Infanticide and the right to life

Ratio

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 1-9

  Carter, Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949131234     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00023     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. See Michael Tooley, 'Abortion and infanticide', in Peter Singer (ed.), Applied Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). It is worth noting that no less a figure than Peter Singer has remarked that Tooley's discussion has not been bettered
2. See Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 83. And the influence of Tooley's analysis of rights is clearly evident in the 1993 edition of Practical Ethics
3. Jonathan Glover has described Tooley's discussion as 'the most convincingly argued in the literature'. Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 127
4. Tooley, 'Abortion and infanticide', p. 64
5. See H. L. A. Hart, 'Are there any natural rights?', in Jeremy Waldron (ed.), Themes of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
6. On the mooted correlation between claims (claim-rights) and duties, see W. N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions, ed. with an intro. by W. W. Cook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 96-7
7. For a denial of any strict correlation between rights and duties, see the defence of a dynamic 'interest theory' of rights in J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Ch. 7. Whereas Raz denies any strict correlation because the same rights can give rise to different duties, I would argue that all that this entails is that any correlation between rights and duties is context dependent, and not necessarily that there is no correlation between them
8. Hart, 'Are there any natural rights?' p. 82
9. See, for example, Joel Feinberg, 'The rights of animals and unborn generations', in William T. Blackstone (ed.), Philosophy and Environmental Crisis (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1974), p. 58
10. R. M. Hare, for example, argues that it is preferable to discuss what we ought to do rather than base our arguments on rights. See R. M. Hare, 'Abortion and the Golden Rule', in Philosophy and Public Affairs, IV, 3 (1975), pp. 201-222
11. Nevertheless, given Raz's approach, the relevant question would be whether or not a young infant could have an interest in continuing to live even if he or she lacked a desire to do so - a view challenged by Tooley, who argues that it is non-momentary interests that are morally significant. As he writes: 'the most plausible view is that it is being a subject of non-momentary interests that makes something a person. If this is right, there are a number of necessary conditions that something must satisfy if it is to be a person, including the possession, either now or at some time in the past, of a sense of time, of a concept of a continuing subject of mental states, and of a capacity for thought episodes.' Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 419-20. It is doubtful, however, that these are necessary conditions for having any long-term interests
12. The key illustration employed by Hohfeld, for example, of a right is that of private property. For a critique of the supposed philosophical justifications of private property, see Alan Carter, The Philosophical Foundations of Property Rights (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989)