Question From an ethical perspective, what does potential count for? My motivation for this question stems directly from a discussion on abortion I once had. In general, it seems to me to be evident that the fetus is not yet a person, but it is a potential person, and it seems that potential might count for something. For example, if we consider the case of a child who has the potential to become a masterful musician, but deny him the ability to ever play music, it seems that a moral wrong has been done.

Accepted:
October 14, 2010

Comments

What does potential count for? I don't think there is a general answer here. One important variable concerns the relation between the potential time-slice person who never came to be and the entity whose development into that time-slice person was disturbed. When these two are closely related, then potential may count for a lot. When you prevent a very talented and highly trained athlete from traveling to the Olympics, then you deprive this person of her chance of a medal; and this seems quite serious because here the person prevented and the person who would have competed are very closely related (the same mature person a few days apart). But suppose the opportunity to compete in the Olympics was closed off much earlier by the parents who sent the first-grader to the chess club rather than to the gymnastics club, so that she becomes as chess lover rather than a gymnastics lover. While the world may have lost a great gymnast, this is not a substantial loss for her (because gymnastics never came to mean much to her). The distance is even greater in the case of an abortion. In this case, there is never even a subject there about whom we can ask whether the lost opportunity was a loss for her. To be sure, we can say that through the abortion the world has lost a person who might have realized this or that valuable potential. But then how serious is this? The world is near carrying capacity (if not beyond) and is losing a few quadrillion such potential persons every day, one for each pair of egg and sperm cells that we fail to make fuse.

There may be other things wrong with having an abortion. But I don't think there is good reason for believing that having an abortion is wrong because it prevents the realization of some potential.