The book goes on to discuss how societies chastise and punish people who commit infanticide or who at least contemplate doing so.

Learning Goal: I’m working on a philosophy writing question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

Hi! To the following question and answer, write an explanation that explain why it was the most intriguing question and why. Also write a separate pargraph as if you were relpying to someone talking about question 2.

Question 2

Significance of Infanticide

According to Marquis, infanticide is murder committed against children less than one-month-old who are presumed incapable of responding rationally (White 2000, p.126). The book goes on to discuss how societies chastise and punish people who commit infanticide or who at least contemplate doing so. Yet, few laws on the books explicitly make infanticide illegal. The significance of infanticide is to argue that today’s laws should be changed. The first law that needs to be changed is that killing children under one month is considered murder according to the current regulations (White 2000, p.128). It seems fitting that when a child is three months old, society would have a greater concern for their safety than when they are only one month old. Many countries have attempted to legalize infanticide in the past, hoping that doing so would decrease the number of infant and child deaths.

Therefore, western society must adhere strictly to current legislation to shift towards more ethical and better societal outcomes. Legalizing infanticide would be a setback for women in western society. The current legislation protects the woman from facing potential repercussions if she were to raise the child. In contrast, if infanticide is legalized, then there would be no legal consequences for her actions toward her child (White 2000, p.132). It could potentially “undermine the rights and protections women have gained” over time, including the right to vote in elections. It may even discourage women from voting because they do not want any repercussions coming their way within their community or country due to actions they take throughout their lifetime (White 2000, p.129).

Illustration of Marquis’ View

The concept of raising infanticide is similar to the idea of raising abortion. According to Don Marquis, people’s actions may be morally justified even though there is no moral justification for those actions. His opinion on the topic of abortion is that it does not matter if one has a good reason for ending their life. Morally, people should judge an action according to its consequences and not by what reason someone has for committing that action (White 2000, p.131). Infanticide takes this idea differently because individuals kill their children instead of another person. Marquis’s view on infanticide is that in extreme poverty or overpopulation cases, it may be justified for parents to kill their children(White 2000, p.135). Marquis thinks killing a baby would be morally okay if no resources were available to support the baby’s needs (White 2000, p.129).

Abortion is only one of many decisions that are made in people’s lives and can easily be overlooked. It is easy to see how infanticide could eventually follow the same direction as abortion (White 2000, p.133). Many states still have laws against unlawful killings, but they may not consistently be enforced. There are many cases where a parent is not charged after they kill their child. One example of this would be when the parents were dating and were unaware that they were pregnant or would become pregnant (White 2000, p.130). If a woman wanted to abort her fetus, she would be charged with unlawful abortion instead of murder.