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Abortion - Issues and Conflicts

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Abortion is an issue surrounded by conflict, with highly committed arguments on both sides. Given the broad range of philosophical issues touching abortion, and the distinct style and nature of the normative arguments employed by either side, it is also a situation with rich potential for study of normative reasoning. Issues ranging from human identity and moral status to the extents of parental, personal and social moral policing power are relevant to abortion. Some of these disagreements are not merely disagreements over normative priorities, but also disagreements over meta level view of ethics. In this essay, I will explore the effect of taking an actualist versus possibilist view of the embryo, a choice that may be influential to a person’s view of abortion even though he or she isn’t aware of the choice. I will start the argument by a simple argument against abortion based on the principle of sovereign personal liberty of the mother looks like the following: P1: It is wrong to force people to do something unwillingly. P2: The law against abortion forces people to have the child without a choice. C: It is wrong to outlaw abortion. P1 is a statement of the normative principle of liberty in an unqualified, barest form. P2 is a factual implication of a law against abortion that pertains to P1. To expand and enrich this argument a little further, we need to qualify P1. It is obvious that personal sovereignty is not always true, and in some situations interference and legal force can be applied against the individual. For example, in category A, agency of the individual is subverted and outside force is necessary to enforce behavior good for the individual. In category B, individual liberty is in conflict with another interest or right belonging to an entity of moral status. In particular, when individual liberty is in conflict with another entity of moral status’s life, there is strong consideration to protect the latter. So by modifying P1 with this qualification, we obtain: P1*: It is wrong to force people to do something unwillingly, unless in protection of the life of another entity of moral status. Since abortion involves the physical destruction of the embryo or fetus at various stages of development, the entity’s life is always a strong consideration for protectio

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