Don Marquis

Donald Bagley Marquis (1935–2022) was an American moral philosopher and bioethicist who served for nearly five decades as a professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas. He is best known in applied ethics for his seminal 1989 paper "Why Abortion Is Immoral"—frequently debated alongside utilitarians like Peter Singer—in which he presented the "Future Like Ours" (or deprivation) argument. Marquis contended that abortion is morally wrong because it deprives a fetus of a valuable future of human experiences, activities, and enjoyments in the exact same way that killing an adult human deprives them of theirs. Beyond abortion ethics, his work covered physician-assisted suicide, end-of-life determinations, and clinical research ethics.