Argument against Marqui

Marqui takes his readers through his process to discover if abortion is morally permissible or not. He concludes that what makes murder wrong is that it denies the victim any chance in the future to do anything valuable, because this is what makes murder wrong Marqui goes on to say that abortion must be wrong because it denies the fetus any chance for a future. He goes on even further to show readers the weight of a fetus’s life and an adult human beings life, “Hence this argument should be taken as showing that abortion is preemptively very seriously wrong, where the presumption is very strong- as strong as the presumption that killing another adult human being is wrong.” (263). In this claim Marqui draws a parallel between the morality of killing an adult human being and aborting a fetus, and that the wrongness of killing an adult human being and aborting a fetus are equally wrong. I find issue in this argument because the life of an adult human being and the life of a fetus are drastically different, and it is a false comparison to claim that it is equally wrong to kill an adult human being and abort a fetus. The adult human being, if he or she is behaving like a rational social animal, will have fostered relationships with their family and friends, they probably have a job and are doing something that affects the community. A fetus has not made any relationships or behaved in a social way at all. If the adult human being were to be killed than his or her community will have been impacted in some way.  The life of a fetus impacts far less people than the life of an average adult human being, namely just the fetuses mother and father and, perhaps, close family will even know of its existence. The fetus has not done anything, consciously, to benefit his or her community and family. The future of the fetus is mostly hypothetical, who knows if it will actually do anything worth-while or otherwise in its life. The adult human being, on the other hand, has established value in his or her life; therefore his or her life is a more prominent loss if he or she dies. Later on in his essay Marqui briefly touches on the idea that fetuses and the adult human being are different because of the fetuses lack of life, “…for fetuses do not have experiences, activities, and projects to be continued or discontinued.” (Marqui). But after admitting that there are some differences Marqui does not change his claim that adult human being’s life has more value than a fetus.