Abstract
The category of potentiality is unloved in philosophy because it always seems to imply an implicit and dangerous return to the Aristotelian doctrine which was disposed of in the XVIIth century by thinkers like Galileo and Descartes, whether the issues were theoretical or practical. Yet in a great number of ethical cases, it is not possible to dispense with this category of potentiality that enables us to assess a situation. In thinking abortion, it is impossible to bypass this notion. Is it a means by which a rational account can be taken of potentiality? We are facing here the philosophical positions of Singer on a chief subject of his researches; and we will show that his dealing of the notion of potentiality tends to dissimulate the dynamics of the phenomena he studies from an ethical point of view. We will try to see the extent to which the notion of probability may be substituted to potentiality.
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Notes
- 1.
«Again, when people say that motion, something perfectly familiar to everyone, is ‘the actuality of a potential being, in so far as it is potential’, do they not give the impression of uttering magic words which have a hidden meaning beyond the grasp of the human mind? For who can understand these expressions?» ([3], I, p. 49).
- 2.
Mocked by some journalists when it was pronounced, that is, several years after the affair of ‘contaminated blood’ burst, that sentence of Georgina Dufoix, who had been a minister of social affairs and national solidarity at the peak of the crisis of ‘contaminated blood’, is far from inadequate. The Court of Justice of the Republic found the minister innocent of the charge of involuntary manslaughter.
- 3.
That is the terrible avowal of the unknowable nature of what we nonetheless posit at the beginning of what we try to know.
- 4.
« It is certain that […] no act or accident can exist without a substance for it to belong to. But we do not come to know a substance immediately , through being aware of the substance itself; we come to know it only through its being the subject of certain acts. Hence it is perfectly reasonable, and indeed sanctioned by usage, for us to use different names for substances which we recognize as being the subjects of quite different acts or accidents. And it is reasonable for us to leave until later the examination of whether these different names signify different things or one and the same thing» ([3], 1985, II, p. 124).
- 5.
Descartes does not back before hatred and does not say that hatred is never good, as Spinoza, his great dissident reader, said.
- 6.
Vuillemin , who uses history, especially ancient history, and gives extraordinary depth to the theatre of the reflections to which he leads us, finds the origin of that attitude in Aristotle himself who, though he did not calculate probabilities, nor even thought of doing so, thought that, in an alternative of statements about the future, what is true and necessary is not one of the other components of the alternative but the latter itself, which is really constitutive of a being which is neither that of an event nor of its absence. That particularly emphasizes the idea of power and radically thwarts the necessitarianist illusion of the Megarics.
- 7.
From Thomas Bayes, the eighteenth century theologian-mathematician, who invented them in a small essay published in London in 1763 thanks to R. Price and entitled An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances [1].
- 8.
And of which I – or others – have already experienced the developing effects in the shape of other phenomena or events.
- 9.
I wish to underline here that, contrary to what might be imagined, this point does not have much in common with religious belief . What are called ‘subjective probabilities’ or Bayesian probabilities were invented by Thomas Bayes, who was not only an eminent mathematician who elaborated the Rule that bears his name, but who was also a theologian of the Presbyterian Church, a dissident Church of Anglicanism. Christianity does not at all imply support for what I have called dogmatism. Conversely, what I have called determinism is not only the work of theists. Atheists could also suppose some necessity in the processes of matter which would not be due to some superior intelligence organizing them.
- 10.
de re: about things; de dicto: about discourses.
- 11.
We will have the opportunity of criticizing it again, but from another, ethical, angle in Chapter V.
- 12.
Though the foetus is not a person, that does not mean that it does not have any right to life. It may not have one as a person, but that does not preclude other rights to life, unless only persons have a right to life (which is absurd), or there is no other right to life than those which result from being a person.
- 13.
Hegel used spacing out according to self-consciousness to classify peoples. In relation to the diversity of species, that criterion becomes quite arbitrary. Each species, if that unit is accepted, presents a temporarily balanced set of features which allows it to live. Isolating one, to the detriment of the others, is something that is perfectly arbitrary.
- 14.
To be quite fair, one must add that just after the developments I have just mentioned and which he complacently spreads out, he analyses a syllogism that holds that the minor premise (the second proposition) is stronger than that of the previous syllogism. Here is the syllogism in its entirety:
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First premise: It is not right to kill a potential human being .
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Second premise: A human foetus is a potential human being.
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Conclusion: Therefore it is not right to kill a human foetus.
The weakness of the syllogism this time, unlike the one we have previously presented, is due to the poverty of the first premise: it is not enough to be potentially a being to have all the rights of that being. Does Prince Charles have the rights of a king of England, because he has had the title potentially for a long time?
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- 15.
This tends to confirm what we have just established: to judge abortion, it is difficult to make do completely without dogmatism.
- 16.
Claude Sureau’s article is available freely on the Internet. Without recommending that the embryo and the foetus be treated as persons, it nonetheless criticizes the lack of status attributed accorded to the unborn child.
- 17.
The archetype of that collusion of the instant of death and the instant of decision is, obviously for Kierkegaard, what Christianity has called ‘Abraham’s sacrifice’.
- 18.
Is it by chance that in Philosophical Fragments, the noun instant is almost constantly associated with the noun of decision or with the adjective decisive?
- 19.
In addition to discourses on the temporality of our passions and on the relative liveliness of our impressions and ideas, Hume is the author of four discourses which present four philosophers – the Platonist, the Stoic, the Epicurean and the Sceptic – who each have their ‘moment’ of reason [6]. This has sometimes been called the picture of the four discourses, but we prefer calling it a quadrant.
- 20.
He could have added: ‘And that modern pathos concentrates on the future.’ We are also thinking of the philosophies of Fichte, Hegel and perhaps, before them, Kant, whose practical philosophy may be read as a promotion of the future.
- 21.
It is, from this point of view, quite impressive to compare the way Hare thinks about the set of representations surrounding the issue of birth and abortion, and that in which Kierkegaard tried to think in Philosophical Fragments, and in a context which is not that of the thinking about abortion, nor even about birth from the instant. [7]
- 22.
To put it clearly: has the importance that a decision can have. Riens philosophiques [8].
- 23.
We borrow the expression provisional morality from Descartes, but everybody will have understood that with these words we are absolutely not defending the content that he gives to his provisional morals, the principles of which turn their back on the probabilism we have defended, and which is closer to game theory.
- 24.
We are especially thinking of what is been established at paragraph 8.3 of Chapter VIII of Moral Thinking. [5]
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Cléro, JP. (2021). Ethics and the Notion of Potentiality. In: Reflections on Medical Ethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65233-3_3
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