“Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other”- Malcolm Muggeridge
A few days ago I blogged about the central philosophical differences in the abortion debate: the sanctity of life ethic vs the quality of life ethic. Today I want to touch on the dangers of the quality of life ethic (you should read the other blog first, so as to better understand this blog).
If you define personhood as human function (some have coined the term ‘functionalism’ to describe this quality of life philosophy), than you have moved from something scientific and easily verifiable (is this entity a human being?) to something subjective and unclear. For example, what is the dividing line that determines the pre-defined level of human functions that separates person from non-person, and more importantly, who decides? These questions are hard to answer.
Peter Kreeft, Professor Of Philosophy at Boston College, writes,
Thus the crucial issue is: Are there any human beings who are not persons? If so, killing them might be permissible, like killing warts. But who might these human non-persons be? Jews? Blacks? Slaves? Infidels? Counterrevolutionaries? Others have said so, and justified their genocide, lynching, slavery, jihad, or gulag. But pro-choicers never include these groups as non-persons.
This replacement in society is mirrored by the replacement in philosophy of the old “Sanctity of Life Ethic” by the new “Quality of Life Ethic.” In this new ethic, a human life is judged as valuable and worth living if and and only if the judgers decide that it performs at a certain level - e.g., a functional I.Q. of 60 or 40; or an ability to relate to other people (it would logically follow that a severely autistic person does not have enough “quality” in his life to deserve to live); or the prospect of a fairly normal, healthy and pain-free life (thus active euthanasia, or assisted suicide, is justified). If someone lacks the functional criteria of a “quality” life, he lacks personhood and the right to life.
The Functionalism that is the basis of the “Quality of Life Ethic” is morally reprehensible for at least three reasons. First, it is degrading, demeaning and destructive to human dignity; it treats persons like trained seals. Second, it is elitist; it discriminates against less perfect performers. Third, it takes advantage, it is power play, it is might over right rationalized.
Personhood is indeed unclear-for Functionalism. Such questions as the following are not clearly answerable: Which features count as proof of personhood? Why? How do we decide? Who decides? What gives them that right? And how much of each feature is necessary for personhood? And who decides that, and why? Also, all the performance-qualifications adduced for personhood are difficult to measure objectively and with certainty. To use the unclear, not universally accepted, hard-to-measure functionalist concept of personhood to decide the sharply controversial issue of who is a person and who may be killed is to try to clarify the obsure by the more obscure, obscuram per obscurius.
To say that some human beings are not persons is to say that only achievers, only successful functioners, only sufficiently intelligent performers, qualify as persons and have a right to life. And who is to say what “sufficient” is? The line can be drawn at will-the will of the stronger. Nature, reason, and justice are then replaced by artifice, prejudice, and power. When it is in the self-interest of certain people to kill certain other people, whether fetuses, or the dying, or enemies of the state, or Jews, or Armenians, or Cambodians, or heretics, or prophets, the killers will simply define their victims as non-persons by pointing out that they do not meet certain criteria. Who determines the criteria? Those in power, of course. Whenever personhood is defined functionally, the dividing line between persons and non-persons will be based on a decision by those in power, a decision of will. Such a decision, given the fallenness of human nature, will inevitably be based on self-interest. Where there is an interest in killing persons, they will be defined as non-persons.
The eventual are George Bernard Shaw’s utopia of the future in which each citizen would have to appear annually before a Central Planning Committee to justify the social utility of his or her (or its) existence, or else be painlessly “terminated.” That is the crotch of the Functionalist camel whose nose is already under our tent. The nose is abortion. The camel is all one piece. Let the nose in and the rest will follow. To keep the camel out you must hit it on the nose.
Once you have accepted the premise that not all human beings are persons, you have moved from the easily verifiable and scientific (are you a member of the homo sapien species?) to the highly opinionated and subjective.
History has shown that people have a natural tendency to want to oppress others, and the quality of human life philosophy makes it that much easier for them to do so (the fruits of this new philosophy are just now starting to blossom).
I will close with a quote from Alan Keyes, a pro-life African American, he writes,
See, why do people forget this? They speak this cold-blooded language to people like myself as if we’re too stupid to remember that the day before yesterday we were not considered actual persons. And that if today we deny the principle on which we stood in order to demand respect for our humanity, if we deny it to those human beings in the womb, it will be denied once again to us and to others. Because then it just becomes a matter of who you can get on your side to draw the line between humanity and nonhumanity, personhood and nonpersonhood, and then the majority can oppress and the powerful can abuse. And those who end up on the wrong side have nothing.
HP, I’m running out of steam in this discussion.
You argue from a central premise: that you know the definition of what a human being is. If you are correct, then everything you say follows logically from that premise.
But you’re wrong. You don’t know what a human being is.
What is your definition of human being than, Mitch.
Like I said in my previous response, it isn’t important whether or not my definition is right. If there was one group of people in the abortion debate that didn’t need to have a right definition, it would be the pro-lifers. Pro-choicers must have the right definition, since they are the ones fighting for the right to kill whatever it is. When you want something killed, you have the responsibility to prove it is not a human being.
This is how Beckwith, in his book on the subject responds,
So again, whether or not I have the right definition isn’t important, it is whether you have the right definition.
And as you try to find a definition, you will find out that whatever definition you give for excluding the zygote, or embryo, or fetus, will come back and bite you with regard to the infant. So your stuck, you either accept that the infant must not be a person, and allow abortion, or decide the infant is a person, and find abortion unjustified. The pro-choice people chose the former, the pro-life people chose the latter.
So you choose Mitch, or either give me a definition that includes newborn infants, but allows for abortion. I am telling you now, you can’t, I have debated this topic for many years now, and all the common ground I need is the belief that an infant is just as deserving of all its rights as an adult.
Oh yeah, before I forget. Thanks for the advice on the comments, it worked. I am now able to allow immediate posting of the comments, while prohibiting spam.
Thanks again!!!
I don’t have a definition. I have already told you that.
And, no, that doesn’t mean I’m ethically required to outlaw abortion because the zygote might be human. That’s erring on teh side of caution. However, there is no side of caution in this argument. Either way, harm is done. I choose to prevent the actual harm of banning abortion, rather than the theoretical harm of allowing it.
Let’s try an exercise here. I’m now going to argue that the sperm and ovum are human. They are the product of the sexual process. They contain human genes and chromosomes. If combined, they will naturally form into a human being. Therefore, birth control is murder, and male masturbation is murder.
Prove me wrong.
Hey Mitch, good stuff. I’ll answer you tomorrow, I have a final at UCSD and as soon as I’m done, ill answer.
Lets get right into it…
You write, I’m now going to argue that the sperm and ovum are human. They are the product of the sexual process. They contain human genes and chromosomes. If combined, they will naturally form into a human being. Therefore, birth control is murder, and male masturbation is murder.
Sperm and ovum are merely parts of individual genetic human beings. Like your dead tissue, or a hair off your body, they are simply parts of you. They are no more individual humans than your finger, or toe is.
On the other hand, at conception, when this sperm and ovum meet, something new is created. It is a misnomer to refer to this entity as a “fertilized ovum.” For both ovum and sperm, which are genetically each a part of its owner (mother and father, respectively), cease to exist at the moment of conception.
Something new is created that really is the result of humans sexual act, something that does not share the DNA of the ‘mother’, or the DNA of the ‘father’, but a unique DNA that has never been known before. From this point until death, no new genetic information is needed to make the unborn entity a unique individual human. Her (or his) genetic make-up is established at conception, determining her unique individual physical characteristics — gender, eye color, bone structure, hair color, skin color, susceptibility to certain diseases, etc. That is to say, at conception, the “genotype” — the inherited characteristics of a unique human being — is established and will remain in force for the entire life of this individual. Although sharing the same nature with all human beings, the unborn individual, like each one of us, is unlike any that has been conceived before and unlike any that will ever be conceived again. The only thing necessary for the growth and development of this human organism (as with the rest of us) is oxygen, food, and water, since this organism — like the newborn, the infant, and the adolescent — needs only to develop in accordance with her already-designed nature that is present at conception.
On the other hand, the sperm or the ovum, doesn’t posses the inherent ability to grow within it. Contrary to what you said above, sperm and ovum, no matter what you do to them, no matter what environment they are in, don’t have the power to progress to other human stages in life (infancy, adolescence, etc).
So you see, there really isn’t anything fundamentally different from the unborn entity than the infant, or the adolescent. Sure, they don’t look the same, however, a little reflection, will show that the concept of a ‘human form’ is a dynamic and not a static one. Each of us, during normal growth and development, exhibits a long succession of different outward forms. An early embryo, though not looking like a newborn, does look exactly like a human ought to look at this stage of his or her development. Thus, the appearance of an 80-year-old adult differs greatly from that of a newborn child, and yet we speak without hesitation of both as persons. In both cases, we have learned to recognize the physical appearances associated with those development stages as normal expressions of human personhood.
Once we recognize that human development is a process that does not cease at the time of birth, then to insist that the unborn at six weeks look like the newborn infant is no more reasonable than to expect the newborn to look like a teenager. If we acknowledge as ‘human’ a succession of outward forms after birth, there is no reason not to extend that courtesy to the unborn, since human life is a continuum from conception to natural death.
You’ve done nothing to prove your assertion that the zygote is human, you’ve simply elaborated and expanded on it. Your logic:
1. Abortion is wrong. Why? Because the zygote and fetus are human beings.
2. Why are they human beings? Because they possess a complete, unique genetic complement.
3. Why are entities with a complete, unique genetic complement human? Because left to nature, given only nutrition and water, they will develop into babies, children, adolesecents, and adults.
Well, of course, the zygote requires a womb to develop. And, frequently, they don’t, and we call those stillbirths (and, by the way, we don’t give stillbirths funerals—they’re generally treated like medica waste, and the parents, while traumatized, will not be as deeply scarred as they would if they’d lost an actual child.) And, of course, left to nature, given only food, water and shelter, most people wouldn’t live past 30, and the ones who did live would be savages.
Moreover, mix a sperm and an ovum together and they’ll follow the same course of action. And the fertilized egg is too just that—a fertilized egg. It’s not a separate entity, at the moment of conception it is the ovum with the combined genetic material of both the mother and father.
You’ve provided neither evidence, nor a chain of logic. You’ve simply asserted the same point in different ways.
I can make the assertion that an object will fall at the rate of accelaration of 32 feet per second per second, and, given a sufficiently accurate timepiece, I can prove that assertion. That’s proof.
I can make the assertion that the invasion of Iraq has been harmful for the war on terror, and can muster evidence to support my position. You can muster evidence to oppose it. That’s proof.
How can you, similarly, muster evidence to support the notion that the fertilized zygote is human?
Hello Mitch,
You write, You’ve done nothing to prove your assertion that the zygote is human, you’ve simply elaborated and expanded on it. Your logic
Actually, my ‘logic’ is different than what you described. The way I am going about proving that the fetus, embryo and zygote are human beings, is by starting with our common ground that the infant AND the adult are both human beings, and moving backwards. I am taking something agreed upon by both sides(that infants are human beings), and trying to show that there is nothing fundamentally different from an infant than a fetus, or embryo, or zygote.
They are not in themselves absolute proofs, but I am taking the short cut route to arrive at the same thing. The absolute proof of what a human being is, and why one is valued is much more entailed and cumbersome.
With that said, you write, Well, of course, the zygote requires a womb to develop. And, frequently, they don’t, and we call those stillbirths (and, by the way, we don’t give stillbirths funerals—they’re generally treated like medica waste, and the parents, while traumatized, will not be as deeply scarred as they would if they’d lost an actual child.) And, of course, left to nature, given only food, water and shelter, most people wouldn’t live past 30, and the ones who did live would be savages.
The number of stillborns or miscarriages is an invalid argument, for it does not logically follow from the number of unborn entities who die that these entities are not by nature fully human. To cite an example, it does not follow from the fact that underdeveloped countries have a high infant mortality rate that their babies are less human than those born in countries with a low infant mortality rate.
Quoting a Pro-lifers statements in a Fox News Debate with a pro-choicer
“Comparing death by[abortion] to a miscarriage is like saying the atrocity of cold-blooded murder is the same as a tragic but accidental death.”
Whether or not parents feel emotional pain over miscarriages or stillborns, as a standard for moral action, rests on a very unstable foundation. Feeling is notoriously an unsure guide to the humanity of others. Many groups of humans have had difficulty in feeling that persons of another tongue, color, religion, sex, are as human as they. One usually feels a greater sense of loss at the sudden death of a healthy parent than one feels for the hundreds who die daily of starvation in underdeveloped countries. Does this mean that the latter are less human than one’s parent? Certainly not.
You also write, Moreover, mix a sperm and an ovum together and they’ll follow the same course of action. And the fertilized egg is too just that—a fertilized egg. It’s not a separate entity, at the moment of conception it is the ovum with the combined genetic material of both the mother and father.
Here, let me try to explain this a different way. Lets say we are discussing what is or is not lemonade. Lets say that the type of lemonade we are talking about is only a combination of lemons and water.
With that said, individual lemons, or individual water, is not lemonade. But the moment the two touch, the moment those two things are brought together, the chemical reaction between the two changes. Together you have lemonade, individually you have lemons and water.
That is what I am trying to get across here. Individually you have sperm and ovum. But once the two join, scientifically you have something new. It is a scientific fact that individually sperm and ovum are merely parts of their owners. Since they each have the same DNA of the owners. However, at the moment of conception, this union of the two, creates something new, a new DNA. This new entity has a DNA this world has never seen before, and will never see again. And this new entity, like the infant, and the adolescent, has a designed nature that will guide it to other stages in human life.
Actually, I like your analogy—but it works better for my side of the argument than yours. Because lemonade is NOT just lemons and water, it’s also sugar. Without sugar, it’s just water with lemon juice in it.
The fertilized ovum is water and lemon juice. The sugar is yet to come.
Hello Mitch,
You can’t change my analogy. It is my analogy afterall.
On the other hand, if your point is that infants have a seperate ‘ingredient’ than a fetus, or embryo, or zygote, pray tell, what is that difference? To use your analogy, when it comes to human beings, what is the sugar that the infant has that the pre-born does not have?
HP - I don’t know what the secret ingredient is. But I know it’s missing.
A person doesn’t have to know what lemonade is made of to taste a glass of water and lemon juice and know it’s not lemonade.
Well, how are we supposed to arrive at a conclusion if you respond with something like that. It is basically like me responding,
‘I don’t agree with you and I am not telling you why’
Where do you go from there?
I’ve already shown that the ‘you’ is basically present from conception until natural death. Ive shown a clear scientific difference from the moment of conception to before, and explained that nothing fundamental changes.
What am I missing?
HP:
*SIGH* You’ve done neither of those things.
Hello Mitch,
I wrote this,
What part of this do you disagree with, and why?
None of it. However, I disagree that the “something new” is a person. And most Americans agree with me.
Why do you disagree?
YOU: “Hey, Mitch, look at my pet dog!”
THE DOG: “Meow.”
(The dog scratches its chin, begins to lick itself clean quite thoroughly.)
ME: “That’s not a dog, it’s a cat.”
YOU: “Of course it’s a dog!”
(YOU proceed to lay out a well-reasoned, well-researched, well-written and lengthy proof that it’s a dog.)
ME: “It’s not a dog, it’s a cat. I know a cat when I see one, and that’s definitely a cat.”
YOU: “Can you prove that it’s a cat? If not, you will be forced to assume that it’s a dog, because of my well-reasoned, well-researched and lengthy proof that it is one.”
ME: (attempts to refute the proof that it is a dog, even though I can’t really prove it’s a cat.)
YOU: “Since you have not proven that it is a cat, we must, therefore, in the name of erring on the side of safety, decide it’s a dog.”
ME: “Oh, fine, it’s a dog then.”
DOG: “Meow.”
(The DOG sharpens its claws on the sofa, coughs up a hairball, and then goes to sleep.)
I am the one that is giving the scientific and logical arguments here Mitch. You simply ignore them, and refuse to answer direct questions.
I have shown you that scientifically there is a big difference between ovum and sperm, on one hand, and conception on the other. I have also argued that there is no fundamental difference between conception and any other stage of development(zygote, embryo, fetus, newborn infant, adolescent etc).
What more can I do? You just respond with ‘well I don’t see it as a human being’, with no logical or scientific arguments supporting your claim. What kind of response is that? If you don’t want to deal with the logical side of this, or the scientifical arguments, how do you come to any conclusion on any topic? How would you feel if every person simply responded with, “I just know liberals are wrong, wrong on everything”, without ever giving any supportive reasons. There is no possibility for dialogue after that.
If your whole foundation for what constitutes a human being is based on what you personally ‘feel’ is a human being, than you are no different than the slave owner who also ‘felt’ that black people were not persons. Or the sexist who ‘felt’ women were inferior to men, or the nazi who ‘felt’ jews were not persons.
It all becomes subjective than, and a fight over power. What’s to seperate you from the person who feels a ninth month pregnancy should also be aborted, over any reason the mother see’s fit. Or what’s to seperate you from this?
HispanicPundit, I’m not refusing to give you the answers to your questions—I don’t know the answers to your questions.
That’s life. We sail into an uncertain future without enough data to make decisions, and yet we must make those decisions anyway.
I don’t know what constiutes a person, but I know that a single-celled organism is NOT a person, no matter how it was produced and what its genetic structure is.
You say I am:
I’ve had the same argument used against me by vegetarians. Didn’t make me swear off meat either.
Let me try this one more time:
You define a human being as the sexual product of a man and woman, with a complete genetic code.
You seem to like that definition because it provides a clear, bright line between “nonhuman” and “human.” It’s like water turning into ice. At 32.1 degrees F it’s water, at 32 degrees it’s ice.
However, there is no reason to assume there is a single point of transition between tissue and human. Your “proof” has consisted of thousands of words EXPLAINING the definition, but nothing at all PROVING the definition.
Whereas my observation—which is shared by most Americans—is that becoming human is a PROCESS. It’s not like water turning into ice, it’s like … congealing butter. At the one end, you have melted butter, something that’s definitely liquid. On the other end of the process, you have a stick of butter, something that most people would say is solid. Put it in the freezer and you could kill somebody with it. But there is no single point in the process where the butter “freezes,” where it makes an abrupt transition from liquid to solid.
At one end of the process, you have a single, fertilized cell. Not human, no more than a paramecium is human.
On the other end, you have a baby. Definitely human. As a matter of fact, I’d say that the fetus becomes COMPLETELY human well before birth. How much before? I don’t know.
At some point in the middle of this process, we reach a point where reasonable, moral people must say, “This fetus has developed enough humanity that killing it would be wrong.” But I can’t tell you when that point is.
Same thing is true for animals, by the way. We already know that gorillas and other higher apes have powers of language. They are capable of showing love. A recent article described that gorillas are even able to MOURN. Should we consider them to be human? If not, why not—because they have a different genome?
Hello Mitch,
You write, I’ve had the same argument used against me by vegetarians. Didn’t make me swear off meat either.
Except in this case we are dealing with human life.
You write, You define a human being as the sexual product of a man and woman, with a complete genetic code.
This is not *my* definition, this is the scientific definition, I am merely borrowing it. You keep insisting that all human beings are persons, something that I completely agree with you on, Mitch. But what you fail to see is that people on your side, the ones who have thought this through much more than you have, don’t agree with you.
If you think Peter Singer is a ‘wacko’, than take the new liberal blog left 2 right as an example. It is a blog composed of liberal philosophy professors and lawyers that got together to, as swerve left says, “takes on the post-election koan of how the left can better communicate to the right”. This blog is fairly representative of the left, and is linked to by several liberal blogs.
One of the posts on the blog discusses abortion, the liberal author writes,
So you see, even liberals agree that human life starts at conception.
This is not something that I cleverly invented to justify my pro-life views, or something that I personally like. This is something widely agreed upon by both sides. This is something that you can not argue against, it is held by scientists. How else do you think scientists decide if something is a dog, or a cat, or a fish, or whatever? They dont wait until the dog reaches maturity, they know from the moment of conception that that ‘blog of cells’ is a member of the ‘dog species’ and will grow into a full grown mature dog given time.
So yes, a zygote, embryo and fetus are all human beings, just at different stages in life. They do look different than what you see everyday, for example, from infants, but so does the infant when compared to an adult. An 80 year old man looks very different than a two day old infant, but the two are both fully human, just at different stages in life. They may exhibit different human functions through each stage, but both are still fully human.
In addition, your gradualism answer has more problems than it solves. Beckwith writes,
If personhood is only a developing, gradual thing, then we are never fully persons, because we continue to grow, at least intellectually and emotionally and spiritually. Albert Schweitzer said, at 70, “I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.” But if we are only partial persons, then murder is only partially wrong, and it is less wrong to kill younger, lesser persons than older ones. If it is more permissible to kill a fetus than to kill an infant because the fetus is less of a person, then it is for exactly the same reason more permissible to kill a seven-year-old, who has not yet developed his reproductive system or many of his educational and communications skills, than to kill a 27-year-old. The absurd conclusion follows from defining a person functionally. Someone who is fully human cannot gradually become more fully human. Certainly it is true that the unborn human physically develops gradually, as is true of humans at later stages (e.g., infancy, childhood, adolescence). But it does not follow from this fact that the unborn human is any less human than the infant, the child, or the adolescent. They are nonetheless fully human although they are gradually developing.
You also write, Same thing is true for animals, by the way. We already know that gorillas and other higher apes have powers of language. They are capable of showing love. A recent article described that gorillas are even able to MOURN. Should we consider them to be human? If not, why not—because they have a different genome?
Throughout this discussion it has been a shared premise that a human being is ipso facto important and valuable. We can discuss whether this premise is true or not, or whether other species should also be included similarly important another day. To open up that discussion now would completely blow up this discussion and send it on a different tangent that I am currently not prepared to take (I leave to Mexico on Saturday).