The newest Richard Cheese album is available for pre-order, featuring lounge-ified versions of "Supersonic," "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Light My Fire," "Freebird," and "My Neck, My Back."
We don't disagree that there is continuity of organism (just as there is continuity of a population of organisms over time)--all life on this planet is connected in that way. But just as we don't count every species as human, even in our own genetic lineage, we don't count every life stage of individual human organisms as persons. There's a sense in which "I" was once a zygote that had my same DNA, but at that stage there was no "me" there yet--there was nothing that it was like to be a zygote, to use Thomas Nagel's expression. In that same sense that "I" was a zygote, "I" will be a dead body in the future, even though there will at that point be nothing that it is like to be me, and the person that I am will be gone from the world though my body will briefly remain.
I think we understand each other's positions. You think that being a human organism is the same thing as to be a person, while I think personhood is a feature that comes into existence and persists for a subset of the life of an organism, that requires capacities of sentience or self-awareness.
But I think I can give reasons to support why my view makes moral, legal, and practical sense, and why human cultures and practices are more consistent with my view than yours. I don't think you can give such reasons, other than the brute assertion that human organisms are persons from start to finish. Your view has no need of the notion of person, yet it seems to me that there are all sorts of practical, moral, and legal reasons why we do need and use such a notion.
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. "Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him."My intuition is that in this scenario, it is morally supererogatory to remain connected to the violinist--it is not a moral requirement. The problem with this scenario is that it isn't quite analogous to pregnancy except in case of rape. If one gave voluntary consent to be connected to the violinist to save his life, it seems that one would have a moral duty to see it through. That raises the question of what constitutes "voluntary consent" with respect to pregnancy, which may occur accidentally or unintentionally despite use of contraception, for example. And note again that this scenario only applies in the case where personhood is taken as given, which I've been arguing is definitely not the case in early stages of a pregnancy.
The seriousness with which Project Inform took the resurgence of interest in the causation controversey was indicated by the publication in early June of a six-page 'Discussion Paper' devoted entirely to the topic. The report began by blasting the media for their irresponsibility and sensationalism. Why do reporters love the HIV dissenters? Why have they confused Montagnier's position with Duesberg's, despite Montagnier's own disavowals? "Apparently because it makes a good story--'Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong! Top Scientists in Error Ten Years! Secrets! Coverup! Big Business, Big Science Collusion!' ... Such is the sorry state of AIDS reporting in some circles today."There are lots of interesting parallels here, including political. Epstein notes (pp. 158-159) HIV dissenters and promoters of their views being libertarian (Charles Thomas) and conservative (Phillip Johnson, Bryan Ellison, Tom Bethell, Patrick Buchanan). Johnson, Bethell, and Buchanan are also anti-evolutionists; Bethell and Buchanan also deny that there's anthropogenic global warming.
Focusing on four groups opposing the HIV hypothesis--the New York Native, Spin magazine, assorted journalists, and certain scientists--Project Inform was at pains to question the credibility of each and to uncover motivations for adopting heretical stances. ... In considering the fourth, crucial group of HIV dissenters--the scientists--Project Inform's report similarly emphasized the issue of credibility. Root-Bernstein "works in a field not directly related to AIDS" and "has not conducted or published any AIDS research other than editorials," yet "Spin calls him 'one of the leading AIDS researchers in the US.'" Kary Mullis, while "obviously a serious scientist," was similarly "an outsider to AIDS research"; furthermore, his PCR test "has, if anything, helped to bolster the case for HIV." Of all the heretical scientists, only Sonnabend "is professionally involved with AIDS," but "primarily as a clinician": "While Dr. Sonnabend has earned respect in many ways, his arguments against HIV are no more valid than the others."
...
In focusing on formal credentials, Project Inform walked a fine line. This, after all, was a grassroots organization staffed by self-educated AIDS experts; its executive director, before the epidemic came along, had been a business consultant. A big part of Project Inform's work involved disseminating highly technical knowledge about AIDS to laypeople in order to create what might be called a mass-based expertise. In its reckoning of the tokens of expertise, Project Inform was not about to argue that academic degrees or journal publications are everything. Lacking the right credentials, Peter Duesberg could still be considered an AIDS expert of sorts--but not in a way that would make him stand out from the crowd: "Perhaps his most relevant work is that he has studied the medical literature on AIDS (as have thousands of patients, physicians, and activists), and this qualifies as a form of expertise." But "Duesberg's supporters and the media spread misinformation when they present him as an 'AIDS researcher' in the sense that phrase is usually meant." His published writings on AIDS were "simply editorials."
Project Inform noted that there was a "legitimate" scientific question that had been "lost in the fog" generated by media fascination with Duesberg and other dissenters: How does HIV cause AIDS? Following the lead of Gallo and others, the report emphasized that pathogenesis was separate from etiology; while part one of the report was entitled "Is HIV the Cause of AIDS?" part two was called "How Does HIV Cause AIDS?"
From the other end of things, a recent New York Times article featured a similar argument (although his piece was on a broader topic than abortion):The quote is from a New York Times editorial by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga about the difference between reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Here's the quotation in context; it's the ending of the piece:Look at your loved ones. Do you see a hunk of cells or do you see something else? … We do not see cells, simple or complex – we see people, human life. That thing in a petri dish is something else. [2]
In his State of the Union speech, President Bush went on to observe that "human life is a gift from our creator — and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale." Putting aside the belief in a "creator," the vast majority of the world's population takes a similar stance on valuing human life. What is at issue, rather, is how we are to define "human life." Look around you. Look at your loved ones. Do you see a hunk of cells or do you see something else?
Most humans practice a kind of dualism, seeing a distinction between mind and body. We all automatically confer a higher order to a developed biological entity like a human brain. We do not see cells, simple or complex — we see people, human life. That thing in a petri dish is something else. It doesn't yet have the memories and loves and hopes that accumulate over the years. Until this is understood by our politicians, the gallant efforts of so many biomedical scientists, as good as they are, will remain only stopgap measures.
Vocab has removed a critical piece of what Gazzaniga wrote--he's not making anything like an argument from size, but rather an argument much more like my position, as seen in what Vocab omitted with his ellipsis and immediately following what he quoted. The piece as a whole is taking issue with the conflation of reproductive and therapeutic cloning, with the idea that the latter involves creating cloned people, and Gazzaniga's position seems to be that this confusion occurs because people are thinking of and talking about undifferentiated cells as though they are people--the same thing that is occuring in this very debate. (BTW, the president's Council on Bioethics, of which Gazzaniga was a member, argued that therapeutic, but not reproductive cloning should be permissible. My view is that while there are currently issues of knowledge and technology that could result in harm to cloned people, in the long run I don't see any ethical difference between reproductive cloning and natural reproduction, so long as the products of each get equal treatment on the same standard of personhood.)
Vocab suggests it would have been better to call this the "just a bunch of cells" argument, but that's really not an argument based on size, but rather an argument based on structure, function, and capacity--which is a good argument! I suspect that this is, in fact, the sort of argument that Klusendorf is misconstruing.
Next Vocab gives an argument from essences:
can any living being become anything else besides what it already is? How can something become a person unless its essence is already personhood? If the color blue is only blue and not the color red in the same way at the same time, its very essence – its fundamental property – must be blue and not red. Another example is that of the tadpole and frog. The tadpole is simply a name for a specific stage during a frog’s development. If one were to terminate a certain tadpole, then a certain frog would be terminated and no longer exist. This means you did not come from a fetus you once were a fetus.The answer to the first question is clearly yes--there are all kinds of metamorphoses that occur in living things while they are alive, including changes of shape, color, size, and sex. And when they die, they can become parts of other things--just as other things become part of them when they come into existence, develop, and change. The second question is, I think, flawed. First, I don't think it's correct to regard personhood as a fixed, unchanging property. Douglas Hofstadter's book, I Am A Strange Loop, argues that self concepts not only develop over time, but can be shared across persons. Second, the question implies that anything that is a person is always and eternally a person and cannot be constructed out of something else. But on everybody's views, human beings are biological organisms, which come into and go out of existence in virtue of the states of their underlying components. Both the view Vocab has been defending and mine say that there are biological components which are not persons, which through some change of state subsequently become persons. If Vocab wants to hold a view by which personhood is an essential property of a simple substance, then he can do that by holding a dualistic view of an eternal soul which is a person that attaches at some point to a human as a biological animal. But if that's his view, then that's the argument we should be having, rather than one in which Vocab is defending a view like animalism.
One way to think about the idea of probability (or potentiality) is that every adult was once an unborn person, just as every oak tree was once an acorn. An acorn is simply a mini-oak tree, just as a microscopic person is a mini-human.But that last sentence is just false. Acorns are not miniature oak trees and zygotes are not miniature people. That's precisely the error that Gazzaniga is warning against in his article.
I also think Vocab errs in claiming that PETA is being more consistent in holding animals above humans--that is not a consequence of my or their position, and I believe they are more concerned with publicity than consistency, as they euthanize adoptable animals by the thousands.Nigel: And it’s interesting that many of your critics focus on descriptions of a situation where you’re playing off a human being who’s less than a person, against an animal which is a person.
Peter: I think that’s a tactic. Maybe it’s quite an effective tactic with some audiences. They try and say that animals in some circumstances deserve more consideration than humans do. It’s accurate that there are some situations, though I think they are quite rare ones, where that would be true, where the human was so intellectually disabled or incapable of understanding things where you would want to give preference to the non-human animal; it would have greater interest in going on living or not suffering in a certain way. But it’s really completely irrelevant to the vast majority of cases in which we are interfering with animals, that is where we’re producing them for food where obviously they’re suffering, and it’s not at all necessary for me to say that somehow they have the same let alone a superior status to humans to point to the fact that we’re inflicting unnecessary suffering on them, and that should be enough to make it wrong given that we’re not doing this in order to save human lives but just because we like to eat a certain kind of food.
Dolphins have long been recognised as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioural studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.
It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.
In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.
In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.
Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.
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