Debate

I really need to come up with catchy/significant titels for these posts. Anyway, here's my response.

SLE vs. QLE is good enough shorthand. You asked what criteria I would suggest we use to determine “personhood”. For purposes of this discussion and to avoid this blowing up into a debate that involves euthanasia (though that could certainly be grist for future mills here) I would say that at the point the fetus becomes viable outside the womb is the point at which it has the rights of a person. Before then, which as best I can tell given current levels of technology is twenty-two to twenty-three weeks, I still believe that it is a person, but it becomes more difficult for me to tell someone that they are committing an immoral act in having an abortion. When a mother loses her baby naturally at a very early stage I would perfectly understand them mourning the loss. So I do believe that conception is the point at which life begins, but while they are completely dependent on the womb environment the rights of the mother take precedent. During that time it is as much a part of her body as any other. Once it is capable of independence, it should be granted that possibility.

When I talk about us being created in the image and likeness of God, I don’t necessarily mean that the more like God one is the more of a person they are. Considering I believe that God is so much more, infinitely more than we are, we can’t approach what God is. As such I don’t think that an adult is more like God than a child or if they are then it’s a matter of an infinitesimal difference. It comes back to that matter of potential, I suppose. In regards to a brain-dead individual, I would say that they are not like God of course since they don’t even have the potential to reason, emote, etc. So for me at least, one is either a person or one is not, there are no degrees per se.

So speaking of that let’s talk a little about potential. You talk about the likelihood for that argument to grant us fewer rights. After all, you say, you have the potential to be a corpse. I’ve often heard this brought up and I’d say that’s not a potential, that’s a certainty. In our culture even corpses have rights, but no one argues that you should have the same rights as a corpse, because a corpse is not a person. No one argues that they are, so this strikes me as a bit of a red herring. Now if the corpse had potential to become a person I could see an argument for giving corpses the same rights as a person, but not the other way ‘round. In my mind a fetus is a person, so the potential is not the possibility that they will become a person. It’s not a serious state change (dead to alive), but the idea that given time they will come to be someone just like you or I. It’s a matter of degrees. Even if that baby will come out with Down’s Syndrome, that doesn’t mean that they lose the chance to experience existence as best they can. When you say a” blastocyst has much lower of a chance of realizing its potential personhood”, I assume that you’re talking about statistical chances. For me that doesn’t really enter into the equation. I always try to assume what the best case scenario would be when I make a moral decision. If there is any chance that the baby can come to full development, then it should be allowed to. Of course things are never that simple and if, as in your examples of woman A and woman B, there is near certainty that it would cause a great deal of harm for a woman to carry to term, I think it would be morally permissible for her to abort so long as she did it early on. Of course, in my opinion it would be better for her to take every possible precaution not to get pregnant including, but not limited to sterilization.

I’d be interested in hearing more from you concerning the idea of suffering. What does it mean to suffer? Is it strictly speaking mental? If I were to assault someone who was unable to feel the pain physically, but was still mentally acute or vice versa is this different morally from assaulting someone who had all of their faculties? And while the mother can certainly determine her level of suffering, how certain can she be of what level her child is capable of? Should she always assume that her level would outweigh that of her child’s? I can’t help but think that this sort of reasoning could extend beyond the point of a child being born. If a two year old is causing their mother to suffer, should the mother be allowed to take extreme action to end it? And then you need to examine the mother’s ability to ascertain their own level of suffering. A fourteen year old doesn’t usually possess the tools necessary to make that assessment. Given that, would it be moral for a teenage mother to abort? So this adds another question to our discussion. It’s not just, at what point is it no longer moral to abort given the baby’s level of development, but also at what point does a mother lose or gain the ability to make that decision?

If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that personhood, in practice, is a binary variable; either one is a person or one is not. You deny meaningful degrees of personhood because your basis of comparison, God, is infinite. Since God has so much more personhood than anyone else, the minor difference in personhood between two humans is negligible.

But if we follow this reasoning a little further, I think we will reach a conclusion unacceptable to both of us. We would be forced to equate our personhood to that of a dog, for instance. After all, when we consider the difference between our personhood and a dog’s, it is nothing in comparison with God’s infinite personhood. Denying degrees of personhood between humans based on comparison with infinite personhood also denies degrees of personhood between species. A proponent of SLE would be forced to conclude that humans are not deserving of any special moral consideration based on our likeness to God. I assume that you do not agree with this conclusion thus you must accept that the premise is faulty. Therefore meaningful degrees of personhood (or God-likeness, for the religiously inclined) exist between some humans.

You do have a valid point in your rebuttal to my ‘potential corpse’ reasoning. The state-change from living to dead is (often) such a drastic difference that moral comparisons may not be applicable. Still, the argument for potential can be used to justify the restriction of rights. All of us have the potential to become senile, yet no one claims that we should have the same rights of the mentally incompetent. Again, I can see potential playing some role in moral considerations, I just don’t know exactly what it is and am hoping you can shed some light on this.

This leads me to another train of thought. I’m confident that you would agree that one who is senile is still created in the image and likeness of God (a person), yet we don’t grant them the rights of a mentally capable adult; the power of attorney, for instance. Nor do we grant equal rights to children based on their potential to become adults. If not degrees of personhood, what criteria are you using to justify the differing moral rights?

You legitimately ask me to define my use of the term ‘suffering’. Since my QLE is rooted on this concept, I should have carefully defined it at the outset. Suffering occurs when any entity cannot fulfill any of its interests. Anything that lives has an interest in not dying, anything that can feel pain has an interest in not being in pain, anything that is hungry has an interest in feeding, etc. An otherwise normal person who cannot feel pain has only one less interest than the rest of us, that individual doesn’t have an interest in avoiding pain. He/She will still have an interest in avoiding injury, scars, bruises, wasted time, the emotional impacts of being a victim, and so forth. Thus assaulting this individual would only be marginally less immoral than anyone else.

Another question you asked is how a woman can determine the level of suffering her fetus is capable of. Well, we need to take into account the varying interests at play here. As a living thing, a fetus has an interest in living and, after a certain amount of development, a fetus has a central nervous system and has an interest not experiencing pain, but that seems to be the extent of it. I know of no evidence of any other interests of a human fetus. An adult woman, by way of contrast, has both of these interest plus many more, such as an interest in avoiding the pain, expense, inconvenience, emotional hardships, and health risks of childbirth. Her multitude of interests trumps those of the fetus.

Using this version of the QLE, it is easy to see why a woman’s prerogative does not extend to after the birth of the child, at least not in our modern society. The main suffering a postpartum mother would experience result from the on-going care of the infant. Infanticide is not justifiable because our society provides an alternative that does not infringe upon the infant’s interest in survival and does not require the mother to assume additional suffering; adoption or foster care. There is no question that these options are morally superior to infanticide since they reduce the suffering experienced by the infant without significantly increasing suffering for any other person. For this reason, post-birth is the rational point to grant a human a moral right to life.