Justifying Positive Appeals to Conscience: The Debate We Can’t Avoid

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This article refers to:

Unjustified Asymmetry: Positive Claims of Conscience and Heartbeat Bills

This article is referred to by:

Finding Our Balance in the Asymmetry Debate

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am especially grateful to Kyle Fritz for charitable feedback on multiple earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to Brian Eltomi for thoughtful conversations that were integral to formulating the argument presented here.

Notes

1 I take burdens to include difficulties, sacrifices, or harms.

2 I use “fetus” to apply to all stages of prenatal development.

3 One well-known argument for this claim is that the death of the fetus deprives it of all of the value of its future, and that it has a valuable future comparable to our own (Marquis 1989).

4 While burdens resulting from negative appeals can also include shame experienced by being denied a request for an abortion, this possibility is contingent upon the manner in which a referral is made, and is therefore avoidable. There is no parallel in the case of a conscientious objector who is required to violate their own moral integrity—in such cases, the central burden just is their acting contrary to conscience.