Sorry folks. I’ve been UA for most of the last two or three days. I had my 71st birthday during that time (on Halloween, no less!), and did a lot of jiggery-pokery with my computer, which is now up and running again with both Windows 7 and 8 in good order. Windows 8 is not compatible with all my programs, so, in order to keep them, as I wish to, I have to run both operating systems. Windows 8 is certainly faster, and has some nice features. It has been suggested to me that using a program to give me the Windows 7 experience in Windows 8 is like keeping training wheels on a bike. Well, perhaps, but then, I don’t find the Windows 8 interface as productive, even if it is functional. And it’s mainly just ugly, so I see no reason to put that excrescence on my desktop. But that’s just me. Samsung, apparently, is offering a similar interface change on all their laptops. Perhaps Samsung knows something Microsoft doesn’t. Anyway, everything is functional once again, and I am back on track.
The odium theologicum is, literally speaking, theological hatred. Referring to the Arian dispute in the early church, at the point where Athanasius (the Patriarch or Pope of Alexandria, who, of course, was later rehabilitated, and is now, amongst theologians, regarded as the main architect of Christian orthodox teaching regarding the nature of the incarnation), having been found by councils of the church in Milan and Arles, guilty of heresy, and sent by the emperor into exile, Gibbon, in his great history, says with cool wit:
The ingenious malice of their enemies had deprived them of the benefit of mutual comfort and advice, separated those illustrious exiles [for more prelates than Athanasius refused to sign the Arian protocols] into distant provinces, and carefully selected the most barbarous tracts of a great empire. Yet they soon experienced that the deserts of Libya, and the most barbarous tracts of Cappadocia, were less inhospitable than the residence of those cities in which an Arian bishop could satiate, without restraint, the exquisite rancour of theological hatred. [Decline and Fall, chapter 21]
The closing expression, “the exquisite rancour of theological hatred,” occurred to me as I watched a debate between Bill Donahue and Christopher Hitchens (which begins with this clip). (It starts off a bit unpromisingly, but after the priest moderator makes a few signs of the cross and offers a quick prayer, and then gives a long introduction in which he suggests that debates and universities were a Catholic invention, and were in any case at home in a Catholic context, we get into the real meat and potatoes of the debate, and then it becomes clear that Donahue had no intention to debate at all. Talk about odium theologicum! Bill Donahue is a nasty tempered, nasty minded, abusive bully. Why anyone should have thought it promising to put this rather abusive person into a debate is hard to fathom, yet he does express well the rancour of theological hatred. Whether it measures up to Gibbons’ “exquisite rancour” may be doubted. Here’s an example of his rebarbative style:
It’s not, by the way, Catholics for Free Choice, it’s Catholics for Choice, and, not to put too fine a point on it, the truth seems to be that, Vatican condemnation or not, many if not most Catholics in the United States are opposed to some fundamental Catholic principles, such as the absolute prohibition of abortion. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is, according to Wikipedia, “a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses drag and religious imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance and satirize issues of gender and morality.” It had its origins during the AIDS crisis in the late seventies, and, quoting further from Wikipedia:
The Sisters have grown throughout the U.S. and are currently organized as an international network of orders, which are mostly non-profit charity organizations that raise money for AIDS, LGBT-related causes, and mainstream community service organizations, while promoting safer sex and educating others about the harmful effects of drug use and other risky behaviors. In San Francisco alone where they continue to be the most active, between 1979 and 2007 the Sisters are credited with raising over $1 million for various causes.
Although their existence may be seen as an implicit criticism of the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on gay sexuality, its main purpose is clearly empowerment and charity. A narrow-minded idiot like Bill Donahue may find this anti-Catholic, which no doubt is a part of its métier, but people like Donahue should not forget that the church brings this kind of opprobrium upon itself by taking such a hard-line in condemning all forms of sexuality besides its strictly reproductive uses. To say that the Order of Perpetual Indulgence (another name for the same thing) is anti-Catholic is perhaps not altogether false, but it is to tell only one side of the story. Of course, Hitchens rather tellingly goes on to point out that the Jesus of Matthew told his followers that those are blessed who are persecuted for his sake, so that Bill Donahue should thank his critics rather than condemn them. But for someone like Donahue to complain about anti-Catholicism when his own abusiveness seems to know no reasonable limit is to fall at the first fence.
Which brings me to my real point for today. I will try to be brief. I am beginning to think a bit more closely about what I should like to say at the Eschaton conference coming up in Ottawa at the end of the month, and to that end I am reading Robert P. George’s The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis. George teaches jurisprudence at Princeton. He is a Catholic, a natural law theorist, and sets out in his book to establish a basis for legislating Catholic morality. It is therefore no surprise that he thinks of morality as being in crisis, since, by his lights, only Catholic morality is true morality. Indeed, opposing John Rawls’ idea of justice, which would make it largely impossible for different comprehensive world views to impose their morality on others who can reasonably differ, George claims that this depends entirely on whether or not what is being claimed is or is not the truth. But of course the problem of establishing the truth in these areas is what makes it possible for there to be a plurality of comprehensive world views — a point which George misses entirely.
Take the issue of abortion. While the Catholic Church holds that abortion in any circumstances, even to save the life of a woman, is wrong, many people are of a different opinion. Early in his book George provides what he considers a conclusive argument for holding that there are both pre-conscious and post-conscious human persons, and that both have as much right to life as a person with consciousness, plans, projects, hopes and fears, things valued and things condemned, things that are considered consistent with their lives as persons, and things that could be felt to degrade or to obliterate the value of their lives. He considers that this is something that can be known even to “unaided reason.” As he says:
The wrongness of abortion follows from the truth — fully accessible even to unaided reason — that the life of a human being is intrinsically, and not merely instrumentally good. [14 -- 'unaided reason' here means 'reason without the gift of faith']
I am not going to go into the argument here, although it has to do with the claim that those who think that we can separate the person, as a going concern, with plans, projects, hopes and fears (as immediately above), from the body as a instrument of those plans and purposes, is self-defeating. Thus, even a comatose body or a developing embryo have the same value as a person in the midst of a busy, rewarding and productive life, and none may be given priority over the other. Thus an embryo is in no way distinct in its essence from the adult human being in the midst of her life.
Now, the important point for the moment lies in how this plays into the public square. Since George has what he considers a conclusive argument showing that the secularist is not only wrong but self-inconsistent, in the context where the question is being asked, behind Rawls’ famous “veil of ignorance” — so that you do not know what position you have in the society, what your income is, what opportunities or privileges or lack of these things you may have, what one of a number of different comprehensive world outlooks you may hold, and so on — in order to ensure that the resulting distribution of benefits and harms are fair — giving us the Rawlsian slogan “justice as fairness” — George thinks that, unless your argument for the legitimacy of abortion is as strong as his argument against it, his argument should win in the public square. That is, however many different comprehensive world views there are, George thinks that, since he has demonstrated (to his satisfaction), that the only rational point of view is one in which both “pre-conscious” and “post-conscious” (his terms) human beings are considered to be persons in the fullest sense, unless you have an argument showing his to be wrong, his should stand, no matter what was decided behind the veil of ignorance.
Indeed, George quotes from Judith Jarvis Thompson, to this effect:
While I know of no conclusive reason for denying that fertilized eggs have a right to life, I also know of no conclusive reason for asserting that they do have a right to life. [quoted, 61]
George’s response to this is predictable:
But one is entitled to this conclusion [the one represented by the Thompson quote] about the moral status of newly conceived human beings (Thompson’s “fertilized eggs”) only if one can make an argument sufficient to support it. And such an argument would have to rebut the argument put forward to show that the unborn have a right to life even in the earliest stages of their existence. [61]
Actually, I think such a rebuttal can be made, but that is not the point here. The person who makes an argument because it is in agreement with their own religious presuppositions, despite the fact that they think it has more universal validity than that, cannot claim that the argument is conclusive in fact, unless they can show why it must be accepted by all as conclusive. For there are, after all, things that can be said in response to the claim that personal identity remains constant from the point of conception to the point of a vegetative state late in life. Even if we were to grant a kind of proleptic personhood to the conceptus, and a kind of residual personhood to a comatose body, there is no reason we should grant the claim that is being made, that there are no relevant moral differences involved at these different levels of (presupposed) “personhood.” But even in the absence of a conclusive rebuttal to George’s argument, Thompson’s response is perfectly reasonable; for she is saying that she does not find George’s argument compelling, and though she has no compelling argument for the other side, this does not provide George’s argument with any greater weight of authority.
It is said that the Arians, who believed that Jesus was not God incarnate, but of a lesser divinity, did not have a stable and consistent set of beliefs. The “orthodox” party, on the other hand, had a consistency and stability from which it never wavered – whether of belief or only of language, as Gibbon points out — but had at least a formula behind which its advocates could take their stand, unmoved and immovable. And so they won the day. But it does not follow that they won because what the believed was true. Thompson’s point (quoted above) seems to be that there is no knock-down argument either way, though I think she might have added that, in a conflict between a woman with her life projects and plans in place, with her own self-conception and world outlook, and the place that a child might play at that time in relation to the totality of her plans and self-conception, the matter of abortion should be left to the woman, and should not be imposed on her by others, no matter what arguments they may find compelling. George, along with other Catholic thinkers, believes that the Catholic argument against abortion is decisive, but it is not a view that commends itself to all, and it is for this reason that it must be left, where it belongs, behind the veil of ignorance. The uses of coercive power, either to force a woman to carry a foetus to term, or to force someone to suffer the pains, the disabilities and the indignities that a disease may visit upon one, is an illegitimate intrusion into the life of independent human beings, each of whom must be given scope in which to carry out their own life project, or to be able to say when their life project is done. These considerations may be seen, I think, rationally, to overcome arguments which would give others unprecedented access to the life plans and projects of people whose liberties must not be subverted, however rational those who wish to have such access believe their arguments to be.
I am far from convinced that religious leaders place any value on other people’s plans, projects, hope and fears, even within their own ‘flock’.
However pleasant the message, the required behaviour appears to be 1) support the theocracy 2) do what we say god wants (probably in that order). Individuals are not valued except as almost anonymous members of the collective.
Blow that for a game of soldiers.
If the Catholic god were to exist, then the inconsistency seems to start with it. If the life of every human were intrinsically good from conception on, then why don’t all embryos implant, and if they implant, why don’t they all go to term? Why is it acceptable for this god to abort, but not women? Also why doesn’t this god make sure that women who don’t want to get pregnant, don’t get pregnant? The facts just don’t match up with the presence of a god who actually cares about human life in any form. Finally, is it intrinsically good to be born to parents who are unwilling or unable to care for you?
You seem to be arguing here that the default position in this case has to be that if we don’t know either way, we have to leave it up to the woman. But this itself must be defended. It would be quite easy to argue that if we aren’t certain if something has the right to the preservation of its life then we should err on the side of caution and avoid committing murder out of ignorance. Since the woman is in no better position to judge the rights of the embryo/foetus or the morality of the situation than we are, all your position here does is basically insist that we have to accept that her choice is paramount and the paramount concern here … but that’s PRECISELY what’s being debated here.
Legally, this seems to indicate that we should either compromise or, in a democracy, perhaps settle it by what most people think is the case. Morally, the best we can do is accept that we are acting out of ignorance and try really hard to figure out what the case actually is, and not simply call it settled until one side presents a knockdown argument.
That there is not more than one life involved here is the only thing that hasn’t been and will never be decided to everyones satisfaction.
The idea that an unfeeling, unthinking, unknowing and non personal blob of tissue is a human being is a religious idea. You just believe it because you believe it. That doesn’t give you the right to force the consequences of your belief onto others.
Verbosestoic:
Yes, while I don’t argue it, I think it is true that this is the default. In the absence of a good reason to interfere with another person’s freedom, the default is to let that person act according to their own values, projects, plans and expectations. There is no right to intrude oneself between them and the outcome they judge to be best for them. This is fundamental to any principle of liberty. Of course, this takes for granted that gratuitous harm to another person, and no unnecessary harm to a sentient being are both excluded. Freedom must be consistent with the greatest liberty for others. Sometimes, that gives us a reason to act coercively regarding another person, but in the case where the harm done is as unclear as it is in most cases of abortion, or in the case of those in a vegetative state, it seems clear that we are not dealing with persons.
The supposition that a conceptus is a person is ridiculous, without a lot of qualification, and that seems to me what George is trying to do. The argument is, I think, invalid. People who have lapsed into a Permanent Vegetative State are no longer persons. While we may be squeamish about ending the life of such a being, no personal harm is done, no freedoms are violated, no projects or plans have been abridged. The reasons death is a harm do not apply to them. Thus, Terry Schaivo was not murdered. She was not a person who could be murdered. It was a perfectly sane medical decision to say that there was no longer a person there.
However, since we observe people’s wills, we may feel bound to respect their will to be kept alive in such circumstances. Even then, killing them could not reasonably be considered murder, for the person no longer possesses the qualities necessary for harm to be done to them. They are biologically functioning at a minimal level. They have less consciousness, and fewer plans than dogs and cats. who could be more greatly harmed than irreversibly comatose humans. Indeed, if we do take matters to the lengths that George and others want to — based almost entirely on religious grounds, although George will not acknowledge that — then we need to reassess what it is thought appropriate to do to animals functioning at higher levels of consciousness than comatose humans.
In the case of abortion the default position is that the woman is in charge of her own reproductivity, period. This should not be a matter for other people even to consider.
I have a wart on my finger. That wart is roughly as complex as a week-old foetus, and contains a viral organism which is regarded by some people as alive. It also contains some of my cells which, as I understand it, could be potentiated in a lab and used to produce an embryo and eventually a human being.
Do I have the right to remove that wart? Or detach a leech, in conditions in which it cannot remain alive? Or take pills to kill a tapeworm or a liver fluke?
Nobody disputes that foetuses are made of living cells that have the potential to produce human beings. But pretty soon, if biology continues to develop, EVERY cell will have the potential to produce human beings. Where will your argument be then?
She did, in fact, add some of those very arguments. The cited quotation — taken out of context, unsurprisingly — is from Thomson’s (no “p,” incidentally) famous essay “A Defense of Abortion,” where she concedes for the sake of argument that a fetus does have a right to life and then goes on to show how that still doesn’t imply a clear conclusion that abortion is wrong because a women *also* has rights. George ought to have paid more attention to the rest of Thomson’s argument — but, being a Catholic, the notion that women actually matter at all in the abortion debate is beyond his grasp.
I’ve always considered Bill Donahue a buffoon. Who wants to emulate that guy? Who believes he knows what’s good for us? Who wants to have what he’s having? He discredits himself and his ideology.
Thank you TPP, for the reference to Thomson’s paper (always put a ‘p’ in it for some reason), which I haven’t read now for many many years. The interesting thing about George’s argument is that it does not need to refer to anyone else’s opinion. It is complete and rational just as it is, which is precisely why I think the general point that he is making — that, notwithstanding the veil of ignorance, the truth is always more important than our political arrangements, and, since he has presented us with the truth, accessible to everyone by unaided reason…. — must fail. However, it is also important to note that this is in fact how the RCC argues — namely, that its arguments are valid, and therefore should be instantiated in law.
Of course, the arguments may be valid — but they are not sound, because their premises are utter bollocks, not to put too fine a point on it.
Eric,
And, of course, in the absence of a good reason to interfere with someone’s life, the default is to let them live, and that’s what the debate is over here. If we accept the base premise of the argument you are going after in your post — even if just for the sake of argument — then what we are saying is that we don’t know whether they have that right to life or not. Now, the woman is not more qualified to determine that than we are, and so leaving THAT part of the decision up to her makes no sense. You can argue as you do here, that if we don’t know for certain we should protect freedom … or, more, in this case that we shouldn’t restrict the known and settled right in favour of the uncertain one, but the counter to that is that it can easily be argued that the right to life is so fundamental that we should always err on the side of protecting it than not protecting it, given any uncertainty. And so we’re right back into the same scrap again, over different terms.
Now, on to the attempt to settle the issue:
I don’t think even you believe that. Let me toss some thought experiments at you:
Imagine that you have someone in a PVS. Someone decides to sexually abuse them. I imagine that you would like that person charged with sexual assault, but since you claim that the person in a PVS is not really a person they couldn’t do that, since no crime was committed against a person. Thus, what that person did would be, under your definition, more akin to them “abusing” a very realistic blow-up sex doll, which isn’t actionable under the law in most jurisdictions, and certainly could not be considered sexual assault. Is that okay with you?
Let’s go further. If they are not persons, then they are not covered either morally or legally under protections against being enslaved. Thus, under your own argument, someone could legally and morally purchase someone in a PVS and set them up as a living art exhibit in their home, keeping them alive as long as that seemed interesting and then terminating them afterwards. After all, they aren’t really a person. As long as the person in the PVS was not experiencing undue suffering that might run it afoul of notions of cruelty to animals, this should be acceptable if they are not persons. Again, is that okay with you?
See, I think that most people will consider them persons because they will follow the Kantian line that they should not be treated merely as means to the ends of others, but as ends in themselves, which is what we’d use to argue that these cases should not be allowed. But that, it seems to me, is something that can only apply to humans, at least consistently. So, we cycle back to the same problem again: at what point should we consider a foetus or someone in a PVS worthy of being considered as an end in themself? And this brings us right back up against the problem that philosophically we’re running up against a really difficult problem in terms of personhood.
corio37:
You presume here that complexity is some kind of important determining factor in personhood, but most people don’t really think that and it is actually a controversial argument. So, the comparison gets off to a rocky start.
Ah, Sam Harris’ supposedly damning argument. The problem is that it is easily sidestepped — along with the wart examples — by simply saying that those who argue that specifically — so, please stop calling these things “my argument”; I’ll let you know when the argument is one I personally hold [grin] — define personhood based on the “if nature takes its course” rider, that because a fertilized egg in the womb if left to its own devices will either implant or not and will either develop into a baby or not without any external intervention, it deserves protection from externally introduced factors that would stop that process. Warts, of course, don’t have that. Neither do skin cells from your nose. Fertilized eggs outside a womb don’t have that. But fertilized eggs artificially implanted in a womb do, as would clones that are being generated completely in a vat; if you let the process proceed, each of those will develop into babies. So we can make a clear distinction based on existing moral principles, and thus it is no longer the case that your examples actually necessarily are applicable in the same way using the same principles that we would use to argue for the personhood of a foetus.
Kevin Alexander,
Utter rot. This is trivializing a critical issue in moral philosophy simply because you seem to want the answer to come out on your side and you don’t like religious people.
Even if I accepted the “unthinking blob of tissue not being a person is obvious” argument, a foetus thinks and even seems to know at some point before birth, and therefore at some point before birth it deserves protection as a person, by your own rhetoric.
You seem to have missed my actual suggestions for this uncertain case that you think certain:
To deny that this is what we should do is you forcing the consequences of your beliefs onto others. I’m trying to ensure that if we don’t know the answer here we pick the best compromise and keep working to find the right answer. How is that forcing the consequences of my beliefs onto others?
Oh, I certainly wasn’t suggesting that the arguments were sound. In order to get to their conclusions you have to accept hosts of very questionable premises indeed, such that they have proved there to be a god, that that god has given revelations, that we can know what those revelations are, and that this god has provided not only a clear sign of what is good, but that following that good is obligatory for everyone without exception. It is a wonderfully complete system, the arguments for it look as substantial as pyramids, and the whole system is about about as useful as pyramids to the general welfare, and would, if established in law — at least in my view — be completely disastrous as a form of the good life. The same goes for other religious points of view. Islam claims to have the recipe for a perfect society, and yet if you look at any society in which some effort is made to govern along Islamic lines, people are miserable, authoritarian idiots are in charge, and women are essentially chattel.
Verbosestoic:
Perhaps that is what the debate is over, but on the side of assisted dying, the persons themselves are the determining factor, for it is their right to die when life has become intolerable that is in question, and in the case of abortion, it is the right of the woman to terminate pregnancy, before there is an independent person that is in question — in both situations the default is that of not interfering with someone’s choices, or to interfere, in your words, with someone’s life.
As for what may be done with someone who has lapsed into a PVS, of course we would continue to show respect to the body, just as we would to the body if it were dead. Using the body for sex, whether in a PVS or in a dead state would still be repulsive to most of us, and an infringement on the right of the formerly living person to have his or her remains treated with respect. And since we all have an interest in having our wishes respected after we die, this is something that is reasonably protected. The point you are making is empty. Showing that we should treat PVS patients with respect, as well as bodies, does not show that there is a functioning person who deserves the same regard that is given to free and competent persons.
Eric,
Tying this to assisted dying is bad because it’s clear that in that case we are considering the right to life to trump choice by default and need good arguments for why that should be changed, so it works against you, and in your abortion case it is the entire “independent person” that is being debated, so again we aren’t going to agree on that EVEN IF we accepted your default.
As for the rest, it comes down to whether you think people with PVS are protected by them being granted personhood rights even when they are not people under your view. If you do, then we could also grant personhood to foetuses even if they aren’t technically people as well, and so the precise personhood argument becomes moot. I think that most people consider people with PVS to still be people, which is why the cases I mentioned would be considered sexual assault and slavery as opposed to something else that we also make illegal. Now, if you don’t think that, but treat it like the case of the corpse where we say that the corpse has no personhood rights but that we are restricting some actions for other reasons, you would have to justify every single case where that is done — including that of life — for PVS people with something that DOESN’T depend on them having personhood rights AND would simply end up proving that this right to freedom and liberty is far less important than you are making it out to be when we talk about abortion; we could limit abortions, for example, easily if people simply found them distasteful enough.
If the RCC had its way – every ovulation of every female would be fertilized and the zygote carried to term. The rights of ova would trump the rights of the woman ovulating. The rights of fetuses would trump the rights of the pregnant woman. If a young woman is murdered, why don’t we charge the murderer with the murder of all her potential children? Shouldn’t we do an autopsy and count up all the ovules? The RCC seems to believe that the right to life takes precedence over all others – no matter what that life might be like and I can imagine some lives which I would not want to subject others. Do we have the right to force life on another by our having children or forcing others to do so?
One question that is not easy to answer is what makes a human human? Is it a diploid set of genes? Is it consciousness? Given that we can’t take good care of the humans who are currently alive, why are we so hellbent on bringing more into the world? In the US, 16% of the population now faces food insecurity – many of them children.
Why is it that all of these arguments over abortion seem to ignore the fact that there’s someone else involve in the equation?
As I’ve said, I’m ethically against abortion for the reasons of economic convenience. But I’m not the one who’s pregnant. I’m not the one literally putting my life at risk for 9 months. I’m not the one who the religious (and yes, it’s a religious argument) would consign to slavery for that period of time and beyond.
Even if I immediately drop the newborn off at the nearest fire station, I’m not the one who has to deal with the emotional consequences of birth.
The primary rights are the woman’s. Period. Full stop.
Her choice. You can yammer on all you want about where YOU would put the bright line between personhood and nonpersonhood. Your opinion does not matter. Hers does.
Giving this move to declare personhood at conception, does anyone know of a church who has started to symbolically baptize zygotes? They are already underwater.
Kevin,
I DEARLY hope that you aren’t actually saying what this sounds like: that it is her opinion that decides whether the foetus should be considered a PERSON or not. You can make a valid but debatable claim that even if it is person her right to libery/bodily autonomy/whatever still means that whether she has an abortion or not is up to her, and you can make a valid but debatable claim that the foetus is not a person and so only her rights need to be considered. However, the foetus is either a person objectively or it is not, and any claim that its personhood depends on her opinion of whether or not it is a person is, well, a heinous claim. Personhood does not depend on anyone’s opinion.
This would seem to apply to both sides, if it’s accurate. But in general the reason the woman is put a bit aside in a lot of these discussions is that a) if the foetus is not objectively a person and so therefore does not have personhood rights, then her rights are obviously paramount and so do not need to be argued over and b) the right to life is probably the most fundamental right in all of Western society, meaning that if the foetus IS deemed to have a right to life then we would clearly need an exceptionally good argument for allowing abortion (which bodily autonomy MIGHT provide).
Basically, the real issues here are not about her rights, at least right now, and thus the focus isn’t on them, no matter how much you might think that it’s really all about her.
To hold this position and not want abortion illegal in cases of economic convenience, you must either:
a) Be a moral relativist, arguing that while you consider it immoral that doesn’t mean that it objectively is.
b) Not want morals enforced by law.
c) Think that a law for that case would be impractical.
Which is it?
So VS, when is a person a person and why do you believe this? If the fertilized zygote is a person, should every miscarriage be investigated as a possible homicide?
I don’t know … as I said earlier. I personally think that it’s some point before birth because I believe that there is no relevant capacity that a 1 minute old infant has that a 9-month old foetus doesn’t that could mean that a foetus at that age is not a person while an infant is, and I think it undeniable that an infant is a person. I don’t think that an unfertilized egg or even unimplanted zygote is a person, at least in part because there’s no natural progression to the obvious states from there and I think that’s important. Beyond that, it’s not clear. Personhood, however — despite Kevin’s insistence that the issue is only driven by religious motivations — is a VERY complicated and difficult concept, especially in these cases. We’ve all seen the attempts at loose definitions that end up being contradictory, and so much more work needs to be done … which won’t get done if we refuse to bring it up for fear of re-opening the abortion debate.
It would seem that we would need to define person first, before we can move forward. Could an individual forfeit personhood by an event – say committing a heinous crime?
I am truly baffled by the behavior of the so called right to life or pro-life movement; I cannot understand why someone would work so hard to ensure that a child is born and then not provide for him or her after that. How can a pro-life person oppose sex education, birth control, prenatal care, postnatal care, medical care until of age, living wages for parents, education, housing, healthy diets, etc? If we, as a society, force a pregnancy to term, aren’t we then responsible for allowing the child to thrive?
As I asked before, how does the US, as a very rich western society, allow children to live in poverty without adequate food, health care, housing – without any hope for the future – and yet want to force more children to be born?
Michael, Kant actually thought a person could forfeit personhood. A suicide, he said, who tried and failed, could be treated as we treat any non-human animal, and does not deserve our moral regard. Of course, I think he is wrong in this, but it is at least an example of the kind of thing you have in mind.
Verbosestoic. I do not think it is reasonable to speak as you do about personhood developing, as you say,
Rather than treating this as a genuinely difficult problem you see prepared to suggest criteria which are not based on any criteria. John Locke defined a person as
which would exclude both the 9-month-old foetus, and the one minute old infant.
Certainly, it seems that there is some very serious work to be done here on personal identity (that is, a being who can consider itself as a self, the same thinking being in different times and places.). But of course, that is only the first step. Considering something to be a person is to ascribe to it features that relate it to its own future, for example, as well as, according to McMahan (The Ethics of Killing), to be above a threshold of respect. In McMahan’s view, and I agree with him, the foetus does not rise above this threshold, and since it can therefore have only time-relative interests, and no clear future-directed intentions, its time-relative interests are in fact, if not negligible, at least not very strong. It is also not a person in the relevant ethical sense. That is why, in fact, most people consider the life of the woman more important than the life of the foetus, if there is a conflict between the two.
It is too easy simply to say things like “I personally think that it’s some point before birth …” The “I personally” really doesn’t claim much more than that this is what you think just now, and there is no reason to give intellectual weight to it. And saying that there is no relevant distinction between a 9 month foetus, and a one minute old infant, is to ignore the significance of birth. For if, as does happen, the only way to save the woman’s life in childbirth is to destroy the foetus, then this is a perfectly morally appropriate thing to do, though we do not usually think that it is appropriate to save the life of one person by killing another. So, intuitively, there is an important distinction here.
I should add here that for men to be discussing questions of abortion is a bit of a stretch, since we are talking about something that will never be a part of our own experience. And even if most women were in principle opposed to abortion, it still wouldn’t apply to the individual woman faced with this decision.
As for your earlier “argument”:
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
Eric,
Note that I’ll be hopping around in my quotes a bit, so please bear with me:
This, I think, is a bit unfair considering that your quoted section was a reply to Michael with only a vague criteria that was preceded by “I don’t know”. And the discussion of that specifically:
With the “I personally”, you imply here that this was just an assertion or statement of opinion on my part, when I justified it with an argument. And that argument was not just that there is no relevant distinction, but that there was no relevant distinction in CAPACITIES. So my argument was this (with the unstated premise added in):
1) Personhood is defined by capacities, real or potential (I don’t need to have an opinion on which yet).
2) There is no relevant difference in capacities between a 9 month old foetus and a 1 minute old infant.
3) Infants are considered persons.
Therefore, at at least some point before birth, foetuses should also be considered persons.
In terms of actual capacities — rather than an opportunity to develop/demonstrate them due to a change in environment — I don’t see a difference. I think this is convincing, but it’s only a “personally” because it CAN be challenged and it doesn’t settle the argument because it doesn’t say WHAT capacity we are looking for. It can be challenged by:
1) Arguing that capacities are not the criteria for personhood. This is fine, but then you’d need to say what it is and justify that. Most pro-choice arguments — suffering, for example — ARE about capacities. Even your two arguments are that sort of argument: Locke’s is explicit, and it seems to me that your “future-related intentions” are about intentions and so are that as well (we’ll leave out the “respect” part because that’s either still a capacity or a qualifier of one, or else it’s appealing to what we think, which is problematic when defining people). So, you aren’t making this move.
2) You can argue that the capacities are different. For all of the ones you mention, I fail to see how that is the case. You agree that for Locke’s it is, and I don’t see how McMahan’s could be different other than by introducing a direct environment where it can develop.
3) You can argue that infants shouldn’t be considered persons either. Some have done this — I think Singer does, but don’t quote me on that since I might be wrong — but most people still, for example, think infanticide is wrong, and so we’d have to introduce protections, and then if we do that then we can do it for the foetus as well even if it is a person, so it ends up working against your claim.
This is a nice lead-in to the “argument” that you didn’t get: “perfectly morally appropriate” ACCORDING TO WHO? Certainly to you, but that depends on a specific moral outlook. Others disagree. And so we need to know why. Now, when you toss in the “intuitively” here, you are relating it to an intuitive outcome, but you seem to be suggesting that it is because the foetus is not considered a person and should not be. I rather think that it’s likely more of a “trolley case” issue, where people say that it’s right only because they can think of the actions and not of a direct intervention. So they do the Utilitarian think and conclude “1 alive, 1 dead versus 2 dead … do it” but I suspect that if the question was phrased in a manner similar to the “push someone in front of the train” case, they’d have the same contradictory response as the trolley case is.
And this leads in to your last comment. The whole point of the PVS example was to find an obvious case where we could examine personhood. I argued that PVS cases were persons and you denied that. We were trying to settle at least the abortion case, but you appealed to choice in dying and abortion cases, it seemed to me, to JUSTIFY your sense that PVS cases were no longer persons. The problem, as I pointed out, is that those cases are debatable as well. As in the previous case, it seems obvious TO YOU, but not to everyone else, and so tossing them out as examples to settle the PVS case only clutters it up more. These sorts of analogies or thought experiments are supposed to add clarity, by adding cases where EVERYONE should see your point. If you deliberately use debated examples that YOU think are clear, it isn’t helpful.
As far as I can tell, murdering someone will never be a part of my own experience, and yet I feel perfectly qualified to discuss the morality of it. I take a strongly rational stance towards morality, and so believe that we can advance a universal argument for its morality/immorality that won’t depend on anyone’s experience to put forward or understand. If that’s true, then men are just as qualified as women to discuss this, and in general personal or potential experience can only IMPEDE that study by potentially making the person biased in favour of what’s best for them as opposed to what’s right. And if you take the tack that experience matters, then I fail to see how you can avoid having a least a partially relativistic morality.
Well, Verbosestoic — and you are, too, almost as verbose as I am! — regarding the “I personally,” I do not see the argument, just a claim that you do not personally
And by the last point you are saying something that some people are quite prepared to deny. The issues here are very subtle, and I’m not sure I have a grasp of them, but McMahan speaks, for instance, of a threshold of respect, and then actually claims that infants may live below the threshold of respect (for persons). So, it may not be so undeniable as all that, and in fact the Groningen Protocol in Holland is based on the assumption that infants are not persons, and have no personal interests to protect. The same goes, though in a different way, for PVS individuals. Are they persons? Well, not in the traditional sense. They have no future directed interests, for they have no future direction, but they may have had future directed interests that may have included their being in a PVS, which we should honour because they are the expressed desires of persons. That’s where last will and testaments get their purchase. Though no longer persons, those who are dead had future directed interests that we should respect, because they were persons. And normally, the same considerations can be used with reference to children too. They will become persons, whose lives will have future directed interests in a way that they do not now. The problem with ascribing personhood to infants is that there are animals whose moral status is thought to be lower than that of infants, and yet their mental abilities far surpass them. Ascribing personhood to infants and not to, say, Gorillas, is speciesist, and it is not clear that that is an appropriate move in the ethical game. I am not entirely sure that there are wholly satisfactory ways of resolving these difficulties.
Regarding men scrapping over the morality of abortion, men’s relationship to abortion and to murder are very different. You may not think that you will ever murder. Long may this conviction remain so. Yet you can be a murderer. Without a lot of technological jiggery-pokery you are not going to be a mother. The cases are asymmetrical.