Jerry Smith

bd-from-kg
Yes, my definition was meant to cover this. Excluding those individuals that do not possess the qualities we value as personhood, and that should not have rights extended to them, is a very important criterion.

This is the reason so many people object to a definition that does include a zygote, an embryo, or a fetus without a complete brain.

Your definition is based on the individual's present nature, but it is not descriptive of what the individual is now. I might base a definition of the word "mortal" on the natural and foreseeable development of death in an individual's future, but I would not base a definition of "dead individual" on that same "nature".

The 'real' one that I 'started' with is remarkably similar to the 'formal' one. The main difference is this:

The 'starting' criteria we use to recognize personhood are not entirely conscious, qualifiable or quantifiable ones. Some radicals might use logic to deny personhood to babies, but we can look at a baby and perceive that it is a person without applying any reasoning whatsoever, based on our subconscious reaction to it.
On the other hand, the 'formalized' definition gives a practical method for discerning the personhood of an individual in dispute. It is based on one of the most important criteria, leaving no room for dispute assuming that this 'formalized' definition is agreed to by all.

We define it as an automobile because it has the structural features that distinguish an automobile from other things. We value automobiles because of their unique abilities to take us from one point to another. When we define automobiles, we take our values about them into account so that we can write laws about what can or cannot be done with or to an automobile. This is because we cannot write laws about what can or cannot be done to or with the values we associate with automobiles. We cannot write laws about movement from here to there that practically apply to auto theft, obeying speed limits, etc. The laws must apply to the object. The object must be defined in relation to its structure (to be recognized), but informed by our values (to be useful).

What is the "relevant sense?" In an operating factory full of workers, with the blueprints for building a car at hand (or even in sandwiched between layers of plastic and rubber), the pile of rubber and plastic will develop into a car unless someone the factory is shut down. Sure the factory, workers, and blueprints are necessary for this to take place. Can a zygote turn itself into a person without the work input of a woman's body?

What is the standard for determining which kind of definition to use?

The 'meaningful' statement was: "Thus it is absurd to base an individual’s legal status only on the past and present while ignoring his likely future - i.e., the potential which arises from his nature."

I'm sorry. I should have found a better way to push this remark aside. Perhaps I should have said, "yes, it is. We should take the individual's future potential into account when determining his legal status. I see no reason why that should be the sole determining factor, though. What an individual is (i.e. person, rock, etc.) will have some bearing as well."

Ok, so an individual's "likely future" is relevant only to the extent that it arises from his present nature. I have no problems with this statement. However, there is no corrollary stating that an individual already is anything that it is likely and foreseeably going to become.

I accept physical structures that will produce mental states in the future. I do not accept physical structures that will eventually develop other physical structures that will produce mental states. A zygote does not satisfy this criterion.
By the way, there is really only one physical structure that we know of that does qualify. Others may exist in other solar systems, but not here. The one, of course, is the human brain.

I didn't really mean them to be amusing. I did mean for them to help illuminate our different understandings of the relevant properties.

OK.. The person in a brain-dead state still has the qualifying structures for personhood. It should therefore be illegal to kill them. Perhaps their unique medical condition should make it legal to unplug them, though. Continuing their status as Persons would definitely give the government jurisdiction over the situation.

We can lawfully treat people in different circumstances differently. We must provide them equal protection under the law, but we can mandate life-saving efforts in one case, and leave them optional in another case.

To anticipate your response, yes, the cases are different as a matter of likely and forseeable future potential. It does make sense for laws to accommodate this kind of potential. It does not make sense for definitions (moral or legal) to do so.

You have gone to a lot of trouble to say that an embryo is living while the pile of rubber and plastic at the factory is not. Please explain how the fact that an organism is alive implies that it is already what one day it will be.

I will leave you out of my "we" - where I suggested that an embryo doesn't remotely resemble anything "we" conceive of as human - if you will do the same for me with this statement.

If we define a person as an individual entitled to rights, then we are involved in some kind of tautology when we suggest that all persons are due rights. We might as well say that anything that is due rights is due rights.

You are unsatisfied with the constitutional provision of rights to persons, since it does not define persons. On the other hand, you seem to be satisfied with it because it takes a revolutionary view in broadly granting rights only on the basis of the one criterion of personhood. A stroke of genius you call it, and, politically and socially speaking, so it is. A philosopher could never prove that all persons should be granted rights. He would have to start with some "criterion for granting rights", and then apply it in every case where the criterion was fulfilled. This is what you are doing. While Jamie_L and I are screaming that cognition is important to PERSONHOOD, you are working from the idea that cognition (or whatever quality) is important to the GRANTING OF RIGHTS... with the idea that a PERSON can be trivially defined as any individual to whom we must grant rights. I say that it should work the other way around. Why undermine the founding fathers? If we are going to make up the rules about who gets rights (God help us!), why do we bother at all with the Fathers' idea about all Persons getting them?

Not quite, though mathematically close. I am saying that I have a good idea of what a person is. It is a value judgement, yes, but inescapably so. If not a value judgement, to what kind of criteria are you going to apply your own definition? Cognition? Why? God forbid, because we value it... what's the scientific reason?

The thing remaining is to codify, to the greatest extent possible, the most universal ideas about what makes an individual a Person into a simple definition with a real-world application.

I tell them they have a shitty perspective on what is a Person, and that to the extent I can impose my will on them, they will follow the rules that treat Jews and Blacks as People.

I have ordered the Book of the Month to see Derschowitz's opinion on that.
It is hard to identify any objective criterion that entitles an individual to civil rights. The key word,to me, is civil, that means 'of society', and also implies that the rights are based on social values. Social values are usually based more on the biology and culture of the individuals in the society than on any objective features of the individuals they treat.

Just because there is no single criterion (apart from personhood itself) that entitles an individual to rights, and just because personhood is a subjective concept, does not mean the assignments we make are arbitrary. We cannot discount this kind of arbitrariness. The idea that cognition is special is itself an arbitrary designation. I could ask what is so special about cognition? Why not some other criteria, such as earwax?

Or to the structures they possess, which are known to cause the 'human kind' of cognition. The important thing is that we do include babies, because we perceive them as persons, and want them to be protected. The "real" reasons, where it concerns babies at least, are in our biology and culture, not in our logic.

I have read Jamie_L's post, and I could not believe that I missed opportunities to call you out on his fantastic point. I noticed you did not respond to it in your reply to him... here it is again:

[ April 05, 2002: Message edited by: Jerry Smith ]</p>

Jerry Smith

Tristan, BD, MadMordigan,

I was trying to defend a position I do not truly hold: the feminist, pro-choice position, that until birth "Personhood" is irrelevant to legal and safe abortion. It is based on the idea that the right-to-life of the fetus does not override the woman's right to self-determination. So far, bd-from-kg is waxing the floor with my ass in this argument, probably because his side is right, possibly because no-one who adopts the pro-choice side of it was there to defend it with any grace. I did my best because the viewpoint was not being represented and because it is one of the major views in the political debate. I still intend to take up "my" side of it, but I won't have time to get into that for a while, and I want to focus on the Personhood aspect of it.. and separately from the general Abortion thread..

Scrutinizer

The morally significant difference between the two cases is that a sperm and egg have the potential to produce a person, whereas a conceptus 14 days after conception has the potential to become a person, as Stephen Buckle says, 'the power possessed by an entity to undergo changes which are changes to itself... to undergo growth or better still, development'.

The fact that a zygote/embryo requires the woman's body to properly go through the developmental process is irrelevant, as the potential is still innate potential where the changes occur to the zygote itself rather than to separate sperm and ova. If we're going to use the argument that a zygote requires its mother, we could say the same for infants. Without the "work input" of a guardian with relation to diaper changing, feeding, etc., the infant would inevitably die, so its developmental process would be stunted. Even so, it seems a very far stretch of the imagination to claim that there is no morally significant difference between killing an infant and using a contraceptive! Interestingly enough, some people have claimed that there isn't a morally significant difference, but the question is: do you feel comfortable asserting that?

Regards,

- Scrutinizer

[ April 08, 2002: Message edited by: Scrutinizer ]</p>

Scrutinizer

bd-from-kg,

To make it easier on you, I've written my response to your comments in the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000075&p=6" target="_blank">Abortion - Yes? No? Why?</a> thread here.

If you gained that impression I certainly don't blame you. My mind is far from set in concrete on this issue. At present I'm hovering over both the conservative and moderate views on abortion, leaning quite strongly towards the conservative view but still trying to set my feet on more solid ground. Your argument regarding the future qualities of individuals as a basis for personhood is definitely intriguing and quite compelling, so I'll give that some more thought.

My only objection to that argument at this stage is the one based on Burgess' article. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find an online version of the article, but I'll try my best to represent him properly! From reading what you wrote about Burgess, I'm not sure whether I just didn't explain his position well enough or whether I'm simply misunderstanding your response to him. For instance, you wrote:

I think the best way to illustrate what Burgess intends is by means of an example. One definition of death is complete organic breakdown, or the idea that when most or all of the principal life systems - cardiovascular, pulmonary, central nervous - irreversibly cease to function, death occurs. If this view of death is accepted, Burgess argues that by symmetry we should consider the beginning of life to be where most or all of the principal life systems start to function.

Burgess then anticipates an objection:

So, my only real objection to your argument based on future-oriented qualities is Burgess' claim that symmetry considerations ought to render syngamy a non-viable point for the "beginning" of life. And he seems to be right in saying that unless there are good reasons for not doing so, we ought to come up with a view of life and death that is symmetrical. If death is the point where vital life systems irreversibly cease functioning, life should be the point where vital life systems begin functioning, unless there is good reason for departing from a symmetry rule.

Regards,

- Scrutinizer

[ April 08, 2002: Message edited by: Scrutinizer ]</p>

Jerry Smith

My arguments were addressed to bd's effort to define a zygote as a Person on the basis of its future qualities rather than its present qualities. He argued that because it had the future potential to possess the qualities of a person then we must conclude it is already a person. My analogy was sound in showing the difference betweeen a definition based on future qualities and one based on current qualities. The future qualities (be the potential for them innate or otherwise) of a pile of rubber and plastic in an auto-factory are not sufficient to define the pile as an "automobile" any more than the future qualities of a zygote or an embryo qualify it as a Person.

I understand that the potentials of a zygote are innate (for all that it matters), whereas the potentials for the rubber and plastic at the automobile factory are not innate. Until someone shows the relevance of "innateness" of potential in defining a thing, it remains beside the point.

Jamie_L

OK. I think I'm confusing myself as well as the issue trying to think about cars, so I'm not going to attempt to defend my own previous car analogies or attack anyone else's.

Some responses to BD:

I have a sense of personhood, and I'm trying to define it. In the process, I am exploring the origins of that sense and correcting it where it appears to be incorrect of deficient. Thus, I think am doing exactly what you say I should be doing.

Hmm. I guess I'll have to re-read my dictionary. Analogy: I was raised with an intuitive belief that murder is wrong. I have never sat down and intellectually defined why I should continue to hold that belief. Would it be intellectually corrupt for me to start this process by asking "why do I believe murder wrong?" Should I instead set aside my sense of morality in this case and start by assuming murder may or may not be wrong, and then proceed?

I did not create my definitions of personhood to justify a stance on abortion. My stance on abortion was based on my sense of personhood. Interestingly enough, as I have attempted to understand, define, and clarify my definition of personhood, I have narrowed my stance on when abortions should be legal (this hasn't come out in the arguement, but its something I've realized). I am hardly trying to fabricate definitions to support an a priori assumption about the legality of abortion.

Now, in previous posts we have touched on cases of individuals the law currently considers persons, but which don't fit the criteria as you have defined them (natrual, foreseeable cognition). You have said you will get to those later. I accepted that, but now I think we have entered a portion of the debate in which these cases can't be ignored.

First, why do you feel the need to worry about cases that your definition of personhood does not cover? If it is just because you feel that these people should be considered persons? If so, then you are guilty of the same intellectual corruption that I am. Of course, I argue that this is not a sin at all.

Further, you have attacked my position based on the fact that in it's basic form it might not cover a sentient orangutan or a space alien. Well, how is it that the omissions in my position are a sign of its weakness, while the omissions in yours are not? I think it's worth noting that my position covers all the currently recognized "legal" persons while omitting exceptional, hypothetical cases, while yours ommits real cases in an attempt to cover the fanciful ones.

And I'll say it again: I'm simply uncomfortable with the future cognition definition. It seems incomplete, and IMO it does not get at what makes a person a person. Is the right of an infant to protection only dependent upon its future state? I just don't think so. An infant is deserving of rights BECAUSE it is an infant, not in spite of being an infant. Likewise, the drunk and the comatose patient.

Continuing to harp on the passed-out drunk, I refuse to accept that there is no physical difference between a passed-out drunk and a brain-dead person. The fact that the drunk will recover does relate to why he is a person, but being able to recover is a byproduct of the drunk's current physical condition. They drunk is capable of recovery by virtue of the current state of his material brain. Thus the current state of his brain is different from the state of the "dead" brain. The MIND or CONSCIOUSNESS may be virtually identical, but the structure producing that mind is different.

Life is busy, and my posts will be infrequent for a while. Hang in there, and I'll be back.

Jamie

[ April 10, 2002: Message edited by: Jamie_L ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Jerry smith:

My family duties, which normally occupy the weekends, went on longer than usual, and I got interested in a couple of other threads. But here at long last are some responses to your April 5 post.

I skipped over a lot of stuff that struck me as redundant. Your comment about the zygote needing the “work input of the woman’s body” was answered satisfactorily by Scrutinizer. The final comment was a quote from Jamie_L’s post, which I’ll get to soon (I hope).

Consider Tom and Tim. Tom, as a result of a weird accident of some kind, has lost all of his brain except for a few low-level structures (like the stem) that control vital bodily functions. In Tim’s case the brain is physically intact, but all the parts other than the ones that Tom still has have been damaged beyond repair. A close examination show that the neural connections have been randomized, but fortunately the neurons aren’t even firing and are so messed up chemically that they obviously will never fire. Shall we conclude that Tim, as a result of having some stuff that can loosely be described as a “brain” – which has some superficial resemblance to the brain of a normally functioning adult – is a “person”, but Tom is a non-person? If so, why? Why should the presence of some stuff that’s broken beyond all chance of repair entitle Tim to a different legal status than Tom? Do we take this kind of attitude in any other situation whatsoever – that the presence of some worthless junk gives something a higher status than its absence? What is the moral principle in play here?

I can see how you might fall into this confusion given your total failure to even attempt to base your criterion for personhood on any moral principle. If the criterion is arbitrary – i.e., not based on any valid, generally accepted moral principle, then of course any attempt to argue that the individuals who fit your criterion are entitled to rights is bound to be circular: they are due rights because they are persons, and they are persons because they deserve rights.

That’s why you have to justify your criterion for personhood in terms of a recognized moral principle.

I really don’t follow you here. We have defined (for purposes of this debate) a “person” as someone entitled to civil rights. So I have no idea what distinction you’re trying to make here. What’s the difference between saying that cognition is important to personhood and saying that it’s important to the granting of rights?

You’re getting your documents confused. First, I think it’s obvious that the writers of the Constitution took it for granted that the word “person” referred to all human beings. It was the Supreme Court that chose to treat this word as problematic in order to reach the desired conclusion in Roe v. Wade. But the Constitution is a legal document; it does not attempt to lay out the philosophy underlying its provisions. The revolutionary document that I referred to is the Declaration of Independence, which says clearly that “all mean are created equal”. If the Supreme Court had followed the traditional practice of interpreting the Constitution (in cases where it found the language ambiguous) by referring back to the philosophy that underlies and informs it as laid out in the Declaration, there can hardly be any doubt that it would have arrived at a different (and correct) result.

As I say, I object to interpreting the term “person” in this way. It was the Supreme Court that undermined the founding fathers by pretending that language which is really perfectly clear is somehow ambiguous. What I’m now doing is working to restore the original, traditional understanding that the Constitution should be interpreted in the light of the Declaration’s concept that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights. The idea that these two documents contradict rather than complement one another is ludicrous. But since this understanding has been lost, it is now necessary to clarify the moral foundations which underlie the Declaration itself.

Yes, ultimately we have to apply value judgments. Science can tell us what will happen, but it can’t tell us what we ought to do.

I’ve already explained (at mind-numbing length) my justification for my proposed criterion, including the reasons for including “cognition”. And as I comment below, I now think the ultimate justification for including it is that it’s what makes those who are capable of it capable of functioning as moral agents.

In other words you’d tell them that you don’t share their preferences and are prepared to impose your preferences by force. This is pretty much the only reply you can give, since you’ve abandoned any possibility of a principled objection by your appeals to intuition and subconscious reactions. Needless to say, this is a total abandonment of the principle of equal protection. If our rights depend on other people’s “intuitions” and “subconscious reactions” to us, no one’s rights are secure.

Once again you present an argument designed to insidiously undermine the principle of equal protection. According to you, any old thing can be legitimately used as a criterion for denying someone civil rights so long as it is based on “biology” or the “culture” of the society. If the culture happens to view blacks as inferior (as ours did until quite recently) it is perfectly proper to deny civil rights to blacks. If we decide to lock up everyone of Japanese ancestry because we are at war with Japan, that’s perfectly OK: after all, it’s based on the biology and culture of the individuals in the society. [Note: That’s not what the U.S. actually did in WW2; my point is that on your theory we could have.] In fact, so far as I can see you would have no principled objection to denying civil rights to any unpopular group of people. You seem to have no understanding or respect whatsoever for the principle of equality under the law.

How many times do I have to repeat this? The assignments are arbitrary in the sense that they undermine the principle of equal protection unless they are based on a widely agreed-upon valid moral principle. What is it about this argument that you find so difficult to understand?

As I pointed out earlier, cognition is universally highly valued by humans. Using it as a criterion is hardly likely to be viewed by anyone as arbitrary, and so will not undermine the principle of equal protection.

Also, on reflection I think that the “cognition” in my criterion should be taken to refer to the degree of cognition needed to be a moral agent, which is a determination that has to be made anyway for many purposes by the legal system, and is obviously morally relevant. In other words, it is the very opposite of “arbitrary”.

Jerry:
Or to the structures they possess, which are known to cause the 'human kind' of cognition. [/quote]

On the contrary, the structures they possess are known, with absolute certainty, to be incapable of producing the “human kind” of cognition. In fact, the structures possessed by newborns are incapable of producing anything that can be described with a straight face as “cognition” at all.

What you really seem to want to say is that babies have structures that kinda, sorta resemble the structures that produce cognition in older children and adults. But this resemblance is purely superficial. A more careful examination reveals gross differences, and a detailed analysis shows dramatic differences.

You said earlier:

But that’s an exact description of a baby’s brain. It will eventually develop into a structure that will produce morally significant mental states, but it isn’t there yet. Not even close.

I don’t really agree with this, since you once more want to base the legal status of individuals on how they’re “perceived”, and whether we want to protect them, both of which are completely subjective. But suppose that, for whatever reason, we’ve decided that babies are “persons”. Then to preserve the principle of equal protection, we have no choice but to choose a criterion for “personhood” that includes babies, and then apply it consistently. What we cannot do is just decide that we want to include babies and not fetuses, for no particular morally relevant reason. This would open the door to excluding anyone that we don’t “perceive” as persons or don’t want to be protected.

bd-from-kg

Jamie_L:

This is a reply to your April 5 post.

Not so; we never know the state of the physical structures – certainly not at the level of detail that might, in principle, tell us who is going to recover and who isn’t. My point was that the tests, and their interpretation, are based entirely on which individuals are observed to recover. Their relationship to the physical state is, at this point, mostly a mystery. Presumably the likelihood of recovery is entirely a function of the physical state. But we don’t have to understand what’s going on physically, because that isn’t what really matters. What we’re interested in is future mental states. If there were no way to examine what was inside a person’s head – if it were a “black box” – it wouldn’t change whom we considered “brain dead”. An understanding of the physical structures may be useful someday in predicting future mental states more accurately (and someday, in being able to repair the damage), but they’re of no interest in themselves.

Defining personhood in terms of physical structures is like judging an orchestral performance by examining the succession of physical states of the instruments very closely while ignoring the actual sounds they produced, on the grounds that the sounds are caused by the physical states and are perfectly correlated with them. All this is true but irrelevant. Any sensible person judges such a performance by listening to it, because it’s the sound that matters. The physical states are of interest only because they produce the sound.

Actually it’s not the state of the brain but the overall state of the body – the organism as a whole – that determines the situation. And what’s the difference between being able to transform oneself from a damaged state into one with normal cognitive function and being able to transform oneself from an undamaged state into one with normal cognitive function?

You’re getting very close to saying that the two infants are equally deserving because they’re both human beings. That’s not far from my actual position. (One major quarrel I’d have with it is that in principle other species could qualify as persons; it just appears to be a contingent fact that no other terrestrial species does.) Your position is basically rooted in the idea that an individual’s status is rooted in his fundamental nature; it shouldn’t matter whether he has actually realized the potential inherent in this nature. But if it doesn’t matter that someone is never going to realize this potential, why should it matter that he hasn’t reached it yet? In other words, the underlying logic here is inescapably pro-life.

Sure, a clear line can be drawn. And a clear line can be drawn between a baby whose first tooth has appeared and one with no teeth. The question is, is this morally significant? A bird has a central nervous system; are birds persons?

The correct statement is that it has to supply a lot of outside help to allow the embryo to turn into an infant. The mother doesn’t turn the embryo into an infant; it turns itself into one. All the woman’s body does is to supply the required raw materials and fuel.

As Scrutinizer pointed out, the same thing can be said of a mother with respect to a child: allowing it to turn into an adult requires an awful lot of “work input”. Does that mean that a child is not a person?

This is closely related to the IVF discussion. At this point my inclination is to say that it is a person. (Yes, I know, this isn’t consistent with what I said on the IVF thread.) However, there is no obligation on the part of anyone but those responsible for creating it to resort to heroic measures (such as finding a woman willing to have it “transferred” into her womb, if such a thing were even possible) to keep it alive. On the other hand, I think the woman who contributed the ovum and the scientists involved may be culpable for deliberately creating a new human organism in a situation where it would not be able to develop (“naturally” or otherwise) the capability of cognition.

Now I have one for you. Suppose Smith builds an artificial womb that can take a fetus to term, takes it to an uninhabited planet that no one else knows about, places an embryo in it, and leaves. The embryo can develop into a fetus, then into a baby, at which point the apparatus is designed to open and let it out. Unfortunately this final step will result in the death of the baby. (In fact, no matter how the device is designed, the baby doesn’t have much of a future.) Has Smith done anything wrong? If so, what?

Actually these extreme science fiction scenarios can get rather scary, because you can come up with situation that call practically any of our legal or moral concepts into question. For example, suppose someone uses genetic engineering to create a race of “natural slaves”: they have no initiative, have no interest in doing anything but obeying orders, etc. They might find freedom intolerable and slavery completely acceptable, as long as the physical conditions are reasonable). Yet they are recognizably human, both physically and psychologically, and can breed with other humans. Should they be treated as full citizens with the same rights as everyone else? If not, what should their status be?

Once again I have to point out that the criterion I gave is sufficient but not necessary for personhood. I don’t see this as an especially “special” case. My own father developed pneumonia and was put on a respirator for a couple of weeks and would have died if he had been taken off it. Since he would have died without this intervention, was he a “non-person”? Again, a little common sense needs to be applied here.

But these examples do suggest that the “naturally and foreseeably” criterion needs to be modified. As I’ve said before, the original idea behind it was that the nature of the individual in question is such that he is capable of transforming himself, in a certain sense, into an individual with the capability of cognition. In fact, his nature is such that he will normally go through this transformation. The catch is that word “normally”. I’ll think about this further when I have the time.

Scrutinizer

Jerry Smith

I think innateness is quite clearly relevant. A sperm and ovum when separate from one another have no more potential to become a person than a lampshade and a stereo. Preventing a sperm and ovum from joining is not interfering to abort the process of development in an individual at all.

Once again, if you don't think innateness is morally relevant, you should be committed to thinking that there is no direct morally significant difference between killing an infant and using a contraceptive. Are you committed to this idea?

Regards,

- Scrutinizer

Jerry Smith

Scrutinizer:

Innateness is relevant to some discussions, ideas, or arguments, but not this one. bd's argument is that a proper definition of Person must be based on the natural and forseeable future potential of an individual, and he gives a rationale for that (that we value a thing for its future potential).

Innateness of the potential only becomes important if you accept the position that the best definition of Person relies on an individual's future potential. It then becomes necessary in order to reconcile the common sense meaning of Person with the meaning of person that emerges from the definition. Innateness is, however, fundamentally irrelevant to whether an individual or thing actually will "naturally and forseeably" have certain qualities in the future, except in that it is sometimes part of the reason that future potential exists.
I agree with the statement that Preventing fertilization is not interfering to abort the development of an individual. That is not because it follows from the "fact" that "a sperm and ovum, when separate from one another have no more potential to become a person than a lampshade or stereo". The fact is they do have much more potential to "become" a person than a lampshade and a stereo. They have the potential to meet and fertilize. But the individual gametes are currently things with different qualities than a zygote. That is the reason we call them by different names, in much the same way that a zygote or embryo (or a young fetus) is currently something with different qualities than a Person.

I must do no such thing. I have a moral stance against killing a Person (this includes infants[*]). I must only accept unfertilized gametes as Persons if my definition of Person is based on future qualities rather than present qualities. My moral stance against killing does not apply at all to non-persons, such as unfertilized gametes, zygotes, elk, rainbows, rocks, etc...

The moral and legal status of persons is a separate question from the definition of person. I think what bd is doing is asking us to recognize equal rights to life for an embryo on the basis of the ethic (and constitutional law) of equality of persons and persons' rights to life.

I resist this and ask bd for a compelling reason why an embryo should be considered a person. He answers this way: it, like a person, will naturally and foreseeably have human cognition in the future. I reply: that isn't good enough. Persons have equal rights because of what they are now, which is a function of their present qualities.

When I point to the sky at night, I might say, "look at all of those stars!" You would look at me askance if I said "look at all of those supernovae and black holes."

If you put an embryo under a microscope and tell me to "look at the tiny person," I will assume that you have some "pro-life" axe to grind.

BD can and does rightly ask - which present qualities is Personhood uniquely based on? I may or may not be able to answer him properly, but I do have every right to insist that present qualities are the only thing relevent to what a thing is.

The answer to BD's question is probably too difficult for me. I have been maintaining that since cognition is an important but intermittent human trait, we might define a Person as an individual in possession of the structures that produce cognition. The fact is, though, that our concept of Personhood are numerous and complex, and may not yield to strict logical analysis.

It may be that infants do not have the underlying qualities (cognition, etc.) that are important to personhood --- but nevertheless, they have traits that appeal to our senses as being reflective of "Personality" (cognition, etc.). That subjective experience on our part may be all that we need to call them Persons and recognize their rights. If this is the case, our moral principle may be extended to include some individuals somewhat arbitrarily. It is a crime to exlude individuals arbitrarily, but I do not think it is morally necessary to avoid ever including individuals arbitrarily.