This final synthesis chapter tries to promote a more unified understanding of the views that we've studied and what difference they make. It does this by applying the views to the controversial topic of abortion.Nonconsequentialist argumentsThese questions are about Chapter 14 of Harry Gensler's Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge: 2011).
Some argue that abortion must be seriously wrong -- since a fetus is innocent human life and it's seriously wrong to kill innocent human life.But "human" has various senses; a fetus is "human" in some senses but not in others. The real issue is what sense of "human" we should use when we say "Killing innocent human life is seriously wrong." Depending on how we take "human," we get different principles -- with different implications about when it's seriously wrong to kill.