The Department of Social Science, Alabama A&M University, Huntsville, Alabama.
Bioethics. 2021 Feb;35(2):207-213. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12776. Epub 2020 Jun 24.
Common-sense morality seems to dictate that newborn babies strictly outrank non-human animals on an ordered list of subjects of moral consideration. This is best described as the view that newborn babies have a higher moral status than any non-human animal. In this article, I will argue that this common-sense claim about the special moral status of newborn babies makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that fetuses, including pre-conscious fetuses, also have a higher moral status than any non-human animal-indeed, as high as newborn babies. While this conclusion does not quite entail that abortion is generally seriously immoral, it does seem to follow that it would be no less difficult to justify (even relatively early) abortion than it would be to justify killing a newborn.
常识道德似乎表明，在道德考量的主体有序列表中，新生儿严格优于非人类动物。这可以最好地描述为这样一种观点，即新生儿的道德地位高于任何非人类动物。在本文中，我将论证，这种关于新生儿特殊道德地位的常识性主张使得人们很难避免这样一个结论，即胎儿，包括无感知意识的胎儿，也比任何非人类动物具有更高的道德地位——实际上，与新生儿一样高。虽然这个结论并不完全意味着堕胎通常是极其不道德的，但似乎可以得出这样的结论，即即使是相对早期的堕胎，也与杀死新生儿一样难以证明其正当性。
