出版社：Research Institute for Contemporary Philosophy of Life
摘要：In this paper, I review accounts of the moral status of infants and fetuses to show that they either failto establish that infants are properly rights-bearers or fail to explain the grounds of this status. I thendevelop an account of teleological potential understood with reference to Phillipa Foot’s NaturalNorms and argue that it can ground the rights-bearing status of infants and fetuses while avoidingthe typical objections to potentiality-based accounts. I then incorporate this into a two-fold accountof moral status directed at concerns of justice and charity, and grounded in sophisticated cognitivecapacities and sentience respectively, which allows one to maintain that fetuses possessrights-bearing status alongside the intuition that infants are due more moral consideration. Finally, Iconsider potential objections based on concerns about women’s autonomy and implications aboutthe severely cognitively disabled.
