Taking life and the argument from potentiality

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 186-197

  Perrett, Roy W ^a  

^a MASSEY UNIVERSITY   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 4444255282     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.00029     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. This formulation is a slightly modified version of that in Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 152.
2. See, for instance, Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), chap. 4;
3. John Harris, The Value of Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), chap. 1;
4. Singer, Practical Ethics, 83-101;
5. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Bioethics, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 4.
6. For a philosophically motivated review of the relevant biology see Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
7. Cf. Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, 165-169.
8. The distinction is borrowed from Ronald Dworkin, Life's Dominion (New York: Vintage, 1994), 11.
9. See, inter alia: S. I. Benn, "Abortion, Infanticide, and Respect for Persons," in The Problem of Abortion, ed. Joel Feinberg (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1973);
10. Jonathan Glover, Causing Deaths and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977);
11. Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide;
12. Bonnie Steinbock, Life before Birth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
13. Joel Feinberg and Barbara Baum Levenbook, "Abortion," in Matters of Life and Death, 3rd ed., ed. Tom Regan (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993).
14. See David B. Annis, "Abortion and the Potentiality Principle," Southern Journal of Philosophy 22 (1984): 155-163;
15. Michael J. Wreen, "T he Power of Potentiality," Theoria 52 (1986): 16-40;
16. Edward Covey, "Physical Possibility and Potentiality in Ethics," American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1991): 237-244.
17. Robert C. Stalnaker, "A Theory of Conditionals," in Causation and Conditionals, ed. Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 173.
18. On the failure of transitivity for subjunctive conditionals, see also John L. Pollock, Subjunctive Reasoning (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976).
19. Stalnaker, "A Theory of Conditionals," 173n.
20. See, for instance, Nicola Poplawski and Grant Gillett, "Ethics and Embryos," Journal of Medical Ethics 17 (1991): 62-69, which firmly rejects such a notion: "The total form of a human being exists through time. We can also say that a single individual makes up that form throughout its temporal existence. Therefore, if we can justify a moral value for that individual at one time, that moral value ought to be conferred on the total form throughout its temporal existence" (64).
21. John T. Noonan, Jr., "An Almost Absolute Value in History," in The Morality of Abortion, ed. John T. Noonan, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
22. Peter Singer and Karen Dawson, "IVF Technology and the Argument from Potential," in Embryo Experimentation, ed. Peter Singer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
23. Cf. Stephen Buckle, "Arguing from Potential," in Embryo Experimentation, ed. Peter Singer et al.; Jim Stone, "Why Potentiality Matters," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1987): 815-830.
24. John Perry, ed., Personal Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), part 1.
25. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 210.
26. Roderick M. Chisholm, Person and Object (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976);
27. Richard Swinburne, "Personal Identity," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973-74): 231-248;
28. Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984);
29. Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
30. Rosalind Hursthouse, Beginning Lives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 80.
31. Steinbock, Life before Birth, 64.
32. Massimo Reichlin, "The Argument from Potential," Bioethics 11 (1997): 1-23.
33. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 394.
34. Don Locke, "The Parfit Population Problem," Philosophy 62 (1987): 137.
35. Cf. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 367.
36. See further Parfit, Reasons and Persons, part 4;
37. Derek Parfit, "Overpopulation and the Quality of Life," in Applied Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986);
38. David Heyd, Genethics: Moral Issues in the Creation of People (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992);
39. Nick Fotion and Jan C. Heller, eds., Contingent Future Persons (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997).
40. "Overpopulation and the Quality of Life," 150.
41. For forceful criticism of this commonsense view see Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).