The Ethics of Homicide and the Morality of Abortion

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Mark Brown

Homicide is widely considered the most serious crime, justified only in special and extreme circumstances, in self-defense perhaps, or in order to protect others under one’s care, or more controversially, in situations where human beings live at the margins of life. The Personhood Theory of Homicide, for example, locates the limits of justifiable homicide at the limits of the right to life of persons, who may or may not be human in a biological sense. Abortion could be a form of justifiable homicide on this view if it could be shown that the fetus failed to satisfy reasonable criteria of personhood. The Personhood Theory has been worked out in detail, principally in terms of the intrinsic value of certain forms of consciousness and the conditions under which countervailing moral imperatives override the presumptive value of rationality, happiness, self-consciousness, interpersonal connection and other manifestations of psychological maturity. Over the years the Personhood Theory has lost its power to compel consent, in part due to the emergence of alternative theories of homicide which have quite different implications for the morality of abortion. In this essay, I consider one such rival theory, the Future Like Ours account recently defended by Don Marquis. I argue that the real insights of the Future Like Ours Theory of Homicide can be incorporated within the Personhood Theory of Homicide without its associated anti-abortion implications.

In standard versions of the Personhood Theory of Homicide, killing adult, competent human beings is presumptively seriously wrong because doing so destroys a person. Persons are thought to be uniquely significant centers of intrinsic value because persons are autonomous agents, or because persons are subjects of reflective self-awareness, or because persons are rationally self-interested bargainers guided by a sense of justice or because persons are the source and receptacle of other moral, spiritual or aesthetic values. Since the fetus is a human organism but lacks the psychological complexity constitutive of personhood, Personhood Theorists view some abortions as justifiable homicides. The fetus may be a potential person but personhood theorists argue that potential personhood does not entitle an individual to homicide protection. This is because in general potential F’s are non-F’s from a moral point of view: potential husbands have no marital rights; potential sweepstakes winners have no property rights to the Grand Prize; and potential Presidents have no right to assume the powers and privileges of the presidency. Unless potential personhood is exceptional in some way, potential persons are non-persons who are not entitled to the rights of persons.

The Future Like Ours Theory of Homicide seeks to circumvent both the category of a person and the category of potential personhood. It begins with a deceptively simple but intuitively compelling claim: It is presumptively wrong to kill us, competent adult human beings, because doing so destroys not our personhood but our most valuable possession, a future of value. Homicide is wrong on this view because it unjustly deprives the victim of his or her future, and since the fetus is thought to have a future similar in morally relevant respects to the future lost by an adult homicide victim, abortion is justifiable only in the same special and extreme circumstances in which killing competent adult human beings is justifiable. In skeletal form the argument looks like this:

The Future Like Ours Argument (FLO)

Premise 1: Unjust killings of us, competent adult human beings, are wrong because they deprive us of our future of value.

Premise 2: The fetus has a future of value in the same sense in which competent adult human beings have a future of value.

Premise 3: Relevantly similar cases should be treated in relevantly similar ways.

Conclusion: Unjust killings of fetuses are wrong in the same way, and to the same extent, as unjust killings of competent adult human beings.

On this view, neither the level of conscious awareness nor the probability that consciousness will emerge is needed to entitle an individual to homicide protection. FLO substitutes for potentiality principles the metaphysical thesis that human beings in general and the fetus in particular possess a future of value. For principles derived from the category of personhood, it substitutes the ethical principle that human beings possess a future which confers upon them the right not to be unjustly killed. Both substitutions falter under analysis.

The metaphysical thesis should not be confused with the claim that the fetus is a potential person in the sense that in the natural course of events it will become a person or the claim that a future can be foreseen in which the fetus has a valuable life. If FLO is to constitute a conceptual advance over the claim that the fetus is a potential person, the distinction between a potential future of value for the fetus and present possession of a future of value must be established. The same objection which undermines the potential personhood argument blocks a potential future of value interpretation of FLO. A potential future of value is a future of value which the fetus does not have and since the fetus cannot be deprived of what it does not have, abortion cannot be presumptively wrong because it deprives the fetus of a potential future of value. The distinction in the case of the fetus between a potential future of value and present possession of a future of value could be established if a future of value were implicit in some way in the present of the fetus. In the first part of this paper, I argue that no currently available theory of persistence implies that the fetus has such a property.

The ethical principle which drives FLO to its anti-abortion conclusion is the claim that homicide is presumptively wrong because it deprives its victim of a future of value. A FLO ethics of homicide is said to explain our considered moral judgements regarding the conditions of justifiable homicide better than its chief competitor, the Personhood Theory. In the second part of this essay, I argue that moral intuition reveals no differential explanatory support for FLO in any case other than abortion, where moral intuitions clash.

Although FLO fails to establish its conclusion at more than one point, it succeeds in illuminating the conceptual connection between the ethics of homicide and the intuitive appeal of anti-abortion arguments. In the third part of this paper I argue that anti-abortion arguments derive much of their intuitive power from our ability to appropriate in a moment reflective self-consciousness a past as a fetus and a future as a person. Empathetic identification with the fetus comes naturally because each of us spontaneously constructs a life story with an unremembered beginning, an experienced middle and a number of imagined endings. Culpable homicide is wrong in part because it robs its victims of their imagined future and their reconstructed past, but since a fetus does not possess a future or a past in this sense, the fetus cannot be a homicide victim. It can be presumptively wrong to kill us because as persons we presently possess a represented past and a represented future, but not presumptively wrong to kill a fetus because it cannot remember its past and its future consists in the unrealized potential other people attribute to it. I will argue that a Personhood Theory which highlights the significance of representations of temporal duration in the mental lives of persons can accommodate the intuitions elicited by FLO without commitment to the wrongness of

abortion.

I

My argument against the FLO metaphysical thesis divides into two main parts: (1) The distinction between prediction and possession of the future cannot be established in the case of the fetus under any currently available interpretation of persistence; and (2) This failure implies a moral skepticism incompatible with the starting point of FLO, "the unproblematic assumption concerning our own case: it is wrong to kill us".

Let us use "persistence" as a neutral term for the property through which an object exists over time and by means of which objects are identified and reidentified. To draw attention to the commonplace, spontaneous and inevitable character of the practice of individuation and reidentification indicates only that there must be some property under which persistence is possible, not that such a property makes possible the present possession of the future, either in the case of persons or in the case of the fetus. Philosophers have identified three main candidates for the property of cross-temporal identity: endurance, perdurance or momentary existence. Momentary existence would seem least favorable for FLO. If other times are abstract representations constructed in the present which are useful in some contexts and distractions in others; if, as Augustine might say, the past is memory and the future anticipation, then only those capable of memory and anticipation and other abstract representations have any kind of future.

Endurance and perdurance are more promising for FLO. An enduring individual is a union of spatial parts which can be wholly present at more than one time, rather like an automobile moving down a road; a perduring individual is a union of spatial and temporal parts none of which is wholly present at any point in spacetime, its parts distributed in time in the way the road on which the automobile travels is distributed in space.

An endurance interpretation could provide the metaphysical underpinning for FLO if a future of value could be seen as an essential part of the fetus. In general, to say that an individual endures through time is to say that it retains its properties in whole or in part through change, and that as a consequence, numerically the same individual exists in the past, present and future. Moreover, an endurance claim is itself timeless in the sense that it can be true in the present that a persisting individual exists in a determinate future. In Classical Atomism for example, absolutely unchanging and indivisible particles exist at all times. Pure endurance is of little use to the friend of FLO however since the exchange of material constituents is an integral aspect of embryological development. A naturalistically minded defender of FLO should be reluctant rest his case upon the discovery of a simple and indivisible fetal atom.

Partial endurance takes retention of essential properties to be sufficient for cross-temporal identity, rather like a rope in which the exterior is composed of overlapping strands of hemp and the interior composed of wire cable. Perhaps the fetus is an Aristotelian continuant whose essential properties determine a segment of its spacetime worm in which what is now a fetus has a future of value. Probably the best candidate for fetal essential properties are the forty six chromosomes which make up its genetic code. Not only is embryonic development prefigured in the zygote, the physiological function of every cell in a human being is controlled by the same set of chromosomes. A timeline which locates a future of value for the fetus would surely track the expression of its genotype in a mature human organism.

This kind of genetic code essentialism is vulnerable to refutation by sorites. Precisely because genotype is distributed in forty-six endlessly repeated chromosomes, any specification of cross-temporal identity in terms of genotype is open to failure of transitivity counterexamples in which genotypic properties are peeled off one by one. At some point, one either makes an arbitrary judgement that the organism perished while retaining some but not all of its core properties, or one claims, contrary to the hypothesis, that the organism persists through the loss of its essential properties.

Consider ordinary transplant operations, not brain transplants, but heart, liver and kidney transplants. For a genotypic essentialist, the organism which results would either be a hybrid individual, in part genotypically identical to one organism and in part genotypically identical to another organism, or, as most would say, the recipient organism survives with a genotypically anomalous part. Let the transplants continue one by one up and to and including the brain transplant. At the end of the process, the entire genotype (and phenotype) have been replaced but at no point can one non-arbitrarily demarcate the end of one organism and the beginning of another. Somatic cell gene therapy suggests another sorites argument. It is possible to alter the genetic code of human bone marrow cells, reintroduce them into the bloodstream and induce them to reproduce. In this case, the genetic code in some cells have been changed, but the organism itself persists. Now, repeat the procedure until all the cells are altered, reintroduced and reproducing. Repeat the entire cycle, modifying cell nuclei a bit more each time, and in the end one will have an organism with a substantially altered genotype, but no point at which genotypic essence was lost. Consider finally, the possibility of fetal somatic cell manipulation. Systematic manipulation of the genetic code during embryonic development could transform utterly the phenotype of the human organism. If the fetus has a future like ours, and possesses that future in virtue of its genetic code, at some point pre-natal genetic therapy deprives the fetus of its future. This procedure is similar in morally relevant respects to a partial endurance FLO description of abortion, but few would consider embryonic genetic therapy to be morally equivalent to homicide.

Perhaps purdurance theory can establish the needed distinction between a potential future of value and present possession of a future of value. Perduring objects possess temporal parts in the same sense that three dimensional objects possess spatial parts. Cross-temporal identity for perduring objects consists in sortal relative relations between sortal relative momentary objects. The United States is a fairly clear example. To say that the United States is densely populated in the northeast is to say that the northeastern part of the nation-state USA is densely populated; to say that the United States was sparsely populated in 1800 is to say that the 1800-part of the nation-state USA is sparsely populated. To say that a perduring fetus has a future of value is to say that a segment of the region of spacetime which it occupies has value, a judgement which if true at all is true at the time an abortion is contemplated. Abortion can be seen as a form of amputation, in which the fetus suffers the loss of its largest and most valuable part.

Perduring individuals are not all of a kind. Indeed, their identity both at a time and over time is crucially dependent upon the sort of entity that it is. Two main types of sortal relativity have been identified: mereological sums and nomological unities. Mereological sums of temporal parts are bound together by conventional, interest relative and ultimately optional relations. Clubs, nations and dynasties are perduring objects in this sense as are gerrymandered objects such as Clinton-Blair or any other newly posited entity, e.g. "mydogs" is the mereological sum of the series of dogs I have owned. The fetus can be viewed as a temporal part of a mereological sum which subsumes an intrinsically valuable time slice, but it also can be viewed as a temporal and spatial part of an individual united under the sortal "woman", or as a temporal part of the gerrymandered sortal "myfetuses". No perduring object has privileged status from the standpoint of constructive mereology; none can be used in an argument for the wrongness of abortion; none can be used in an argument for the permissibility of abortion. FLO loses its dialectical force.

Nomological perduring objects are persisting individuals whose temporal parts are united by causal properties which perpetuate themselves or give rise to self-organizing patterns of development. The cross temporal identity of a nomological perduring object thus consists in the causal powers immanent within a momentary object which generates succeeding momentary objects of the same sort. A time slice of a knife, for example, perpetuates its properties of rigidity and sharpness under a wide range of conditions, giving rise to future knife time slices linked under the sortal "knife". The kind of sorities which undermined the endurance theory of fetal possession of the future fails against a theory of fetal perdurance. Since the causal relations which link momentary fetal stages do not purport to be identity relations, they need not be transitive.

Perdurance theories have been worked out in the greatest detail in psychological continuity theories of personal identity. Psychological continuity theorists suggest that a person persists through time when person stages are causally and representationally linked by overlapping chains of memories, intentions, character traits and other forms of psychological connectedness. If the immanent causality of the fetus could be linked under a unity relation implicit in the sortal "person" to a future person stage then the fetus could be said to have a future of value because it has a future as a person. Unfortunately for FLO, the embryological evidence indicates that a fetal stage cannot function as a person stage in a psychological continuity theory of personhood because the fetus has no personal mental states. If the immanent causality of the fetus could be linked under the sortal "human organism" to an intrinsically valuable stage of a human being, the fetus could possess a future of value, but nothing in the immanent causality of humanity insures a future of value for the fetus.

We may tentatively conclude that under no currently available theory of persistence does the fetus have a future of value. A future of value may be foreseen in that such a development is an expected and intended sequence of events, but potentiality in this sense is not sufficient to show that at the time an abortion is contemplated the fetus has a future of value. If we do not know that the fetus has a future of value then we do not know on the basis of FLO that abortion is immoral.

Perhaps we have overlooked a theory of persistence which plainly shows that the fetus has a future of value. Perhaps the objections I have urged against a FLO interpretation of the leading theories of persistence are less than cogent. We cannot be sure that something important has not been overlooked, but notice that we nonetheless employ terms like "persistence", "individual" and "change" as a fundamental theme in our everyday representation of the world. The practice of individuation seems not to carry explicit commitments to partial endurers, perdurers, monads or any other metaphysical model of persistence. This suggests a Minimalist Conclusion: The reference of "persistence" is fixed as the actual process, whatever it turns out to be, through which individuals continue to exist through various kinds of change.

Minimalism seems the appropriate response to failure of closure in the metaphysics of persistence, but in conjunction with the FLO Theory of Homicide it yields a moral skepticism at odds with the central intuition motivating FLO: If we know anything about these matters, we know that it is wrong to kill us.

The Minimalist Argument Against FLO

Premise 1: If we know that homicide is wrong then we know a substantive theory of persistence under which human beings have a future of value.

Premise 2: We do not know a substantive theory of persistence under which human beings have a future of value.

Conclusion: We do not know that homicide is wrong.

This result should not be surprising. Any moral argument which presupposes substantive metaphysical truths must be supplemented with substantive metaphysical arguments. Perhaps those arguments will be forthcoming, but if the friend of FLO foregoes those arguments because it is obvious that in some sense people can be deprived of their future, then he has embraced Minimalism, but failed to draw the skeptical conclusion where moral intuitions clash, in the morality of abortion.

II

Marquis needlessly defends the claim that FLO demonstrates its anti-abortion conclusion without recourse to the category of a person, perhaps to highlight the contrast between FLO and the Personhood Theory. The "us" to whom he refers is his readership. Anyone who has the memory, moral sense and rationality to understand FLO merits homicide protection, regardless of species membership or point of origin. In addition, Marquis describes the future of value which we purportedly share with the fetus as "those activities, projects, experiences and enjoyments which [constitute] personal life." As stated, the argument clearly relies upon the concept of a person but perhaps there is an interpretation of FLO in which personhood does not enter in an essential way. Marquis suggests that FLO may be interpreted either as present possession of a future of enjoyment (FOE) or present possession of a future as a person (FAP). One who adopted FOE might argue that, "as a consequence, it is wrong to kill cows and pigs", but surely FLO is designed to generate a conclusion stronger than that most abortions are morally equivalent to a trip to MacDonalds. I do not wish to minimize the moral seriousness of the odious conditions under which mass market food animals are raised, but surely FLO derives its persuasiveness from the analogy between fetuses and persons, not the analogy between fetuses and farm animals.

In any case, the conceptual innovation which drives FLO to its anti-abortion conclusion is the idea of present possession of a future of value. This yields the plausible moral principle that homicide is presumptively wrong because it deprives its victims of a personal future which is rightfully their own. The idea that our future is part of who we are does explain the intuition that it is wrong to kill infants and the unconscious and it explains why early death from disease or suicidal behavior is tragic, but the thought that each of us is a uniquely valuable person also explains these intuitions. The FLO Theory of Homicide must be shown to have differential intuitive support in cases other than abortion if the FLO argument for the immorality of abortion is to retain its dialectical force. Supporters of FLO cite three sorts of cases.

Consider first the right to life of unconscious adults. FLO would extend homicide protection to individuals who suffer minor concussions, undergo anesthesia or fall into reversible coma because these individuals persist into a future in which they regain consciousness and a semblance of normal life. Partial endurance theory cannot provide the needed interpretation of persistence because sameness of genotype underwrites a future as a human organism, not a valuable future as a person. Perdurance theory provides the most natural interpretation, but it neither distinguishes FLO from the Personhood Theory nor motivates the anti-abortion conclusion. A psychological continuity theory of personal identity for example, links present person stages to future person stages if there is sufficient causal and representational overlap of memory, character, intention and other time spanning psychological states. The overlap is surely sufficient in the case of the dispositional psychology of a temporarily unconscious person and the future fully conscious person to whom he is psychologically connected. Remnants of the unconscious person’s experiences continue to exist as episodic memory engrams which can be activated in the right retrieval environment; intentions are still loaded into the motivational circuits awaiting an initiating stimulus; character traits exist in the unconscious person as arrays of standing beliefs and desires instantiated by the engrams through which semantic memory is realized. Dispositional psychological properties exist in the fetus in a much weaker and more problematic sense. Given the right uterine and social environment the fetus will come to have engrams which enable it to represent its future experiences, intentions and values, but nothing in the fetal brain is causally and representationally linked to any activity, project or experience which constitutes a future of value. Dispositional psychological states of a fetal stage are not psychologically continuous with occurrent psychological states of a future person stage. Hence, on a perdurance interpretation of persistence, a temporarily unconscious adult but not a fetus has a future as a person.

Perhaps the intuition that infanticide is seriously wrong will confer upon FLO an explanatory edge. The reasoning which led Personhood Theorists of Homicide to locate the fetus outside the scope of homicide protection might seem to commit them to withhold protection from infants, young children and other human beings whose psychological states are insufficiently linked to a future person stage. FLO provides a straightforward and satisfying explanation for the moral revulsion most people feel at the thought of killing babies: Even if an infant lacks the psychological complexity of a person, it has a life which is open to a future of love, laughter and creative self-expression. To kill a baby before it has a chance to achieve self-consciousness avoids the destruction of a person by eliminating the victim. It robs the infant of what is rightfully its own, its future as a person.

The standard personhood response to the problem of infanticide is to remind the critic that personhood is a sufficient, not a necessary, condition for homicide protection. There may be other good and sufficient reasons to prohibit killing human beings. FLO is no different than the personhood theory in this regard, it also states sufficient but not necessary conditions, although for FLO the difficult cases tend to come at the end of life rather than the beginning. Consider the not atypical case of Mrs Smith:

. . . an 85-year-old resident of a nursing home, transferred to the hospital for treatment of pneumonia. . . . [H]er overall condition and prognosis remain grim. For the past 3 years her mental state has been steadily deteriorating due to a series of strokes which have finally rendered her severely demented. She is now nonambulatory, incapable of sitting up in bed, and uncommunicative most of the time. When she does talk, her speech is completely incoherent and repetitive. Mrs. Smith shows no sign of recognizing or remembering her family and primary caregivers.

Mrs Smith and similarly situated elderly and neurologically damaged people do not have much of a future, either in quantitative or qualitative terms. The cost of continued care for people like Mrs Smith can be justified by FLO on the grounds that the quality of life for people who do have a FLO would be enhanced by a well-founded belief in the security of old age. Large scale active euthanasia of the elderly incompetent can be ruled out as a needlessly provocative infringement upon the social role of senior citizen. This is essentially the same approach taken by personhood theorists who argue that infants and small children should enjoy homicide protection because the practice of infanticide poses a danger to the social norms regarding children. Since children grow up to be persons whose psychological well-being depnds upon how they were treated as children, a society of persons has an interest in the protection of children. Abortion also coarsens attitudes toward children, but in this case a competing public interest in reproductive freedom enters into the calculation of sound public policy. Once the baby is born, the bodily autonomy of the woman is no longer a controlling public policy concern. Infanticide can be ruled out as a needlessly provocative infringement upon the social role of the child. In both cases, social policy considerations dictate an extension of homicide protection; in neither case does FLO gain differential explanatory support.

Personhood theory, but not FLO, can explain the widespread intuition that late term abortions are more serious than early abortions, and that infanticide is more serious than late term abortions. Recall that the unity relation which links person stages is a matter of degree. An individual may have some psychological link to a person stage without that linkage being sufficient for personhood. In such a case, the individual acquires intrinsic value to the degree that it approximates full personhood. Recall also that the unity relation for persons is intransitive. This means that the accumulation of slight differences in the character and complexity of psychological states can give rise to indeterminate borderlines between personal and non-personal stages in the life of a biological individual. A viable fetus, for example, may share emotional dispositions and implicit memories with a future person stage, an infant might share with a future person recognitional memories and learned social responses and a toddler might have experiential memories and a sense of self in common with a future person. As the fetus, infant and child accumulate linkages to full personhood, his or her value as a potential person rises to a point which merits homicide protection well before his or her personal identity is fully determinate. The situation is similar to the rise in political stature of U.S. Presidential candidates. Winners of early primaries are taken more seriously than losers, the nominees of the major parties receive matching federal campaign funds and the limelight of the Presidential Debates, and the President-elect is entitled to Secret Service Protection; but at no point prior to the Inauguration does the candidate acquire full presidential status. In both cases, potentiality matters, matters more as linkages accumulate, and generates special forms of protection; but in neither case is potentiality equivalent to achieved status.

The attitudes of people faced with the death of a young person provide the supporters of FLO with a third set of moral intuitions for which their theory supplies a seemingly perspicuous explanation. Young adults with AIDS and cancer who know they are dying believe that their future has been snatched away and may envy those who suffer a similar fate later in life; youthful victims of life destroying accidents and violence rail against the laws of nature and the lawlessness of humanity which have robbed them of their allotted time; the parents of a brokenhearted teenager who precipitously takes his own life grieve for their lost child and for the future he has thrown away. All of this is an intelligible and perfectly reasonable response according to FLO. These people believe they have lost their future because they believed they possessed their future.

A theory of homicide should explain the attitudes of the dying and grief stricken but it need not accept those beliefs as philosophically perspicuous constraints upon the limits of justifiable homicide or the metaphysics of persistence. Desperate people may frame their personal tragedies in terms which invest their lives with meaning, but their understandable reactions should not determine the limits of reproductive freedom. Dying people certainly have a liberty interest in controlling the terms of their own death, just as Jehovah’s Witnesses have a liberty interest in controlling their medical treatment, but their beliefs need not be taken as true to be taken seriously.

Neither should the attitudes of the dying be dismissed as misguided albeit understandable defense mechanisms. FLO reveals something very deep in the self-understanding of dying and grieving people. There is a sense in which we all believe that a premature death is a greater misfortune than death after a long, rich and fulfilling life. Even if it turns out that these beliefs have no metaphysical foundation, FLO has exposed an explanatory gap in personhood theories of homicide. Death may be a great misfortune because it destroys a precious and irreplaceable person, and murder may be a terrible crime because it intentionally obliterates a person, but how can personhood theorists explain the special horror most everyone feels at the murder of child?

III

Children and young adults may have a future to lose in the way FLO suggests, but the revisionary metaphysics upon which this theory of homicide depends cannot draw its principal support from untutored intuition. Grieving parents and AIDS victims know that dying young is a terrible thing but most are neutral regarding the metaphysics of time. Their attitudes can be accommodated by a Minimalism which regards persistence as whatever process which as a matter of fact underwrites the practice of individuation. What AIDS victims understand is how a foreseen death can alter the experience of time; what grieving parents understand is how empty their own experience of time has become. The past and the future are humanly accessible through mental representations all of which are expressions of the current mental state of a self-conscious person, but which nonetheless generate powerful intuitions of temporal extension.

Memory is not a spotlight which penetrates the mists of time to illuminate fixed images from the past. Recollections change as people revise the past to satisfy their present concerns and reflect current knowledge. Memory derives its meaning and value from the authorship of the person who remembers the past. Anticipation opens no window on the future. The imagined future, no less than the reconstructed past, is the product of current needs and forms of understanding. Self-representation selectively appropriates elements of the past, adapts them to the demands of the present and projects selected elements of itself into the future. Internally, the self is depicted as essentially and fully four dimensional, entirely capable of accepting responsibility for the welfare of others, sustaining interest in long term projects and sacrificing present satisfactions for future goals. At any moment a person can project a representation of a self which extends over time, a self which is understood from the perspective of the present, reconstructed from present remnants of the past and projected in the present into many possible futures. We do possess a future, a self-represented future the loss of which can be tragic. Killing a person deprives her of this future: Her hopes and dreams are dashed, her goals unfulfilled, her sins unforgiven, longed for reunions and reconciliations never occur. All of this happens in the present, within a continually updated autobiography which contains all that mattered to the person. Premature death is tragic and homicide presumptively wrong because both deprive persons of a future of value which they themselves have created.

What of the infants and children who died in the Oklahoma City bombing? Have they not lost something real, even though they never represented their past or their future? So it seems. But notice that it is we, the surviving parents, relatives and fellow citizens who believe their loss is real. We have a powerful intuition of temporal extension on their behalf because we represent futures in which they are painfully absent alongside futures in which they too survived. These intuitions lend equal support to the FLO hypothesis of the present possession of the future and to the hypothesis that persons are uniquely capable of the present representation of the future. The FLO Theory of Homicide has not been shown to have differential intuitive support in any case other than abortion.

What, then, of the millions of aborted fetuses? Have they been deprived of their future? We may represent a future for them if we choose, but, it is we, self-conscious persons, who make this future. We can also project ourselves into a past of which we have no memory, into early childhood, infancy and in utero. We can represent our self as the human being who is continuous with the infant in the baby pictures and with the fetus in the ultrasound. If we represent the past in this way, we will elicit powerful intuitions of temporal extension and empathetic identification. We can, if we wish, represent to ourselves a future for a fetus, but this is not something the fetus can do. The only future we know is a self-represented future. A self-represented future is a terrible thing to lose but this is not a misfortune which can befall a fetus. FLO fails because in the only sense of which we can be sure, the fetus has no future.