In the Journal of Medical Ethics (February, 2012), Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue that given the same moral status or lack thereof between a foetus and a new born baby, the same conditions that would justify the killing of the foetus also justify the killing of the new born ('After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?'). They structure their argument around what they take to be the fact that neither the new born nor the foetus is a person, in which case it is not subject to a moral right to life in which case the rights and interests of actual persons, such as the mother, society etc, ought to take priority. They consider the potentiality objection to the effect that both the foetus and the new born are potential persons and reject it arguing that no harm is done to a potential person by not allowing such an entity to develop into a person. They also reject the adoption objection to the effect that adoption would be a better option than abortion or after birth abortion since they do not believe that it is straightforwardly true that the mental health of the mother would be better in the adoption case than in the abortion/after birth abortion case; and if in this case the interests of an actual person (the mother) should prevail, then after birth abortion should be a valid alternative to adoption.
I do not wish to engage in-depth with the details and presuppositions of their article. What I would like to do is take the occasion of their paper to explore a position on what it is to be a person. On one account of personhood (an account broad enough to include that of Giubilini and Minerva), to be a person is to have some property or set of properties such that one can potentially but not actually possess them and then, if allowed to develop, actually possess them; in which case one was only potentially a person and then actually so. I want to present an alternative view.
On the alternative view, to be a person is not essentially to have a certain property or set of properties, but it is a distinct state of being, that is to say, a person is a type of thing and thus personhood goes along with being that type of thing. The motivation for the view that being a person is being a type of thing and not having certain person constituting properties is as follows. Properties whilst serving to identify a thing are not identifiable with a thing. Rather, properties are multiply realisable such that different individuals can possess the same properties. But if several different individuals can possess the same properties, then a problem arises with regard to the property based conception of personhood. A person is a unique and non-repeatable individual; there might be many people named Gaven Kerr in the world, but there is only one of me. So whilst there are a lot of people, a person is essentially an individual. But if a person is essentially an individual, then it cannot be constituted by some property or set of properties, since properties are such that they are multiply realisable whereas a person is not. It follows then that the status a thing has as a person is not granted to it on the basis of properties that it has, but on the basis of the thing itself that instantiates those properties. Thus, it is the very individual that is a person, and not the properties that make the individual a person.
Given the latter, to be a person is to be an individual type of thing and not to come to possess a certain property or properties. Now, if being a person grants one a moral status, as Giubilini and Minerva grant, then a thing that is a person has such a status. But contrary to Giubilini and Minerva, a person is not something that becomes over time through the accumulation of certain properties, but is what the thing in question is. This then entails that one is not potentially a person and then actually so, but that one just is a person period, from beginning to end.
On this account of personhood, if one is prepared to recognise that the entity which is 28 years old is the same entity that was 18 years old and is the same entity that was 8 years old and is the same entity that was newborn, and the same entity that was in utero, i.e. in my own case, a self-developing and independent human substance, then given that to be a person is to be a type of thing and given the continuity of identity over all of the aforementioned time spans, a human substance did not first come into being and then a human person, rather a particular self-developing independent substance that is a person came into being, and, qua person, such an entity is subject to a moral right to life.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post, Gav.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me that there are at least two issues here, which are best stated from the first-point point of view, namely (1) what are my identity conditions (when do I come into existence and go out of existence?), and (2) what gives me moral standing? Although you sketch a very different response to these questions to Giubilini and Minerva, you seem to share with them the assumption that the answer to question (1) is closely bound up with the answer to question (2). But I wonder one needs to accept this assumption. Couldn’t one accept Locke’s view that ‘person’ is a ‘forensic’ term which is ascribed on the basis of moral characteristics whilst leaving it open whether you and I are essentially persons (perhaps it is an attribute which we could lose before we die, eg if we enter a persistent vegetative state). It would then be possible to subscribe to your view that we are unique and non-repeatable things whilst at the same time insisting that what gives us moral standing is some property that we can gain or lose such as sentience or rationality. Indeed this position strikes me as particularly plausible if the moral characteristics in question are characteristics such as moral accountability and punishability (Locke’s concern) since these are plainly tied to empirically determinable properties such as rationality.
One theory of objects that strikes me as plausible is that an object just is an instance of a kind and is individuated as such. The paradigm of a kind is a natural kind, but there are other kinds, including functional kinds. As a result, there might be a (functional?) kind exhibited by all and only persons, but also a (natural?) kind exhibited by all and only human beings. If so, then there might generally be at least two intimately related objects present when we're looking at a fellow adult human being. There is the instance of the human being kind, but there is also the instance of the person kind. These instances are distinct because the kinds that they are instancing are distinct even though the instancing of these kinds is, in the ordinary case, clearly related.
ReplyDeleteIf we think of matters this way, then one might concede that there is a twenty-eight year-old object (the instance of the human being kind) that is identical with a past fetus (which was the same instance of the human being kind) without conceding that the fetus is a person. At the same time, one need not endorse a theory of persons whereby one's particular identity is accounted for solely by the having properties essentially related to the kind personhood. One's particular identity comes from being a particular instance of the kind personhood Being a particular instance is not exhausted by having the features of some or other person and might even be essentially tied up with the particular human life in question that, upon proper development, helps to realize this very instancing of personhood.
I want to agree with Jeremy that Gaven may be moving a bit fast from the thought that there is persistence of an object all the way back in time to the fetus to the conclusion that there is persistence of an object with moral standing. However, I also want to emphasize that this agreement does not require one to give up that what we are essentially (qua subjects) is persons (with moral standing).
Anyways, great post Gaven. Definitely good stuff to think about.