In our society where there is this type of binary situation exists the tendancy is to err or default on the positve rather than the negative. When a person is accused of a crime (which is a binary situation; ethier guilty or innocent) the legal stance is to default to the positive. The accused is assumed innocent untill proven guilty.
OK: how does this work with the other
potentiality examples you raised: is it appropriate to treat every fetus or kid as the best positive outcome, which in this case is a fully capable adult? ie: let them buy cigarettes and beer and vote?
The default stance is to not treat a fetus as a spontaneous abortion because that would detrimental to the human race in general.
I can't imagine why.
The continuation of the human race depends on fetuses. It makes more sense, survival wise, to assume the fetus is not a potential spontaneous abortion.
Not to me it doesn't. I find this to be a non-sequitur.
I would say that an outcome-based view would be blind to whether a fetus is a person or not. In fact: outcome-based views such as utilitarianism are pretty famous for their ambivalence toward human rights. Part of the reason for introduction of moral frameworks such as Rule Utilitarianism.
Besides prenatal care improves the odds for success.
Sure. This is true whether the fetus is defined as a person or not, right? As a practical matter, I doubt people who believe a fetus is a person have better prenatal care than those who believe a fetus is going to
become a person, assuming they're planning to bring the pregnancy to term.
I would further submit that poor prenatal care bringing a fetus to term would have a net negative result on the overall health of the next generation. It follows that there is therefore a moral argument to terminate these pregnancies once identified. Additionally, it is very clear that malformed fetuses should be terminated within such a framework. All of this remains true whether the fetuses are persons or not.
This is the greatest problem with an outcome-based moral framework: it is quite blind to human rights and can lead to normitive proscriptions most people consider instinctively morally unsupportable. Advocates suggest this is because our instincts are not very good.
The positive potentiality is also a reason why the fetus is not treated as a potential spontaneous abortion. Alive untill proven dead.
Yeah, but that's layering one dubious argument onto another: that we must (or even can) treat something
now as one of its potential future states (dubious) and that you should always choose the most positive outcome (further complication: positive for whom?) as the category (dubious).
There can be reasons to side with one potential rather than the other. Some are arbirtary. Some can have negative consequences we may wish to avoid.
The most consistent Humanist moral framework does assign a fetus non-human status, but this does not impact the issue of whether it's moral to terminate a fetus - human or not. I think you'll have to be more specific about these vague 'negative consequences we wish to avoid,' that you seem to think are different whether a fetus is held to be a human or not.
