Dead Babies

We're talking about things we are and are not allowed to kill in Bioethics. One philosopher, Marquis, claims that the moral harm of killing is that of depriving some entity of a valuable future. Thus, killing fetuses is wrong, because they could have gone on to lead valuable lives; contraception, on the other hand, is not wrong, because it lacks a single, identifiable victim. This seems like a somewhat suspect distinction to draw, given my knowledge of reproductive biology. In Marquis's world, removing a single stem cell from an 8-cell blob amounts to murder, since that individual cell could have theoretically gone on to become a fully-functioning twin. Additionally, even the failure to recursively separate post-cleavage zygotic cells into infinite twins would seem like a passive way of denying thousands upon thousands of children potential life (ignoring, for the moment, difficulties with telomeres or uterine capacity).

Future value of life is a silly standard.