Abstract
When a human being comes into existence is crucial in bioethics. Conceptionism is the view that a human being comes into existence at conception. The twinning argument is an influential objection to this view. All versions of the twinning argument rely on a metaphysics of material objects, namely, endurantism. Given this, a strategy for defending conceptionism against the twinning argument is to deny endurantism and adopt an alternative metaphysics of material objects. A version of this strategy which has been debated in this journal is to adopt perdurantism, or the ‘multiple occupancy view’, on which monozygotic twins share the zygote region as a temporal part. We present a novel version of this strategy: conceptionists can evade the twinning argument by adopting an exdurantist metaphysics of material objects. We suggest reasons for thinking that this is a plausible and, indeed, preferable way for conceptionists to avoid the twinning argument.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 529–535 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Bioethics |
| Volume | 33 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 25 Jan 2019 |
Bibliographical note
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.Keywords
- embryo ethics
- exdurantism
- metaphysics
- monozygotic twinning
- zygote
