Donald Bagley Marquis

Donald Bagley Marquis (* 1935 ) is an American philosopher . He has been a professor at the University of Kansas since 1970 . His main focus is on ethics, especially medical ethics . He mostly publishes under the short form Don Marquis .

Marquis worked on various aspects of medical ethics, such as: B. the problems in the field of clinical studies. He became known, among other things, for his non-religiously based approach to the ethical assessment of abortion . In his essay, Why Abortion is Immoral , published in 1989, he developed a theory that he called "Valuable-future-like-ours" theory and came to the conclusion that abortions are an issue could not be justified ethically.

With his approach, Don Marquis claims to be able to lift the argumentative stalemate of the abortion proponents and opponents by not making basic assumptions denied by the other side, such as "already human" vs. “Not yet a person”, but rather starts from the intuition that every person refuses to kill himself because his future is valuable to him. It is therefore wrong to take this future from anyone. Even if one assumes that embryos are not yet human beings in the full sense of the term, an abortion will rob a human of their future.

Fonts

• Leaving Therapy to Chance. An Impasse in the Ethics of Randomized Clinical Trials. The Hastings Center Report, 1983
• Why Abortion is Immoral. In: The Journal of Philosophy. Volume 86, No. 4 (April 1989), pp. 183–202 ( e-Text, different page counting ; PDF; 212 kB).
• An Ethical Problem Concerning Recent Therapeutic Research on Breast Cancer. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 1989

Web links

• Website at the University of Kansas
• Curriculum vitae (PDF; 2.1 MB)