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secularprolifeconspectus · 5 years

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The Fetal Personhood Masterpost

*this is a living document, chronically edited, check back for additions*

Beyond Infanticide

The Moral Insignificance of Self‐consciousness

The Magnanimity of Spirit

In Defense of Humanity

The Ontogenesis of the Human Person

I Was Once a Fetus

In Defense of Speciesism

Is Speciesism Like Racism and Sexism?

Embryos & metaphysical personhood

On Abortion

The Uncertainty Principle

The Apple Argument Against Abortion

Personhood status of the human zygote

Construction vs. Development

Beyond the Abortion Wars

Gaining and Losing Personhood?

Embryos, Four-Dimensionalism, and Moral Status

An Alternative to the Rational Substance

Personhood: An Essential Characteristic

Miscellaneous

Excerpts below the cut!

1. Beyond Infanticide

“Beyond Infanticide: How Psychological Accounts of Persons Can Justify Harming Infants” by Rodger, Blackshaw, and Miller (2018)

The stronger intuitions against the permissibility of these ‘pre-personal acts’ allow us to re-establish a comprehensive and persuasive reductio against psychological accounts of persons.

Since fetuses lack the relevant psychological apparatus or features (either in kind or degree), they lack certain rights or interests that adult humans ordinarily have, including the right to life.

Given the growing acceptance of the permissibility of infanticide, whether for severely disabled infants or more broadly, this has gradually ceased to be the case.

Given psychological accounts, we argue, it follows, first, that infanticide is permissible for healthy infants. Secondly, infants can be harvested for organ transplants (or, perhaps, for more trivial reasons). Thirdly, infants can be subject to live, invasive experimentation. Fourthly, infants can be used for sexual gratification. Finally, infants can be actively discriminated against on the basis of what are generally accepted protected characteristics for mature humans.

For those undisposed towards ‘rights’, our argument can be adapted, mutatis mutandis, for various accounts of the wrongness of murder.

For clarity, we take ‘x has a right to life’ to mean that other humans ordinarily have an obligation to refrain from killing x (excepting perhaps cases of self-defense, and so on).

the same accounts which permit infanticide fail equally to prohibit considerably more unpalatable actions.

the desire to continue existing requires the concept of a continuing self

‘a thing’s interest is a function of its present and future desires’

accounts need to be very carefully drawn even to include young children in the morality of respect.

According to these accounts, not all human beings are persons. There is a threshold (usually taken to be a complex of psychological properties and capacities) that must be attained for a human to be regarded as a person and to gain the rights most adult humans have. Although fetuses, newborns and infants may have some rights in virtue of their limited psychological capacities, they come nowhere near to having a serious right to life. And, in particular, the rights they do have are typically over ridable by the rights or interests of actual persons.

More precisely for our purposes, a pre-personal human is any human who has not yet attained the capacities or other features sufficient for inclusion within the community of full rights-bearers. We also define pre-personal acts: acts performed on or with a pre-personal human.

Infants are little different to conscious fetuses psychologically, and so according to typical psychological accounts of personhood, value and rights, they also lack a right to life.

The natural implication is that infanticide is at least sometimes permissible, and typically, ethicists who hold to psychological accounts agree that this is true for cases of severely disabled infants whose quality of life is likely to be poor.

most of the aforementioned authors do not make room in their accounts for any rights for fetuses and infants (excepting perhaps the right not to be subject to pain), while the other accounts suggest that in view of their minimal psychological capacities, their rights are present but easily overridable and, in McMahan’s (2003, p. 339) words, ‘may permissibly be weighed and traded off against the time-relative interests of others in the manner approved by consequentialists’. If this is correct, of course, it is plausible that infanticide is sometimes obligatory.

If the rights of infants are overridable by the rights of actual persons, there is no reason why healthy infants should be immune from the utilitarian calculus: if the interests of adults can be furthered sufficiently by killing the infant, there is no theoretical ground for opposing such killing.

According to McMahan (2003, p. 360), ‘most people will find this implication intolerable’, and he freely confesses ‘that I cannot embrace it without significant misgivings and considerable unease’. Despite his unease, however, McMahan (2003, p. 361) feels he is inexorably forced into accepting that newborns must be ‘in principle, sacrificable’.

‘we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be’.

One suspects, of course, that for many people the circumstances in which abortion is thought to be acceptable are considerably wider.

Involuntary organ donation is one possibility, mentioned by Kaczor (2014) as an implication of McMahan’s views. There is a critical shortage of organ donors worldwide, and if pre-personal humans that are unwanted by parents or relatives could help meet this need, there may be a moral obligation to use them thus.

they ‘fall outside the scope of the constraint against harmful using’

it is difficult to see how there could be any strong argument against even the commercialization of this practice.

If psychological accounts are correct and infants are not persons, there may even be a moral obligation to utilize available organs to maximize benefit to existing persons. Non-consensual organ harvesting, while desirable because of the obvious benefits to those in need of organs, is constrained by our obligation to respect surviving interests of the dead such as the previously expressed desire for bodily integrity after death. There are no such surviving interests for infants – their weak time-relative interests cannot survive their death. Discarding their organs appears to be unjustifiable, given the great goods that would accrue to actual persons from their use.

if he thinks we should all accept his arguments that infants and children are fundamentally different entities with different rights then, were we to do so, having an opportunistic attitude towards infants would be entirely consonant with having a protective attitude towards more mature children.

It is at least worth considering whether more trivial benefits for actual persons might equally justify this practice. After all, if the deontic constraints on killing humans are absent for infants, and if they are sufficiently anesthetized (for example), it becomes difficult to explain why only the great benefit of saving lives via organ transplants would justify the practice – why not more trivial benefits, like purely hedonic ones?

According to bioethicist R. Alta Charo (2015), nearly everyone in the United States (US) has benefited in some respect from research using fetal tissue. But with similar justification, tissue obtained from infants whose lives have been ended by infanticide could also be used. The use of euthanised infants’ organs and tissues in this way is not the only possibility.

it seems that using infants for medical research prior to being euthanized (or even without being euthanized) would also be permissible, provided sufficient benefits to actual persons accrue. It would be necessary to ensure that the research does not cause pain, but this is compatible with relatively extreme actions as long as appropriate safeguards are in place (e.g. a requirement for sufficient analgesia). It might even be that a degree (perhaps a large degree) of pain is morally acceptable, provided it is not gratuitous, and provided the benefits are sufficiently large. It is also possible that this could be a commercial transaction.

Provided that such acts do not result in physical damage or pain, such acts could be permitted on any human that is yet to reach the threshold of personhood, including those that will become persons in the future.

Of course, if the infant is subsequently killed, harm that would manifest in the future may not even be relevant.

In any case, since there is no principled objection to using infants in this way according to the morality of respect, all that is necessary to justify it is sufficient gratification for the actor.

Again, as with organ harvesting and experimentation, this could even be commercialized.

If we are to ground the common intuition that having sexual relations with infants is wrong, we will need an explanation of why infants have a non-negotiable right to sexual integrity but animals do not, without relying on species exceptionalism.

But if infants are not persons in any relevant sense, and if they are not part of the ‘morality of respect’ in virtue of being ‘one of us’, it is difficult to see how rape could constitute such an assault on them. And it is especially difficult to see, if infants are not ‘one of us’ in a way that accords them broadly the same rights as us, why we should attribute to them the same interest in sexual integrity which we have. For those who oppose abortion and infanticide, one way to attribute the same interest here is in claiming an identity relation between fetuses, infants and adults, and to suggest that identity relations are sufficient (though not necessary) to preserve interests and rights.

it might be that they have latent second-order desires against being used sexually, but the admission of latent second-order desires would only serve to prohibit abortion and infanticide similarly.

the sexual rights the victim would have if he were, in fact, too cognitively impaired to consent: ‘it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be…if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably’.

For the problem with such justifications is that most people would recoil at the idea that there are only instrumental reasons for the prohibition on sexual activity with infants: the heinousness of sexual activity with infants is surely something intrinsic to the action itself – not merely a pragmatic concern.

We suggest that human infants are more similar in kind to human adults than pebbles and mosquitoes in this respect. It would be wrong to selectively destroy black infants because one prefers white infants aesthetically, just as it would be wrong to selectively destroy female infants for the same reason (or to help prevent the spread of Duchenne muscular dystrophy). Or, supposing we could tell from an early stage whether a child was likely to be same-sex attracted or not, it would be wrong to kill an infant on those grounds (this need not result directly from antipathy towards same-sex attracted people: one might have only the resources to raise one child, and yet strongly desire grandchildren, in a country where same-sex attracted adults were banned from adopting).

We suggest, therefore, that the intuitive injunction against the discriminatory killing of infants undermines the proposed psychological accounts of value and rights.

So it is not possible to dismiss this as a straw man implication of psychological accounts.

the behaviors described in these scenarios constitute such violations.

argue that other intuitions pertaining to personhood and value imply that a serious right to life requires certain actual – not potential – psychological capacities

Consequently, psychological accounts prima facie imply the permissibility of our five scenarios, contrary to our intuitions about their wrongness or heinousness.

Moral theories that violate our strong intuitions need to explain why these violations do not undermine their status as moral theories

There are two options for the defender of psychological accounts: to reject these intuitions, or to explain why each of these scenarios is morally problematic. In the former case, there is not much we can do other than to strengthen the intuitions and defend them from undercutting defeaters. We take it that most people will feel the force of these intuitions and not give them up lightly. Although there is a strong intuition against infanticide which we have strengthened, we have also detailed further scenarios against which there are even stronger intuitions, such that the cost of giving them up is augmented.

But our primary task here is shoring up the intuitions against pre-personal harms and exhibiting the cost of rejecting them.

So the task is not merely to explain why these scenarios involve moral wrongdoing.

It is to explain, firstly, why they involve wrongdoing in ways that, for example, abortion does not. Secondly, since the intuitions here are not merely that the scenarios are to be avoided but that they involve intrinsic wrongdoing, we need an explanation of their intrinsic wrongdoing without reference to practical concerns that might easily be outweighed.

Explanations appealing only to contingent features, or which allow for these actions to be only negligibly wrong insofar as other wrong making characteristics are absent, will not suffice.

In the absence of such accounts, we conclude that our overall reductio succeeds.

Insofar as this is the case, the credibility of psychological accounts is thereby diminished in proportion to the strength of the intuitions against such acts.

But if all this is true, it has significant implications for abortion ethics. As we noted in the introduction, many contemporary defences of abortion depend on denying fetuses (and often infants) the status of personhood on the basis of psychological accounts of rights, value and personhood. If, as we suggest, those accounts are made implausible by the reductios described above, defenders of the permissibility of abortion will have to appeal to alternative arguments.

2. The Moral Insignificance of Self‐consciousness

“The Moral Insignificance of Self-Consciousness” by Joshua Shepherd (2017)

I examine them and argue that (a) in various ways they depend on unwarranted assumptions

about self-consciousness's functional significance, and (b) once these assumptions are undermined, motivation for these arguments dissipates. I then consider the direct route to self-consciousness's significance, which depends on claims that self-consciousness has intrinsic value or final value. I argue what intrinsic or final value self-consciousness possesses is not enough to generate strong moral reasons against harming or killing.

Self-consciousness's significance. The fact that an entity E is self-conscious generates strong

(i.e., not easily outweighed or overridden) moral reasons against harming or killing E.

Self-consciousness [Capacity]. Self consciousness is the capacity to think of oneself as oneself,

and to think of various features of oneself as features of oneself.

An implication of this is obviously that the self-consciousness in question can be ascribed to all creatures that are phenomenally conscious, including various non-human animals.

In addition to containing a number of questionable claims, this line of reasoning obscures our topic. Intuitions about the moral significance of human beings may track a wide range of properties, and may thus mislead us here. Even if not, we want to know about the moral significance of self-consciousness, no matter what kind of entities possess it.

Broadly, self-consciousness might come by its moral significance in two diff erent ways. Call the first way indirect, the second direct. If one takes the indirect route, one argues that self-consciousness is significant in the sense that the possession of self-consciousness is critical (perhaps necessary, perhaps sufficient) for possession of other properties, capacities, or whatever and that these other properties, capacities, or whatever are the things that generate strong moral reasons against harming or killing. By contrast, self-consciousness is significant in a direct way if the possession of self-consciousness itself generates strong reasons against harming or killing.

the best-known arguments related to self-consciousness is significance share an unwarranted optimism regarding the functional significance of self-consciousness.

the possession of self-consciousness involves a capacity to token mental states with a certain kind of representational content— de se content, or content that includes explicit reference to the subject who tokens the state.

Peacocke draws a useful contrast between the capacity to token self.referring states and the wealth of background knowledge a creature may deploy in representing various things as holding of themselves. A creature may possess the relevant capacity—and thus qualify as self-conscious—without possessing a very sophisticated mental life. What is critical is not just the relevant capacity, but interactions between this capacity and a wide range of additional cognitive capacities, including abilities to represent various things as holding of oneself.

This is not to say that self-consciousness is of no functional significance.

So if these proposals are right, self-consciousness will extend quite far into the animal kingdom.

we should question whether such talk is as accurate as moral theory needs it to be. For the fact is that in human beings the capacity for self-consciousness emerges alongside a suite of sophisticated cognitive capacities

If self-consciousness is only one piece of a very complex and integrated tapestry, one wants a justification for the singling out of self-consciousness as deserving of special attention in moral philosophy. Short of such a justification, it seems we should be discussing the significance of cognitive sophistication generally—of the whole tapestry.

Failure to appreciate the limited functional significance of self-consciousness alone exposes moral philosophers to a danger in reasoning regarding the functional role of self-consciousness on the one hand, and its moral significance on the other.

there is no good reason to think that the particularity of an entity's mental life depends upon possession of self-consciousness

In order to properly examine the moral significance of some feature or property of an entity, we need to get a grip on the feature or property. We need to know what it is we are examining.

it is important not to conflate self-consciousness with cognitive sophistication

A claim about moral significance depends on unwarranted functional assumptions about the possession (or absence) of self-consciousness.

Interests about the future do not require self-consciousness. Interests about the future can be interests about the future, whether or not they are about your own future existence.

On the latter, there is little reason to say, as Baker wishes to, that personhood emerges around the time of birth

‘A being with a rudimentary first-person perspective is a person only if it is of a kind that normally develops robust first-person perspectives

This view is coherent. But it is not very plausible. What Baker needs is a reason to give rudimentary first-person perspectives person-making significance. According to these perspectives, developmental significance does not work, since it is dubious that this perspective is really doing the relevant developmental work. Moving to kind membership does not remove the problem either—it simply buries it. Membership in a kind has little to do with the rudimentary first-person perspective, which is now starting to look like an arbitrary feature of many kinds in the animal kingdom.

Baker's attempt to ground the metaphysical importance of a rudimentary first-person perspective (which does not involve self-consciousness) in the possession of a full-blown first-person perspective (which does involve self-consciousness) falls flat.

There is an apparent conflict here, and Baker attempts to resolve these intuitions (initially) by arguing that the non-self-conscious entities are in some developmental sense on the way to self-consciousness, and are persons in virtue of this.

we have no great reason to conceive of an entity as developmentally on the way to self-consciousness unless self-consciousness is of critical functional importance for the entity. Once we see self-consciousness as a minor part of a general trend toward cognitive sophistication, theories of personhood that include strong appeals to self-consciousness look to suffer from misplaced focus.

something has intrinsic moral significance (or value) if its value in some sense depends or supervenes on its internal or non-relational properties

the best kind of support for an attribution of intrinsic moral significance to some property or capacity is that the property or capacity passes a kind of isolation test.

The kind of answer we need is one that is fairly clear and obvious, and one that compels widespread agreement among those that have an adequate understanding of the nature of the capacity or property.

One takes the property or capacity in question and considers its presence or absence in situations that hold fixed other relevant properties or capacities. This can be tricky. One wants to avoid illicitly building in features that make the thing instrumentally or extrinsically morally significant. For such features might cloud judgment regarding the thing's intrinsic significance.

we value certain aspects of phenomenal consciousness for their own sakes, or intrinsically. If we accept that in so valuing them we are not horribly mistaken, we can accept that some aspects of phenomenal consciousness are intrinsically valuable.

One way to make sure we don't mistake these features for self-consciousness's intrinsic significance is simply to rule them out.

Is self-consciousness so significant that its possession generates strong reasons against harming or killing the entity that has it—reasons that are absent in the case of the otherwise similar but non-self-conscious entity? Plausibly, the answer to all of these questions is no. Self-consciousness does not appear to have much intrinsic moral significance.

it is clear that understanding a thing's final value sometimes requires getting the circumstances surrounding the thing just right. This is because we ascribe (or ought to ascribe) final value to a capacity, object, or whatever not necessarily because of its intrinsic properties, but simply because we value (or ought to value) it for its own sake, that is, not merely as a means.

The kind of value that accrues to self-consciousness here seems analogous to the value we might give to a range of mental capacities, such as the capacity to direct covert attention, or generate mental imagery. These capacities are nice to have. But their value seems contingent on predilections of the valuer. (One is not deluded if one fails to value the possession of covert attention, or the capacity to generate mental imagery.) The final value such mental capacities possess thus does not seem sufficient or even necessary for the generation of strong reasons against harming or killing entities that possess them. Analogously, whatever final moral significance self-consciousness might have does not seem sufficient or even necessary for the generation of strong reasons against harming or killing an entity.

In my view, self-consciousness can and often does function as a particularly shiny red herring.

We lack good reasons to think that self-consciousness is highly morally significant. Reflection on the nature and grounds of human and non-human moral significance should turn elsewhere

I would insist that analogous desires or goals that lack self-referring content could be inserted, and thus that the normative role of self-consciousness here is relatively unimportant

this argument's reliance on future orientation is problematic. The older one gets, the less future-oriented one might become. It does not become better to kill the aged because they are less future-oriented than the young.

metaphysical personhood is not moral personhood��if we want metaphysical personhood to generate strong moral reasons against harming or killing, we need some kind of bridge principle linking metaphysical personhood and moral significance.

Baker offers no argument for the assertion quoted above. And I can see no good reason to

accept it. It is not analytic that the only things capable of possessing a right to life are things that qualify as metaphysical persons. Until we know more about the content of metaphysical personhood, it would be wise to withhold judgment about whether metaphysical personhood is necessary for possession of a right to life (or possession of moral significance more generally). And this raises the stakes for what an account of metaphysical personhood should contain if

it is to offer an indirect route to moral significance.

3. The Magnanimity of Spirit

"The Magnanimity of Spirit: On the Human Consideration of Animals" by Antonio Wolf (2021)

With natural rights we have the peculiarity of right which exists where no claim is made, and where no enforcement actualizes right.

a right is in essence a social phenomenon of recognition of will established in and through an enforcing institution.

The animal values life because it is part of its natural drive to live at all cost despite the seemingly most intolerable and forsaken conditions. Animals value life because they feel it, but there is no rational judgment of the quality of this life.

Not only that, a human being is willing to reason about the value of the lives of others despite the other’s immediate feelings, e.g. the duty to deny others the freedom to self-destruct.

there is a normative argument to be made which, despite not ceding the question of rights, does impose certain necessities on ethical life and even demands a duty of the human towards the animal not for the animal’s sake, but for the sake of the human subject’s actualization and

Freedom. Human beings have moral duties to their self which demand their developing of the qualities of humaneness towards animals even if these are not ethical duties to animals as such.

for Kant human beings alone are ends in themselves due to their autonomous rational nature, and so must regard themselves and other humans as ends and not means. The recognition of this confers to such beings a dignity (intrinsic value) which commands the respect of any moral agent, and dignity alone commands moral duty.

When it is said in common thought that we can recognize the ‘humanity’ of animals, that is, that we can speak of how human they are, it is often said with an unspoken projection of humanity onto them. With Spirit that comprehends itself, however, there is no need to project humanity, for humanity is there in animal being; it is simply partial.

No, what we recognize in animals is precisely the partiality of human essence: freedom. A free individual, one capable of recognition, desires to see freedom in the social and Natural world around them.

nowhere in the rational development of freedom does it ever make sense to put oneself in a relation of absolute dominion or absolute antagonism towards not just anyone, but of anything whatsoever. The fully free individual has no desire to dominate another for the sake of domination, not even animals, and instead enjoys not only the freedom of recognition, but the recognition of freedom.

Because if one is truly free, one cannot help but recognize freedom and desire its actuality.

Human being entails magnanimity towards animals because animals do not deserve the consideration, yet it is afforded because it is the humane thing to do, and this is concretely no mere abstract dictate of reason, but is fully felt by an actualized human being who recognizes at the highest degree. Fully actualized Spirit desires to see freedom realized, and it takes satisfaction in its reality even if that reality is the reality of a being which cannot measure up to Spirit.

with magnanimity as the only necessary relation there isn’t a reason for why biological necessity has any bearing.

As the social consciousness of modernity has come to confluence on the recognition that, though animals are unequal to human beings, they are nonetheless partially human, we have seen that we have opted to extend to them the privilege of protection within law itself, an objective ethical relation which is most interestingly done mostly out of a concern for the inhumanity of the deed and not for the quality of life of animals.

As based on the fact that for us—free beings—freedom is of value everywhere, and the fostering of this freedom is our greatest mission both in the human and animal world. It is because a cruel human being is not free, that an animal should be free from human originated cruelty.

4. In Defense of Humanity

"In Defense of Humanity: Why Animals Cannot Possess Human Rights" by Nicholas H. Lee (2014)

Mary Ann Glendon calls this allure of rights the “romance of rights” and contends that this new rights discourse focuses on influencing the courts rather than influencing society as a whole.

Rather, Smith holds, inherent worth should be based on the intrinsic nature of the species, and capacities such as creativity, responsibility, language, and the like that indicate moral differences in kind are all “capacities that flow from the nature of humans and are absent from the natures of all animals.”

He responds, however, that it is not individuals who are awarded rights once they achieve some level of special capacity.

He logically concludes, therefore, that capabilities are not at issue in this debate.

A direct consequence of rejecting human exceptionalism is that the weak lose status and can be abused by the strong.

He adds that being part of the human species is a morally relevant fact, and “[i]f the moral irrelevance of humanity is what philosophy teaches, so that we have to choose between philosophy and the intuition that says that membership in the human species is morally relevant, philosophy will have to go.”

“we may end up treating human beings as badly as we treat animals, rather than treating animals as well as we treat (or aspire to treat) human beings.”

5. The Ontogenesis of the Human Person

"The Ontogenesis of the Human Person: A Neo-Aristotelian View" by Mathew Lu (2013)

the embryo possesses its rationality in potency. But the key point is that it has the potential to manifest rationality only because it is an instance of the natural kind human being, to which rationality belongs as an essential property.

For even if we cannot easily give an account of exactly what properties are sufficient for a substance to count as a moral person, if a normal adult human being counts as a person, then so does the embryo.

This follows simply from the reasonable assumption that what makes a normal adult human being a person is some aspect of his or her human nature. Thus, anything that shares that nature would also have to count as a person.

no human being is ever “pre-rational.” All human beings are always already rational, though it is true that in particular cases their rational powers might be in potency. The key Aristotelian metaphysical grounds for this is simply that no power can be in potency except insofar as it belongs to the nature of the kind of thing that has that potential power. In other words, all human beings, including the immature and incapacitated, as well as those who are in some way “defective,” are always already rational simply because all human beings qua human beings instantiate a human nature that is essentially rational. Furthermore, this is true even if those individuals will never manifest the rational powers

on this view the set of human beings is, at minimum, a complete subset of the set of moral persons understood substances of a rational nature.

On this model the embryo has moral value for what it always already is, (in virtue of instantiating a rational human nature)

embryos are always already persons, because what it means to be a person is simply to be a substance of a rational nature, and any possessor of human nature qualifies. A particular creature either entirely possesses a human nature or entirely lacks one. Thus, it is nonsensical to speak of the embryo as a “potential person.”

If one assumes that all persons have a “right to life,” the embryo, as an instance of rational human nature, has such a right.

without something like this analysis, especially including an appeal to the teleological ordering of nature in general, and human nature in particular, we find ourselves unable to explain even very simple facts, such as that human embryos regularly mature into individuals who manifest rational activity

6. I Was Once a Fetus

"I Was Once a Fetus: That is Why Abortion is Wrong" by Alexander R. Pruss (2001)

since it is uncontroversial that it is wrong to kill an adult human being for the sorts of reasons for which most abortions are performed, it follows that most abortions are wrong.

The advantage of this argument over others is that it avoids talking of personhood

It certainly did not behave like a body part of either my mother or my father.

we can see that in the earliest days of this organism before implantation, the organism floated free, independently seeking nutrition in my mother’s womb. This organism certainly was not a part of my mother.

If an organism that once existed has never died, then this organism still exists.

it is sufficiently established that Bob, that embryo who came into existence nine months before my birth, has never died. But by my metaphysical principle, if he has never died, he is still alive.

If Bob is here, and if no part of me is a large animal, and if Bob is a large animal, Bob and I must be one and the same entity.

every organ of mine is an organ of Bob’s since Bob’s organs have developed into being my organs, and yet without any transplant happening. Thus, I and Bob are organisms having all of our organs in common. But the only way that can be is if I and Bob are the same organism

My body is simply my property, and so stealing one of my kidneys is a mere property crime–it is not stealing a part of me. These consequences are ethically unacceptable.

Finally, if this is right, then the traditional rallying cry of abortion supporters that “it’s my body” is no different in principle from the silly argument that I can do whatever I like in my house because my house is my property.

There is too much absurdity there, and so this Cartesian view fails.

it could only be used by the proponent of abortion if he had good reason to deny that the soul substance was united with the embryo from conception–otherwise, the safer thing is to refrain from killing what might be I. But since the soul substance is unobservable, no such grounds are possible

as soon as there is a unitary organism, there is a soul.

Why should the cells that were the precursors of the brain cells not be counted as having been the same organ as the brain, albeit in inchoate form? If so, then perhaps I was there from conception, even on this view.

I am nothing else than a process of thinking. We would do well to reject this view just because it contradicts the commonsensical fact that we think.

as in 259 out of 260 cases twinning will not occur, one needs to act on the presumption that it will not in fact occur.

consider the hypothetical killing of the fetus that I once was. This killing would have exactly the same victim as killing me now would.

Given that murder is a crime whose wrongness comes from the harm to the victim, it is clear that when the victim is the same, and the harm greater, killing is if anything more wrong.

we see that the wrongfulness of killing me when I was a fetus is at least as great as the wrongfulness of killing me now in relevantly similar circumstances. Thus, my moral status when I was a fetus with respect to being killed is the same, or more favorable to me than, my status now.

nothing is said here about whether I was a person when I was a fetus. That issue is irrelevant. Whether I was a person then or not, killing me would have had the same victim and involved greater harm as killing me now. Observe that if I was not a person when I was a fetus, then the harm in killing me then would have been even greater than if I was a person then. For killing me when I was not a person would thus have deprived me of all of my personhood as lived out on earth

The essential property of a being is a property which that being cannot lack as long as that being exists.

it is likewise plausible that being a person is an essential property of every person. If someone were a person and if personhood were removed from her, she would cease to exist. If this is correct, then the fetus that I was truly was a person since I am a person.

If the fetus that I was were not a person, then it would be the case that I could have existed without being a person–which is impossible.

Human dignity is a property of me that makes it wrong for another human being to set out to kill when I am juridically innocent

Human dignity is an essential property: it is part of the essence of who I am. Were I to lack this intrinsic dignity, I would not be myself; I would not exist.

But if human dignity understood in this way is an essential property and I have it, then the fetus that I was also had it– otherwise it wouldn’t be an essential property.

Whether it is acceptable to kill the fetus under those circumstances depends on whether it would be acceptable to kill me now were I to endanger my mother’s life unintentionally.

The loss of an organ does not kill a human being unless it disrupts general functioning, and in this case no disruption of general functioning occurred.

7. In Defense of Speciesism

“In Defense of Speciesism” by Michael Wreen (1984)

Personal identity seems to be closely tied to bodily identity, with the latter seeming to be either a necessary condition for the former or criteriologically related to the former.

For it would seem, first, that there is at least a quasi-meta-physical linkage between the concepts of a person and a human being, and second, that our ability to identify with human non-persons in a way that we seem not to be able to identify with sentient and intelligent nonhuman non-persons thus has a solid metaphysical basis. And it would therefore also seem, though this must be taken with caution, that there is an intimate connection between basic rights, such as a right to life, and humanity, here taken biologically.

A human being can function as a person only if he has adequate food, water, shelter, air, an intact and properly functioning brain, and the time, ability, an opportunity to acquire knowledge and develop his intellectual capacities and moral sensibilities. These conditions, among others, are what I shall call the empirical preconditions for human personhood (EPHP).

If they are satisfied, the beneficiaries can take no credit for having seen to it that they were; that wasn’t their doing. And if they are not satisfied, the victims deserve no blame; that also was not their doing. The latter, the victims, are Fortune’s Fools, or, in the case of the infant and the fetus, Fortune’s Not Yet Favored (if they are lucky).

Basic rights may well depend on personhood simpliciter in a world in which the notion of a person were easily separable from that of a human being, and in which personhood wasn’t bound by biological, social, physical, and psychological factors, or by the vulnerabilities to which human flesh and mind are subject, or by the real threats to existence which we all face, threats posed by conditions over which we have little or no control

Human non-persons, then, should be ascribed basic rights; for although in the primary case it is persons who are ascribed basic rights, equality of opportunity, or, better, fairness, requires us to ascribe basic rights to human non-persons as well.

they were denied the opportunity to become or to remain persons.

The reach of basic rights, then, exceeds the grasp of personhood, and that because we live in the world, and the decidedly imperfect world, that we do.

For personhood is species-specific (so far as we know), and within our species the norm: its absence, not its presence, calls for special explanation.

Gifts of fortune, unlike personhood, are no one’s birthright.

8. Is Speciesism Like Racism and Sexism?

"Is Speciesism Like Racism and Sexism?" by Mathew T. Lu (2017)

In short, discrimination on the basis of race or sex is not wrong per se. Rather “racism” and “sexism” name precisely those cases in which race or sex are used to discriminate even though those factors are properly irrelevant to some broader end or purpose. That is what makes them examples of injustice and the product of irrational judgments.

In the case of racism or sexism the false judgment is that race or sex is a relevant criterion for making a distinction in some particular case. In the case of speciesism the false judgment is supposed to be that membership in a biological species is a relevant criterion for moral personhood.

First, he focuses almost entirely on the active exercise of certain powers, e.g., using language. Second, he fails to understand how such capacities (i.e., potencies) properly belong to (and only make sense in the context of) the nature of certain kinds of substances.

Instead, what actually matters is that human beings are a natural kind that is rational by nature. Now, as it happens, it is true that all members of the biological species homo sapiens

sapiens are in fact instantiations of the natural kind that we call “rational animal.” But non-humans could, in principle, also belong to that natural kind.

What ultimately matters for moral personhood is not biological species membership but the possession of a rational nature. It is, however, absolutely crucial to understand that not every individual who possesses a given nature will be able to actively exercise all the powers that belong to that nature at any given time. While all human beings are rational by nature, not all individual human beings can actively exercise the characteristic powers of that nature, such as the use of language and abstract thought. But, metaphysically speaking, it is only contingently (or accidentally) true that such individuals lack the ability to actively exercise those powers. On the other hand, beings that are not rational by nature – whether rocks or dogs – lack those powers essentially.

It is not that a non-rational being has been replaced by a rational one. Rather, the very same being was rational by nature from the beginning of its existence, but those rational powers remained for some time in potency and were only (contingently) actualized at a later time. Nonetheless, in virtue of her rational nature those powers were always properly predicated of her, even before should could actively exercise them. The powers belong to her substantial nature, whether or not they are actively exercised.

They point to essential realities about the natures of certain kind of things (humans, salmon, oak trees) even if it turns out that particular members of those natural kinds never happen to exhibit the properties in question for contingent reasons.

the rational powers belong to the essence of human beings even though some particular human beings might never actively exercise those powers for contingent reasons

Even though she will never exercise the rational powers, she nonetheless actually possesses them (in potency) precisely because, as a human being, she has a rational nature.

Ultimately, it is impossible to make sense of a capability or potency except with regards to a particular nature or essence. In other words, exercising a rational power just is, and can be nothing else than, the actualization of a potency of a rational nature.

just because someone refuses to do metaphysics explicitly does not mean that he is not implicitly employing a variety of (undefended) metaphysical presuppositions.

since properly understood personhood is founded precisely on the possession of a rational nature and all members of the human species possess such a nature (including those contingently unable to actively exercise the rational powers), there is hardly anything that could be more relevant to the question of whether a particular individual is a moral person.

Recognizing the moral status of all human beings is the opposite. It is an expression of justice (giving to each his due) on the basis of a true judgment about his nature.

9. Embryos & metaphysical personhood

"Embryos & metaphysical personhood: both biology & philosophy support the pro-life case" by Kristina Artuković (2021)

in order to explain why abortion is morally impermissible and should be legally impermissible, we will have to (a) address the relation that members of our natural kind, including preborn humans, must have towards metaphysical personhood, which should (b) establish the proof of their moral status, which would then (c) provide a substantial reason for giving them protection via legal personhood.

All beings of the same kind necessarily take part in the essential properties of that kind which designate them through the entirety of their existence.

It would be very, very easy to say: all humans take part in metaphysical personhood, therefore all of them have moral status. However, we would fail to address how exactly humans take part in metaphysical personhood and deal with those gray areas of “human non-personhood.”

all living humans must have an inherent and active relation to metaphysical personhood

Attainment of metaphysical personhood is why zygotes, embryos, fetuses and newborns necessarily have moral status. As individual members of our species, they are always in an active, inherent, self-initiated and self-governed relation of attaining the capabilities we all share radically, as members of the same rational type of natural kinds. Every increment of the human developmental process, from conception to the end of our life, is part of the physical and metaphysical chain that sustains or enables the capabilities that comprise metaphysical personhood. This is a nice example of how science without philosophy cannot tell us what human means, and how philosophy without science cannot explain human in a relevant way.

These two processes aren’t stopped by negative factors, but instead are organically overshadowed.

after this relation becomes absolutely passive, these humans nonetheless retain a remnant of their moral status through their corporeality, echoing in the legal universe, since we generally find it morally and sometimes even legally binding to respect their explicit will regarding the integrity of their body and regarding the transfer of their property, all within the framework of common good. This also serves as a reminder that there is no sharp distinction between the body and metaphysical personhood — they are infused into each other from the moment of conception.

Attainment, retainment, and restoration are actual, not potential. So the moral issue of prenatal justice is actually about what we are stopping by killing prenatal humans. It may be one thing to kill something alive but essentially non-sentient, but it is a fundamentally different thing to kill an entity that is actively involved, with the entirety of its corporeality, in the finite and foreseeable process of attaining consciousness and reason. And how do we prove that? In the case of prenatal humans — easily, because they are bound by the developmental rules of our kind.

10. On Abortion

“On Abortion” by Rehumanize International (2019)

Modern pro-choice ideology seeks to exclude certain human beings from personhood based on factors such as size, dependence, and ability level. Pro-life people, on the other hand, often argue that we must expand personhood, eliminating these arbitrary distinctions

Throughout history, the concept of personhood has almost exclusively been used as an excuse to discriminate against whole classes of human beings. While expanding the definition of personhood could prevent further dehumanization and violence, we propose an alternative solution: "personhood” should not be amended — it should be abolished.

We advocate for human rights, not person rights, because the definition of who can or cannot be a person is ultimately a rhetorical debate that ignores scientific facts. If there could ever be a category of “living humans who are not persons,” then personhood at best is a useless attribute. At worst, it is discriminatory and deadly.

11. The Uncertainty Principle

"The Uncertainty Principle" by Abort73 (2017)

In order for abortion to be justified, there must be absolute certainty that it does not kill a human person.

there are only four possibilities with regard to abortion. They are:

The fetus is a person, and you know that.

The fetus is a person, but you don't know that.

The fetus is not a person, but you don't know that.

The fetus is not a person, and you know that.

Now consider each of these ramifications in actual practice:

If a fetus is a person and you know that, then abortion is an act of homicide. You intentionally killed an innocent human person.

If a fetus is a person but you don't know that, then abortion is an act of manslaughter. You unintentionally killed an innocent human person.

If the fetus is not a person but you don't know that, then abortion is an act of criminal negligence. You didn't kill an innocent human person, but you intentionally risked doing so.

If a fetus is not a person and you know that, then abortion is an act that needs no justification. You did nothing more significant than getting a haircut or removing your tonsils.

Notice that only one of the above scenarios justifies abortion, and notice that it is a scenario that does not exist in the real world. No one can say with absolute certainty that abortion does not kill a human person. At best, someone can be strongly convinced that it does not, but they have no capacity to prove so, since their metrics are indistinct and immeasurable.

Personal conviction makes no difference. The absence of human life must be completely verified before any of these actions can take place.

In the context of abortion, the burden of proof lies with those who want to justify the practice, not with those who oppose it.

As such, it is not the responsibility of abortion opponents to prove that abortion does kill a human person; it is the responsibility of abortion advocates to prove that it doesn't. If ANY uncertainty exists, then abortion cannot be justified.

12. The Apple Argument Against Abortion

“The Apple Argument Against Abortion” by Peter Kreeft (2001)

Roe used such skepticism to justify a pro-choice position. Since we don't know when human life begins, the argument went, we cannot impose restrictions. (Why it is more restrictive to give life than to take it, I cannot figure out.)

You're not sure there is a person there, but you're not sure there isn't either, and it just so happens that there is a person there, and you kill him. You cannot plead ignorance. True, you didn't know there was a person there, but you didn't know there wasn't either, so your act was literally the height of irresponsibility. This is the act Roe allowed.

In Case 3, the fetus isn't a person, but you didn't know that. So abortion is just as irresponsible as it is in the previous case.

You cannot legally be charged with manslaughter, since no man was slaughtered, but you can and should be charged with criminal negligence.

Only in Case 4 is abortion a reasonable, permissible, and responsible choice. But note: What makes Case 4 permissible is not merely the fact that the fetus is not a person but also your knowledge that it is not, your overcoming of skepticism.

So skepticism counts not for abortion but against it.

13. Personhood status of the human zygote, embryo, fetus

"Personhood status of the human zygote, embryo, fetus" by John Janez Miklavcic and Paul Flaman (2017)

The study also suggests that the developmental potential of the human zygote genome is unique in some respects from that of the murine zygote genome. Furthermore, the uniqueness of the human from the murine zygote genome likely extends to other mammalian species and other human cell types in its totipotent and pluripotent properties for early human development. There are features of the zygotic DNA that are unique to the development of a human organism. While some believe that humans are distinct from other animals due to attributes of self-reflection, cognitive sapient awareness and advanced reasoning, there are also fundamental distinctions in the biology of humans that stem from initial development at the one-cell stage. One could thus propose that certain features appearing in embryogenesis and fetal progression that are uniquely human (i.e., cognitive sapient awareness) are uniquely reliant on human zygote DNA (and its division and subsequent development). This argues strongly that the human being at the one-cell stage already possesses the status for personhood.

The appearance and development of organs cannot be a criterion for personhood since the continued differentiation of tissue in the adult human means that there is a risk of having personhood status revoked from an individual if and when an organ may take on the appearance (and function) of another organ (see Capacities section for further discussion). Although, due to the constant de- and re-differentiation of tissues, who can say which features or at which time a human being actually becomes a human person? Human biology is not static, and humans are in a continual state of organ and tissue turnover. Proposing that personhood relies on achieving certain biologic milestones would mean that personhood status too would not be static and would be a “moving target.” It would not serve to have personhood as a concept loosely bound to philosophical arguments based on arbitrary criteria whereby a human can cyclically gain and lose personhood repeatedly.

Given the genetic component of intelligence, it stands that a combination of numerous genes is expressed to produce the intelligence phenotype. It is likely that many of the genes that contribute to intelligence have yet to be discovered. Shi and Wu describe the expression of genes at several stages in the pre-implantation embryo: fertilization, cleavage, morula, and blastocyst (Shi and Wu 2009). Genes are not expressed solely after birth; genes including those related to intelligence are expressed in parental gametes, at the single-cell zygote stage, and throughout all prenatal stages. Intelligence then is a capacity that is developing and present in an individual even before birth and potentially as early as fertilization. Thus, the intelligence criterion does not preclude personhood status before birth, at fertilization, or at an earlier stage of development.

In the case of the prenatal and postnatal human being, change is only in regard to the continuum of development. This notion is supported by George and Tollefsen (George and Tollefsen 2008) in stating that “the difference … is merely a difference between stages along a continuum” (119). As personhood is an ontological concept, then exhibiting actual characteristics is inherent in the “potential” being. The ontological person is not a sum of its parts, so exhibiting qualities of an actualized person in the “potential” state qualifies a being as a human person. In the case of an “embryonic human [being] and that same human [being] later in life … there is only a difference of degree” and “the changes from embryo to fetus to infant to adolescent … are merely changes in degree of natural development of the entity” (George and Tollefsen 2008, 120, 123) that constitute the ontological person.

There is risk in allowing exercisable capacities to define personhood, as doing so may confer more or less moral status to some persons over others. For example, if self-consciousness was deemed an essential characteristic for personhood, it can be said that some persons have more self-consciousness than others and thus have more moral status than others (Lee and George 2005, 13–26). In this example it can easily be seen how bestowing personhood on the basis of capacities necessarily conflicts with the right to equality among people as some persons develop more or greater capacity than other persons and would thus have a higher moral status than others. Extending the argument for personhood on the basis of any other capacity is subject to the same rebuttal. It follows then that all humans are deserving of personhood irrespective of the degree of development of capacities.

Proponents for personhood on the basis of capacities (i.e., McMahan and self-consciousness) may also argue that personhood can be revoked upon the loss of capacities. We argue, however, that even if there was a capacity that was deemed necessary for personhood and this capacity was lost, revoking personhood would be erroneous since capacities can often be restored. Consider that Jones describes the “brains of human beings [as] far from fixed” in relaying the concept of plasticity of brains (Jones 2004, 22–31). In the case of neurodegenerative cell death in Parkinson’s disease (Gaillard and Jaber 2011, 124–33), neurological restructuring of the brain for new synaptic connections potentially allows some functionality to be restored. The brain is able to create new connections to restore abilities. For example, if the capacity for speech is hindered or lost, it is possible that the brain can restore some or all of the ability for speech by creating or restructuring neural networks. The range of plasticity for which the brain is capable of restoring capacities (and which specific capacities) which have been lost is unknown. Thus, defining personhood by capacities encounters an ethical incongruency in clinical decision making and associated healthcare provision. Revoking personhood upon loss of capacities, when the capacities may be restored would be erroneous and, thus, defining human personhood using any criteria for capacities is flawed.

14. Construction vs. Development

"Construction vs. Development: Polarizing Models of Human Gestation" by Richard Stith (2014)

The humanity of a developing embryo—and not just its humanity in general (or essential humanity) but also its particular humanity (sex, race, likely height, even special talents, etc.)—seems to them present from conception rather than something to be added on from the outside in the course of gestation. For constructionists, the embryo is only a first step toward making a human being; for their opponents, the embryo is a human being taking his or her first developmental step.

In brief: a living organism defines itself independently of our definitions.

The humanity of the embryo, however, is always objectively present and active: the embryo is stamped from conception with the design of a human being, and that design is not just some sort of passive blueprint. It is a directing power gradually revealing its nature. Though (like the block) the embryo can linguistically be said to have a hidden potential, its active inner design already gives the embryo a species identity and an individual identity

an embryo cannot be fully described (certainly not as “rocklike” or “wormlike”) without disclosing its active inner potency, perhaps someday including (as we learn more) its particular individual character (race, deep sexual tendencies, and more). To call its future merely “potential” is thus misleading at best, in that the word can refer ambivalently either to a passive potential or to an active potential.

An “in-divid-ual,” a being unified and indivisible, cannot be composed of unrelated parts that some outside force has simply pushed together into a certain shape and then abandoned.

she will not envision the unborn fetus ever to be truly alive. Even if it finally fulfills her subjective criteria for counting as a living human being, the fact that it appears to be merely constructed means that it cannot be fully appreciated as a living human being, for its form will not seem to sustain itself. Put another way, no mere construction can, at any stage, be as fully alive as a developing being is from the first moment of its active development, for only the latter contains and gradually manifests its own form.

If the latter are constructionists, and construction alone cannot generate life, then their lack of passionate opposition to late-term abortion makes sense. Yes, the fetus now meets their definition of a human being, but it still does not seem to them really alive because they still define it rather than it defining itself.

Once a concession has been made to the concept of manufacture and to an arbitrary point at which development has proceeded “far enough” along the assembly line to generate a human being, the precise positioning of this point becomes purely a matter of preference, convenience, and the power to enforce one’s view.

The capacity to be a friend is a universal trait of human beings and yet also a personalizing one.

every friend is a unique individual. To say that an embryo could be a friend is thus to envision it as a human individual even though nothing individual is yet known about him or her.

15. Beyond the Abortion Wars

"Beyond the Abortion Wars" by Charles Camosy (2015)

a human fetus or an infant, if she or he is allowed simply to develop and fulfill the potential inside of her/him, will do all of these things. This potential, I would argue, is why both prenatal children and newborn infants are persons.

The problem, rather than actual disagreement, largely comes from confusion over the meaning of the word "potential."

The first understanding is something like what we mean by "probability," or "chance." In this view, a being has the potential to become X if that being has a percentage chance greater than zero of becoming X. But the second understanding refers to potential of a different kind: what already exists inside a being as the kind of thing that it already is.

she is speaking of the potential that already exists inside of you. It is part of who you are as a human person. It is potential based on the nature of the kind of thing that you already are.

It ceases being a tree and becomes a new kind of thing. The fancy phrase I like to use for this process is a "nature-changing event."

It just needs energy and the right environment to become the kind of thing it already is. No "nature-changing event" is necessary.

This is not true of the human fetus or newborn infant. These entities are already human organisms, and thus they already have this potential inside them based on the kind of things that they already are. Based on their nature. No "nature-changing event" is necessary. They only require energy and the right environment to express their potential to become the kind of thing they already are.

Indeed, we already acknowledge this kind of potential when we say that a prenatal child or newborn has a "disease" or "injury." Something accidental to her nature is frustrating her ability to express the potential that exists inside of her. If we find a way to heal the disease or injury, we don't consider this to be anything like a nature-changing event. We say that the potential that always existed inside her was finally able to be fully expressed. A diseased or injured person, when healed, is finally able to fully express who he already was the whole time.

consider a severely mentally disabled human being who has the cognitive and mental capacities similar to those of a high-functioning dog. Why should that human being be treated in a different way than the dog is…?

16. Gaining and Losing Personhood?

"Gaining and Losing Personhood?" by Alexander Pruss (2023)

1. Love (of the relevant sort) is appropriately only a relation towards a person. 2. Someone appropriately has an unconditional love for another human. 3. One can only appropriately have an unconditional R for an individual if the individual cannot cease to have the features that make R appropriate towards them. 4. Therefore, at least one human is such that they cannot cease to be a person. (1–3) 5. If at least one human is such that they cannot cease to be a person, then all humans are such that they cannot cease to be a person. 6. If all humans are such that they cannot cease to be a person, then it is impossible for a non-person to become a human person. 7. All humans are such that they cannot cease to be a person. (4,5) 8. It is impossible for a non-person to become a human person. (6,7) 9. Any normal human fetus can become a human person. 10. Therefore, any normal human fetus is a person. (8,9)

17. Embryos, Four-Dimensionalism, and Moral Status

"Embryos, Four-Dimensionalism, and Moral Status" by David Hershenov (2023)

The causal relationship between the stages of entities that belong to a natural kind will serve to distinguish the embryonic human animal and person from other Four-Dimensional objects that likewise are mindless at one time but later think.

Our intuitions that we would survive certain hypothetical changes as indicated by what appears to be prudential concern for the resulting individual can’t be accounted for in terms of the persistence of a capacity for self-conscious reflection or ties of psychological connections and continuity. My contention is that only an appeal to a criterion that identifies us with a future thinker in virtue of sharing the same biological life can make sense of such responses.

Four-Dimensionalism can be defined as the view that “Necessarily, each spatial-temporal object has a temporal part at every moment of its existence”

An entity is said to perdure if it persists in virtue of having temporal parts.

Three-Dimensionalism is a view that denies that we have temporal parts, are extended in time, and persist by perduring. Rather, we are said to persist by enduring, being wholly present at each time that we exist.

the mindless embryonic stages are the same kind of stages of the latter thinking person – i.e., they are all animal stages. There are mindless animal stages linked by life processes to thinking animal stages. They are all living stages of an animal. Their diachronic (as well as synchronic) unity is due to their parts being caught up in the same life processes. They are stages of the same token of a natural kind, not parts of two things of distinct kinds cobbled together in virtue of the principle of unrestricted composition

So the idea is that there’s a principled distinction between things that have thinking parts at one time in their existence but not at another. The mindless animal stages that are part of a later thinking thing are stages of one and the same animal. The later thinking stages are also animal stages united by life processes.

I suspect only the human animal will have its mindless and thinking stages bound by the same unity relation. And the reason there is no animal composed of you up to this moment and another reader after this moment is that there is not the appropriate immanent causation characteristic of life processes, the earlier stages of a life causing the successive stages of the same life. Likewise for the composite of the scattered gametes and the reader that resulted from their fusion. There are three lives involved. The same life does not link them diachronically or synchronically.

So we can grant that mindless human animals are persons without having to bestow that title on every object which has mindless stages preceding its thinking ones.

Olson cautions that trying to determine what is directly involved in the production of thought is as hopeless as trying to determine which of the many workers, suppliers, managers, tools and materials is directly involved with the factory production of a knife, or which parts of the body are directly involved with walking. He insists that the problem is not even one of vagueness – it is not that we have a clear application and then boundary cases. Instead, the fault lies in the notion of directly involved being unprincipled.

The animal needs to be alive to think. The fact that the event of someone’s biological life could configure less material than it does is irrelevant. While it is true that one’s animal can become smaller, that does not mean that the life processes which make thought possible were not earlier an event of a larger substance. Since one’s thoughts depend upon the contribution of such processes, wherever they are located, so is the thinker of those thoughts to be found. And that life is dispersed throughout the body.

Damasio’s acceptance of “the idea that the mind derives from the entire organism as an ensemble” (1994, p. 225) leads him to reject the assumptions underlying one of philosophy’s most famous thought experiments - the brain in the vat. He claims the disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrients, without perfect duplication of the inputs and stimuli outputs, might not even be able to think.

We are persons because of our capacity for self-consciousness, but that capacity is not actualized during all of our stages.

So to then insist that the thoughts are ours as long as some part of the brain produces them is unwarranted. The boundaries of the brain have been rather arbitrarily drawn by the authors of anatomy texts rather than determined by a unified function. The brain does many things, only some which involve the fore-mentioned neurological processing of pain and pleasure sensations. Since such sentient activities are not what unifies all the parts of the brain, there are not grounds for claiming we persist as long as somewhere in that brain are the vehicles of such sensations.

once readers see that thinkers are best individuated by life processes, it becomes arbitrary to claim only part of the animal is a person.

our prudential intuitions, our belief that we are persons if any entities are, and the maximality principle all serve to indicate that the human animal is the least arbitrary candidate for the persistence of the person in the above cases.

mindless animals have interests: they have an interest in food and survival and flourishing of a sort. We can speak of things going well for mindless animals, their functioning as they should. They have a good. As creatures with a good, a later mental life can earlier be in their interest. That mental life will serve the animal’s interests or telos. Just as other organ systems served to keep the organism alive and flourishing, so will its later cognitive systems.

it still makes sense to speak of a telos due to an innate development pattern (or design) and an interest in that telos of mindless human animals.

neither an individual sperm or egg, nor the scattered pair of gametes whose chromosomes have yet to fuse, possess a genetic nature that determines the particular capacities whose actualization can make a life good.

What the fetus is finally, is something that makes itself self-aware: that good is the fetus’s good – this is its nature. Anything benefits from the good which it is its nature to make for itself. I submit that we have a prima facie duty to all creatures not to deprive them of the conscious goods which it is their nature to realize

18. An Alternative to the Rational Substance

"An Alternative to the Rational Substance Pro-life View" by David Hershenov (2023)

My critique of the Rational Substance View is that it’s bad biology and questionable metaphysics, as rational capacities aren’t essential and their loss or gain doesn’t constitute substantial change.

I’ll contend that rational development is a contingent rather than essential trait.

I’ll instead recommend to pro-lifers the Healthy Development Account in which fetuses are contingently rational and the morally relevant potential is that of healthy development.

mindless human beings have interests in healthy development, the satisfaction of which results in sophisticated, rational, reflective mental lives capable of unrivalled levels of well-being. This will bestow upon them great moral status.

The reductios of potentiality plaguing many other pro-life approaches are circumvented by the Healthy Development Account on the grounds that they all involve creatures that aren’t unhealthy if they don’t become persons.

If an animal lacks a root or radical capacity for rationality, then it is not a human being. It could have human parents but not be human because it is lacking a rational nature.

George and Tollefsen (2011) hypothesize that some miscarried fetuses were so chromosomally deficient that they were not human.

The capacity is untapped. But it is part of our nature. All human beings, including our embryos, have it.

The Rational Substance Pro-Life View will maintain that fetuses have great moral status because of their ability to later actualize their root capacity for rationality.

the active or intrinsic potential of the human fetus to develop its mental capacities is morally significant.

development is a matter of degree, not kind.

it is not the capacity that matters but being a member of the kind. And that kind membership doesn’t come in degrees. We are all human. We are not human to different extent.

If a living being ceases to exist, then it has died as death involves ceasing to instantiate life processes

A non-rejected organ shouldn’t destroy the recipient.

the reductios of potential believed to befall accounts that bestow elevated moral status on mindless and minimally minded humans in virtue of the mental capacities they will later manifest after considerable development can be avoided without an appeal to substantial change

"An entity has moral status if and only if it or its interests morally matter to some degree for the entity’s own sake, such that it can be wronged"

I’m dubious of claims that newborns and the unborn lack the interests required for the moral standing that warrants protecting their lives. Those maintaining such a position typically fail to recognize that something can be in an individual’s interest even if that individual doesn’t take an interest in it.

What is in the interests of individuals need not be conscious or even accessible to their consciousness. It is in the unborn and newborn’s interest to survive even though they do not consciously desire to live on into the future—nor could they given their lack of the requisite conceptual apparatus.

My contention is that all living things have an interest in being healthy, which involves not just health at the moment but healthy development, the two being intertwined. The living aren’t healthy at any time that their development is stymied, and they then cease to make preparations for their growth and maintenance. And so every human potential person, even those who are too immature to have ever been conscious or are no longer conscious due to pathology, necessarily have a prima facie interest to live and develop in a healthy fashion. Their well-being when mindless just consists in their healthy functioning. And their healthy development will lay the foundation for their fuller flourishing when conscious.

Non-living mindless entities cannot maintain or undergo changes in their well-being and thus don’t have an intrinsic welfare.

Mindless living beings, on the other hand, can undergo fluctuations in their well-being as their health improves or worsens. As living teleological systems, they monitor themselves and their environments, and they respond and make internally driven adjustments to acquire and maintain health. In virtue of such results, we can state whether their lives are going well or not, whether they are flourishing or failing.

Understanding well-being in relation to flourishing that will provide continuity between the minded and mindless.

“Flourishing consists in the growth and development of the capacities of a living being.” At times later in that development, the flourishing of human beings will involve the maturation and exercise of mental capacities. But earlier, when mindless, they could be flourishing in the appropriate way for their stage of development.

If the mindless do have interests, I don’t see what else other than health could be the basis of the interests and well-being of the non-conscious. The manner in which non-conscious organisms operate can’t be described as directed at anything else but survival and reproduction.

the degree of the harm of an entity’s death depends, at least in part, the value and extent of the well-being that it loses out on

Our great moral status and interest in maintaining it is why we are protected by a right to life

While our moral status depends upon our being the kind of being capable of such great well-being when healthy, it doesn’t depend upon our always being able to reach such levels of well-being.

late in life when we have very little time left because of a fatal pathology and thus little well-being left to obtain, our moral status doesn’t diminish and our right to life doesn’t vanish or decrease in stringency.

An organism will be healthy when its parts are functioning properly. They are functioning properly when they make the appropriate contribution for members of that reference class of males and females of certain ages to the goals of survival and reproduction

Health doesn’t depend upon our values, so an interest in health won’t mean the pursuit of outcomes that depend upon and fluctuate with variations in societal values.

Living beings thrive when they are healthy. When they are mindless, health is all there is to their well-being. Health is good for the mindless and the good is their interest.

given their potential to obtain great levels of well-being when they develop in a healthy manner, that means they’ll be greatly harmed if deprived of that valuable future.

if there is an unhealthy, cognitively impaired human fetus or infant and a healthy non-human animal with comparable manifested mental abilities (which includes the equal absence of mental life), they are not equally harmed by never becoming persons, because it isn’t unhealthy for the non-human to be so mentally limited. Only human beings are unhealthy when they fail to develop into persons or cease to remain persons.

when mindless or minimally minded, it is only human beings that have interests in developing the rational mind of a person.

Present health can’t be coherently described without understanding future healthy development.

The future good must be in the mindless being’s interest when it is mindless. This distinguishes the Healthy Development Account of potential from other accounts that just ascribe moral significance on the basis of future property acquisitions or capacity actualizations or later interests.

The mindless presently have an interest in a healthy life.

it is the case that a healthy life is good for them now and their interest in health is an interest in ongoing health that includes their future healthy development. The basis for their future health is their present healthy development as structures and properties are prepared and sustained for their role in future healthy mental functioning.

The only basis that I can see for ascribing interests to the mindless is to appeal to the good realized by their healthy development for entities of their kind.

if the mindless don’t have any level of well-being, then we can’t explain why it is a harm to lapse into a coma and why the harm occurs when one is in the coma. Nor can we make sense of why it would be beneficial for someone to come out of coma or, better yet, be in their interest to become conscious for the first time.

Consciousness makes possible pain, not harm. Entities can be harmed by not becoming conscious. Individuals who are supposed to be conscious, but aren’t, can be harmed to degrees not reached by living creatures not designed to develop consciousness.

The benefit of acquiring a mind for the first time can’t be explained without according wellbeing to the mindless, while some philosophers might try to explain the harm of losing one’s mind without acknowledging well-being in the mindless.

Given that it is surely in their interest not to so suffer, we can conclude that they can have interests that they can’t conceptualize.

possession of that interest in pain avoidance doesn’t require the onset of consciousness, but merely the potential to suffer pain in the future.

If readers maintain well-being depends upon conscious interests, then a minded being only has interests of which she is aware or could immediately access.

if consciousness of the interest in health isn’t required for the neonate to possess it, then that interest should exist earlier in the fetus before there is any consciousness at all.

a scattered object is not alive and so, according to the Healthy Development Account, doesn’t have interests. Ergo, the potential of any cells other than the zygote to become a person is morally irrelevant.

The young human being’s interests in realizing that potential health, however improbable or passive, bestows upon it considerable moral status and distinguishes it from all other kinds of potential rational persons.

19. Personhood: An essential characteristic

"Personhood: An essential characteristic of the human species" by Frederick White (2013)

human social order recognizes the personhood of human beings within two competing constructs—an existential construct that personhood is a state of being inherent and essential to the human species, and a relational construct that personhood is a conditional state of value defined by society.

This essay provides an overview analysis of the existential and relational constructs of personhood in the interpersonal context and finds a broad range of results that are manifestly superior under existential theory.

Such empiricism supports a normative conclusion that the good rests in the existential construction of human personhood, and gives credence to a claim of truth that personhood is an essential characteristic of the human species and is not a conditional state dependent upon circumstance, perception, cognition, or societal dictum.

The secular mind has also found in humanity that which extends beyond the physical.

The construct of a Deity allowed man to transform those behaviors into customs extending beyond the confines of a given social context, thus becoming ‘habitual convictions controlled by reason’

The latter, moral, nature of man Darwin admitted as “a more interesting problem.”

noted, Plato found intelligence as “the most divine thing in man, the most essentially human because [it is] the only part of himself which he does not share with the animal kingdom….”

However, Aristotle held the nous as distinctive to man, being “the power of responding to universals and meanings, the power of acting with deliberation, with conscious forethought, or acting rationally”

“the human race exists by means of art also and the powers of reasoning”. Human beings, unlike even the most highly developed animals, have the capacity to relate to God, to understand a moral code, and to choose to live by it.

Even Darwin in later years felt that the existence of the world as a function of natural processes was not incompatible with the transcendental,

if animals have some form of rational thought, then a conception of human exceptionalism and of human personhood based in solely in rationality would need re-examination.

While “the body is necessary for the action of the intellect,” he also held it as true that “the intellectual principle which we call the mind or the intellect has an operation per se apart from the body.”

For Plato it was clear that the essence of a human being transcends its physical substrate,

Echoing Kant (and Darwin), they argue that, “No neuroscientific discoveries can solve any of the conceptual problems that are the proper province of philosophy, any more than the empirical discoveries of physicists can prove mathematical theorems”

any deterministic assault of biologic reductionism upon the assertion that personhood is intrinsic to human life, or upon the doctrine of the imago Dei, is simply inconclusive.

“will again by normal processes give rise to a conscious life, or can be caused to give rise to a conscious life….”

Among the conditions he applies to personhood are rationality, consciousness, the attitude or stance taken by society, capacity for reciprocity, capability for verbal communication, and a self consciousness

“if the moral status-conferring attribute varies in degrees,” then “it will follow that some humans will possess the attribute in question in a higher degree than other humans, with the result that not all humans will be equal in fundamental moral worth, that is, dignity”

Conditional personhood is flawed in its argument that a lesser expression alters the very state of personhood.

If personhood can end before life ends, then human nature becomes a fragile expression of self-awareness, and is not a robust and inalienable foundation of human rights and culture.

Tertullian held that human personhood was not removed in impending death but rather limited in its fullest expression.

This analysis begins with two fundamental assertions: that personhood is a distinctly human state within the natural order, intrinsic to human life, and independent of the status of the human being—an assertion of existential personhood—and the antithetical position that personhood is a conditional state dependent upon circumstance, perception, cognition, or societal dictum—an assertion of relational personhood.

In existential thought, characteristics of human personhood are innate and are to be discovered. For relational theorists, the characteristics of human personhood are to be defined by the society.

‘“society” and “individuals” do not denote separable phenomena, but are simply collective and distributive aspects of the same thing’

“the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble (aggregate) of social relations.

Here, an ostensibly democratic society turns to its fundamental conception of persons as the explicit basis for political subjugation of individuals.

the objective to “turn the Jews into ‘socially dead’ beings…and, once they were, to treat them as such.”

This empirical analysis, at least in the context of the practical rationality of natural law theory, finds manifestly superior results associated with the application of an existential construct of personhood, and supports the conclusion that the good rests in the existential assertion that personhood is not a creation of society

the recognition that inalienable rights of humans endow due to equality in creation is further support to the conclusion that the good rests in the existential construct of personhood.

Such a relational construction appropriates sweeping powers to the State and sets the stage for arbitrary allocation of life sustaining resources.

Such a construction is inherently dangerous in a time of plenty, and could easily become malevolent in times of scarcity

A result of this ethic is that persons of advantage or authority may take actions toward vulnerable persons which do not depend upon the consent of those individuals and may not reflect their best interests.

Absent a commitment to an existential personhood of humanity, the right of “every person” to be free of discrimination is quite distinct from a right protecting all human beings.

Here all persons hold equality in rights to care and dignity, forming a beneficent foundation for determination of best interests.

Such empiricism supports the normative conclusion that the good rests in the existential construction of human personhood, and gives credence to a claim of truth that personhood is an essential characteristic of the human species, and is not a conditional state dependent upon circumstance, perception, cognition, or societal dictum.

The authors note that contemporary cognitive neuroscience has “in effect replaced the Cartesian dualism of mind and body with an analogous dualism of brain and body”

“there is no hope for any form of reduction that will allow one to derive laws governing phenomena at the higher level of psychology from the laws governing phenomena at the neural level”

While explicitly rejecting personhood as intrinsic to humanity, Dennett does seem to accept the converse, finding humanity “as the deciding mark of personhood”

20. Miscellaneous

we care for pain and distress that animals may suffer and try to diminish it, but not because animals have rights, but because our human nature compels us to do so. Source

Feminist philosophers have also challenged the individualism that is central in the arguments for the moral status of animals. Rather than identifying intrinsic or innate properties that non-humans share with humans, some feminists have argued instead that we ought to understand moral status in relational terms given that moral recognition is invariably a social practice. As Elizabeth Anderson has written:

Moral considerability is not an intrinsic property of any creature, nor is it supervenient on only its intrinsic properties, such as its capacities. It depends, deeply, on the kind of relations they can have with us. "Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life" by Elizabeth Anderson (2005)

Social Dominance Orientation: the ideological belief that inequality can be justified and that weaker groups should be dominated by stronger groups (Dhont, et al., 2016)

Ultimately, we must treat animals right not because of what they are, but because of who we are. Source

That legitimacy threatens universal human rights, which are grounded in the principle that all humans are equal simply because we are human. If we reject that principle and argue that our rights are based on something other than our shared human nature—that it is a creature's apparent rationality or self-awareness, for instance, that entitles it to rights—we can wind up elevating the rights of chimps and pigs above those of profoundly disabled or demented humans. Indeed, some animal-rights advocates have done just that.

Animals do not have rights or the moral responsibilities that accompany rights… and that's why we ponder our moral obligations to animals—who are, after all, the ultimate speciesists—even though animals do not do the same for us. We do so because we are human, endowed with exceptional dignity that deserves singular defense. Source

I believe we cannot live together (or even alone) without privileging our own existence. We don’t have to see ourselves as the divinely appointed stewards of creation to recognise that we bear responsibility for restoring the magnificent living systems we have harmed. And we don’t have to deny our bias towards ourselves to defend the lives of other beings. Source

some criterion has to be found which is applicable in practice and which allows us to determine whether an entity belongs to the class of moral subjects or not. Here an interdisciplinary approach is necessary that combines the above moral considerations concerning the quality characterizing a moral subject with the state-of-the-art knowledge from the natural sciences about when an entity actually possesses this quality. Source

Membership in a certain species can be suggested as a a) necessary, b) necessary and sufficient or c) sufficient condition for being morally considerable. The according claims would be that a) only (but possibly not all) members of the favored species are to be considered, b) all and only species members or c) all (but not necessarily only) species members ought to be taken into account. Source

What Solinger's analysis suggests is that, ironically, while the pro-choice camp contends that the pro-life position diminishes the rights of women in favor of "fetal" rights; the pro-choice position actually does not ascribe inherent rights to women either. Rather, women are viewed as having reproductive choices if they can afford them or if they are deemed legitimate choice-makers. Source

human beings are endowed with a certain intrinsic dignity that cannot, indeed, ought not, be degraded by cost-benefit analysis nor affirmed existentially by another's choice… Respecting the non market norms and values of these most intimate human relationships… provides the surest defense against a complete commercialization of all of human life… "The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision" by Erika Bachiochi (2021)

Using legality as your way to define personhood, rather than humanity, will always exclude certain humans. Which is exactly what has been done throughout history as an excuse to discrimate, torture, and kill.

In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity. –Kant

#fetal personhood #pin

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