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Title:
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Abortion in public reason
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Author:
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Páez Conesa, José Ezequiel
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Other authors:
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Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca; Moreso, Josep Joan; Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Departament de Dret |
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Abstract:
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What abortion laws a liberal political community ought to have? Much has been said about the moral problem of abortion, but there has not been yet (to my knowledge) a fully articulate account of the bearing of the competing answers to this ethical problem on liberal public reason. The first part of my project consists in a critical review of the different attempts to solve the various philosophical puzzles, both metaphysical and moral, posed by the abortion problem. Why is it wrong to kill beings like you and me? By answering this question we shall gain a better insight into those properties we have that give us such strong reasons against killing beings like us. Here we face a tremendous philosophical diffuculty, for it is not possible to determine what the robustest account of the wrongness of killing is without dealing with deeper metaethical and metaphysical problems. Indeed, consequentialist and nonconsequentialist moral theories differ in what it is that makes an action morally wrong -is it just the outcome of the action as compared with the outcomes of its alternatives? Or is it something else? Also, what are we essentially? Is the foetus merely our precursor? Then killing a foetus is relevantly similar to contraception. Or is the foetus one of us? If so, when we kill it, are we depriving it of a future as valuable as ours? Perhaps the relation of identity (the fact that it is its future as opposed to someone else's) doesn't matter. That may be because the foetus is an aggregate of biological and psychological facts and perhaps aggregates are not substances. Or maybe it is a substance but only psychological realtions matter, not personal identity. The second part of my project has to do with the different status these metaphisical and ethical positions ought to have in liberal public reason. Though this is the part in which most research is still needed, my own intuition is that, given the depth of the philosphical views in competition, restrictive abortion laws ought to be considered unrespectful to citizens' autonomy. |
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Publication date:
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2012-05-04 |
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Subject (UDC):
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34 - Dret |
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Subject(s):
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Avortament -- Aspectes ètics i morals
Identitat (Concepte filosòfic)
Liberalisme |
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Rights:
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L'accés als continguts d'aquest document queda condicionat a l'acceptació de les condicions d'ús establertes per la següent llicència Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ |
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Pages:
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32 p. |
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Document type:
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Report |
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Collection:
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Els ajuts de l'AGAUR;2011FI_B2 0005
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