Judith Thomson's People Seeds Abortion Argument

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Philosophy is considered as the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, and it comes from the greek word Philosophia, which means love of wisdom. The value of Philosophy is to raise questions for the purpose of raising them, not necessarily answering such questions. Philosophy allows individuals to instead consider arguments for what they might want to believe to be true - and that is exactly what I will do in this paper. I will present an objection to Judith Thomson’s People Seeds Argument and I will present a defense to Immanuel Kant’s ethical theory of Kantianism. On pages 563-4 in Vaughn, we discover Thomson’s People Seeds Argument, which is a Pro-Abortion argument-by-analogy. The analogy in the argument …show more content…
The author of The Kantian Perspective uses an example in which the author compares parents who have shaken their baby and killed them to other parents who have shaken but did not kill their baby. The author says, “…babies sometimes die from such treatment. When they do, we judge the killer much more harshly than we do other parents - most of whom have shaken their babies at least once or twice, but have luckily done so without any permanent damage.” While this could be true, I don’t think the author gets it correct here. One parent who has killed their child by shaking them does indeed deserve more blame, but this does not mean that other parents who did not kill their child are excused from their actions, because after all, they are rational and autonomous, too. So, while one may have been more worse, both are deserving of blame. Also, Kantianism does in fact address this. Kantianism says murder is wrong, and a parent who shakes their baby but does not kill it, is also wrong, simply because human beings deserve respect. Now, this brings up another objection from the author: babies aren’t part of the Moral Community, so they don’t deserve
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