The Metaphysics of Abortion

Persons, Souls, and immortality

Metaphysics and Ontology used to be essentially synonymous, but in the early 20th century some philosophers claimed it was possible to do ontology without doing metaphysics. Both disciplines are concerned with the principles that govern the fundamental nature of reality. 20th century ontologists like Sartre and Heidegger claimed that we could understand this nature by examining the phenomena that present themselves to our experience. They rejected what they called metaphysical claims, which are speculations about the reality beyond our experience. That distinction is somewhat problematic, but it’s useful for dividing up the questions we are concerned with. In this essay I will be dealing with the more speculative metaphysical questions, that require us to consider beliefs that clearly go beyond what we can actually experience.

The metaphysical question most important for the abortion issue concerns the fundamental nature of the mind or soul. Does Reality consist of only one fundamental physical substance? Or are there two separate substances, the mental and the physical? If the first claim is true, than the mind is just something that arises when we arrange physical stuff into a certain pattern. If the second claim is true, the mental and spiritual realm, which includes things like thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, pleasures and pains, is a separate domain of its own, whose connection to the physical is only a contingent fact.