Abstract
We are beings endowed with “personal capacities”—the capacity for reason, for a concept of self, perhaps more. Among ontologically salient views about what else we are, I focus on the “Big Three.” According to animalism, we are animals that have psychological properties only contingently. According to psychologistic materialism, we are material beings; according to substance dualism, we are either immaterial beings or composites of immaterial and material ones; but according to both psychologistic materialism and substance dualism, we essentially have some psychological properties. I argue that—contrary to what has been argued and is natural to think—none of the Big Three yields different assignments of moral status to early fetuses from any of the others, and consequently the moral status of early abortion doesn’t depend on which (if any) of these views of personal ontology is correct.
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Notes
Eric Olson (1997) typifies the animalist position.
The Big Three don’t exhaust the “conceptual space” of personal ontology, of course. Chisholm (1989, esp. 124–7), for example, takes each of us to be a minute physical thing within a human brain; Puccetti (1973), a cerebral hemisphere; Hudson (2001), a temporal part of a brain. A referee floats the view that each of us is a brain and suggests that it may be immune to my arguments. I don’t take up these or other candidates here. I argue that the moral status of early abortion is independent not of every possible view of personal ontology, but only of the Big Three. As a dialectical matter, this limitation doesn’t much affect the reach of my argument; the Big Three dwarf all the other views, even taken collectively, in popularity and influence.
When the fetus attains sentience is a difficult empirical matter that exceeds my expertise. As I inexpertly read the evidence, sentience probably arrives around 24 weeks, give or take a few—see, for example, Levene and Chervenak 2009: 28—though some place it considerably later.
My argument differs importantly from Earl Conee’s (1999) argument to the effect that metaphysical issues are irrelevant to the moral status of abortion. Filigree aside, Conee’s argument comes to the point that insofar as metaphysical theses aren’t moral ones, nothing of moral substance follows from any metaphysical thesis concerning the self, and given any metaphysical position concerning the nature of the self, one can tailor a metaphysics-to-morals bridge principle to yield any desired result concerning the moral status of abortion. While this is right as far as it goes, I go farther: I argue that there are substantive moral claims that the Big Three must all, somewhat surprisingly, accommodate, and that this accommodation undermines any basis for thinking that they will yield different verdicts on the morality of early abortion even when coupled with substantive moral claims.
Jaegwon Kim (1998: 119), too, suggests that we “may have to consider substantival dualism as a serious option.”
Some claim to find another distinction in sense: between psychological person—what I’m calling simply a person—and “moral person,” a being with maximal moral standing or something along those lines. This alleged distinction is illusory: advocates of the strong animal rights position hold that mice have maximal moral standing, but this view doesn’t commit them to saying that mice are people, on any recognizable idiomatic sense of ‘person’. (I omit stipulated senses as irrelevant to present purposes.) It’s a substantive question whether all and only psychological people have maximal moral standing, but I see no distinct concept of moral person.
See David Lewis 1976 on the capacity to speak Finnish.
It may even be that the comatose are exercising these capacities, but can’t manifest this exercise in behavior; see Laureys and Schiff 2011.
The headline of a BBC story, ‘Plants “can think and remember”’ (Gill 2010), undoubtedly overstates matters, but also illustrates that the case I imagine is not utterly fantastic.
Consider too Isaiah 55:12: ‘all the trees of the field shall clap their hands’.
My example resembles one offered by Michael Tooley (1972), but his concerns sentient non-persons (kittens) that gain the potential for personal capacities. It’s important for my purposes that the beings in question are not even sentient.
All three responses carry the caveat that the notions of intrinsicality and potentiality are both problematically unclear. My invocation of them is at least as clear, however, as their use in the objection to which I am responding.
See George Pope Morris 1843: 39.
It’s unclear whether Marquis’s argument hinges on the presupposition that depriving a being of an FLO wrongs it. If it does, then my considerations show his argument to be fallacious. I don’t claim that the Big Three are neutral with respect to the abortion debate, but rather with respect to the moral status of early abortion.
Compare Alastair Norcross’s (1990) notion of “depraving.”
Dualists should hold this, at any rate. Some dualists may have (e.g.) theological motivations for holding that some thinking things are material and others not, but such motivations are undermined by all the usual philosophical arguments for dualism, which apply with equal cogency to all thinking things.
Panpsychists will deny this, though not for remotely plausible reasons. In any case, if panpsychism is true, then having psychological states (while it may suffice for having a soul, if dualism is also true) does not suffice for moral standing, unless particle physicists wrong the particles they destroy, which I cannot believe.
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Acknowledgments
I presented a close cousin of this paper, by invitation, at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. David Shoemaker organized the session; he and David Hershenov raised helpful challenges. The paper had a hearing, in something close to its present form, at the 2012 Bled Conference on Ethical Issues: Theoretical and Applied; the organizers of the conference and its participants gave me lively, productive discussion. An anonymous, superbly conscientious referee provided detailed comments and suggestions, most of which I have heeded. All of these people have made the paper much better than I could have made it alone, and all have my gratitude.
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Mills, E. Early Abortion and Personal Ontology. Acta Anal 28, 19–30 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0182-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0182-0