Abortion And Infanticide By Michael Tooley

Who and what has a right to life is a question most would not know how to answer or would ignore. The topic of abortion which is the termination of a fetus, and Infanticide that is the killing of a baby within a year of birth, are complicated. Michael Tooley in his essay “Abortion and Infanticide” argues that abortion and infanticide are permissible. His main argument is that infants do not have a right to life because they do not have a sense of self. In his essay he writes “Since it is virtually certain that an infant at such a stage of its development does not possess the concept of a continuing self, and thus does not possess a serious right to life, there is excellent reason to believe that infanticide is morally permissible in most cases where it is otherwise desirable.

Tooley says that an infant cannot possess a serious right to life because it does not possess the concept of a continuing self, and nor does a fetus. He believes that in order to have a right to life you need to be a person, not a human being. To Tooley, a person has thought while a human being only has life. Eventually, he puts an example of a person wanting to get tortured rather than get killed but then when it comes a kitten it is the opposite what is correct. Tooley says “Most people would consider it worse to kill an individual than to torture him for an hour, we do not usually view the killing of a newborn kitten as morally outrageous, although we would regard someone who tortured a newborn kitten for an hour as heinously evil.” (page