METAPHYSICS OF PERSONHOOD: Choose the answer that is NOT one of the features of the Substantial View of Personhood (or the Self).  

In Book I.7, we find Aristotle’s famous “function argument.” Here, he examines what plant, animal, and human souls have in common and what distinguishes them from one another.  The function will be to be the good and noble performance of this function.  What power of the soul is peculiar to man? Read all of Book I.7 and 1098a1-10 (pp. 10 – 12 in Oxford)

There is no common ground in the abortion debate.

Which of the following is not an important question in the modern abortion/Infanticide debate:

Roe v. Wade (1973) said that the default position of the American Constitution is that no living human organism has a right to life until it is born (the Supervenient-Birth view of personhood), but if states want to, they could pass laws to protect fetuses after the point of viability (able to survive outside the woman’s body) which was 27 weeks in 1973.  . Which of the following is NOT one of the reasons why philosophers argue “Supervenience-Viability” is problematic as a criterion of personhood (supervenient view)?

Some proponents of abortion/feticide argue that this procedure which has ended the lives of 60 million human organisms in the USA since 1973 is  a justified means of population control in the world, and that abortion/feticide (and, perhaps, infanticide as Margaret Sanger argued) is also a justified means of relieving economic burdens on the family.  . What is a possible problem with this argument? 

The postmodern or relativistic view of the self (that many American laws assume and politicians like President Obama endorsed) says that the mother decides the personhood of the fetus/infant.  Which of the following has not been raised as an objection to this view?  

One common Supervenient view up until the 19th Century was that the fetus was not a person until it acquired a “soul” and the mother could feel the living organism moving inside her.  This view was called “quickening” and it occurred between 12 – 16 weeks.  Why is this view rejected today? 

In common parlance, the word “abortion” is usually defined as the intentional termination of a pregnancy that destroys or kills the embryo or fetus.   Some philosophers argue that it should, instead,  be called feticide to distinguish it from spontaneous (natural) abortions. 

Moral Relativism Explain your answers as you would to an elderly person without any ethical training (i.e. avoid sounding like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) with your own examples.  . (1) Give us the argument for moral relativism from Naturalism (scientific atheism).    . (2) Give us the most persuasive (or second-most if Naturalism is your first) argument (in your mind) to believe in conventionalism (cultural moral relativism).  Explain with examples and define the view you are defending.  . (3 & 4) Give us the two most persuasive arguments (in your mind) against conventionalism and in favor of moral realism/objectivism. Explain with examples and define the view that you are defending.  .