How should we think of abortion in view of common sense beliefs about death? In Question #1596, Professor Gentzler's solution to the problem of death-as-punishment was to suggest that we should see death, not as placing a person in some worse state (since a dead person is in no state at all), but as depriving him of what benefits he might have enjoyed had he lived. Yet by this same brand of reasoning, couldn't we argue that aborted fetuses are harmed in an analogous way? In both cases we have a puzzle about people who in some sense don't exist; the dead person because he is no longer conscious, the fetus because it is not sufficiently developed.
I think that you are right to see the relevance of these considerations to the question of abortion. I briefly address some of the complex issues that the question of the moral permissibility of abortion raises at http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/1247 .
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