Dr. Bonnie Steinbock on the ethics of abortion

In this episode I will be discussing the topic of abortion with a philosopher who has studied the moral arguments on both sides of the issue. I am interested in rational bases of moral decision making. I’d like to be able to work out moral rules from a set of socially acceptable first principles, but often I find that my moral intuition conflicts with what I derive as a rational morality. Is our morality wrong if it is not totally consistent, or is morality not derivable from precepts? I’d like to understand how these ideas apply to the topic of abortion ethics.

Bonnie Steinbock is professor emerita of the Department of Philosophy at the University at Albany/State University of New York. A Fellow of the Hastings Center, she has been a visiting professor at Santa Clara University (2012), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2015) and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia (2017). In addition to 70 articles, she is the author of Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos (Oxford University Press, 1992, 2011) and the editor or co-editor of several collections, including Killing and Letting Die (1980, 1994), New Ethics for the Public's Health (1999), Public Health Ethics: Theory, Policy, and Practice (2006), the Oxford Handbook of Bioethics (2008), and Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, 4th - 8th editions. Her latest book, co-written with Paul Menzel, is Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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