bd-from-kg,
This is a reply to your latest post.
1) On Aliens
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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.
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So you wish to account for extra-terrestrials, but only insofar as their biology is like ours? Yes its a wierd hypothetical. Your hypothetical invoked extraterrestrials to show that cognition is important. Mine was to remind you that our argument isn't about whether cognition is important, but whether it is important before it is developed.
2) on the comatose
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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.
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A new identity: new ideas, moral standards, attitudes - this does not spring into existence spontaneously. If an identity, a personality, ideas, moral standards, attitudes do not exist while an individual is in a coma, then they will not exist when that individual emerges from a coma. Are you talking about someone who is revived from a coma in the state of a 20 week fetus, and who eventually learns a new personality, etc? If there is a personality there when a person is revived from a coma, there was a personality there when the person was in the coma.
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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.
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No, we don't value anyone for being capable of forming an identity. We don't look at a baseball star and remark what a fine baseball player he could make some day. We don't sign Jr up for the major leagues based on the observation that he has the potential to be a baseball star some day. Each person is considered, valued, and treated according to their current identity (which does, incidentally, include their observed future potential). The same is true of the person in the coma, though we are unsure whether the identity is still there while a person is in a coma, whether it has been replaced by a new one, or whether there is no identity and the "person" is really a brain-dead individual.
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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.
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No: only if they need radical medical intervention to regain consciousness and the ability to demonstrate mental activity. If they retain an identity while in a coma, then there is definitely a mental state that is perpetuated while in a coma. What is an identity apart from a mental state (or set of them)?
3. On moral principles and criteria for "personhood"
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me->Previously: I am no more prepared to say that a zygote is a person than I am to say that a brain-dead person is.
bd-from-kg: 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...
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You misunderstood me... My statement was intended as a reply to your statement:
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(from previous post): Unless you’re prepared to say that a brain-dead individual is a “person” (which seems to me to be absurd), your only recourse, if you want to use these things as criteria of “personhood”, is to define them in terms of expected or potential future mental states.
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So, if what you say is true (that a cognition-based principle for rights must include the brain-dead), then I have no choice but to pick between the cognition based principle that includes brain-dead people I wouldn't agree with including, or the future-cognition principle that includes not-yet-brain-alive people I wouldn't agree with including.
I could criticize your principle equally for excluding brain-dead people the way the Nazis excluded jews and blacks. Basically, it comes down to which is the better principle.
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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.
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{Perhaps you could.. after all it is your contention, not mine. I contend only that we anthropomorphize the behaviors and features of kittens and puppies sometimes, so that some people are led to adopt the notion that they are developing human cognitive traits such as identity (personality).} - original reply
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I'm sorry, I misread your comments. I think the answer to your question is systematic learning, thoughtfulness, and rudimentary acquisition of an intelligent world view....
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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”.
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EDIT... I should have said that we do not value an infant for being the kind of individual that an develop a personality, but rather that we value an infant because it is ENGAGED IN developing a personality!! Instead I said this, which means the same:
{The point you are avoiding is that the development of personality is a cognitive one: it works by thinking and learning. We do place great value on thinking and learning, and not only instrumental value for the results they eventually produce, but for the mental states of learning and thinking themselves. We do not want to miss interacting with a newborn, watching it learn and helping it learn. We would not willingly give up that step and jump to college graduation.}... original post
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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.
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You would be morally justified in killing that individual? I don't agree. I don't agree with your conclusion:
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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.
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Going on...
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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.
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On what basis do you dismiss the idea that newborns have meaningful and morally relevant mental states (cognition)? I understand that they are not
physically capable of much in the way of self-expression, but why assume that they are not cognizant of the world around them, and using systems of intelligence to encode information about it into systematic knowledge? I would say that the amount they have learned by the age of 6 months is good evidence that this exactly what they have been doing. Furthermore, one would have to wonder what their cerebral cortexes are up to if they are not being engaged in cognition.
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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.
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So you think cognition requires the physical ability to act upon one's thoughts or express one's ideas? Is it because newborns are too weak to do these things that you assume they are not cognizant?
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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.
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Two options:
1) the objective tests are flawed - I don't know what tests you are talking about, so it is hard for me to take their word for it.
2) we can't exclude any person from being treated with equal rights, so if chimps are indeed cognizant - well, we've got some cages to unlock.
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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.
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Your definition of cognition is not of prime importance. By your definition people in comas are not cognitive individuals. The more robust cognition that includes ideas, whether actively being formulated or not, and highly systematic learning is more important to me, and I think, to our society as a whole.
Edit#2 fixes this quote:
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In fact, what you mean by “cognition” doesn’t even require consciousness.
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Perhaps cognizance is a better word than cognition. In any case, no - one doesn't have to be conscious to have the qualities we regard as important.
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In short, only mental events can have moral significance. their physical causes have no value in themselves;
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I agree. Furthermore, I assert that whether or not mental events are characterized by periods of unconsciousness is beside the point.
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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,
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Pardon me, but Bull. Cognition does involve consciousness: it is characterized by periods of consciousness. It also involves unconscious states. Individuals undergoing cognition have intrinsic value based on their mental states even during periods of unconsciousness. The sleeping are intrinsically valued, and not only because of what they may do if they wake up. Because of who they are while they are asleep, because of the ideas they already have, the attitudes the already have, the cognitive personalities they already have.
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whereas the “future cognition” in question is generally cognition in my sense: it involves intrinsically desirable mental states.
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If a sleeping, infant, or comatose person has only "instrumental" value, in bringing about "future cognition," or as you put it, future "intrinsically desirable mental states," then:
a) we have no reason to refrain from killing her
b) her instrumental value is at least as important as her intrinsic value.
My definition, which places intrinsic value on the person as a cognitive being does not have these problems.
Which of these options do you hold to?
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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.
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Or more succinctly, between what you call cognition which is an intermittent process unique to states of consciousness, and what I call cognition, which is a process characterized both by states of consciousness and states of unconsciousness.
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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.
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So it is ok to kill someone in the present, just not in the future? I think you are equivocating between future consequences of an action and moral significance of events that take place in the present.
Edit#3 fixes this quote:
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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:
...<quote about EEG's as a measure of cognition snipped>...
But of course what goes on in the cortex is by definition a physical process.
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We can only measure such things as cognition by the physical processes associated with them (whether as cause or as effect). I was objecting to the assertions you and Dr. Singer seem to be making about the cognitive status of infants based on the fact that I don't have access to any means of measuring cognitive status: the most obvious of which is the EEG.
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His brain is “rewiring” itself at a very rapid clip, but the infant is not conscious of it.
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Your insight into the mind of an infant continues to amaze me. All kidding aside, what do you mean by "conscious of it"? Perhaps the infant hasn't named it as "learning", and perhaps the infant hasn't figured out that he is a unique individual doing the "learning," but what reason do we have to believe that the infant is not as aware of his learning process as you and I are of ours?
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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.
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Sorry, but that isn't quite right. True, a consequentialist must look at the future consequences of an action to determine whether it is right or wrong. Now, if that was all there was to it, and we fill in the rest of the details of your theory, we would find that anything we do that prevents morally relevant mental states from occurring in the future is the moral and legal equivalent of murder. This would include contraception.
Fortunately, it is not that simple: a consequentialist looks at whether an action will cause harm to a person. If there is no person, and the action will not cause harm to a person, then there is no crime. The only legitimate way to assess whether an action is a crime when the action under consideration will prevent a person from coming to be is by whether or not there is a person in the present: that is, whether or not there exists an individual currently in possession of the significant quality or qualities. We agree that the significant quality is cognition, so in the case of abortion, as in the case of contraception, there is no harm to a person, and no person can be harmed in the future due to our actions.
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Final note: I can’t possibly keep up with this thread from this point on.
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I am sorry to hear that. It may not be obvious from my posts, but I have a great deal of respect for your intellect and for your keen insight that reaches straight to the heart of the problems. I will miss your challenges, and your intelligent and articulate posts on this topic.
Thanks for the time you have already put into our discussion..
Jerry
Edit #3 reduces the "edit messages"
[ April 30, 2002: Message edited by: Jerry Smith ]</p>
04-30-2002, 05:49 PM
