Response To Marquis's Argument

1018 Words3 Pages

Marquis’s argument Marquis presents the argument that abortion is morally wrong because it prevents the fetus from experiencing a “future like ours”. To expand on this, he argues the ethics of abortion and compares the killing of a child or human to the killing of a fetus. Since the fetus has the same standards of a future that children and adults do, that reasoning alone “follows that abortion is prima facie seriously morally wrong” (Marquis 709). By killing the fetus, we are depriving it of the memories, experiences, activities, enjoyments, etc. that it has the potential to experience. According to Marquis, killing someone is morally wrong because it deprives someone of a future they could experience. This applies to the ethics of abortion …show more content…

A strength I could give to his argument is that it is reasonable. For clarification, I believe that his argument that killing a fetus is wrong because it deprives it of a potential future is a reasonable assessment based on an analysis of morality, and not based on the principle of religion or some other outside factor. Marquis employs critical thinking in his argument, rather than defending his argument using biblical examples. I consider this to be a strength because employing one’s critical thinking, rather than parroting words written by someone else shows that you took the time to analyze the issue at hand, this being the morality of abortion for Marquis. I think one of the weaknesses of his argument is that it is riddled with too many hypotheticals and caveats. What I mean by this is that I observed in his writing that he comes up with several hypothetical scenarios that, under further scrutiny, don’t make sense once you apply it to the bigger picture. For example, one objection that you can raise against Marquis is the ethics of euthanasia, and how if all killing is morally wrong, wouldn’t that make euthanasia

Open Document