Analysis Of Tooley's Response To The Potentiality Argument

My goal in this essay is to show that Tooley’s response to the Potentiality Argument (that is, the argument formulated in the essay question) is not successful and that the fetus ' potential for a valuable life and future does morally justify extending to it a right to life. I begin with a formulation of the Potentiality Argument. Next, I present Tooley’s response to this argument. Finally, I argue that this response fails to establish the claim that killing a person and letting a person die both have an equal moral standpoint.

The Potentiality Argument can be formulated as follows. If A (any being, human or nonhuman) has a potential for personhood and a valuable life, then it is morally impermissible to kill it. A fetus/infant has the

He poses a hypothetical situation in which newborn kittens are injected with a serum that would allow them to develop, later on, the mental capabilities required for becoming a sentient person with self-concept and self-awareness. Since a kitten will eventually develop human like capabilities, then it follows that it is now a potential person. In this case, Tooley states that it would be unjustifiable not to reward cats the same right to life as members of the species Homo sapiens. Following this, Tooley integrates this hypothetical situation with his moral symmetry principle to establish that the distinction between action and inaction lacks moral significance, provided both cases have the same motivation. In other words, killing a person and letting a person die both have an equal moral standpoint. The principle is illustrated in the following example from the text. “(1) Jones sees that Smith will be killed by a bomb unless he warns him. Jones 's re- action is: "How lucky, it will save me the trouble of killing Smith my- self." So Jones allows Smith to be killed by the bomb, even though he could easily have warned him. (2) Jones wants Smith dead, and there- fore shoots him” (Tooley, p. 59). In

Tooley’s claim that killing a person and letting a person die both have an equal moral standpoint is erroneous, as intentionally killing a person worsens an individual 's situation and makes you play an active role in his/her death, whereas refraining from saving a person from dying, in some cases, will not make you play an active role in his/her death. For example, let’s imagine one of your friends, A, is lying in a small hospital with person B and they ran out of oxygen tanks. You arrive at the hospital with one oxygen tank. If you give the oxygen tank to A, then B dies. In this case, you are not playing an active role in B’s death. If, on the other hand, B happens to have an oxygen tank and you detach it from him/her and give it to A, then this follows that B will die. In this case, you are playing an active role in the death of B. This example, as a result, addresses my concerns surrounding Tooley’s moral symmetry principle and shows that a moral difference does in fact exist when it comes to killing a person or refraining from saving