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The Necessity of Design
Author(s) -
Bindig Todd S.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
new blackfriars
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1741-2005
pISSN - 0028-4289
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-2005.2007.00201.x
Subject(s) - irrational number , intuition , abortion , epistemology , cognition , psychology , function (biology) , principle of sufficient reason , social psychology , ethical theory , philosophy , neuroscience , mathematics , pregnancy , geometry , evolutionary biology , biology , genetics
In Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing , an example involving a congenitally retarded child and a dog of similar cognitive ability is used to attempt to show that arguments about the potential to manifest traits are morally irrelevant to the abortion debate. McMahan argues that our intuition to enhance the child rather than the dog may be irrational. I explain that the only way to maintain common‐sense ethics and strongly held intuitions about function and dysfunction is to accept a theory of design and to think, not in terms of “species” but, in terms of kinds of things that are designed to function in specific ways, where the failure of an individual of the kind to manifest characteristic functions is indicative of a privation rather than evidence that the individual is not – or not yet – a member of that kind and thus not as morally significant as members of the kind.