Final answer:
Mary Anne Warren argues that personhood is characterized by five criteria, which are consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity to communicate, and the presence of self-concepts and self-awareness. These characteristics underpin her position that a fetus does not qualify as a person and therefore abortion is morally permissible, contrasting with other views that look at human species membership or potentiality for assigning moral status.
Step-by-step explanation:
Mary Anne Warren identifies five characteristics that she believes are essential to the concept of personhood. However, these are not detailed within the provided text.
From other known works of Warren, these characteristics typically include consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems), self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control), the capacity to communicate (by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types), and the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness (either individual or racial, or both). Warren's criteria for personhood play a crucial role in her arguments regarding abortion, as she posits that fetuses do not satisfy these criteria and therefore do not possess rights equivalent to persons, such as the right to life.
These characteristics serve as the foundation of her argument that aborting a fetus is morally permissible since, according to her, a fetus lacks the essential traits of personhood. This perspective is contrasted with other views that assign moral status based on being a member of the human species, as argued by Ronald Dworkin, or on the potentiality of the human embryo, as mentioned in Aristotle's theory of hylomorphism. These contrasting views fuel the ongoing philosophical and ethical debate on abortion and the rights connected to bodily autonomy versus the right to life of the fetus.