Counterfactual persons and the argument against abortion: Reply to Kulesa

In his (2023) Ryan Kulesa argues that it is prima facie wrong to kill a ‘counterfactual person’. Some early foetuses, though still lacking consciousness, are counterfactual persons. Hence, it is prima facie wrong to kill (abort) these foetuses. Kulesa’s aim is to reconcile apparently conflicting intuitions about abortion and related acts, e.g., the failure to rescue frozen foetuses in abortion rescue cases, which philosophers writing about abortion find it hard to reconcile. I argue that he does not succeed because his argument does not establish that the mere fact that an entity is a counterfactual person is a sufficient condition of the prima face wrongness of killing it. More generally, Kulesa does not establish that the concept of counterfactual personhood is of utility in the debates he is concerned with at all.