Can someone help me out by giving me feedback on this. It's due Tuesday! Here's the topic. By the way, this talks about abortion. If you don't want to read this, then please don't review it. Edit! Thanks Skins for reviewing! I don't need a review anymore because I already have most of it done. All I need now is the intro and conclusion. 
Select some element of Warren's argument for the morality of abortion with which you disagree, and respond critically. Include a clear explanation of her overall view.This is undergoing edits, but please review! You'll probably see something that I didn't think of.
In her paper, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”, Mary Anne Warren argues that killing a fetus is permissible because a fetus is not a person. Warren gives five criteria that she uses in characterizing what a person is. The first criterion is that a person has to have consciousness of both objects and events that occur outside the body and/or objects and events that occur inside the body, and they must have ability to feel pain. Her second criterion is that they must have reasoning which she defines as being able to solve new and complex problems. Her third criterion talks about self-motivated activity, meaning activity that is not genetically or externally controlled. Her fourth criterion talks about how a person must be able to communicate in whatever form. She also says that they must be able to communicate many messages, not just one message in many forms. Her fifth criterion talks about self-concepts and how people must have self-awareness. She says the awareness can be of themselves or of their species. She says that one can determine who are people just by looking at the either of the first two criteria, meaning that they may be sufficient to determine what personhood is by themselves. Warren argues that the fetus does not have any of the five criteria and that since it does not, it is not a person. 1 In this paper I hope to show that Warren’s first criterion may be satisfied by the fetus.
Warren admits that a fetus of seven or eight months is “somewhat more person like” than a fetus in the first stages of development 2She says that it can feel and respond to pain and that it might have a primitive form of consciousness . However, she also says that the fetus cannot reason or communicate, is not self-aware and does not have self-motivated activity.3 I believe that she is correct about the fetus being unable to reason or communicate . I believe that she is also correct about the fetus not being self-aware or having self-motivation. However, I believe that there is a problem with her first criterion of personhood. Warren states that to be a person, one must be able to feel pain and be conscious of events and objects external and/or internal to the body4. If the fetus can feel pain, does that not mean that it is aware of the external world? In this case the womb. The fetus may not know exactly what happened to cause it pain, but it knows that something happened. The fetus may not know exactly what the object is, but it does know that there is something causing it pain. The fetus knows that the event, the feeling of pain, happened. The fetus, also, knows that something, the object, caused it that pain. It may not know the precise dimensions or what the object actually looks like, but it does have the awareness of the object.
In her first criterion of personhood, Warren states that a person must have consciousness of objects and events external and/or internal to the body. However, she does not define consciousness or explain how consciousness should be measured. In her paper, Warren gives examples of who she considers not to be people. She uses the words “appreciable mental capacity” when describing what she calls “defective human beings.”5 How much is appreciable though? What Warren considers as appreciable may be different than what someone else considers as appreciable. For example, someone may think that “appreciable mental capacity” might mean that even though that human may not be able to do advanced mathematics, build a bridge, or anything else that requires higher thinking, if they are able to do the basic things in life, such as communicating in someway, feeling pain, etc then they have “appreciable mental capacity.” However, someone else may think that having “appreciable mental capacity” means being able to do advanced mathematics, build bridges, or anything else that requires higher level thinking. My point is that, without knowing Warren's idea of “appreciable mental capacity,” we do not know whether that being is truly a person or not.
