The debate over the morality of abortion hinges on fundamental disagreements about when personhood begins and the extent of individual bodily autonomy. Two seminal philosophical essays that have profoundly shaped this discussion are Don Marquis's "Why Abortion Is Immoral" (1989) and Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion" (1971). While Thomson famously argues for abortion rights by invoking bodily autonomy, even if a fetus is considered a person, Marquis presents a compelling case against abortion by focusing on the loss of future experiences. Examining their core arguments reveals that Marquis's position, by directly confronting the value of a potential future, offers a more philosophically robust challenge to the permissibility of abortion than Thomson's widely cited thought experiments.
Marquis's central thesis is that abortion is morally wrong because it deprives a fetus of a valuable future of experiences. He posits that what makes killing an adult human being wrong is not simply the loss of conscious experience, but the loss of all those experiences that would have constituted a future life. This "future-like-ours" argument extends this principle to fetuses, asserting that they too have a prima facie claim to a future that is morally significant. Marquis carefully avoids defining personhood in terms of consciousness or self-awareness, which are notoriously difficult to pinpoint and have problematic implications for infants or those in comas. Instead, he focuses on the potentiality for such experiences, which he believes is present from conception. His argument is designed to be inclusive, applying to a wide range of cases and sidestepping the biological or biological-based definitions of life that often lead to intractable disputes. For example, a violinist in Thomson's scenario might be a person with conscious experiences, but the argument against killing them is rooted in their right to life, not solely the deprivation of future experiences. Marquis's approach offers a unified explanation for why it is wrong to kill both adults and fetuses.
Judith Jarvis Thomson, on the other hand, famously employs the violinist analogy to argue that even if a fetus is considered a person with a right to life, a woman has a right to control her own body and can therefore terminate an unwanted pregnancy. In her scenario, a violinist, who is a person, is plugged into a person's circulatory system, and to save his life, that person must remain connected for nine months. Thomson argues that while it would be good of the person to remain connected, they are not morally obligated to do so. This thought experiment is designed to illustrate that the right to life does not necessarily entail the right to use another person's body. Her argument centers on the distinction between a right to life and a right to be sustained by another person, suggesting that the latter is not automatically granted by the former. While influential, Thomson’s argument can be seen as sidestepping the core question of whether the fetus is a person with a full right to life in the first place, and instead focuses on the implications of that potential personhood in relation to the pregnant individual’s autonomy.
Marquis's argument directly addresses and attempts to resolve the core moral intuition that terminating a developing human life is problematic, regardless of the precise moment personhood is attained. By focusing on the loss of a future, he provides a compelling reason to believe that abortion is not merely a matter of bodily autonomy but a significant moral harm. His approach, for instance, would account for why it is wrong to kill a young child, not just because they are currently experiencing joy, but because they have a vast potential for future happiness and fulfillment. This framework offers a more comprehensive ethical justification for prohibiting abortion than Thomson's, which, while powerfully defending bodily autonomy, relies on specific hypothetical scenarios that do not fully capture the nuanced moral weight of ending a developing life. The future-like-ours argument posits that the entity in question possesses a good that is being taken away, a good that is intrinsically valuable and deserves moral consideration.
In conclusion, while Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion" offers a powerful and widely discussed argument for abortion rights based on bodily autonomy, Don Marquis's "Why Abortion Is Immoral" provides a more philosophically grounded and comprehensive challenge. Marquis's focus on the deprivation of a future of experiences, rather than on contested definitions of personhood or the specifics of bodily autonomy, offers a stronger ethical basis for considering abortion morally impermissible. His argument effectively addresses the intuition that ending a developing human life represents a profound loss, making it a more potent philosophical counterpoint in the ongoing debate.