Pruss

This is a variant of an argument by Don Marquis.  It starts by trying to figure out one of the things that is wrong with killing an adult human being.

• Seven years ago, I was a graduate student, and I started this ten years earlier.  Twenty years ago, I was a teenager.  Twenty-five years ago I was a kid.  Thirty-three years ago I was a baby.  About a year before that I was a fetus, and before that I was an embryo.
• Now a bit of ethics.  It would be wrong to kill me now.  Why?  Surely because of the harm to me.  The harm to me doesn’t consist in the pain, though, because it’d also be wrong to kill me painlessly when I am asleep.  Surely the harm consists in what I am being deprived of—namely, my future.  Assuming an average lifespan, I have some forty to fifty years ahead of me.  You would be depriving me of these years if you killed me now.  And I am fairly innocent: I haven’t done anything to legally deserve such a terrible thing to have happen to me.  (Opponents of capital punishment think that even if I wasn’t innocent, killing me would be wrong.)  Suppose instead you killed me a year ago.  Then you would have deprived me of more: you would have deprived me of my last year of life, in addition to the 40-50 years of the future that you would deprive me of by killing me now.  What if you killed me seventeen years ago?  I would then have lost even more years of my life—I would never have had the fun of being a philosophy grad student, in addition to not having the pleasure of teaching philosophy, and in addition to the 40-50 years of the future.  If you killed me when I was twelve, you would have deprived me of even more: you would have additionally deprived me of my teenage years.  If you killed me when I was a four-year-old, you would have deprived me of even more—most of my childhood, my teenage years, my college years, my graduate school years, my philosophy teaching, and my next 40-50 years.  If you killed me when I was a newborn, you would have deprived me of all that and of being a toddler.  And if you killed me when I was a fetus, you would have deprived me of my next 40-50 years, and teaching philosophy, and of my childhood, and of my babyhood.
• In other words, the earlier you kill me, the more harm you do to me: the more you deprive me of.  Moreover, the victim is the same.  That fetus in my past—that was me.  Killing that fetus would have been killing me, albeit at a very early point in my life.  Nor did I deserve it more then.  I wasn’t a murderer back then either.  So, the earlier I am killed, the more I am deprived of.  The victim is the same, the harm to the victim is greater.  Since what makes killing me now wrong is the harm caused to me by such a killing, it would be if anything more wrong to have killed me earlier, since the harm would have been greater—I would have lost more by it.
• This, in summary, is the argument of my paper.  Observe that it doesn’t matter for this argument that I was a person when I was a fetus.  All that matters is that it was me there.
• One crucial part of the argument is the claim that that fetus is me.  One might dispute this. 

·        For instance, one might think that I am my soul and argue that the fetus does not have a soul.

o       But there is really no scientific evidence either way on whether the fetus has a soul, since souls aren’t observable.  One can argue that in the absence of evidence, one should opt for the safer route of not killing.

·        Or one might argue that I am my brain. 

o       If so, then I only came into existence 4-5 weeks after conception, in which case at least most abortions would be wrong, since most abortions are done after that.

·        Or one might argue that there are two different things here: me and my body.  My body is an animal.  I am a person.  I am not my body.  The fetus became this animal.  I did not come into existence until a fair bit of time after conception—maybe a fair bit of time after birth. 

o       This has the implausible consequence that I am not a mammal or a biological human—only my body is.

·      A relevant question is whether I am an animal.

• The second crucial part of the argument is the claim that one of the things that are sufficient to make murder wrong is the harm to the victim, and that this harm consists in the deprivation of future life.  After all, it is wrong to kidnap someone and to imprison her for no reason, since that would deprive her of many things she could do.  But killing deprives one of even more things.

·        For instance, one might think that what makes killing me wrong is that I want to live. 

o      This would suggest that killing me wouldn’t be wrong if I were suicidal or just did not want to live.  But that is false.

·       A better alternate is that what makes killing me wrong is that it interrupts my life.  My life has a certain value based on the my past experiences and actions, and this is cut off by killing me.

o      One objection to this alternative is to consider the case of a newborn baby.  Such a baby has some past experiences and actions—she has seen the world for a couple of hours or days, she has sucked her thumb before birth, etc.  But these past experiences and actions do not significantly more valuable than those of a pretty unsophisticated animal, say a chicken.  If it is the value of the past experiences and actions that renders killing innocent people wrong, then killing a newborn would not be wrong on that count: it would be more like killing a chicken.  But this is surely false.  In fact, we don’t need to limit ourselves to newborns.  It’s probably only at around one year of age, or quite a bit later, that the actions and experiences start to outstrip those of smart animals.

o      Another objection.  Suppose that Fred, an adult man, is now unconscious following an accident.  Brain scans determine that he has had total and irrecoverable amnesia.  The brain scan, however, also reveals that he is about to wake up, and that he will be able to lead a fairly normal life, once he learns the things he has forgotten.  In the case of Fred, the chain of experiences and actions has already been interrupted.  If interruption is what makes it wrong, then what is wrong with killing him now?

o      A final objection: Consider how we judge end-of-life cases.  Suppose Fred can only be expected to live another couple of days.  We are trying to determine whether it is worth trying to do some difficult medical procedure on him that might prolong his life by a couple of hours.  It seems that it doesn’t really matter here how rich a life Fred lived in the past.  What matters is what we can expect to have happen to Fred in the future, in the next couple of days.  Will the procedure decrease his quality of life in such a way that the extension of life will not be worth while?  Our inclination, I think, would also be that we would be more likely to extend Fred’s life a little bit if Fred were in his 20s than if Fred were in his 90s.  Yet if Fred were in his 90s, he would have had a richer past.

·        Response: Killing someone does deprive her of her future.  This much is clear even if this deprivation isn't the main thing that makes killing wrong.  Moreover, it is a greater harm to deprive someone of her future than it is to deprive her of, say, an arm or a leg.  Thus, killing me now imposes a harm greater than cutting off my arm or leg.  Killing me as a fetus would have imposed a harm that was no less, perhaps even greater.  It is wrong to impose a harm so great upon an innocent person without a compensating advantage to that innocent person--it is wrong for you to cut off my arm or leg without my having a medical need for it.  For the same reason, to have killed me as a fetus would have been wrong, since it would have imposed on me an even greater harm than cutting off my arm or leg now would.

Warren

 Mary Ann Warren thinks she can show that abortion is acceptable.

• As Warren sees it, the main argument people give for the wrongness of abortion is:

• (1) The fetus is an innocent human being.
• (2) It is wrong to kill innocent human beings.
• (3) Therefore, it is wrong to kill the fetus.
• Now, if by “human being” we mean a biological member of the species homo sapiens, an animal that is genetically human, then modern science makes it impossible to deny (1). 
  • People sometimes say about the abortion issue: “It is a mystery when human life begins.”  (It’s not clear that this supports the pro-choice conclusion, actually, as some people think.  If it’s not clear whether something is a living human being, then isn’t it better to be safe and not kill it?  If something is moving in the woods and it could be a deer or a man, we should not shoot.) 
  • But in a biological sense there is no mystery.  Modern biology tells us that human life begins at fertilization or conception.  After fertilization, there is a new, living, independent organism, which is genetically human, which gradually develops into a new human being, and which is not a part of the mother or of the father.  In fact, for the first couple of days, it floats around unattached in the mother looking for nutrition.  There is no controversy about the biological facts.  There is a human being in the biological sense there.
  • Imagine someone said: “It is a mystery when elephant life begins.”  Here is a sequence of some pictures.  The first is of an elephant fetus.  The next two show baby elephants.  And the last is an adult elephant.  If we ask: What do all these pictures have in common? the answer is: The are all elephants.
  • Likewise, in the next picture.  If we ask: What do all of these have in common, we have to say: They are all human beings.  What at the top is a 6.5-week-old embryo, an 11-week-old fetus, and an 18-week-old fetus.  (Scientists use the word “embryo” when the bones have not yet developed and “fetus” when they have.)  And then we have older human beings. 
• If we mean by “human”, a “biological human”, there is no denying that there is a biological human there from conception, Warren agrees.  However, Warren thinks you can make a further distinction.  You can make a distinction between a biological human and a person.  To soften up the reader for this distinction, she notes that something that isn’t human could be a person.  If there existed intelligent aliens, they wouldn’t be human, but they would be persons.  A term Warren uses for “person” as “a human being in the moral sense.”
• So Warren says that (2) is false.  Instead, it needs to be replaced with something like:
  • (2a) It is wrong to kill innocent persons.
• But Warren thinks that in fact even (2a) isn’t quite right: more qualification is needed still.  But she isn’t going to press this point.  Rather, Warren thinks that once we make a distinction between human beings (understood biologically) and persons, it becomes obvious that a fetus is not a person.  For what is a person?  Suppose we saw a bunch of aliens and wanted to tell if they are persons.  Why would we want to know?  Well, we might want to know what rights they have.  We might want to know if it’s OK to kill them, for instance, if they’re inconvenient to us.  Now, it’s really tough to give a definition of a person.  But we can give, Warren thinks, five traits of persons:
  • (1) Persons are conscious and can feel things, such as pain.
  • (2) Persons can reason: they have a “developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems”.
  • (3) Persons are self-moved: their activity is relatively free of direct external or genetic control.
  • (4) Persons can communicate “messages of an indefinite variety of types” (not just, say, “There is danger here” and “There is food here”).
  • (5) They have a self-concept and self-awareness, either individually or as a species.  (For the last option, Warren is imagining a bunch of aliens that live in a giant colony and have no ideas of themselves as individuals—there are science fiction stories like that.)
• Warren says that perhaps you don’t need to have all of the traits to be a person.  But she seems to think that it’s clear that if you have all of them, then you are a person, and if you have none or only, say, one of them, then you are not a person.
• The fetus’s brain is probably not sophisticated enough for it to have (2)-(5).  In fact, the fetus is less sophisticated than an adult mammal.  It’s true that a brain starts to develop pretty early—around the 6th week after conception—and so the fetus and embryo might well have (1): in fact, there is some scientific evidence of consciousness of pain fairly early on.  However if we said that the amount of abilities that the fetus has is sufficient to say it has (2)-(5), we would have to say the same thing about a cat.
• So, Warren concludes, fetuses are not persons.  Since only persons have a right to life, fetuses have no right to life.  Taking up Thomson’s example, Warren says that there would be nothing immoral in a woman in the 7th month of pregnancy having an abortion even because the pregnancy interfered with her vacation dates.  If the fetus is not a person, then killing it is just not morally significant.  (Warren is a little too quick.  Many people would say it’s wrong to kill your cat just because it interferes with your vacation plans, even though they do not think cats are persons.)
• Warren then looks at one major objection to her argument: The fetus is potentially a person, and hence has a right to life.  By “potentially a person”, she means that it will probably develop into a person if nurtured and allowed to develop naturally.  But Warren thinks that probably potential persons have no moral rights at all.  And even if they have them, these rights are trumped by the rights of actual persons, like the mother’s.  She gives a science-fiction example.  The aliens can make each of your cells develop into a full human being.  She thinks you have a right to run away and deprive these cells of their potential future human life, and this shows that potential persons have no rights.
  • But is running away like abortion?  You are not killing your cells, but only not letting the aliens develop them further.
  • Moreover, the case does not satisfy Warren’s own definition of potential persons.  A potential person is something that would likely develop into a person if nurtured and allowed to develop naturally.  If we nurture our body’s cells and let them develop naturally, they are not going to develop into persons.  They will stay as our cells.  The aliens’ manipulation is not natural.
  • [In fact, it seems plausible that if we took one of our cells and transformed to such an extent that it would be able to develop into a human being, then this cell would then be a different cell from the one we started with.  So the cells in my skin cannot develop into human beings: but with the help of cloning technology they can perhaps be changed into cells that can.  But these wouldn’t be the same cells or organisms any more afterwards.  Rather, my skin cells would have to be destroyed first—as the cells they are—before they could be made into human beings.  So respect for my own cells does not require me to let the aliens operate.]
  • The fetus is not just a potential person in the way the cells are—that they can be made into a person—but the fetus already has certain genetic capacities for growth and development in virtue of which it will on its own develop into a full blown person if properly nourished.

But let’s go back to Warren’s main argument.  She thinks the fetus is not a person because it lacks most of the five traits of personhood.  Is she right?  Discussion.

• It is surely true that the fetus lacks the traits Warren lists.  Thus, the main question is whether these are indeed the traits of personhood, the traits that determine whether it is OK or not for one to be killed if one is innocent.
• Some issues to consider. 
  • Consider someone asleep in a deep and dreamless sleep or under total anesthesia.  Such a person lacks most of the characteristics listed, but we think it’s just as wrong to kill someone asleep.
  • But a person asleep can easily be woken up!  So she has all these capacities.
    • Worry: Shouldn’t we say she is only a potential person? 
  • But now imagine aliens who hibernate for nine months and cannot be woken up before nine months is up.
  • Or persons who are in a coma but who are expected to recover fully.
  • Or severely mentally retarded adults.
  • But perhaps the most worrying case is this.  Babies!  A newborn baby is less sophisticated intellectually than a dog.  Since we wouldn’t say that a dog meets Warren’s criteria of a person, we shouldn’t say that a small baby does.  But it doesn’t seem right to say that we can kill babies whenever they are inconvenient.
    • There are two ways out for Warren:
      • She might logically say: Babies that can’t talk and think sophisticated thoughts yet—say, six-month-old babies—are not persons.  They are only potential persons.  Thus, we can kill them.  Very few people who defend abortion are willing to come out and say this.  Peter Singer does say it.  He argues that if we accept abortion like he does, then we should accept infanticide in some cases.  (Why only in some?  If the baby is not a person, and non-persons have no rights, then a woman should be able to kill her baby even if the baby interferes with her vacation plans.)
      • But Warren’s official response is that in the case of the baby, there is no interference between the mother’s rights and the baby’s rights, and so there is no reason for the mother to kill the baby, even though the baby is not a person.  After all, she can always give up the baby for adoption.
        • But what about a poorer country, where no one is willing to adopt?  Is it OK for women to kill, or at least stop feeding, the baby, for any reason whatsoever?  (Warren used to think you can kill a non-person for any reason whatsoever.  Now she backtracks a little.)  Warren says: yes.
        • And what if I end up with my baby on a desert island?  Do I have a right to kill the baby?
        • Moreover, it seems quite rational for an adult to make large sacrifices for his or her six-month-old baby.  But if the baby is not a person, is this rational?
      • Warren thinks pictures of fetuses are emotionally powerful because fetuses look like persons but are not.  But actually on her account they don’t look like persons.  What a fetus looks most like is a baby, rather than a person, and babies are not persons on Warren’s view.  So she cannot explain the reaction people have to the pictures in this way.