, (b) are of benefit only to those who can afford them, (c) can have bad unforeseen consequences and (d) take the challenge out of many admirable human activities by making them too easy to perform.

How does Buchanan respond to these objections.

Chapter 7 – Reproductive Cloning

8. One common reaction to the idea of cloning a human being is this: Even if there is nothing inherently wrong with cloning a human, there is no pressing need to learn how to do this in a world that is facing so many other more urgent medical needs. What can the proponent of cloning research say in reply to this?

9. Human cloning, should it become feasible and legally permitted, is yet another technology that raises eugenics problems of the sort discussed in item 5 above. People will use cloning to select for desirable traits and against unwanted traits. (149) Does Pence answer this worry, as far as cloning is concerned, on p. 144 where he argues that cloned humans will have no significant effect on the human gene pool over two or three generations?