PP217 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Judith Jarvis Thomson, Abortion Debate, Sentience
Document Summary
Not everything immoral should be illegal either. This is the normative legal question, sometimes called the political question. Killing of certain kinds of beings is wrong in certain circumstances. If we claim that a fetus has a right to life, we are claiming that it is the sort of thing that it is wrong to kill. Kantians define something that can bear rights as a person. However, a person does not have to be human. The classification of personhood does not refer to a biological characteristic, but rather to a moral, or sometimes legal, feature. The issue is what makes someone a person: sumner suggests sentience--the ability to experience suffering. Others suggest more rigorous criteria like autonomy, or the ability to form plans and pursue them. After all, mere sentience applies to cattle, and we don"t treat them as persons. Others, often on religious grounds, hold that an embryo is a person from the moment of conception.
