Marquis and Contraception

    I struggled with Don Marquis’ section on rejecting the premise that, if the ethic of killing he is arguing for is presumed correct, the use of contraception is also seriously immoral. Marquis writes, “The ethics of killing in this essay would entail that contraception is wrong only if something were denied a human future of value by contraception. Nothing at all is denied such a future by contraception, however.” He breaks down four categories of potential subjects of harm by contraception: some sperm or other, some ovum or other, a sperm and an ovum separately, and a sperm and ovum together. While I agree with Marquis on this point, I believe there are examples of the use of contraception denies a valuable future, which would require Marquis to accept that some forms of contraception are immoral. Focusing on the fourth subject, sperm and ovum together, and a form of contraception that kills sperm, spermicide, I will argue that Marquis fails to overcome the objection that contraception fails to deny a future of value in this specific case. 

     Marquis writes “the immortality of contraception is not entailed by the loss of a future like ours argument simply because there is no nonarbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the case of contraception.” However, I believe in the specific case described above, where a sperm and ovum come together but fail to fertilize because of the use of spermicide, that the argument that there is no “nonarbitrarily identifiable subject” is insufficient. In this case I find it difficult for Marquis to argue that the sperm and ovum that have joined and, under normal circumstances, would have fertilized cannot be considered an “identifiable subject.” The spermicide, which effectively kills the sperm that had the potential to join an egg, destroys the potential for a valuable future of the fertilized egg because it destroys a necessary component of the fertilization process that under normal circumstances would have potentially created a future of value.