Friday, January 21, 2011

We All Decide Who Are People And Who Are Not

Comments like this are really silly:
"The question is -- and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer: Is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no," Santorum says in the interview, which was first picked up by CBN's David Brody. "Well if that person, human life is not a person, then, I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'We are going to decide who are people and who are not people.'"
Then what's a black man supposed to do? Nobody of any race can go through life without drawing the people / nonpeople distinction somewhere. For example, unless you draw it in such a way that some foods aren't people, you can't eat anything without committing a murderous act of cannibalism. And if your pants are people, you go around wearing people a lot, which is less bad but still kind of weird. The more serious disagreement involves animals -- some of us think they deserve some portion of the regard that persons do. Others don't think so.

The philosophical issue surrounding the personhood of the fetus is that some of us think you need a mind of some minimal sort in order to be a person, while others think it's just a matter of having human DNA, or being able to at some future point become a human. A few years ago I wrote something about why the former view is a lot better than the latter.

I'm not going to pretend that the psychological roots of people's feelings about abortion lie entirely in this philosophical question -- attitudes toward female sexuality play a huge role. But as far as the personhood question goes, drawing the person/nonperson boundary is something both sides have to do, and anti-abortion people shouldn't be taken seriously when they claim that only their opponents are doing it.

5 comments:

yoyo said...

It seems to me a lot of people might be susceptible to the "it has human DNA" argument just because they have little experience with science and philosophical hypotheticals, and thus persuaded by dumb arguments.

The focus on "woman's right to choose/privacy" also obscures the argument about when personhood obtains.

Hector_St_Clare said...

Re: The philosophical issue surrounding the personhood of the fetus is that some of us think you need a mind of some minimal sort in order to be a person, while others think it's just a matter of having human DNA, or being able to at some future point become a human

Well, firstly, many of us on the pro-life side, at least the religious ones, do believe that the unborn child does have a soul beginning at, or shortly after, conception. We do _not_ believe that the soul, or the mind, are simply manifestations of the physical working of the brain, so it isn't necessary for the fetus to have a functioning brain in order for it to have a soul.

That having been said, even if you are a physicalist who doesn't believe in the existence of the soul, the argument that the unborn child is a unique human organism, and that he or she will someday become a person who has all the capacities we have, would by themselves be (in my opinion) strong enough grounds for declaring abortion to be immoral and/or illegal. (With some caveats for severe threats to the life or health or the mother, and maybe also for fetuses that are not going to be able to survive anyway).

Here's a hypothetical, since you folks seem to be fond of them: in the old Turkish Empire, it was not uncommon for parents to castrate their children and then sell them to the royal court (where they could often make a good living as eunuch officials). Was that doing an injustice to the child? All it was doing was depriving them of a _future_ capacity (sexuality) not of a capacity that they currently exercised. If you think that the practice of castration was immoral, and all decent people do, then the logical implication is that individual human beings are entitled not just to enjoy the capacities and abilities they currently have, but those that they can reasonably and inevitably be expected to acquire in the future.

The unborn child is clearly a unique human being (the life of a diploid organism begins when that organism is conceived- look at any decent biology textbook, this is uncontroversial), so this would seem to suggest that the child is then entitled to those capaicties it can reasonably be expected to exercise in the future, which include living a full, healthy life in this world. To argue otherwise would be to give too much importance to the temporal dimension of things- and as pointed out elsewhere, it would justify not just Turks castrating their sons, but also the murder of sleeping people and the like.

N.B: this argument about future capacities, of course, doesn't extend to fetuses who are so badly malformed that they will never be able to survive more than a couple months, and so forth. I think on religious grounds that killing those fetuses is still generally immoral, but you can at least make a case there that you can't make in the case of most unborn children.

MikeYo said...

Santorum is being his usual flame-throwing, uncompromising cultural conservative self. I don't think that the legality of abortion is connected to the status of a fetus as a person with the same rights as someone who has been born. First, to find that a fetus is entitled to the same legal protections as an infant child is sort of intellectually dishonest. There are obviously real differnces between a fetus and an infant child (most notably that one is litterally connected to the mother). Similarly, there are differences between an infant child and a young adult. While both the infant and the young adult are considered "persons" under the law, they are very different under the law. In the same way, I believe that while a fetus is clearly human, this does not mean that a fetus is legally the same as a 20 year old or an infant.
For millenia, there have been women who decide that they cannot and will not carry their pregnancies to term. No law has ever been successful in convincing many of these women to not terminate their pregnancies. In fact, efforts to ban abortion often have deeply inhumane results. A legalized abortion, while perhaps unpleasant, is a clean, humane, and controlled means of offering a service for which the demand cannot be contained by the law. Moreover, the debate over the legality (not the justness) of abortion abscures the fact that our society is unlikely to be confortable with the effect of using the criminal law to punish women who terminate their pregnancies.
Santorum's comment reflects his intellectual immaturity with respect to the complexity of abortion in human society. It also shows his lack of rhetorical ethics in that he tries to advance his position by tethering it to the clearly racist law in early America that Blacks were to be counted as less than Whites for purposes of the Census. The fact that it was clearly wrong to say that a Black man was 3/4 of a White man does not mean that there must be no legal distinction between a fetus and an infant child.

Hector_St_Clare said...

Re: There are obviously real differnces between a fetus and an infant child (most notably that one is litterally connected to the mother)

That's true, but I fail to see why that means that we have a right to kill the unborn child. Society, and the mother, have a moral obligation (and should have a legal obligation as well) to protect his or her life, just as we have the general obligation to protect other innocent human life. In some extreme cases, when there are serious threats to the mother's life or health, then that consideration can be outweighed by the need to protect the mother, but except in those kind of serious medical emergencies, I fail to see how killing the child can be justified.

Re: No law has ever been successful in convincing many of these women to not terminate their pregnancies.

Wrong. People on your side tend to repeat this a lot, but it doesn't really withstand scrutiny, so I'm not sure why it's still repeated. See the study 'Abortion' by Potts, Diggory and Peel, from 1970, in which they tried to estimate the number of abortions (legal and illegal) taking place around 1970. The best estimate is that there were about 400-800 000 all told. In the few years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion rate went up tto 1.6 million, which is at least a 200% increase, and possibly as much as 400% increase. Abortion is like any other good: make them easier to get, and you will have more of them. No one believes that making most abortions illegal would end the practice, but it would certainly reduce the incidence.

Re: does not mean that there must be no legal distinction between a fetus and an infant child.

Making 'legal distinctions' is all very well, but we are still bound to respect the most fundamental obligation we have to each other, the protection of innocent human life.

MikeYo said...

Well, I was trying to frame my belief that abortion should be legal as in technical, philosophical legal terms. The reason I was doing this is because the argument that abortion should be illegal because the fetus is a "person" is ultimately a technical, semantic argument. It ignores the larger impact of banning abortion. Whether you like it or not, women sometimes get pregnant but do not want to have the baby and don't want to continue being pregnant. I fail to see what society gains by forcing her to remain pregnant. Your argument often claims that we, as a society, would be more respectful of human life if abortion were illegal. I just don't understand how that belief has ever manifested itself in reality. Look at the slums of the developing world or the even in many parts of the developed world where women have children very often before they are ready and without really wanting a child. You think that's where human life is respected? You think that is humanity? How absurd for the goal of our public policy to just be fewer abortions. The goal should be for a better, fairer world. Limiting abortion by the brute force of the law doesn't seem like it goes in that direction. Abortion isn't pretty and perhaps we must work towards a world where it isn't needed anymore, but the fact that it isn't pretty doesn't mean it's time to sick the police, the prosecutors, and the prisons on scared, young women who aren't ready to be pregnant or to have a child. You should be willing to entertain the thought that these women have very, very good reasons for not wanting to continue with the pregnancy.