Hud Hudson

In a very influential paper, Abortion, Joel Feinberg offers a series of arguments against four popular proposals for the criterion of moral personhood and defends a fifth proposal. In this paper, I demonstrate that two widely‐accepted arguments employed by Feinberg against the modified species criterion and the strict potentiality criterion, respectively, are unsound. Moreover, I argue that there is a general feature of his inquiry into the criteria for moral personhood which undermines his efforts to argue convincingly either in favour of his own candidate or against other candidates.

Three Dimensionalists and Four Dimensionalists are engaged in a debate on the topics of persistence and mereology. In this paper, I explore implications of Four Dimensionalism for the formulation of the criterion of personhood and on the question of which individuals satisfy that criterion. In my discussion I argue that the Four Dimensionalist has reason to identify a human person with a proper part of a human organism, and that the Four Dimensionalist has reason to believe that if there is something morally wrong with human abortion or infanticide, it cannot be grounded in claims about the moral status of persons

Recently, Judith Jarvis Thomson has offered a definition of the constitution relation against the backdrop of a robust ontology of objects she calls all‐fusions. Despite finding her reasons to believe in all manner of all‐fusions intriguing, in this paper I note an unsatisfactory consequence of her position for constitution‐theorists. I argue that an unrestricted commitmentto all‐fusions should lead the constitution‐theorist to reject her definitionof the constitution relation, on the grounds that by choosing our all‐fusionscarefully, we can secure the unpalatable result that two different all‐fusionsconstitute the same thing, even though neither one ofthem constitutes the other