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Few applied debates test ethical theory as severely as those surrounding the beginning of human life. Abortion, embryo research, cloning and the prospect of selecting or 'designing' a child's characteristics each force a prior question: what is the moral status of the early human being, and which features — if any — confer the right to life? This lesson applies the three normative approaches the AQA specification names for ethics — natural moral law, situation ethics and virtue ethics — together with the deontology of Kant and the consequentialism of utilitarianism, to these issues. The aim is not to survey opinions but to see how each theory generates and defends a verdict, and where each is vulnerable.
The framing assumption of most religious approaches is the sanctity of life: that human life is intrinsically valuable and inviolable, not because of what a human can do but because of what a human is. In Christian thought the doctrine is grounded in the imago Dei — humanity made "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27) — so that worth cannot be diminished by disability, dependence or stage of development. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2270) holds that "human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception," and Pope John Paul II's encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995) condemned direct abortion as a grave moral evil and warned of a "culture of death."
Key term: Sanctity of life — the view that human life is intrinsically and equally valuable from conception, possessing a worth that is not conditional on quality, capacity or social utility.
The rival framing is the quality of life principle: that what matters morally is not the bare fact of biological life but the character and prospects of that life — whether it contains, or can come to contain, the goods that make existence worth having. The two principles do not always conflict, but in hard cases (severe abnormality, anencephaly, a pregnancy that threatens the mother) they pull in opposite directions, and almost every disagreement in this topic can be traced to which principle a thinker treats as foundational.
The scriptural and traditional backing for sanctity of life is worth setting out precisely, because exam answers often assert it vaguely. Psalm 139:13 — "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb" — and Jeremiah 1:5 — "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" — are read as portraying God's active involvement with the individual before birth. The Didache (c. 100 CE), one of the earliest Christian moral handbooks, instructs: "you shall not murder a child by abortion." It is important, however, not to overstate Christian unanimity. The Roman Catholic position is the strictest, treating the embryo as a person from conception and prohibiting direct abortion absolutely. The Church of England and many Protestant bodies hold that abortion is a serious moral wrong yet may be the lesser evil in grave circumstances — risk to the mother's life or health, severe foetal abnormality, pregnancy after rape — a position closer to a strong-presumption view than an absolute one. Islam likewise affirms life as a trust from God while permitting, in some schools, early abortion for serious reasons, often tied to debates about when ensoulment occurs (variously placed at forty or one hundred and twenty days, drawing on hadith). The candidate who writes "Christians believe abortion is wrong" without this differentiation throws away marks; the differences between traditions are themselves examinable.
If the early embryo is already a person, it has the full moral standing of any of us and a corresponding right to life; if personhood arrives later, the moral claim of the early embryo is weaker. Several thresholds are defended:
Key term: Personhood — the cluster of properties (variously: genetic humanity, sentience, rationality, self-awareness) in virtue of which a being is held to have full moral status and a right to life.
It is worth fixing the legal backdrop, since examiners expect candidates to apply ethics to the actual UK framework rather than to argue in the abstract. The Abortion Act 1967 (as amended by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990) does not grant abortion "on demand"; it provides a defence to the offences otherwise created by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 where two registered doctors agree that statutory grounds are met. The most-used ground permits termination up to twenty-four weeks where continuing the pregnancy would pose a greater risk to the physical or mental health of the woman (or her existing children) than termination. Other grounds — grave permanent injury to the woman, risk to her life, or substantial risk of serious foetal abnormality — have no time limit. This legal settlement is itself a gradualist compromise, weighting the foetus's claim more heavily as it approaches viability, and it is a fertile target for evaluation: a sanctity-of-life ethic regards it as licensing the killing of the innocent, while a strong autonomy or utilitarian ethic regards the doctors'-agreement requirement as an unwarranted constraint on the woman's choice.
Mary Anne Warren (1946–2010), in "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion" (1973), set out five traits she took to be central to the concept of a person: consciousness (and in particular the capacity to feel pain), reasoning, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate, and the presence of self-concepts and self-awareness. A being possessing none of these, she argued, is not a person in the morally relevant sense; since the foetus resembles a person far less than a developed mammal does, it is not a person, and abortion is permissible. Warren herself recognised that this reasoning appears to license infanticide, and tried to block that implication by appeal to the social costs of killing newborns and the wishes of those who would value the infant — a move critics regard as the weakest point in her argument. Peter Singer (b. 1946) presses the same logic harder: moral status tracks sentience and the capacity to have preferences about one's future, not species membership, so a self-aware adult mammal may have a stronger claim than a newborn or late foetus. The shock value of Singer's conclusion is, for his opponents, a reductio of the premise.
Two further positions are needed for a complete picture. The potentiality argument concedes that the embryo is not yet a rational, self-aware person but insists that it is a potential one, and that this potential confers strong moral status: to destroy the embryo is to destroy the very being who would otherwise have become a person like us. Critics reply that a potential X does not have the rights of an actual X (a medical student is not yet a doctor and lacks a doctor's authority), and that, since every unfertilised egg and sperm is in some sense "potential life," the argument proves too much. Defenders answer that the fertilised embryo is potential in a far stronger sense — a single, self-directing organism already on a developmental trajectory — than a mere gamete. The gradualist position, which underlies much UK law and practice, holds that moral status is not switched on at a single instant but increases across gestation: the early embryo merits real but limited protection, the late foetus much more. Gradualism has the virtue of matching most people's intuitions — few regard a fortnight-old embryo and a full-term foetus as morally identical — but the vice of arbitrariness, since it must draw lines (14 days, 24 weeks) whose moral exactness is hard to justify. The honest examiner's verdict is that no threshold is wholly free of objection, which is precisely why the debate persists.
Aquinas's natural moral law reasons from a fixed account of the human good. Among the primary precepts is the preservation of (innocent) life; the direct, intended killing of an innocent human being therefore breaches a precept and is intrinsically wrong, irrespective of consequences. On this view the embryo, as an innocent human life, may not be directly killed, so abortion-as-an-end and the destruction of embryos in research are ruled out.
Natural law's verdicts here also flow from its account of the purpose of sex and procreation. Because the reproductive faculty is ordered (on this view) to the generation and nurture of new life within the union of the parents, technologies that sever procreation from the conjugal act, or that manufacture and discard embryos, are judged to frustrate that God-given end — which is the deep reason behind Catholic opposition to IVF and destructive research as well as to abortion. The argument is thus not a series of ad hoc prohibitions but the application of a single teleological picture of the human good.
What natural law does not do is forbid every act that foreseeably results in an embryo's death. The principle of double effect (also drawn from Aquinas) permits an act with both a good and a bad effect provided that (1) the act is not in itself wrong, (2) the bad effect is foreseen but not intended, (3) the bad effect is not the means to the good, and (4) there is a proportionate reason. The textbook case is ectopic pregnancy: removing a damaged fallopian tube to save the mother's life is permissible, because the death of the non-viable embryo is foreseen but neither intended nor used as the means. The same machinery distinguishes a hysterectomy for uterine cancer (permissible) from a direct abortion (not). Critics press two objections. First, the intention/foresight distinction looks strained: in both the craniotomy and the ectopic case the doctor knows for certain the embryo will die, and to say this is merely "foreseen, not intended" can seem like a verbal device for reaching the humane verdict while keeping the rule formally intact — what matters morally, the critic says, should be the certainty of the death, not the surgeon's inner description of it. Second, double effect appears to let consequences in through the back door: the requirement of a proportionate reason is itself a weighing of outcomes, which is awkward for a theory that prides itself on not deciding by consequences. Proportionalism, associated with twentieth-century Catholic moral theologians such as Bernard Hoose who sought to make natural law more flexible, takes this further, holding that one may act against a precept where there is a proportionate reason — that no concrete act is intrinsically wrong independent of its circumstances and proportionate grounds. Defenders see this as moral realism that takes circumstances seriously; opponents (including the magisterium in Veritatis Splendor, 1993) see it as consequentialism by another name and a betrayal of the exceptionless precepts that give natural law its protective force. Where one stands on proportionalism largely determines how flexible one's natural-law verdicts on the beginning of life turn out to be.
A distinctive secular argument grants the embryo's status for the sake of argument and still defends a right to abortion. Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929–2020), in "A Defense of Abortion" (1971), asks you to imagine waking up surgically connected to a famous unconscious violinist whose survival, for nine months, depends on the use of your kidneys. It would be generous to stay connected; but, Thomson argues, you are not morally obliged to lend your body in this way, and unplugging yourself does not wrong the violinist even though he then dies. By analogy, even if the foetus is a person with a right to life, that right does not automatically include a right to the continued use of another person's body; so abortion need not violate the foetus's rights. The argument is powerful because it reframes the dispute as one about bodily autonomy and the limits of obligation, not about the foetus's status. Critics make two replies. First, the violinist is a stranger to whom you have no special relationship, whereas a foetus is (usually) the woman's own child, and parenthood is widely thought to ground special duties. Second, except in cases of rape the woman has voluntarily engaged in the act known to risk pregnancy, which arguably creates a duty the kidnapped kidney-donor never assumed. Thomson anticipates much of this, distinguishing the "minimally decent Samaritan" from the "good Samaritan," but the exchange shows how the abortion debate can be conducted entirely without resolving the personhood question — a point worth deploying in an essay to show command of the literature.
The same theories govern the laboratory. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent — able to become any cell type — and so promise treatments for conditions such as Parkinson's disease, spinal injury and diabetes. The case in favour is that using early, non-sentient embryos (often surplus from IVF and otherwise destined for destruction) to relieve immense suffering is justified; the case against is that, if the embryo is one of us, it is being killed for others' benefit — exactly what Kant's Formula of Humanity forbids. UK policy reflects a gradualist compromise: the Warnock Committee (1984), chaired by Mary Warnock, recommended permitting research up to fourteen days, the appearance of the primitive streak, a recommendation enacted in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 and overseen by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. IVF itself raises the issue of surplus embryos created and then frozen, donated or destroyed. The Catholic Donum Vitae (1987) judges IVF illicit because it separates procreation from the conjugal act and routinely involves the loss of embryos; many Protestant and Anglican voices accept IVF for married couples while urging that surplus embryos be minimised and respected; Islamic jurists typically permit IVF using the couple's own gametes but not donor gametes. Notice that the theories do the work: natural law objects to the disordering of procreation and the killing of embryos; utilitarianism weighs relief of infertility and disease against embryo loss; situation ethics and virtue ethics ask what love, and what good character, require of the would-be parents and the clinicians.
Joseph Fletcher's (1905–1991) situation ethics rejects fixed rules in favour of a single principle: the right act is the one that best serves agape, disinterested love for persons. Fletcher positioned his theory between legalism (rigid rule-following) and antinomianism (no principles at all): the situationist enters each case armed with the moral wisdom of the tradition but ready to set any rule aside if love requires it. His four working principles (pragmatism, relativism, positivism and personalism) and six fundamental propositions all converge on the claims that "love is the only thing that is intrinsically good" and that "the end justifies the means; nothing else." Personalism is especially relevant here: persons, not laws or potential persons, are what love serves, so Fletcher's framework tends to weight the actual woman more heavily than the embryo.
Applied to the beginning of life, situation ethics refuses to say in advance that abortion is right or wrong: it asks what love requires in this situation. In Fletcher's own discussions he was willing to countenance abortion where it served persons — for example following rape, or where continuing the pregnancy would devastate the woman, or where the foetus has a condition incompatible with meaningful life; in another case continuing the pregnancy and supporting the mother might be the loving course. The strength of the approach is its refusal to sacrifice a real person to an abstract rule and its sensitivity to circumstance. The weaknesses are sharp. First, agape is hard to compute: love may direct us, but knowing which outcome is most loving requires the very prediction of consequences that situation ethics shares with — and inherits the uncertainty of — utilitarianism. Second, the absence of rules removes precisely the protection the vulnerable most need: a sanctity-of-life rule shields the embryo because it cannot be set aside, whereas "the loving thing" is endlessly negotiable and can rationalise self-interest as compassion. A natural lawyer will say that this is the whole point of having exceptionless precepts.
Aristotelian virtue ethics shifts the question from "Is this act permitted?" to "What would a person of good character do, and what does this choice make of me?" The decision is approached through the virtues — compassion, justice, courage, temperance, practical wisdom (phronesis) — and the doctrine of the mean, on which each virtue lies between an excess and a deficiency (courage between rashness and cowardice; proper generosity between extravagance and meanness). The goal of the moral life is eudaimonia, flourishing, achieved by habituating good dispositions until acting well becomes second nature. A virtue approach to abortion, embryo research or 'designer' babies resists slogans: it asks whether a given choice expresses care, justice and responsibility, or callousness, self-deception and the vice of treating a child as a possession to be specified. It takes seriously the moral formation of doctors, researchers and parents — not only the rightness of the single act but the kind of people and the kind of medicine the practice cultivates. So a virtue ethicist might be uneasy about commercial embryo selection less because a rule forbids it than because the disposition it fosters — regarding children as products — corrodes the parental virtues of unconditional welcome and acceptance.
The strengths are real: virtue ethics captures the felt importance of motive and character that act-focused theories can miss, and it explains why two outwardly identical decisions can differ morally according to the spirit in which they are taken. The standard objection is that the theory is action-guiding only weakly. Telling an agonised couple to "be compassionate and wise" does not tell them what to do; two people who are genuinely compassionate, just and practically wise may still disagree about the very case before them. Aristotelians answer that ethics is not geometry and that mature phronesis, formed in a good community, does in fact deliver verdicts — but the critic's point that virtue ethics describes good agents better than it adjudicates hard decisions retains force, and a strong essay will weigh it rather than ignore it.
These two named theories frame the secular debate, and the AQA specification treats Bentham and Kant as a comparison in their own right. Kant's ethics is deontological and rests on the categorical imperative. The first formulation, the Formula of Universal Law, asks whether the maxim of one's action could be willed as a universal law without contradiction. The second, the Formula of Humanity, commands that we treat humanity, in ourselves and others, "never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end." This is the sharpest objection to destructive embryo research and to 'designer' babies: to create and destroy embryos as a research resource, or to engineer a child to specification, looks like treating a human being (or potential human being) merely as a means to others' ends. The objection's force, however, turns on the contested prior question of whether the early embryo is the kind of being Kant's principle protects, since for Kant the dignity that grounds the imperative attaches to rational nature — autonomous, law-giving rationality. A defender of research can argue that the pre-sentient embryo does not yet possess rational nature and so is not the bearer of Kantian dignity; the natural lawyer and the Catholic reply that potential rational nature is enough. Kant's own remarks bear most directly on suicide and on duties to oneself, so applying him to the embryo requires this careful argument rather than mere assertion.
Utilitarianism reasons forward from consequences: the right act maximises welfare. The classical versions differ in what they maximise — for Bentham, the balance of pleasure over pain, measured by the hedonic calculus; for Mill, happiness with the "higher" (intellectual, moral) pleasures weighted above the "lower"; for Singer, the satisfaction of the preferences of all affected. These differences matter here. A hedonic act-utilitarian counts only pleasure and pain, so a non-sentient embryo, having neither, contributes nothing to the calculation; research that relieves great future suffering is then not merely permissible but close to obligatory, and the embryo's loss barely registers. A preference utilitarian like Singer adds a further consideration — the thwarting of a being's preferences about its own future — but since the early embryo has no such preferences, the verdict is much the same; what changes is that the late foetus or newborn, which may be on the threshold of having future-directed preferences, acquires more weight. Abortion is assessed case by case by weighing the interests at stake: the woman's welfare and autonomy, the family's circumstances, and (later in gestation) the foetus's developing capacity for suffering. The strength of the approach is its impartial, evidence-based focus on actual welfare rather than on contested metaphysics of the soul. The standard objections are two: aggregation can override the individual, so that a sufficiently large benefit could in principle justify using a person merely as a means; and the calculus is epistemically demanding, requiring predictions of consequences we cannot reliably make. A rule-utilitarian variant — follow the rule whose general adoption maximises welfare — answers the first worry by entrenching a protective rule against killing, at the cost (critics say) of collapsing back into rule-worship whenever the rule and the best outcome diverge.
The contrast between Kant and the utilitarians on this issue is therefore instructive. Kant fixes on the status of the agent acted upon and forbids using a person as a means whatever the benefit; the utilitarian fixes on aggregate welfare and counts a being only insofar as it can be benefited or harmed. The embryo's lack of present sentience makes it weightless for the hedonic utilitarian and weighty for the Kantian who credits it with potential rational nature — which is why the two theories diverge most sharply precisely where the being in question is least developed.
| Natural moral law | Kant | Utilitarianism (Bentham/Singer) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source of rightness | Conformity to God-given precepts of the human good | The rational form of the moral law (categorical imperative) | The welfare produced (pleasure / preference satisfaction) |
| Status of the embryo | Innocent human life; may not be directly killed | Bearer of dignity if it has (potential) rational nature | Morally weightless until sentient/preference-bearing |
| Handles hard cases via | Double effect / proportionalism | Strict, exceptionless duties | Case-by-case recalculation |
| Key strength | Clear protection of the vulnerable | Respects the individual against aggregation | Impartial, evidence-led, avoids metaphysics |
| Key weakness | Rigidity; status of double effect | Status of embryo is the unargued crux | Aggregation can sacrifice the individual |
| Theory | Decisive question | Typical verdict on early-embryo research | Chief vulnerability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Natural moral law | Does the act breach a primary precept? | Impermissible (direct killing of innocent life) | Rigidity; reliance on double effect for hard cases |
| Situation ethics | What does agape require here? | Case-by-case; often permissible | Unpredictable; "love" can rationalise |
| Virtue ethics | What would the virtuous agent do / become? | Depends on character and motive | Weakly action-guiding |
| Kant | Is humanity treated merely as a means? | Impermissible if the embryo has the relevant status | Turns on the contested status of the embryo |
| Utilitarianism | Which act maximises welfare? | Permissible, perhaps obligatory | Aggregation can override the individual |
Reproductive cloning and pre-implantation genetic selection extend the debate. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) screens IVF embryos for serious heritable conditions before transfer, and can also identify an embryo that is a tissue match for a sick sibling — a 'saviour sibling' whose cord blood may treat the older child. Selecting against serious disease commands fairly wide acceptance; selecting for non-medical traits — sex, and in prospect intelligence, height or appearance, the popular sense of a 'designer baby' — is far more contested. A natural-law reading treats embryo creation-and-discard as the killing of innocent life and the selection of children to specification as a disordering of procreation; the "playing God" worry is the popular form of the same intuition, though critics note that almost all of medicine "intervenes in nature" and ask why genetic selection is uniquely transgressive. Kant's concern is instrumentalisation — that a saviour sibling or an enhanced child risks being valued for a function (a tissue source, a trophy) rather than as an end in itself; defenders reply that parents can both use PGD and love the resulting child unconditionally, so the child need not be treated merely as a means. A utilitarian weighs benefits — a cured sibling, a healthier child, relief of infertility — against harms and the risk of entrenching inequality and a "genetic underclass" if enhancement is available only to the wealthy. Situation ethics asks what love requires of this family in this case; virtue ethics asks what the choice reveals about, and does to, the character of those who make it — whether it expresses responsible care or the vice of treating offspring as commodities. The lesson on Genetic and Bioethics develops these technologies, and cases such as He Jiankui's gene-edited babies and Dolly the sheep, in detail; here the point is that the same five theories, applied consistently, generate the competing positions, and that an examiner rewards the candidate who can run a single issue through all five rather than asserting a personal opinion.
Question (25 marks): 'The sanctity of life should always take priority over the quality of life in beginning-of-life decisions.' Evaluate this claim.
A Mid-band response would state the sanctity-of-life position, attach it to natural law and to Evangelium Vitae, contrast it with a quality-of-life or utilitarian view, and assert a preference — but largely by listing positions rather than weighing them.
A Stronger response argues. It grants the force of sanctity of life: a rule that treats every human life as inviolable from conception is admirably resistant to the discriminations a quality-of-life calculus can license — against the disabled, the dependent, the inconvenient — and Warren's and Singer's willingness to follow their premises towards infanticide shows how a status-by-capacity view can erode protections we are rightly unwilling to surrender. But it then turns the objection around: an absolute sanctity principle must hold that it is always wrong directly to end an innocent human life even to save the mother, and natural law itself flinches from this, reaching for double effect to license the ectopic-pregnancy removal that the rule, strictly applied, forbids. That reliance suggests the absolute is doing less work than it claims.
A Top-band response reaches a substantiated judgement. It distinguishes the truth in sanctity of life — that worth is not earned and the vulnerable need a bright-line rule — from the overreach of treating biological life as always trumping every other consideration. It argues that the strongest position is neither a pure sanctity view nor a pure quality view but a principled priority: human life carries a very strong, near-absolute presumption against being ended, which quality-of-life considerations can outweigh only in narrow, well-defined cases (a competent refusal of futile treatment; a direct threat to the mother's life), policed by something like double effect so that the exception cannot be widened at will. On that reasoning the claim is half right: sanctity of life should be the default and should carry the burden of proof, but "always" is too strong, because a rule that cannot bend even to save the mother ceases to look like reverence for life and starts to look like indifference to one life in the name of another.
Examiner-style commentary: The Top-band answer scores because it does not merely choose a side: it isolates what each principle gets right, uses natural law's own recourse to double effect as evidence against the absolute reading, and lands a judgement that is qualified, reasoned and defended against the obvious objection. Naming Warren and Singer to show where a capacity view leads, rather than as decoration, is what lifts AO2.
Exam tip: Do not list "religious views" generically. Show each named theory working — state its decisive question, apply it to one issue (abortion, embryo research, designer babies), then expose its specific weakness. Examiners reward candidates who use Warren and Singer to show where a capacity-based account of personhood leads, and who treat natural law's reliance on double effect as a point to evaluate rather than just to report.