Jamie_L

I don't follow. If you want a response, please elaborate.

Jamie

dk

Jamie
I sarcastically took a swipe at the moral proportionalism expressed in, “A handful of cells, regardless of their potential, are not mentally alive.” A kid sniffing glue has the liberty to snuff (sniff) out a handful of brain cells. A pregnant women has the liberty to destroy a handful of brain cells present in her womb. The point is that both events trivialize tragic events under the auspices of “a few brain cells”, hence denigrates the principle of liberty. Moral proportionalism based on a few brain cells reduces to a self-justifying explanation for unacceptable behavior. I was trying to chop the legs out from under the table of moral proportion.

I’ll try to be more constructive.
We all value personhood, but are grappling/struggling/reaching for a principled criterion for the assignment of personhood in the realities of the post modern world.
Why?
The U.S. for the last 220 years has prospered and progressed as a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and people are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This general principle knits U.S. history into a continuous cohesive effort to form a more perfect Union. The theme runs through the 1) Revolutionary War, 2) Civil War, 3) Suffrage Movement and 4) Civil Rights Movements. Today with the advent of family planning, abortion, in vitro fertilization, genetic therapies, embryonic stem cell research and cloning a complete break away from the Founding Principles seems inevitable, or the reality of modernity confronts the Founding Principles as an obstacle to legal positivism, secularism, egalitarianism, proportionalism, relativism, and utilitarianism.

bg-from-kg asked three key questions that in my opinion outlaw cognition as a principled answer.

I can’t answer a one, much less all three. Absent a principled response to each of these questions, we are left to contemplate the meaning of a more perfect Union. That being the case, then what’s the point of a social movement that forms a less perfect union?

I don't have an answer, except to say the U.S. has re-dedicated itself to become a less perfect union, or we live in a degenerate nation.

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: dk ]</p>

Jamie_L

You've misunderstood and/or misrepresented my statement. By "a handful of cells", I meant a handful of cells, or which NONE is a brain cell. My position is that once a brain exists, a mind exists, and thus a person deserving of rights exists. A kid sniffing glue may destroy brain cells, but unless he renders himself brain dead, he does not destroy a mind. Besides, that is self-destructive behavior which is different from one person taking the life of another. Furthermore, my position is that once a brain has developed in a fetus, the woman does not have the liberty to destroy it.

The Constitution of our "perfect union" based on the "founding principles" you speak of only gives legal personhood to humans who have actually been born. All of us in this thread have been discussing an extension of that definition into the gestation period of human embryos/fetuses. The only disagreement is how far to extend it. Thus, I don't think the history of our "perfect union" has much to offer any of us in supporting our respective arguements. Science has created possibilities unforseen in the past, and we're all in new territory now trying to deal with the results.

Jamie

[ April 30, 2002: Message edited by: Jamie_L ]</p>

Alonzo Fyfe

What rational justification can be given for the "member of a species" criterion?

I wrote a short story a while back called "Pride", which consists of a lion in the San Diago zoo with a defect -- a brain that was far larger than the brain for a standard lion. He learned to write English and, eventually, petition congress for certain "rights".

But he was still a lion. He mated with other lions successfully. A small portion of his offspring (all males, as it turned out) shared his condition.

One of the points of the story was to address the idea that "membership of a species" was relevant to personhood. This lion, it was argued, should be given rights even though he was not a member of a species with cognitive capability. Rather, it was his own facilities that determined his moral status.

But, if rights are acquired on the basis of individual characteristics rather than species characteristics, then what of the infant -- or even full grown adult -- who has characteristics equal to that of a lion. Is it permissible to do to them what we do to lions?

I think that there are serious problems with our "common sense" understanding of personhood. That, basically, it is a rationalization -- riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies, twists and manipulations, all aiming at yielding the conclusions that we like with little regard for logical consistency.

Jamie_L

Alonzo,

I didn't spell it out in the post to which you refer, but my assumption was the cognitive capabilities of an animal are part of what defines its speciation. Perhaps this is not the literal, scientific definition of species. My assumption is that a creature like the lion you mention is so mutated as to be no longer considered a member of its parent species. In effect, it is it's own new species (a species of one). Thus, my intent was that such a lion would be covered by my criteria and would be granted personhood under the law.

The reason for having a "species" criterion is to include in the ranks of "persons" severely mentally retarded individuals whose minds have a moral value even though they may never achieve full cognition.

Jamie

bd-from-kg

Jerry Smith:

This is basically a reply to your April 24 post.

1. On aliens

This surely deserves a prize of some sort in the “really weird pro-choice argument” category. In the first place, in species that reproduce by fission there is no distinction between “parent” and “offspring”, so the whole question is meaningless. In the second, if we have to decide what the best course of action would be in every off-the-wall hypothetically possible scenario in order to decide what to do in the real world, we might as well throw up our hands. Possibilities that are a little different from reality can be illuminating, but ones that bear no resemblance to reality are pointless.

2. On the good ol’ comatose individual

But your original point was:

Now for a comatose person with amnesia, the new identity (in your sense) has not yet been formed: he does not yet have the ideas, moral standards, attitudes, that will make up this new identity, and he no longer has the old ones. So if the identity you’re referring to is the one he will have (or the part of it that will result from innate traits) your statement applies equally to fetuses.

Sure but the point is that we do not value a person (in the relevant sense) for the ideas he has, but for being the kind of individual who can have such ideas. Similarly, we do not value a comatose individual for the identity he (supposedly) has, but for being the kind of individual who is capable of forming an identity.

It seems to me that in the second case you’re applying (and in fact extending) the criterion of “innate potential to develop the capability of having meaningful mental states”. You’re even allowing someone to qualify as a “person” if they need radical medical intervention of an unspecified nature in order to have any mental states at all. In fact, it sounds to me as though the “medical miracle” in question would have to consist of something like “growing” a new brain. Certainly humans do not have an innate potential for anything of this sort. So I would agree that this individual was not a “person” before the operation. And there is never an obligation to create a new person.

3. On moral principles and criteria for “personhood”

Well, that’s a show-stopper, isn’t it? No doubt this is what a committed Nazi would have said about Jews. In fact, I heard much the same thing said about blacks by some southern good ol’ boys. It wasn’t a subject of argument; it was just the way they felt deep down, you see, and nothing could change it... (And nothing ever did. Fortunately most of these guys have died by now; most of the new generation have a different attitude.)

OK, you have a point. Although I think that the real underlying principle is moral agency, what the “equality under the law” principle requires is that we identify moral principles that are widely accepted and applied in our society in determining who is treated as a “person”. Since it’s difficult to determine directly (e.g., by conducting a poll) what these principles are (because most people are not very reflective) this can only be done by examining actual (widely approved) practice. This is the point of noting that infants and individuals in comas are treated as persons. But this was only a first step. The next step was to argue that, given, the fact that infants and the comatose are considered persons, there cannot be a widely accepted moral principle regarding who qualifies as a “person” that excludes fetuses, because anything that is even arguably a widely accepted relevant moral principle that justifies treating babies and the comatose as persons also justifies treating fetuses and zygotes as persons.

Where your statement is decisively wrong is in claiming that I started out by looking for a principle that includes fetuses and zygotes as persons. I did look for principles that included babies and the comatose, because they are pretty much universally considered “persons”, so in searching for a widely accepted relevant moral principle one must limit the search to ones that justify including them. It would be inappropriate (not to mention begging the question) to limit the search to ones that include fetuses and zygotes.

OK, I think you’re misunderstanding me, but then I was a little sloppy here. When I say that what it means for someone to be entitled to rights is that he is entitled to a minimal degree of moral autonomy, I do not mean to imply that all persons are entitled only to the minimal rights that this requires. Fully competent adults are entitled to a lot more rights than that. But in spite of the principle of equal treatment we can’t really extend all of the rights that a competent adult would have to everyone who is capable of functioning as a moral agent to any degree. It is necessary to restrict the freedom of some, such as the severely mentally handicapped and the mentally incompetent. Many such people are moral agents, yet we can hardly allow them to vote, sign contracts, etc., or even to move about freely in some cases.

By saying that someone is “entitled” to rights, I mean (for purposes of this thread) that they qualify for legal protection according to the widely accepted moral principles that underlie the granting of rights to others considered “persons”. Of course, I also have opinions about what relevant moral principles should be widely accepted, but that need not concern us here, especially since the ones actually accepted match the ones that I thing should be pretty well – not surprisingly, since I’m a product of the society in question. (The Founding Fathers had to take this extra step – to push the analysis to a deeper level – but I see no need to go through all of that here unless we really disagree about what moral principles correspond to the kind of society that we want.)

Anyway, since we’re talking mainly about fetuses here, I see little point in discussing in detail what rights a fully competent adult is entitled to.

Perhaps you would like to elaborate on just what it is that newborns have that can reasonably be called a “personality” and which kittens and puppies do not have.

Anyway, the structure of this argument is peculiar. What you’re arguing is that newborns are valued for their present cognition, but now you want to say that the kind of “present cognition” they have that we “value” is that they are developing a personality, by which you mean that they are “learning human ideas, morals, and customs”. But surely it must be clear that the activity of “developing a personality” (in the sense in which a newborn can be said to be doing it) is not valued in itself. Rather, we value the newborn for being the kind of individual who is capable of developing a personality. This is just the kind of innate potential to produce morally significant mental states in the future that my criterion recognizes as the basis for “personhood”.

To see that it’s really the potential to produce future mental states that is being valued here, imagine an individual who was engaged in this type of activity (on the same level as a newborn), but which never resulted in the development of a personality. (Perhaps his brain performs a “memory dump” every month or so and never develops beyond that of a newborn.) Also, suppose that he is recognizably not human in appearance. Would he be considered a “person”? I think not. Thus the kind of activity you describe is valued only for what it produces, not in itself. To put it another way, it has instrumental value, not intrinsic value. (More on this below.)

As I’ve said before, I find it hard to believe that anyone can claim with a straight face that newborns are engaged in “cognition” (as I define it) at all.

I don’t have ready access to Dr. Singer’s books at the moment, so I can’t really answer that. I imagine that it is based on what a chicken is capable of doing versus what a fetus is. So far as “rationality” is concerned, I suspect that his point is that neither a chicken nor a fetus has any. Anyway, this part of the passage is pretty notorious, so it would have been somewhat dishonest to omit it. The main point is clear enough and doesn’t depend on whether you agree with his assessment of a chicken’s mental characteristics.

I believe that I’ve pointed out before that chimp babies come out ahead of human babies on every objective test of mental abilities that has been devised, up to around the age of nine months. After that, human babies forge ahead rapidly. This is perhaps a better indication of the problems with assigning personhood on the basis of present capabilities (unless, of course, you think that chimps should have civil rights).

4. On “cognition”

Here it seems that you’re trying to pull a fast one. Some time ago, in justifying my criterion for consciousness, I explained clearly what I meant by “cognition” and why I thought it was morally significant. It included only conscious activities such as understanding and conceptualizing the world, anticipating and planning for the future, abstract thought and logic.

Now you want to define “present cognition” as an alternative criterion, but to make this work you have to radically redefine the meaning of “cognition”. In fact, what you mean by “cognition” doesn’t even require consciousness.

I explained some time ago on the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000075&p=4" target="_blank"> Abortion - Yes? No? Why?</a> thread why this kind of criterion is untenable

In short, only mental events can have moral significance. their physical causes have no value in themselves; their value lies wholly in the fact that they are causes of mental events. In other words, mental events can have intrinsic value, but physical states or processes have, at best, only instrumental value.

Thus, when asked why we value something with only instrumental value, the appropriate answer is to refer to the things with intrinsic value that they might bring about, whereas when asked the same question about things with intrinsic value we might try to explain what it is about them that value (i.e., find desirable), or we might quite properly say that we “just do”.

[Note: When I call something “desirable” here I mean only that we value it, not that it has in itself some mysterious “property” of “desirability”. Similarly, when I say that something has “value” I mean only that we value it – i.e., desire it or consider it a potential object of desire. And again, the distinction between “intrinsic” and “instrumental” value is not a difference in objective properties, but simply a difference between things we value in themselves and things we value as “instruments” for producing things we do value in themselves.]

It is important to note that things with intrinsic value, by definition, are valued for themselves, and not for either what they produce or how they themselves were produced. We might, of course, object to certain means of producing something with intrinsic value and judge that the undesirability of the means outweighs the desirability of the end, but if there is nothing intrinsically desirable or undesirable about the means, it cannot matter what the means were.

Now let’s look again at your statement:

It should now be clear that this makes no sense. Since what you refer to as “present cognitive activity” may well not involve consciousness at all, it can only be an instrumental good, whereas the “future cognition” in question is generally cognition in my sense: it involves intrinsically desirable mental states. To say that something that is intrinsically desirable is valuable only insofar as it is produced in a particular way is logically absurd.

Similarly, to say that something which has only instrumental value (like what you call “present cognitive activity”) is the thing that we really value, as opposed to the intrinsically desirable thing (what I call “future cognitive activity”) that it produces, is simply confused. We do not value an intrinsically valuable thing for what produced it or only insofar as it was produced in a particular way; and we value the thing that produces it only because it does produce something intrinsically desirable.

The same confusion is reflected in your statement:

Again, what you call “present cognition” has only instrumental value, whereas what I call “future cognition” has intrinsic value. The distinction is not between “present” and “future” cognition, but between what I call cognition, which is a conscious process, and what you call cognition, which isn’t.

Certainly I value cognition (in my sense) which is occurring in the present. But the “present”, strictly speaking, is an infinitesimal sliver of time; virtually all events of interest lie in the future (though in some cases the very near future – e.g., a second from now). Besides, we can’t affect the present or the past, but we can affect the future. Thus all events of moral significance lie in the future.

Now let’s take another look at your argument:

Now as I pointed out earlier, the mental events that an infant is experiencing cannot be seriously described as “cognition” (in my sense) at all. what you’re referring to here as “cognition” of high “quality” is again a physical process. This is confirmed by your statement in your April 24 post:

But of course what goes on in the cortex is by definition a physical process. Not everything (to put it mildly) that occurs in the cortex corresponds to anything occurring at the conscious level. And indeed, it is very hard to imagine that an infant is actually conscious of all of the “learning” taking place in his brain. His brain is “rewiring” itself at a very rapid clip, but the infant is not conscious of it. This is preparation for future cognition, but it is not itself cognition in a morally significant sense (except in the sense that it has instrumental value: it will eventually produce, or at least make possible, morally significant mental events).

But finally, there is a basic problem with rejecting future events as a source of “value”.

There are two basic kinds of ethical theory: deontological and consequentialist. Deontological theories locate the “rightness” or “wrongness” of an act in the nature of the act itself. thus, stealing is wrong because it’s stealing; lying is wrong because it’s lying, etc. Consequentialist theories locate “rightness” or “wrongness” in the consequences of the act. It’s very clear that you (like almost everyone else who has been involved in this discussion) have been arguing from a consequentialist viewpoint; you do not argue that abortion should be legal because it’s not “wrong-in-itself”, but rather have argued from the consequences of keeping abortion legal versus the consequences of making it illegal.

But a consequentialist morality by its nature locates all value in the future: the value of an act cannot be determined by examining the act itself, but by looking at its future results. So rejecting a criterion for “personhood” because it locates value in the future is completely incompatible with a consequentialist ethic. It doesn’t make sense to say that the value of an act lies in the future, but the value of an individual must necessarily be located in the present.

Final note: I can’t possibly keep up with this thread from this point on. It and the “Abortion” thread that it sprang from have already taken up several times as much of my time as I thought possible. I will be making some short posts in the future, but this will be my last long one.

cheetah

Excuse me for intruding late in the thread, but since when was it decided that only humans have cognition? If we are going to say that fetuses have cognition, we surely should give a higher status to apes which have cognition as extensive as that of 4 year olds. Yet, we do not give them the rights of personhood! So, shall it be that personhood is only for organisms who have cognition AND have the potential for cognition above that of a 4 year old? That is an exercise in making the definition fit your ideology as it purposely excludes other organisms to avoid having to protect them and treat them as one would treat a 4 year old!

dk

Jamie believe it or not I pretty much agree with your summary of the issues. The one iota of contention is the "perfect union" concept you hammer on, though I'm probably being petty. I would say major social reforms and movements are subscribed to the founding principles to delineate "a more perfect union". The U.S succeeds when change moves the country to a “more perfect union”, but the U.S. has never been a perfect Union. Its worth noting that the period of post Civil War reconstruction ended with a "Separate but Equal" policy; and this policy clearly defined the U.S. under the founding principles as a less perfect union.

bd-from-kg

cheetah:

Your questions have been discussed extensively on this and the "Abortion" thread that spawned it.

You'll have to talk to Jerry about this. I certainly do not say that fetuses have cognition.

That wouldn't follow even if it were true. The potential of a normal four-year-old is incomparably greater than that of an ape.

But in fact it isn't true. The cognitive abilities of a normal four-year-old far exceed those of an ape. Just as a simple example, show me a single ape who understands how to use pronouns correctly.

cheetah

And show me a 4 year old that understands symbolism, can do math and spell medium difficulty words. It's not usual...maybe it can be done, but you are underestimating apes. And again, it leads us back to the fact that the definition has to include "the potential for" which would be purposely put in there to exclude apes. Not that I am advocating apes being given all human rights, but why do people go through such hoops and measures to make sure their definition of personhood excludes apes bu includes humans? I think it is just some vain idea that humans are "more special"