Don Marquis (philosopher)

Donald Bagley Marquis ( born 1935 ) is an American philosopher. He is at the University of Kansas since 1970 professor. His main focus lies in the area of ​​ethics, particularly medical ethics. He mostly published under the short form Don Marquis.

Marquis worked on various aspects of medical ethics, such as the problems in the context of clinical trials. He became known among other things, its not religion-based approach to ethical evaluation of abortion. In his essay published in 1989, Why Abortion is Immoral, he developed a theory that he " Valuable -future -like- ours" theory ( such as: " theory of a valuable future like ours " ) is called and comes to the conclusion that abortions are not ethically justify himself.

Don Marquis takes claim for themselves with his argumentative approach, the Stalemate of abortion proponents and opponents to be able to pick up by not hit each asked by the other side denied basic assumptions, such as " just human " vs. " No man ", but starts from the intuition that every person refuses to own killing because his future is valuable for him. This future is to take any man therefore wrong. Even if we assume that embryos are not human beings still in the full sense of the term, a man will put his future by an abortion yet.

Writings

• Leaving Therapy to Chance. At Impasse in the Ethics of Randomized Clinical Trials. The Hastings Center Report, 1983
• Why Abortion is Immoral. In: The Journal of Philosophy. Volume 86, No. 4 ( April 1989), pp. 183-202 ( e - text, different page count, PDF, 212 kB).
• An Ethical Problem Concerning Recent Therapeutic Research on Breast Cancer. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 1989