le against theft clearly has more favourable consequences than unfavourable consequences for everyone. The same is true for moral rules against lying or murdering. Rule-utilitarianism, then, offers a method for judging behaviour. More general speaking, act utilitarianism regards each individual action as the fundamental unit of moral evaluation while rule utilitarianism applies the principle of utility not to individuals actions but to general rules under which those actions fall. Continuing with Kant’s approach, even though we know that he does not addresses the issue of abortion as topic directly, we could search into his second critique of his discussions and that is about the moral agent and how we should treat people. By this formulation Kant is arguing that human beings are not simply of subjective importance to them, but are of objective importance to all others as ends in themselves. Therefore, in making moral decisions we should act in a way that recognizes the objective importance of every other individual. The above could probably be used for a pro-life position. The pro-life arguments, which are against abortion, are the following: 1. It is a murder to kill an innocent human being 2. A human fetus is an innocent human being 3. Therefore the conclusion is that it is a crime to kill a human fetus On the other side, we have perhaps a stronger argument and a more philosophical which is that although the fetus has some future rights to self-freedom, if it was the case that the child would be severely handicapped to the point where self-consciousness would be impossible or their freedom to take control of their being was nil, then perhaps Kant would argue pro-choice. Pro-choice suggests that a fetus is not a human being until it: Becomes conscious (sentient) Is viable Is born Although pro-life suggests that a fetus is just an earlier stage of a human being, knowing the scientific stages of a pregnancy where from 0-18 week...
