Human, Not Person: Mary Anne Warren on Abortion
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- Опубліковано 24 бер 2020
- In this video, we examine Mary Anne Warren's (1973) essay, "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion."
Specifically, I discuss Warren's account of "personhood" and her reasons for claiming that fetuses are not persons. If Warren is right, then abortion cannot be thought of as murder, since it does not involve the killing of a person. I end by considering challenges to Warren's view.
Note: The goal of this channel is not to promote or endorse any particular political view, party, or policy. See the channel description for more information: / @bioethicsondemand6258
This was recommended by my ethics teacher for the philsophy essay thank you for your hard work!
Thank you so much for making this video. you flimed this three years agao but you save my final paper today! Shout out to Bioethics on Demand!!!
This is a really good video, thank you.
I enjoyed this video. I do think when she argues that "infants could be adopted and therefore should not be killed". The reason this doesn't also apply to a fetus is because that non-person is dependent on living directly off of and within the non-consenting woman, causing mental/emotional and potentially physical harm. Although this non-person could be adopted after birth, the woman would still be forced to endure months of suffering (for a woman who wants a child they may enjoy the pregnancy process but for many women the emotional and physical changes especially with an unwanted pregnancy can cause serious harm). And therefore keeping the non-person alive until birthed becomes cruel and infringes on the rights of the woman. Whereas an infant after birth can almost immediately be taken into the care of someone else and cause no further harm to the birth mother, therefore there is now no valid reason to kill this non-human. I hope this makes sense
My push-back on this is that infants are also directly dependent on someone else in order to live, particularly for food, shelter from harm, and doctors in case of sickness, so by that logic the infant is still not a person. They are also dependent for much longer, several years in fact, instead of 9 months. Taking care of a child does not come close to stopping once the child is born, and it will cause that next someone just as much if not more mental/emotional harm which will of course lead to physical harm and traumas. The tricky part of this argument too is the assumption that the infant will be adopted, but what if it isn't? If no one wants the infant, does that mean we have license to kill the infant or is the mother now required to take care of it?
Doesn’t society generally function with a performance view towards rights? You have certain rights assuming you act a certain way. For example if you violate a law and are convicted of a crime you are stripped of some of your rights. So your rights are conditional on following the law, and behaving within the confines of the law.
13:29 This is a key part that I think pro-choice supporters do not recognize is that most of their arguments boil down to this type of ableism.