Future‐like‐ours as a metaphysical reductio ad absurdum argument of personal identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Don Marquis' future-like-ours account is regarded as the best secular anti-abortion position because he frames abortion as a wrongful killing via deprivation of a valuable future. Marquis objects to the reductio ad absurdum of contraception as being immoral because it is too difficult to identify an individual that is deprived of a future. To demonstrate why Marquis' treatment of the contraception reductio is flawed by his own future-like-ours line of reasoning, I offer an argument for why there is indeed a candidate for harm-the ovum-for it can be viewed as providing the functional foundation for a new life through (1) mitochondrial DNA inheritance, (2) paternal histone restructuring during fertilization, and (3) ability to initiate parthenogenesis. As evidenced by these distinct and natural features of ova, candidate (2) "some ovum or other" should be morally prioritized as the direct candidate for harm in the contraception reductio. By assessing the philosophical inconsistencies in Marquis' future-like-ours argument, this paper provides strong metaphysical grounds for rejecting the best secular anti-abortion position.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".