I don’t know if I fully agree with Marquis’ assessment of abortion but I did find it the most interesting. What I found fascinating was the idea that killing is wrong because it deprives an individual of all future enjoyments or experiences. I’m not sure why but this seems like a fairly weak ethical justification, yet also completely correct. It says that the act of killing is not wrong in itself but rather for what it entails, namely death or more specifically the loss of a life lived in the future. Marquis says that this position avoids the sort of rights arguments usually construed as, “it is wrong to kill to kill another person because they are rational, they are biologically a human being, it brutalizes the murderer, ect”. The act of killing, according to Marquis, is not in itself unethical but rather that it brings the consequence of death. But many things bring death as a consequence. Would it be comprehensible to say someone was “murdered” by nature if they die from exposure? Surely exposure also brings death, and it is in the dying of another that an act is made unethical, why then can we not say that nature is unethical, or even more radically that life is unethical because it can be seen as the slow murdering of an individual until their eventual death? Everything you do, by virtue of taking up time, contributes to your eventual death. That does not mean that making soup or typing this blog is unethical, and it certainly does not mean that it is murderous.
Murder is fundamentally an act performed by a person with another person as its target, to say then that ethics in this situation do not concern how a person is defined to me seems disingenuous. If murder can only be performed by people and a murdered victim can only be defined first and foremost as a “murdered person”, "murdered animal" ect it seems absolutely necessary to nail down a definition of what being a person entails before we can rightly say that something has been murdered. This brings us back to the debate that Marquis lays out in the beginning: whether a person is defined through reason, biology, divine sanction or whatever. The debate over abortion (or murder or nearly any ethical question) necessarily entails how the objects in question, whether fetuses, people, animals, the handicapped, ect are defined. The question then becomes which of the myriad ways to define a person is correct?