You name the view closer to yours. The rest of the test tries to pull it out of shape. The score is how consistently you held the principle, not which side is right.
About this test
This test does not decide abortion. It borrows pressure from arguments people actually use. Judith Jarvis Thomson's 1971 defense presses bodily autonomy with a violinist who needs the use of your body, and with cases about foreseeable risk. Don Marquis argues that abortion is grave because it deprives a fetus of a future like ours. Viability, sex selection, disability selection, and the difference between birth and the day before are lines people draw and then have to defend. A consistency score, in the spirit of tests of reflective equilibrium, asks whether a principle survives the cases you would rather not meet. Both paths are challenges. Neither path is a key.
Question 1 of 21
What this test asks
For this exercise, which view is closer to yours, even if you hold it with reservations? The next questions will try to unsettle that choice. They are not a vote about what you are allowed to think.
If you start from pro-life: Thomson asks you to imagine waking up surgically attached to a famous violinist. Unplugging will kill him. You never consented to the attachment. If you think you may unplug, what happens to a pro-life principle?
If you start from pro-life: Many policies called pro-life include an exception for rape. If a right to life begins at conception and does not depend on how conception happened, what do you do with that exception?
If you start from pro-life: Fertility treatment sometimes creates embryos that will not be implanted and may be discarded. If fertilization is where a right to life begins, what follows?
If you start from pro-life: You are not required to donate a kidney, even if you are the only match and the other person will die. Is pregnancy a required donation of the body, or a different kind of duty?
If you start from pro-life: Continuing a pregnancy will, in this case, kill the pregnant person. An absolute ban and their survival cannot both be kept. What gives?
If you start from pro-life: Suppose a contraceptive method sometimes acts after fertilization, by preventing implantation. If your line is fertilization, what is that method?
If you start from pro-life: Some people move the moral line to sentience: the capacity to feel. Conception, on that view, is too early. What does your principle say?
If you start from pro-life: You hold a moral objection. Should the state compel other people to continue pregnancies that match that objection?
If you start from pro-life: If a very early embryo is a person, personhood does not stop at abortion law. It shows up in medicine, in what counts as a death, and in what people are asked to mourn. Do you accept that spread?
If you start from pro-life: Bodily autonomy is a real value in your other moral views. When it conflicts with a fetal right to life, which way does the conflict go?
If you start from pro-choice: Viability — the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb — moves when medicine moves. Can it carry the moral line your view wants?
If you start from pro-choice: An abortion is sought because of the fetus's sex, under social pressure that values one sex more. What happens to a pro-choice view?
If you start from pro-choice: Marquis argues that killing a fetus is grave for the same reason killing you would be grave: it takes away a future of experiences, projects, and relationships. What do you do with that?
If you start from pro-choice: What is the moral difference between a newborn and a fetus one day before birth, when the body and the capacity are nearly the same?
If you start from pro-choice: An abortion is sought because a test suggests a disability. People who value choice and also value disabled lives feel the pinch. Where do you land?
If you start from pro-choice: Suppose, for the sake of the question, that a fetus can feel pain earlier than your preferred legal line. What should the line do?
If you start from pro-choice: Your view is being asked to defend an abortion late in pregnancy for a reason that is not a medical emergency. Can it?
If you start from pro-choice: Grant, for a moment, that the fetus is a person with a serious right to life. Does any pro-choice reason survive the grant?
If you start from pro-choice: The pregnancy followed sex the person chose, knowing pregnancy was possible. Does that choice create a duty to carry?
If you start from pro-choice: A few philosophers argue that if a newborn has no more of a 'future interest' than a late fetus, reasons that permit abortion put pressure on how we talk about newborns. What do you do with that symmetry?
Coach
Ask about a skill
Log in to use the coach. A crisis message still gets resources.