Spaceman duplication
The thought experiment of spaceman duplication comes from the essay On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion by the American philosopher Mary Anne Warren in 1973 and is intended to clarify whether potential persons have the same moral status as those who actually exist.
Thought experiment in full
Assume that our spaceman falls into the hands of an alien culture . The scientists there decide to create several 100,000 people by breaking down their bodies into its components. They use these to create fully developed humans, of course with the associated human DNA code. We imagine that these people have all the skills and knowledge of the original man. They also have a self-confidence , in short, each of these people is a bona fidePerson, if not unique. The project should only take seconds and the spaceman should know about it. He also knows that the chances are very good that it will be a success and that people will be treated fairly later on.
“I maintain that he has all the right in the world to flee, even though he is depriving all potential people of the right to live, because his right to live is higher than that of them, despite the fact that all are genetically human, all innocent and that everyone has a high probability of becoming real people soon if the spaceman only refrained from fleeing. "
Philosophical content
At the center of this thought experiment, which is also accompanied by another in the essay, is the idea that the moral status of an existing person always carries more weight than that of a potential person. Warren transfers this intuition to the debate about abortion and concludes that there, too, the pregnant woman as an already existing person should always be given preference over the fetus . In contrast, conservative positions u. a. put forward the potentiality argument, according to which the fact that a human could arise (or, under suitable conditions, also probably arise), speaks for the protective dignity of the fetus.
Individual evidence
- ^ Warren, Mary Anne: On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. In: The Monist, Volume 57, Number 1, 1973, pp. 43-61.
- ^ Warren, Mary Anne: On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. In: The Monist, Volume 57, Number 1, 1973, pp. 59f.
- ↑ Fenner, Dagmar: Introduction to Applied Ethics. Tübingen 2010, p. 81f.