Contemporary Moral Argument Analysis

Many times while discussing controversial topics such as abortion, society tends to argue over the issue itself, overlooking the numerous factors taking in effect to conjure the topic. One of the elements of abortion that must be taken into consideration is personhood. The distinction between whether a fetus is a person, formulates the conflict presented when arguing personhood; furthermore, making this distinction is vital in order to conclude the morality of abortion. One side of the spectrum depicts abortion as moral by the fetus’s lack of functionality as a person. Mary Warren discusses in “Contemporary Moral Arguments” five traits, consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate, and the presence of self-concepts, an …show more content…
Therefore, killing a newborn child would also have to be considered as morally acceptable. Schwarz finds this contradiction in his passage in “Contemporary Moral Arguments” as the foundation for proving any opposing arguments as faulty. Based off of this position, abortions are immoral because, “the fact that a human being functions as a person or has the present and immediate capacity to do so, is not ground for his dignity, preciousness, and right to life; rather, that decisive ground is the fact of his being a person” (Schwarz, CMA pg. 137). An example given in CMA that is used in support the argument is of a child in a coma. Typically, a child in a coma is portrayed still as a human being; however technically they aren’t by the definition of Warren. The question at hand is, how does this child qualify for life while the unborn fetus does not? The basis for the argument is for the fetus’s future potentially to become a functioning human; hence, their right to life should be protected in order for a fetus to have to the opportunity to gain human