In Don Marquis stance against abortion in his piece, Why Abortion is Immoral, rather than resorting to determining whether

or not a fetus is a person or not, he looks at why killing an adult human being is immoral. In this paper I will examine why just as Marquis finds fault in other accounts of the wrongness of killing, why Marquis account is faulty as well. Marquis states that the natural property that determines why killing is wrong should match our intuitions about the matter and should not have other better explanations. Marquis comes up with counter-examples to both the desire and discontinuation accounts, finding cases in which the accounts do not explain why killing certain people would be deemed right or wrong. He then offers a reason why killing is wrong: killing someone deprives him/her a future of value. The loss of ones future includes the loss of the activities, projects, experiences, interests, and relationships that one would have if he/she had not been killed. Thus, to show that this account might have faults in it as well, one would simply come up with an uncontroversial example in which Marquis account does not apply to a case that involves killing. Marquis identifies that there are cases where killing could be deemed morally permissible. He claims that killing does not wrong someone who is sick and dying, implying that the dying person has a future ahead of him that has little to no value. So, according to Marquis, because the value of a humans future is what makes killing right or wrong in different cases, one would look solely at the future to determine whether or not one should be killed. But how do we know what a persons future holds? It is not explicit that, when Marquis is referencing to ones future of value, he is talking about its value as the most likely future that people can predict, or the value predetermined after looking at all the events that transpire in the subjects future. We will therefore look at both cases.

For the purpose of this paper, let us consider the case of euthanasia, where the subject is sick and dying. Some might argue that there are cases in which the subject is near-death and in much suffering, that killing him/her would seem to alleviate that person of a future full of suffering. However, even through tool-assisted precise medical prediction and guaranteed low survivability odds, we cannot predict for sure what a persons future holds. Even the grimmest of lives can be turned valuable through events of chance, such as winning the lottery or a miraculous physical recovery. If we prematurely ended a human life when it would have turned out to be a life of great value, we would have done a morally impermissible act through performing euthanasia. Thus, humans cannot make the decision of whether or not someones future has value, especially since any seemingly bleak life can be transformed by an infinite number of factors, and therefore cannot kill another. If every event of the subjects future is known and it turns out that the subject would indeed be better off dead because his future has little to no value, then one might argue that it should be morally permissible to perform euthanasia. However, it is virtually impossible for us to know the exact details of ones future. Even if the account makes sense theoretically that if we knew everyones future for sure and that killing someone who has a future of no value would be morally permissible, in practice this is not possible and therefore is not a practically applicable account, at least if we are dealing with pre-determined futures, of whether or not killing is wrong. It seems, then, in most all accounts of whether or not killing is right or wrong, each account seems to hold some truth to it. However, different cases in each account can show that the natural property that is used to determine the wrongness of killing can sometimes have exceptions to them. Perhaps in the action of killing, the perpetrator is wrong on different accounts of the wrongness of killing, depending on the situation.