title: Personhood, moral strangers, and the evil of abortion: the painful experience of post-modernity.
abstract: The epistemological and sociological consequences of post-modernity include the inability to show moral strangers, in terms they can see as binding, the moral wrongness of activities such as abortion. Such activities can be perceived as morally disordered within a content-full moral narrative, but not outside of the context it brings. Though one can salvage something of the Enlightenment project of justifying a morality that can bind moral strangers, one is left with moral and metaphysical views that can be recognized as impoverished and incomplete by those who live their lives within the embrace of a content-full moral narrative. The cardinal dualism of post-modernity is not that which separates mind from body, but the gulf between the morality binding moral strangers and that binding moral friends.
authors.affiliation: Center for Ethics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030.
authors.forename: H T
authors.initials: HT
authors.lastname: Engelhardt
mesh_terms: D000029:Abortion, Legal; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D004622:Embryo, Mammalian; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D009014:Morals; D028723:Personhood; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D011247:Pregnancy; D012945:Social Values