Harman says she is defending the “liberal position about early abortion” that there’s “nothing morally bad” about early state abortions. Harman’s position is that among “early fetuses” there are two “very different kinds of beings.” She claims that she and her interviewers “already had moral status then”—that is, as an early embryo—“in virtue of our futures.”  Harman’s claim is that they were all “the beginning stages of persons.”

In a recent interview, Elizabeth Harman, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, presents what is likely to be the worst defense of abortion ever made by a reputable philosopher.

Although I’ll be quoting Harman verbatim throughout this article, I recommend spending the five minutes to watch the video. It is truly one of the most jaw-droppingly incoherent cases for abortion you’ll ever hear.

To recap, Harman says she is defending the “liberal position about early abortion” that there’s “nothing morally bad” about early state abortions. Harman’s position is that among “early fetuses” there are two “very different kinds of beings.” She claims that she and her interviewers “already had moral status then”—that is, as an early embryo—“in virtue of our futures.”  Harman’s claim is that they were all “the beginning stages of persons.”

Ironically, Harman’s view is based in part on a famous, reputable argument against abortion, one that claims what makes killing inherently wrong is that it deprives a victim of their future experiences. She also concedes that the early embryo does indeed have moral status because it is the beginning stage of a person—just as infancy, adolescence, and adulthood are later stages of a person.

But Harman then adds a strange qualifier: the early embryo only has moral status if it lives. “[S]ome early fetuses will die in early pregnancy,” says Harman, “either due to abortion or miscarriage. And in my view that’s a very different kind of entity. That’s something that doesn’t have a future as a person and it doesn’t have moral status.”

Before we continue, let’s consider the implications if we applied her “different kinds of beings” principle to one of the other “stages of persons.”

Imagine there are two children, Jack and Jill, who are in children’s hospital and being treated for a serious illness. The doctors tell Jack he has been cured and can go home tomorrow, but they tell Jill her disease has progressed and she is expected to die tomorrow. Jack has a future, while Jill does not. According to Harman, Jack is a being that has moral status (because he will continue to have a future), but Jill is not only a being who does not have moral status right now (because she does not have a future), but Jill is a being who never had moral status.

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