Jerry Smith

continued from <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000075&p=5" target="_blank">Abortion - Yes? No? Why?</a>

This is a repost of my last "personhood" post from that thread. I hope that bd-from-kg will post his reply to this thread as time allows.
BD:
I would need to learn a lot more about the metaphysical framework Dr. Singer's arguments are based on in order to refute him. I am not here to refute him, though. I am here to talk about how a 'morally defensible' definition of "Person" can be approached.

My first attempt to piece together a definition was a poor one. I did include the stipulation that the species be homo sapiens. As you pointed out, and as I pointed out in a later post, species is irrelevant. My definition was ad hoc, but not arbitrary, because it was designed specifically to include the precise set of those individuals who were "persons" according to my value system.

I did later, however find a much more clear and concise definition, and have posted it. This is the one I referred to in the quote above.
Here it is, in full:
Now, you object that the physiological structures are irrelevant - it is not to them that we give intrinsic value, but the mental states they produce. It is true that the mental state of cognition is an important aspect of humanity. You might even say that it is the defining feature.

Unfortunately, mental states are intermittent in character, and so we are left with an unsatisfactory criterion for personhood by itself, because it cannot diagnose personhood during the periods that cognition is not active. There is more than one approach to resolve this.

Yours is to rely on probable future mental states. This is adequate for the purpose of making a definition that is inclusive of everything we value as a Person, but it does violence to the concept of a definition. We may value something more or less with respect to what it may do in the future, but we define it with respect to what it is now. It also leaves many of us with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance by including in the definition of person such things as embryos, which do not bear the slightest resemblance to any intuitive notion of what a "Person" is.

My approach is to resolve the issue by making use of the fact that all cognitive states are a result of the workings of some specific kind of physiological structure. In humans this structure would be our central nervous system, coupled to our particular kind of sensory input system and source of oxygenated blood. In aliens, it may be a different structure, coupled to some other sensory input system and some other source of metabolic energy. The ability to produce cognition always depends on a specific kind of structure for its operation.

Until we find a case where cognition results from no kind of physiological structure, or a class of individuals that possess physiological structures identical to our own central nervous system but cannot cognate, then this kind of definition creates a perfect one-to-one ratio between what we react to and value as "person" and what is included in the definition, and it is based on a unique and important criterion of personhood.

You and Dr. Singer may have a problem with the kind of definition that is based on physiological structures, but have you looked to see whether the same kind of definition is applied elsewhere?

What is the problem with defining (for moral purposes or other purposes) the term "automobile" structurally? Sure, we value it as an automobile because it rapidly moves us from one point to another without relying on significant amounts of animal work. The intrinsic value is in the "horseless" (or "servantless") locomotion. Now, my car is sitting in the driveway not locomoting anywhere and I still know it is a car. Do I know it by its structures, or by its potential? To answer this, lets look at the pile of plastic and rubber (or a few years ago, steel and rubber) waiting at the starting end of an assembly line. It has the future potential to help me travel without animal power. It will most likely realize that potential unless someone steps in to stop it, because it is at the factory, and turning plastic and rubber into automobiles is what is done at the factory. It will only fail to become an automobile if someone (the EPA or the IRS for instance) steps in to stop it. Yet, we do not define it as an automobile, because it isn't.
On the other hand, even though my wife's car has a broken ignition and cannot run right now, I can look at it and see that it is a car because it contains the necessary structures to travel without animal power. I understand that one of the peripheral structures is malfunctioning, but the key structures are present.
I look at the other end of the assembly line and I see a new car, fresh off the line. It has no gasoline in the tank and therefore cannot run, but I recognize it as a car just the same.

Structual definitions sometimes do serve better.

The difference between a baby and an embryo is the difference between a car with no gasoline and a pile of plastic and rubber.
The difference between a person and comatose person is the difference between a car and a car with a broken ignition.
The difference between a person and a chimpanzee is the difference between a car and a horse & buggy.
The difference between person and a sleeping person is the difference between a car and a parked car.

I hope that I have demonstrated that it makes sense in this case to make a for a thing that is intrinsically valuable a definition that depends on real structures, in real time, that have instrumental value, and uniquely make the intrinsically valuable phenomena possible.

I hope that we are all in agreement about the most important moral determinations: namely that all persons have a right to life and equal protection of that right and others under the law. Our source of disagreement goes to the definition of Person.

It is absurd to base a person's legal status only on the past and present while ignoring his likely future. Where it concerns non-persons, this is not always the clear case.

If an individual non-person has an inherent potential to become a person, must we then extend it the same rights we extend to persons? Why?

Yes, it would make a fetus a person if we our definition of person was made on the basis of future potential. As I said before, this does violence to the idea of definition.

I meant no such exclusion. The definition I advance speaks of ANY physical structure (not state) that produces mental states such as we call "Personality". If an alien, using alien physiological structures can produce these states, then we only have to identify those structures. We do not need to revise the definition in order to include them.

It is a tautology. I might have been more clear if I had said this:
If anything is capable of cognition, even if it has the body of an orangatan, it will still has some structures that are unique in producing cognition. Therefore, it will be included in the definition I advance.

I think we are talking past each other, because you see the defining of Person differently than I. You seem to approach the subject with the idea that defining a "Person" is more a moral act of bestowing rights, than a practical act of definition. You seem to think that we are not so much approaching a definition of
Person, but determining which individuals are entitled to Rights.

My perspective on it is different. I think that we define Personhood because it is a unique phenomenon that we uniquely value. We then assign rights to all Persons because we value Personhood.

A note on the term "cognition", since I know it is bound to come up eventually: I have used the term very loosely. I should have qualified it as cognition at a human level, or some such. I hope there is no major disagreement over the basic idea the term is meant to express. I do understand that some animals are capable of some levels of cognition. I do not mean to include them in our definition. I take it as given that human levels of cognition are well-defined.

bd-from-kg

To all:

Since this thread is going to be devoted entirely to the question of who is a “person”, it would be best to start at the beginning. First off, we are using the term “person” here to refer to an individual who is entitled to civil rights – i.e., to legal protection. Since I am a strong believer in the principle of equality under the law, I tend to ignore the distinction between being entitled to some legal protection and being entitled to the full legal protection afforded to ordinary adults. But since not everyone respects this principle, I will clarify this by saying that a “person” is entitled to at least the same legal protection against being killed or injured as an adult.

At this point I’m going to “copy into the record” my first organized post on this question from the Abortion - Yes? No? Why? thread mentioned by Jerry (with some minor modifications to adapt it to this context).
__________________________________________________ ___

Who is a “person”?

I want to concentrate here on the key point in the abortion debate: which individuals are entitled to legal protection, or as it is often put (emphasizing the crucial form of protection), who has the “right to life”?

The Constitution gives “persons” a number of rights including the right to life, so in U. S. law the question becomes simply whether a fetus is a “person”. Here we’re not interested so much in what the law does say, but with what it ought to say, so we use the term “person” in the slightly different sense of an individual who ought to have the right to life. Thus the question is “who is a person?”

As I have argued elsewhere, a denial of fundamental rights to any class of human beings must be justified in terms of valid moral principles. Of course not everyone agrees on what moral principles are valid, but we can get a pretty good idea of what relevant principles are generally accepted in our society by examining the ethical decisions actually made by that society, and in some cases considering hypothetical cases with a view to teasing out the actual moral principles on which this society operates.

But in this case we can make a surprising amount of progress simply by noticing that certain sorts of things cannot constitute valid moral principles, so that any proposed criterion for “personhood” that depends on them can be rejected immediately.

One sort of thing that cannot constitute a valid moral principle is anything that makes an individual’s rights depend on his physical constitution. For example, an individual lacking an arm or leg cannot be considered a “nonperson” on that basis. In fact, having the heart of an orangutan is equally irrelevant, and for that matter so is having the body of an orangutan. If someone had such a body, but his mind worked exactly the same as a human mind (though this is probably physically impossible) we might or might not consider him to be human, but we would certainly consider him to be a “person” in the sense of being entitled to legal rights. In fact, this principle is taken for granted in any number of science fiction scenarios such as the ones encountered regularly on Star Trek. And I think that very few people would deny that if we were to encounter alien species who thought and acted as much like humans as, say, Klingons or Ferengi, we would regard them as “persons” regardless of the obvious gross physical differences.

Thus any valid criterion of “personhood” cannot legitimately include the stipulation that the individual must be a member of homo sapiens. It is true that, in the real world, everyone who is considered a “person” is in fact a member of homo sapiens, but if this is morally justifiable at all it must be justified on the basis of some morally relevant difference between humans and other animals. Since this difference cannot lie in our physical constitutions, it must lie in our mental makeup.

Before considering what this difference might be, let’s assume that there is a moral justification for denying “personhood” to animals. To be more precise, let’s assume that all human beings who have already been born and are not mentally impaired in any way are entitled to full legal protection (killing them in most circumstances would be considered murder rather than a misdemeanor or minor felony, etc.) whereas no animals are. What does this imply?

First, it implies that “personhood” cannot be based on possession of a “personality”. Lots of animals (for example, six-month-old kittens) have far more complex, interesting, and appealing personalities than newborn babies do, so if having a personality were the key to “personhood”, a great many animals would qualify.

Second, it implies that an individual does not qualify for personhood as a result of being “valued” or “cared for”, or because his death would cause grief or distress. All of these things are true of lots of pets, but this does not make them “persons”. (As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, this is an absolutely awful criterion for “personhood” anyway, because it involves a total repudiation of the principle of equality under the law. But it appears to be very popular just the same.)

Third, it implies that “self-awareness” cannot be a criterion for personhood, because some animals (such as chimps and other primates) seem to have it, and babies don’t. And simple “awareness”, in the sense of being conscious, can’t be a criterion because a great many animals have it.

In fact, and most importantly, the criterion that distinguishes humans from other animals cannot be any mental quality or property that the individual in question has now, because it is true of any such property that either many animals have it or newborn babies do not have it. Thus any reasonable criterion must necessarily involve some aspect of the individual’s expected future mental makeup.

But any criterion for personhood that involves future mental properties will be satisfied by human beings who have not yet been born. In other words, fetuses (and embryos) are “persons”.

The only way to avoid this conclusion (besides denying that babies are persons or asserting that some animals are) is to insist that the amount of time that has yet to elapse before the mental qualities in question are manifested is morally significant. But this has two problems: (1) It appears to be completely arbitrary. To see just how arbitrary, note that babies are not superior to all animals in their mental abilities until at least the age of nine months. But this means that, in order to say that a newborn baby is a person and an embryo is not, one must say that an interval of nine months is not too long but an interval of eighteen months is. Just what moral principle could this conceivably be based on? (2) No such “cutoff time” is imposed for people in comas. If a man is in a deep coma but is thought to have a chance of recovering after 18 months, no one would say “Too bad. Now if he had a chance of recovering in nine months, he’d be a person, but if it’s going to take eighteen he isn’t.”

Of course it is possible to follow Peter Singer into never-never land and simply deny that young babies are “persons”. But any criterion that denied babies the right to life, or that gave “personhood” to some animals, would be totally and angrily rejected by the vast majority of people in our society. They would consider any such criterion to be completely arbitrary and devoid of any moral foundation. Thus implementing any criterion that excluded babies or included some animals would gravely, and probably fatally, undermine the principle of equality under the law. If this principle were interpreted as meaning that anyone could kill babies at will without being charged with murder, or that killing some animals was considered a more serious crime than killing babies, it would be considered a sick joke, a subject of ridicule and contempt.

It remains only to identify the mental qualities that are uniquely human (so far as we know) and justify our treating them in a fundamentally different way from other animals. Of course this isn’t really very difficult. As Aristotle (I believe) said, man is the animal that reasons. That is, humans have the ability to understand and conceptualize the world in ways that are simply not possible to other animals. We can put ourselves in the place of another, anticipate the consequences of our actions, plan for the distant future, to a degree, and in a way, that dwarfs the abilities of other animals. Above all, we are capable of abstract thought, of applying logic to reach conclusions that are far from obvious. In short, we are capable of “cognition” – of rational thought – in a sense in which other animals are not.

But do we value this quality highly enough to justify making such a radical distinction between ourselves and other animals? Consider. Suppose that you learn that your wife is afflicted with a brain disorder that will destroy her ability to reason, to think of the future, to understand what other people are saying or to speak herself. Would you not consider this to be a terrible tragedy? Would you not consider that this disease, however painless and nonlethal, is robbing you of your wife? Without these abilities, she will not merely be another person; she will not be a person at all in any meaningful sense, regardless of what the law says (although you will of course continue to love her and care for her).
Worse yet, suppose that you learned that you had such a disorder? Would this not be your worst nightmare, worse even than death itself?

Finally, suppose that you are a woman who has just learned that your young baby is never going to develop mentally beyond the point he has already reached. Would you not grieve for the son that you had hoped for, but will never be? Would this not be even worse than his being stillborn?

So yes, the capability of cognition is indeed a quality that we value highly, more highly than anything else, including life itself.

But it is not the ability to reason, to plan ahead, to understand the world around us now that we value. We are perfectly willing to wait for these capabilities to unfold, to manifest themselves, as a baby matures into a child and the child into an adult. We are patient. Precisely because we have this ability ourselves, we can anticipate these things and revel in the anticipation. We recognize that the fact that he will (in all likelihood) develop these capabilities is not just a mysterious fact about the future that we somehow happen to know, but a reflection of the baby’s fundamental, innate nature. And it is this nature – a nature which it is our pleasure to watch unfold, to become manifest, slowly but inexorably – which entitles him to be treated in a radically different way from an animal, which makes him, in fact, a person.

Thus our (provisional) criterion for personhood is this:

Anyone who will naturally and foreseeably become capable of cognition is a “person”.

There are still some points to be dealt with, including some negative criteria that are sometimes claimed to disqualify the unborn from personhood in spite of meeting the positive criterion outlined above. And I have not yet dealt with the obvious question of why those unfortunate human beings who are clearly never going to develop the capability of cognition are nevertheless treated as “persons”. And of course there are other pro-choice arguments, including ones that support the criterion for personhood that I’ve proposed. But that will all have to wait for another day.

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A personal note: I was undecided about legalizing abortion for almost a year after I first started thinking about it. It was the dawning realization that any serious principled defense of legalized abortion logically compelled one to take the position that either some animals are entitled to full civil rights, or that babies aren’t, that drove me to take a pro-life stance. So the argument presented here is not an after-the-fact justification or rationalization for my pro-life views, but the actual reason for them.

When I first realized this implication of the pro-choice position I was troubled. It seemed obvious that the more intelligent pro-choice advocates would eventually come to the same realization, and (human nature being what it is) most of them would decide to take the position that babies aren’t persons rather than abandon their pro-choice position. This concern has turned out to be all too prescient. Although at the time it was practically impossible to find anyone who argued that babies do not have a right to life, nowadays I encounter such people almost every time I debate this topic.

So if you don’t see any way that the legalization of abortion has undermined the principle of equal protection, you might want to ponder this. It seems to me that this principle has already been grievously weakened. In another 25 years who knows what the effect will be?

bd-from-kg

Jerry Smith:

OK, now that some foundation has been laid I’m ready to reply to your post. Since you’ve brought up virtually all of the important issues regarding the criterion for “personhood” in one go, and since this is the central issue in the abortion debate, my reply is unavoidably rather long.

1. On physical states, mental states, the future, and the criterion for “personhood”

As I understand it, your current criterion for personhood is:

You say that this:

This isn’t quite enough; a correct criterion would also have to exclude everything that does not “carry the status of human”. But let’s assume that you mean this as well and move on.

If by “physiological structures necessary for intelligent cognition” you mean any such structures that can reasonably expected to produce cognition at some point in the future, your definition is essentially the same as mine. (Mine speaks of eventual cognition; yours speaks of physical states that will eventually produce cognition.) But if it means what I suspect it means, this definition excludes babies. It also either excludes many people in comas or includes many who are brain-dead, depending on exactly how you define this phrase.

This distinction isn’t at all clear. One would ordinarily define a “volcano” (in the sense of an active volcano) in terms of what it may do in the future. When we say that a man is a “liar” we are generally referring to what he is likely to do in the future. On the other hand, a “felon” is defined by what he has done in the past. There doesn’t seem to be any hard and fast rule as to how we define things; it seems to be based on the point of the definition – i.e., why we find the concept of the class of things that satisfy the definition useful.

Anyway, my criterion for “personhood” is based on what the individual is now. The reference to “naturally and foreseeably” developing the capability of cognition requires that individual must now have a nature that will naturally result in his developing this capability. It appears at first sight to be referring to the future, but is actually referring to the present. And of course this implies (given the way things actually work in this world) that the individual’s current physical state must be such that he will naturally develop this capability.

What you seem to be saying is that you start with your real criterion for “personhood” in mind, then try to identify the physical states that are [i]correlated[i] with “personhood” in this sense, and finally make up a formal definition based on them. The fact that you are even able to talk about a possible discrepancy between the two shows that there are in fact two different criteria here: the one you state formally and the one you have in your head. Why not give us the one you have in your head? Then we will be in a position to judge whether there is a discrepancy between your formal definition and the “real” one you started with.

No, we value it as a vehicle because it can take us from one point to another. We call it an “automobile” because it has the structural features that distinguish an automobile from other things. Your whole argument here depends on this equivocation between two entirely different kinds of concepts.

No, it most certainly does not have this potential, at least not in the relevant sense. You may turn it into an automobile, but I guarantee you that it will never turn itself into an automobile. It is not in the nature of this pile of stuff to develop into an automobile; what’s in its nature is to sit there and rust.

Sure. They work better when the thing in question is defined by its structure.

You’ve turned a meaningful statement into a meaningless one. By declaring an individual a “person” we have already defined his legal status in the sense that is relevant here.

Also, I note that you continue to studiously ignore the point, which I have made repeatedly, that my criterion treats an individual’s “likely future” as relevant only to the extent that it arises from his present nature.

As long as you accept physical structures that will produce the requisite mental states in the future, we have no problem, since the physical structure called a “fetus” satisfies this criterion. Otherwise lots of physical structures that you would like to accept as qualifying someone for “personhood” fail to do so.

2. On your “automobile” analogies

Your comparisons between persons and cars are amusing, but also useful in that they can help illuminate our different understandings of the relevant properties.

Assuming that you’re using the word “person” here in the sense of an ordinary, healthy human being, no problem. But it would be more interesting to see what you have to say about the difference between someone who is unconscious from an excess of alcohol and an ordinary conscious adult.

An unconscious drunk has actually suffered a great deal of brain damage. A large percentage of his neurons are not working properly. But fortunately the human body has a highly sophisticated system for repairing this type of damage by restoring the proper chemical balance in the affected cells. So if the damage isn’t too extensive the body can repair itself eventually, and the drunk’s condition is temporary.

But make no mistake: until the damage is repaired the drunk’s brain is non-operational. It is not “capable of cognition”. Its operation is not merely being “inhibited” as if by a mysterious force field; millions upon millions of “circuit elements” are in a physical state that makes it impossible for them to function. A computer in similar condition would simply be fried; it would be a piece of junk. It would be absurd to claim that such a computer is still “capable” of functioning. And it is equally absurd to claim that the drunk’s brain is capable of functioning cognitively. That’s why he’s unconscious. To say that he’s still a person based on his current physical state is nonsense; if his fate was to remain in this state he would be considered brain-dead. Thus if we are going to consider him a “person” it can only be because he is capable of cognitive function in the future. Or, if you prefer, his body is capable of transforming his current physical state into one in which he is capable of cognitive function.

This analogy is seriously flawed. A comatose person generally does not merely have a “broken ignition”. What’s actually wrong with him is far more complicated and subtle than that; in fact, it’s beyond the abilities of our best doctors and scientists figure just what is wrong. Often it’s quite a number of things. Here’s a better analogy: a comatose person is like a car with so many things wrong with it as to be beyond the ability of any human to repair.

But the really illuminating question is this: What’s the difference between a comatose individual and a brain-dead one? To be more specific, let’s imagine Cooper, who is in a deep coma, but whom the doctors think has a pretty good chance of recovering eventually, and Brown, who is in a similar coma but whom the doctors are certain has no chance of recovering.

Almost everyone would agree that Cooper is a “person”, but many would say that Brown is not – that is, that it would not be murder to kill him. And almost everyone would agree that, while it would be a crime to remove an IV line from Cooper, it would not be a crime to do the same to Brown. What is the moral justification for this difference?

Clearly there is no particular physical characteristic or structure that distinguishes comatose individuals from brain-dead ones in general: one cannot point to an orange blob found in the brains of brain-dead people but not in comatose ones. A better try is to appeal to EEG patterns. It’s true that at present we define an individual as “brain-dead” if his EEG remains “flat” for an extended period. But it is likely that other people in comas are in fact brain-dead (in my sense) but we lack the technology at present to confirm this, and it is possible that someone with a flat EEG might recover. In the latter case we would certainly revise the criterion for brain death. And in the former case, with more experience and better technology we might well devise a better criterion to identify more people who are brain-dead.

Obviously the only real distinction in general between comatose individuals and brain-dead ones is that former might recover consciousness, but the latter will not. That is, there is a reasonable chance that a comatose individual will experience morally relevant mental states in the future, whereas there is no chance that a brain-dead one will. And it is on this basis that we say that Cooper is a “person”, while Brown is not, or at any rate that he does not have the full complement of civil rights that Cooper has: we may lawfully do things to Brown that it would be criminal to do to Cooper.

This difference in legal status is not based on any identifiable difference in “physical structures”. It is based on the fact that, when we run some tests on Cooper, we get different results than when we run them on Brown. We really don’t understand what physical difference between them accounts for the different results. All that we really know is that the results are predictive: one set of results predicts (based on experience) that the patient has a significant chance of recovering, while the other predicts that he has no chance. If further results show that the predictions based on these tests are less reliable than we thought, we may change the tests or change the predictions, but we will certainly change the legal status of Cooper or Brown or both.

This shows that the criterion we are applying when we assign a different legal status to Cooper and Brown is not the presence or absence of any identifiable physical structures, or even the specified results of any specified set of tests, but is in fact our beliefs about their future mental states. This shows clearly that it is considered reasonable to base the legal status of individuals on future mental states, and in fact that it is not reasonable to base it on current physical states except insofar as these are predictive of future mental states. In particular, it is not considered reasonable to base it on the presence or absence of any particular physical structures. Physical structures are relevant only insofar as they are causally related to future mental states.

This analogy is radically misguided. A pile of plastic and rubber will never, under any circumstances, transform itself into a car.

You might remember the scene in the movie Terminator 2 where the terminator was frozen and smashed into thousands of tiny pieces. Dead, right? Wrong. The pieces soon began to reassemble themselves into the terminator. Now if your pile of plastic and rubber were to act like that, I would agree that your analogy is sound, because then the relationship between it and the car would be essentially similar to the relationship between an embryo and a baby.

But in the real world this kind of self-assembling behavior is exhibited only by living things. The secret to this behavior is in the genetic code. It contains not only a blueprint for the “finished product”, but complete assembly instructions for building it. And the fertilized egg already contains all of the tools needed to get started, including the tools that will build the tools needed for the later stages, and everything needed to “read” the instructions built into the DNA and carry them out.

This is essentially the secret to how the unconscious drunk and the person in a coma recover. In both cases the DNA has instructions for transforming the current physical state into one that is capable of cognition, and the body has everything that is needed to read and execute these instructions. If we count the drunk and the comatose individual as “persons” on that account, then we must count fetuses (and embryos, and fertilized eggs) as persons for the very same reason.

3. On “personhood” and intuition

We are using “person” here in the special sense of an individual entitled to civil rights. It seems implausible on its face that we would have an innate, intuitive notion of who is entitled to civil rights, and it seems clear that indeed we do not have any such intuitive notion, since there is widespread, dramatic disagreement about who is a “person” in this sense. In fact, there is little evidence that the idea that anyone is entitled to civil rights is in any sense “intuitive”. That’s why the Declaration of Independence was such a revolutionary document.

Well, yes, I was under that impression. Perhaps this impression was created by the fact that we are defining a “person” as an individual entitled to rights.

The only sense I can make of this is that you’re saying that you already know who is entitled to civil rights, so the only remaining challenge is to formulate a criterion that includes all of these individuals and no one else. This is begging the question. If you take this approach, how do you answer someone who says “Personhood is a uniquely valuable phenomenon, and although I can’t put my finger on just what it is or why it’s so valuable, I know intuitively that blacks and Jews don’t have it”?

Anyway, as I pointed out earlier, the notion that we have some innate intuition that allows us to determine who is a “person” without settling these questions is completely untenable.

The only meaningful, intellectually defensible way to approach this issue is to deal with the relevant questions, which are: what entitles an individual to civil rights? What are the qualities that distinguish those who are entitled to civil rights from those who aren’t? Why do these qualities entitle those who have them to these rights? Without serious, defensible answers to these questions, you’re just arbitrarily defining some individuals as “persons” and others as “nonpersons”, which is a total repudiation of the principle of equality under the law.

4. On cognition

Not from me. In order to use the capability of cognition as a quality that distinguishes humans from animals it has to be defined as cognition at a reasonably high level. But as I pointed out earlier, this leads to the problem that babies (up to the age of a year or more) are not capable of “cognition” in this sense. Once again, to justify classifying them as “persons” we have to look at their future capabilities.

Jamie_L

Okay. I'm still in this, but I don't have time right now to transfer old posts from the other thread here to give people a starting point. Just go read the aforementioned thread to see where I'm coming from.

Nutshell - like Jerry, I'm stuck on physical structures.

Now, talking about comas and drunks: BD says it is test results that let us know who is in a coma, and who is brain dead. That it is not knowledge of the physical structures. I argue that the test results are how we know the state of the physical structures. One brain is capable of recovery. One is not. The difference is the physical state of the brain, whether we can precisely define it or not. How we tell the difference is in the test results.

Drunks: The man in the drunken stupor has a brain. That brain, in its healthy state, can produce mental events. Like the man in the coma, the brain can recover from it's damaged state. This deals with future events, but it is the state of the brain now that determines this situation.

Infants: I think I'm not willing to define full, higher reasoning as the bedrock of personhood. I generally consider babies worthy of civil rights not because they will eventually become rational adults. Severely retarded infants who will never reach that level are not special cases requiring special definitions. They are equally deserving of rights as a normal infant. Both are deserving because of what they are at that instant.

Embryos: I find it a clear line to be drawn between a collection of cells capable of growing other cells that can produce a central nervous system, and an existing central nervous system. I find this neither ambiguous nor a slippery slope.

BD has lead me "to the light" with regard to car analogies not being the best vehicle (pun intended) for this debate. However, BD makes an interesting point defeating the analogies. He comments that a person must put together a pile of parts to make it a car. Well, a mother's body must supply a lot of outside help to turn an embrio into an infant. I don't know that it is relevant, but it's unfair to imply an embryo will get to full term on its own.

Lastly, I'm disatisfied with the "naturally and foreseeably" clause. The fact that an embrio in a mother's womb is a person but one in a test tube is not, does not sit right with me.

Let's look at an extreme case: Scientists set up an artificial womb to grow an embryo into a fetus. They create the embrio artificially, outside a womb. At this point, it is not a person under BD's definition because it will not naturally and foreseeably become a person. The scientists put this embryo in the artificial womb. It grows well into the second trimester, becoming a fetus with a central nervous system, human-like physical features, etc. However, the womb was specifically designed to be incapable of carrying the fetus to term. Thus, it is neither natural or forseable for this fetus to become a child.

Is it still a non-person? Can we take it out and kill it?

What about a premature birth? Once outside the womb, the child will not "naturally and forseeably" develop cognition. It will naturally and forseeably die without intervention. At the moment of birth, has that infant become a non-person?

I'm sure there are holes in this arguement, as I'm working on it as I go. But there it is to shoot at.

Jamie

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

bd-from-kg

Jamie_L:

This is a reply to your last post on the “Abortion” thread, since you apparently have decided to post here. Although you’ve decided you don’t like “car” analogies, I wrote this before seeing your last post and started off with yet another one, so bear with me. (I did cut out comments that seem to be redundant at this point.)

Certainly there are clear difference. The question is whether they’re morally relevant.

Here’s yet another “car” analogy (cribbed from the 12-week-old fetus thread). Consider two cases. In A we have all of the parts for a car piled in a heap, together with a guy who knows how to build a car from them and is in the process of doing so. In B we have a car that has been badly damaged, but is still repairable, and a guy who knows how to repair it and is in the process of doing so. It will take the two guys the same amount of time to finish their jobs. We stipulate that the only thing of moral significance in both scenarios is the working car that will exist when the guys are done. I would submit that there is no morally significant difference between these cases.

There are at least two reasons that many people tend to think otherwise, in the analogous cases, both of them bogus. First, they tend to forget about the guy who’s in the process of building the car in case A, but not in case B. In other words, they tend to think of the embryo as just an embryo rather than as a very young human being. But they don’t forget about him in case B. Second, they feel that the comatose individual “looks like” a human being, whereas the embryo doesn’t. But of course the embryo does look exactly like a human being: it is a human being. It’s just that we hardly ever see human beings at this stage of development. If we had never seen a child, but had seen only adults, we would probably feel that a newborn baby didn’t “look like” a human being either.

Suppose someone justified his racist opinions by saying “I don’t consider blacks to be persons, but I do consider whites to be persons. And it is the nature of their physical structure that makes me feel that way as best I can tell.” I suspect you’d say something like: “That’s not an argument. Explain to me why these differences in physical structure justify treating blacks and whites differently under the law.” Well, I feel the same way about your statement. It’s not an argument. You have some feelings, and you’re looking desperately for some grounds to justify them. Instead, you should be trying to understand why you have them, and then you will be in a much better position to evaluate your own thinking more objectively.

If you do think about why you have these feeling, I think you’ll find that they arise from factors that are completely irrelevant to whether embryos should be given legal protection.

First, there’s the fact mentioned above: we practically never see embryos, and thus never see them develop into babies. So, unlike the connection between babies and adult humans, which is completely clear and transparent to us because we see humans at all of the “in between” stages and see how they develop from each stage to the next, the connection between embryos and babies is completely abstract and intellectual; it does not generate the same kinds of feelings produced by our direct experience of babies growing into adults.

Second, we never have to take care of an embryo in the same way that we often have to take care of a baby. Because babies are completely dependent on someone taking the initiative to feed them, protect them, keep them warm, etc., natural selection has produced a very strong urge in most of us to do so when the occasion arises. This instinct is of course accompanied by strong emotions of tenderness, protectiveness, etc. In other words, to maximize a baby’s chances of survival, nature has given us strong instinctive feelings toward babies. None of this is necessary for embryos or fetuses; they are protected in their mothers’ wombs, where they are also kept warm and well-nourished. This process is pretty much automatic; it operates on autopilot, so to speak, so we don’t need the same kinds of instinctive feelings toward embryos that we do toward babies, and therefore don’t have them.

So the differences in the way we feel about embryos and babies are really a byproduct of the details of the reproductive process (considered in the broad sense of reproducing adult humans). In making decisions about the legal status of embryos and fetuses these feelings should be recognized as out of place, and discounted the same way that a child must learn to discount his instinctive fear of monsters appearing in the dark of night.

This is the very definition of intellectual corruption. Starting with the conclusion and finding arguments to support it is the business of a Jesuit, not of an honest skeptic. I honestly don’t understand how you can recognize that this is what you’re doing and continue to do it.

Wrong. It’s radically different from mine. Far from starting with the conviction that abortion should be illegal, I reached this conclusion reluctantly. Lots of moral dilemmas could be avoided, and many real-world problems would have much simpler solutions, if it were otherwise.

__________________________________________________

Warning: Another weekend is approaching, and unlike most people my weekends are much busier than my weekdays. So you probably won’t see much more from me until Monday.

Tristan Scott

BD,

It seems the only way to make your analogy work would be to stipulate that in case B the car is being re-built in a garage owned by the owner of the car. In case A the car is being built in a garage owned by someone else. Why should that person be forced to have the car built in her garage? Isn't that the real issue?

MadMordigan

Why should that person be forced to have the car built in her garage?

And then have the car driven out the garage in such a way as to tear apart the front door.

bd-from-kg

Tristan Scott:
This issue has been extensively discussed on the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000075&p=3" target="_blank">Abortion</a> thread. See especially the numerous exchanges between Jerry Smith and me.

Of course, the subject isn't closed. If you have something new, I'll be happy to see it. But keep in mind that this thread is devoted to the criterion for "personhood". It is possible to argue (and I think Jerry was arguing) that the fetus is a "person" but that the mother is entitled to kill it anyway because of the dependence issue. If this is what you want to argue, you should post on the other thread.

Tristan Scott

BD,

OK, don't get your panties in a bunch. There is another problem with your analogy. In A there should not be parts piled in a heap. There are no parts at all, just some raw materials like some iron, tin, copper, and bauxite. What is going to have to take place in A is a complete transformation of these materials into parts before you can even approach the situation in B.

An embryo is no more a human being than a seperate sperm and ova. In other words the line has to be drawn somewhere as to when personhood begins.

Would you argue that it is immoral to offhandedly murder millions of sperm?

bd-from-kg

Tristan Scott:

I guess my dry style can be misleading. I wasn’t trying to be huffy, just to let you know that the subject has been covered pretty extensively on the other thread. Also, Jerry indicated that he wanted this thread to be about the criterion for personhood, and other stuff (I gathered) would continue to be discussed on the other thread. Of course, it may not work out that way; everyone might want to move to this thread. It’s not really that important, at least to me.

Interesting. This is similar to the objection I made to Jerry’s analogy of a newborn baby to a car with an empty gas tank: there’s a lot more missing than just gas.

But in this case the point was that there doesn’t seem to be any essential difference between a situation where something has to be built and one where it has to be fixed, especially if the amount of work involved is comparable, and especially if the thing is capable of “building” itself or fixing itself. Either way the thing you started with is just as incapable of functioning in the relevant manner, regardless of the “structures” that may be in place in the latter case. And either way it is in the thing’s nature to develop into the thing you really want – the thing with the capability in question. Given this fact, it’s arguable (to put it mildly) that the thing you have is, in a very real sense, the thing you really want.

This is closely related to the element that all of Jerry’s examples ignored: the guy who is ready, willing, and able to do the necessary work, who is an intrinsic part of the situation in the case of embryos, babies, and comatose individuals.

That’s not “in other words”. The second sentence has no apparent logical relationship to the first.

But since you mention it, where do you draw the line, and why? That, after all, is the subject of this thread. Let’s all put our cards on the table.

Um, if you can convince me that it’s in the nature of a sperm to develop the capability of cognition, I might have to rethink my position.