In her paper On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Mary Anne Warren argues for the moral permissibility of abortion. She handles this by going two routes:

Purpose:

The purpose of this assignment is to have you practice the skills necessary in completion of Student Outcomes 4-6, these are:

• Understand and apply the criteria of correct philosophical reasoning
• Understand the difference between a rhetorically good argument and a rationally good argument
• Identify, reconstruct and evaluation arguments posed by philosophers

In doing this also, you will be practicing the skills necessary for Student Outcome 7, which is to present a solution to a philosophical problem. But, in a round-about way, each of the outcomes are present.

Task:

In her paper On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, Mary Anne Warren argues for the moral permissibility of abortion. She handles this by going two routes:

1. The permissibility of abortion even if we classify fetuses as people.
2. Showing that fetuses are not in fact people.

As was explained in the lecture, the main question behind whether abortions are permissible concerns whether fetuses are people. Your task is to chose one of these two routes that she takes and then answer the following (depending on which you go with):

1. This is the first route which you could take. If you go this way you need to:
   1. present and explain, in your own words, the Violinist Thought-Experiment
   1. present and explain what it shows
   1. present and explain what its short-comings are (that is, what cases does it not prove are permissible) 
   1. say whether you think this thought-experiment applies well in showing the permissibility of abortion in the relevant cases and why.
2. This is the second route which you could take. If you go this way you need to:
   1. present and explain, in your own words, the traditional argument against abortions (this is found in paragraph 23 of the reading)
   1. explain, in your own words, why, according to Warren, this argument is bad
   1. present and explain, in your own words, what it takes to be a person rather than just a human (according to Warren) (this is also the part where you say whether Warren thinks fetuses count as people)
   1. say whether you think Warren’s argument is good and why you think that.

Each of these should take you around a paragraph to answer. Each of them are worth 5pts. Labeling your paragraphs with ‘(A)’ through ‘(D)’ according to what part you are talking about in them will make grading very fast and easy for me. Since this is worth 20pts, this is worth 5% of your total grade.