Jerry Smith

Given that the term human being as you define it includes the unborn in stages that many of us consider not to merit that definition (and/or the definition of Person that includes all human beings), I think an important question to ask before talking about the temptation to define classes of human beings as non-persons would be on what basis do we define any human being as a person.

Until that is well-understood, It is impossible to argue that it is necessarily wrong to make a definition of "person" or "human being" that does not include every person, born or not, having the physiological structures necessary for cognition or not, etc.

I think that if our definition of a person was merely, "that which has the physiological structures necessary for intelligent cognition," then we would include every organism that should (according to my value system) carry the status of human (even if they happened to be visiting aliens from outer space, or had experienced damage to their central nervous systems, were asleep, drunk, etc.)

Yet, this definition would not include the unborn which do not have the basic characteristics of personhood.

Also, can you answer this: At what point does a woman in the process of reproduction cease to be one individual of the species homo sapiens and begin to be two individuals of the species homo sapiens? At what point does a reproducing bacterium cease to be one bacterium and become two bacteria?

I also notice that you left unexamined the question of whether abortion law would necessarily be any different if the personhood of a fetus WAS legally recognized. Does the fetus' right to life legally supercede the woman's right to not having anything or anyone growing inside her involuntarily (i.e. right to the integrity of her body, or right to privacy)? Is there any clear legal precedent on this?

bd-from-kg

Jerry Smith:

Point well taken. The paragraph you quoted was a little sloppy. Even I think that there are some human beings who are not “persons” - e.g., those who are brain-dead. Whether there are any other such classes, and what they are, can indeed only be answered when we are relatively clear about what makes an individual a “person”. This is the subject of a post that I am working on right now. Stay tuned.

Of course. At the very least, partial-birth abortions would be banned. Actually there would be a lot of other legal ramifications, but this isn’t really the place to discuss them.

We’ve already discussed this at some length. You have yet to respond to my latest comments. If you want to continue to debate this, why not continue from where we are in this discussion?

callina

whew...this is quite a thread to keep up with.

Thanks to bd and danya for their kind words many posts ago. This controversy is very close to my heart.

I wonder if theism has in some way created this problem. Are embryos thought to be little human beings because they have a soul or some spiritual nature that is distincive from the pregnant woman? I am struggling to understand the anti-abortion stance. An embryo is a remarkable biological structure, but I just can't attach "personhood" to it. I am unfamiliar with most of the posters on this thread and don't mean to offend -- but are there anti-abortion atheists out there?

bd-from-kg

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 argued earlier, 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 was 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.

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 essential 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.
__________________________________________________ ____________________

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, like Danya, 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?

[ March 28, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Danya

That sounds very sweet but we are not talking about a baby and we are not talking about animals. If we always insisted on letting nature take it's course then we might as well give up on medical research for Alzheimers, osteoporosis, vaccinations, and even IVF.
The priority should always be the persons who are already here. They are undeniably persons. They should have the freedom to live out their lives to their full potential based on their choices and the medical technology available to them.
I am still not sure of what you are saying. Some animals are entitled to full civil rights or babies can be killed? Maybe it would be more helpful to state when you are talking about a baby or about an embryo. I think we can assume that in your mind an embryo is a baby but for the sake of our discussion you might want to clarify what stage you are referring to.

Who has argued that babies do not have a right to live?

No, sorry. I still cannot see where you think our equal protections have been grievously weakened. I understand you think so based on your abortion stance. But in what other ways has this demoralized our society in your view.

Jerry Smith

bd: I do not have time to respond fully to your posts this morning. This weekend, I plan to start a "partial-birth" abortion thread. I also plan to continue in this thread to address the legal ramifications of considering an embryo or fetus a person, and to work more on the idea of what the best concept of person is, and why, in light of your objections. Right now, I would like to nit-pick one small paragraph of what you have said:

You cannot generalize that your definition of person cannot depend on from your example of an individual lacking an arm or a leg (or any other of the examples you mentioned.) The fact is, these physiological structures specifically cannot be used a part of the definition because they are peripheral to the everyday concept of person. The brain is a whole 'nother ball of wax (pun intended).

Until this weekend,
Jerry

[ March 29, 2002: Message edited by: Jerry Smith ]</p>

Jamie_L

bd-from-kg:

First of all, I see that you are already aware of the conclusion I came to recently - that a person definition based only on "future mental abilities" has loopholes. In fact, I have a 29-year-old cousin who will never advance mentally beyond the capabilities of a toddler. Since you indicate you have been thinking of this, I'll hold off on further discussion of this for now.

In considering some of your complex cases - human mind in orangutan body, space aliens, etc. - I think maybe it is flawed to try and put forth a single statement that is all-inclusive of personhood. It seems perfectly valid to me that we could have a definition that involved some AND and OR statements (member of homo sapiens with X physical structures OR human-level cognitive ability regardless of species, etc.) It seems like the issue of severe mental retardation would require just such an OR statement to be compatible with the "future mental abilities" personhood definition.

I still do not have problems involving physical development of certain nuerological structures in the definition of personhood. With mental capabilities being virtually inseparable from these physical attributes, I find this to be distinctly different from any other sort of physical condition criteria. That is, it is fundamentally different from any other physical condition one might use to define personhood. It does not in any way (in my view) lend itself to classifying children as non-persons, as the cut-off point can be readily defined without being arbitrary. It also (like your definition) can create a consistent beginning and end of personhood criteria - both pre-birth and post-death (including brain-death) conditions involve lack of functioning of these structures.

Jamie

bd-from-kg

Danya :

[Since there are a number of quotations in this posts I have put your comments in boldfacefor clarity.]

What do you mean by “here”? And if you mean outside the womb rather than inside, how does this square with your earlier insistence that location doesn’t matter; that determining personhood on the basis of location would be “arbitrary” ?

This is denied by many people nowadays. See below.

Yes, I’m saying that this is logically entailed by the pro-choice position.

I don’t know how I could make myself clearer. Unlike some who have posted here (Jamie_L, Jerry Smith, and WJ) I have never in this thread used the term “baby” to refer to an individual who has not yet been born, and I have never anywhere used it to mean someone not yet born without adding the qualifier “unborn” to make this clear. Besides, the argument I presented makes no sense unless “baby” is interpreted to mean a human being who has (recently) been born.

Few people have the courage to take this position publicly. But there are exceptions. The most notable one is Dr. Peter Singer. In his book Practical Ethics he said:

[This section of the book can be found <a href="http://www.petersingerlinks.com/taking.htm" target="_blank">here</a>.]

The logic here (as Jon Curry pointed out in the thread that I provide a link to below) is that any reason that the parents might have for “regretting” that the child was born, or for wishing it dead, is a sufficient justification for killing it.

Here’s another bit of Singer philosophy:

[This was quoted in an article from The New Yorker which can be found <a href="http://www.michaelspecter.com/ny/1999/1999_09_06_philosopher.html" target="_blank">here</a>. Unfortunately the article does not cite the source.]

To get a little perspective on this, consider what the Mayo Clinic has to say about hemophilia:

In other words, Singer isn’t talking here about a handicap that interferes with normal mental function or is even physically disabling to any serious degree. Basically he’s saying that it’s OK for parents to kill an “imperfect” baby on the grounds that they might have better luck next time. Babies are replaceable, like puppies. If you get a puppy and find out that he’s defective, you have him killed and get a new one. The same goes for babies in Peter Singer’s world.

Now none of this would matter except that Dr. Singer’s views have been taken very seriously indeed, both by the general public and in academia. His book Practical Ethics sold over 100,000 copies and is a widely used textbook. And in 1999 he was appointed the DeCamp Professor in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

It is difficult to imagine that Dr. Singer’s book would be widely used as a textbook, much less that he would be given an appointment to such a prestigious position, if there were not a substantial number of people who agree with his views and many others who find them perfectly acceptable. After all, Nazis, racists, and others whose opinions are considered beyond the pale are not appointed to tenured positions at highly respected academic institutions.

So does anyone share his views? Yes. A number of folks right here at II agree with him to one degree or another, and many more have no real quarrel with them.

For example, the following exchange occurred on the 12-week-old fetus thread:

In other words, the justification for protecting babies is not that they have a right to live, but that their parents have a right to keep him alive if they so choose. Obviously this reason disappears if the parents do not want the child to live, so there is no reason to protect a baby from being killed by its own parents. Indeed, in that case, to protect the baby you would have to “actively coerce an adult”, which would seem to put it in the same category as legally protecting a fetus (to which SD was clearly opposed).

Here’s another exchange from this thread:

In other words, according to Jack, killing a baby is not as serious a crime as killing an adult. A baby may have a “right to life” in some sense, but not in the sense that an adult does.

Also noteworthy is the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=14&t=000153" target="_blank">thread on Peter Singer’s views</a> from last year. Jon Curry led off with a pretty accurate description of Singer’s ideas and asked for comments. Remarkably, not a single poster (other than Jon) had any serious objection in principle to Singer’s position. To be sure, some of them indicated that they would prefer to set a “cutoff point” somewhere before birth after which the fetus/baby would be given some legal protection (rather than the age of three years as Singer has suggested), but as for the idea that babies have no “right to life” comparable to adults, there was not a murmur of disapproval. The posters also showed no interest or understanding whatsoever of the principle of equality under the law, which is the only possible basis for such a “right to life” for babies.

Here, for example, is Pompous Bastard:

From all this it is distressingly clear that a great many people today believe that a baby does not have a right to life, at least in the sense of having the same right to life as an adult, and many believe that a baby has no right to life in any sense.

If you’re not aware of the fact that many people now take the position that babies are not entitled to civil rights, this is understandable.

[ March 29, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Jerry Smith:

Unless the objective is to show that these legal ramifications make it clearly unfeasible to treat the unborn as “persons”, this would be pointless. Arguing that a proposition must be wrong because it entails consequences that you don’t like is generally fallacious. To be sure, one must be careful in labeling this a fallacy in discussing moral issues. If the consequences of accepting a principle are ones that are clearly undesirable, this is a valid argument against accepting the principle. But this kind of argument is often fallacious. For example, in the debates on slavery the argument that everyone has the same basic rights was often countered by pointing out that applying this principle to blacks would mean that marriages between blacks and whites would have to be permitted. Thus, if your point is only that treating the unborn as persons would lead to results you don’t like or consider “reasonable”, you’ll be wasting everyone’s time.

But all physiological structures are peripheral to any intellectually defensible concept of a person. I didn’t consider that I was making an argument on this point so much as pointing out something that is perfectly obvious on reflection.

Consider a world to all appearances just like this one, but in which there are no “mental events”. In this world there are beings that appear to be humans, act just like humans, etc, but have no consciousness. (Of course this is probably impossible in world governed by our physical laws, but it does not appear to be logically impossible. We don’t really understand what gives rise to consciousness, so there would seem to be no inconsistency in supposing that the “stuff” in this alternate world lacks this “something” even though it appears to be just like the “stuff” in our world.) Now, would anything that happened in this world have any moral significance whatsoever? I think that the answer is clearly “no”.

Now consider a world consisting entirely of “mental events” with no physical substrate. Would events in this world have any moral significance? It seems to me that the answer is clearly “yes”.

Finally, consider a world in which the mental events were exactly the same as those in our world, but had an entirely different physical substrate. Would events in this world have any moral significance? Again I think the answer is obvious: not only would they have moral significance, but they would have exactly the same moral significance as the corresponding events in our world.

In short, the physical substrate underlying mental events is completely irrelevant to the moral significance of these events; it is only the mental events themselves that have moral significance.

This is the basic justification for saying that, for example, a being whose body was that of an orangutan but whose mental events were indistinguishable from those of a human would clearly be a “person”. And more generally, that any moral distinction we make between animals and humans must be based on differences in mental states rather than on physical differences.

[See my reply to Jamie_L below for a bit more on this subject.]

bd-from-kg

Jamie_L:

Yes. In fact, as I said some time ago, the criterion I gave is sufficient but not necessary for personhood. I do intend to deal later with the reasons why many who do not qualify as persons under this criterion should be treated as persons anyway. But for the moment I will note that this doesn’t help the pro-choice argument in the least. The fact that this criterion is too restrictive, yet fetuses qualify under it anyway, surely should give pause to anyone who is leaning toward a pro-choice position. The criterion that I proposed is, in my opinion, the most restrictive that is anywhere close to being intellectually defensible, yet the unborn qualify as persons even under it.

See my reply to Jerry.

First off, they are logically separable. The correlation between physical and mental attributes is presumably the result of some aspect of the “real world” that we don’t yet fully understand, but whatever it is, it is obviously contingent – that is, it could be otherwise.

More importantly as a practical matter, this “inseparability” works in only one direction. That is, it appears that a given physical state is invariably correlated with a corresponding mental state, but a given mental state may be correlated with more than one physical state. In other words, the same mental state may arise from more than one physical substrate. The most important such case in terms of the present discussion is what might be called the “empty” mental state – i.e., the total absence of consciousness. Obviously a tree and a rock are quite different physically, but we do not distinguish between them morally because both are entirely devoid of consciousness (and always will be). Similarly, we make no difference between a tree and a dead man, aside from those arising from the human feelings that those still alive (including ourselves) may have toward the latter. Even if the man died quite recently, so that the neurological structures in his brain are still intact, no sane person would consider that he has “rights” on that account. The fact that they are no longer capable (and will never again be capable) of producing “mental events” is decisive, because it is only the mental events that a brain produces that are morally significant – not the brain itself. This is even clearer in the case of a “brain-dead” individual. For some such people we are unable (with the current state of technology) to find any difference in the neurological structures in their brains and those in the brains of fully functional adults. So the differences, whatever they are, are very subtle. Obviously these differences would not be considered morally relevant were it not for the fact that the resulting mental events are so very different (normal vs. none at all).

Thus, even if you don’t want to go all the way with me on this and agree that it’s the mental events that really matter and not the physical substrate that produces them, you must surely agree that the moral relevance of the physical substrate lies entirely in the fact that it does produce mental events, or has the capability of producing them in the future. That’s really all that’s needed for my argument.