https://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1803&context=faithandphilosophy

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

An Essay on Free Will

Warranted Christian Belief

Warrant: The Current Debate

This is a chapter for a political philosophy handbook being edited by Antonella Besussi for Ashgate Publishing. The chapter aims to set out the conceptual and theoretical landscape regarding the right and the good in a manner useful to political philosophers unfamiliar with it.

The Right and the Good

Much of the debate about the ethics of abortion has centered on whether the fetus is a person. In an attempt to sidestep this complex issue, I argue that, even if the fetus is not a person, abortion is immoral. To arrive at this conclusion, I argue that giving a fetus fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, and that if this is so, then killing the fetus is immoral. Roughly, this is because killing the fetus impairs it more than giving it fetal alcohol syndrome. Since abortion (in most cases) amounts to killing the fetus, this means that abortion (in most cases) is immoral. I defend the premises of this argument against a plethora of objections, concluding that they either do not work, or commit their proponent to a controversial position.

/pdf/even-if-the-fetus-is-not-a-person-abortion-is-immoral-the-11eug8wfcc.pdf

Even if the fetus is not a person, abortion is immoral: The impairment argument.

Perry Hendricks' impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on two premises: first, impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is immoral, and second, if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. He calls this the impairment principle (TIP). Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than FAS, it follows from these two premises that abortion is immoral. Critics have focussed on the ceteris paribus clause of TIP, which requires that the relevant details surrounding each impairment be sufficiently similar. In this article, we show that the ceteris paribus clause is superfluous, and by replacing it with a more restrictive condition, the impairment argument is considerably strengthened.

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2020/06/04/medethics-2020-106153.full.pdf

Strengthening the impairment argument against abortion

This article is a response to Stephen Law's article ‘The evil-god challenge’. In his article, Law argues that if belief in evil-god is unreasonable, then belief in good-god is unreasonable; that the antecedent is true; and hence so is the consequent. In this article, I show that Law's affirmation of the antecedent is predicated on the problem of good (i.e. the problem of whether an all-evil, all-powerful, and all-knowing God would allow there to be as much good in the world as there is), and argue that the problem of good fails. Thus, the antecedent is unmotivated, which renders the consequent unmotivated. Law's challenge for good-god theists is to show that good-god theism is not rendered unreasonable by the problem of evil in the same way that evil-god theism is rendered unreasonable by the problem of good. Insofar as the problem of good does not render belief in evil-god unreasonable, Law's challenge has been answered: since it is not unreasonable to believe in evil-god (at least for the reasons that Law gives) it is not unreasonable to believe in good-god. Finally, I show that – my criticism aside – the evil-god challenge turns out to be more complicated and controversial than it initially appears, for it relies on the (previously unacknowledged) contentious assumption that sceptical theism is false.

/pdf/sceptical-theism-and-the-evil-god-challenge-o2oat31qef.pdf

Sceptical theism and the evil-god challenge

(Regrettably) Abortion remains immoral: The impairment argument defended.

Joona Rasanen, in his article 'Ectogenesis, abortion and a right to the death of the fetus' (this journal), has argued for the view that parents have a right to the death of the fetus. In this brief article, I will explicate the three arguments Rasanen defends, and show that two of them have false or unmotivated premises and hence fail, and that the support he offers for his third argument is inconsistent with other views he expresses in his article. Therefore, I conclude that there is no right to the death of the fetus, or, if there is one, Rasanen has not shown it.

Perry Hendricks

Papers

Even if the fetus is not a person, abortion is immoral: The impairment argument.

Strengthening the impairment argument against abortion

Sceptical theism and the evil-god challenge

(Regrettably) Abortion remains immoral: The impairment argument defended.

There is no right to the death of the fetus.