Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.I think this works as a "Modest Proposal"-type satire that is really a critique of abortion.
“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”
As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.
The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”....
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
"After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?"
An article by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva in the Journal of Medical Ethics:
Labels:
abortion,
babies,
ethics,
philosophy
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