The purpose of this page is to address points brought up in a discussion on abortion on a medical student website. It in no way is intended to encompass the entirety of any single debate, but to introduce one way the philosophical idea of "personhood" applies to abortion. The following is a bit of personal correspondence I�ve had with a man whose livelihood is derived from readings and research on topics such as this. My own comments are italicized and in purple. Enjoy.
Personhood
At least in the moral realm, the concept of personhood arises from the problem of who or what should count in our deliberations of what to do. One common answer is that all and only humans are the proper objects of moral consideration. (Or of other moral concepts, such as rights.) The first problem with this is that we also will need a criterion or criteria for deciding what counts as being human in the relevant manner. Of course, many people will say that humans and no other creatures have souls. I don't believe that anyone has good reason to believe this, and it's not clear to me how this criterion would actually aid in figuring out what to do, since it's at least hard to tell whether or not something has a soul. But it's important to know whether or not people you talk to have this view, so that you know that you have to take the conversation there.
While Mr. S does not believe in souls the way many Christians and followers of other religions do, it stands to reason that souls are not matters of science or logic, but of religion. As we attempt to broaden the discussion and include voices from many faiths (and no faith at all), this particular point is excluded from consideration for the time being.
Other possibilities for what counts as human are easier to reject without significant argument. Just about all of them are going to be either too inclusive (DNA, for example, will quite obviously include toenails and fecal matter, among other things obviously not worthy of moral consideration) or too exclusive (language use or rationality, or potential for the same, will exclude some entities that we consider to be of moral considerability, not to mention some that we consider to be human in the pre-reflective sense of the term).
This bears clarification for those not in the lingo: DNA as a sole criterion would include anything that has human DNA as a person of its own right, even if it is something our bodies have cast off as a part or by product. Rationality, or the potential for it, as a definition is poor because we may exclude some humans which we care about in our discussions, namely, those who are comatose, severely retarded, or even sleeping.
There are also other good reasons to reject species membership as a criterion of moral considerability. Consider the following hypothetical situation: We discover that members of some other species on earth (present or future) have, or we are contacted by beings from elsewhere who have, the same or relevantly similar kinds of experiences, cognitive abilities, emotional states, and social arrangements that we have. Would there be any reasonable basis for denying those creatures equal moral consideration, merely because they are of a different species? I submit not, although you might find people who disagree. That would be another signpost for where a particular discussion needs to go.
It sounds like we�re talking about extraterrestrial, but it�s an important mental gymnastic exercise for the discussion. Even though it is a hypothetical, the outcome of our debate on whether our Martian friends are "persons" given the above criteria is an important one and lends itself to furthering ideas of what persons are or are not.
Now if membership in the human species turns out not to be of moral significance, (as membership in the male sex, the white "race," etc.), one might wonder what *is* of moral significance. Well, there area lot of possible answers--my preferred criteria include, but are not necessarily limited to, sentience and sapience. Sentience is, to me, the bare minimum required to generate any kind of direct obligation to an entity. If a thing does not have experiences at all, how could it possibly be wrong, assuming no indirect duties to other, sentient, creatures, to use them as you like? Sapience, which is often considered a useful gloss of "personhood," is of course the ability to recognize (or, perhaps, the actuality of recognizing) oneself as a conscious being continuing through time. This is relevant because both the kinds and degrees of harm and well-being available to such [sapient] creatures is clearly greater than those of (merely) sentient creatures.
By "having experiences," we�re not talking simply about what happens to something or someone. We�re talking about what happens to something or someone AND which that thing or one can respond to, interact with, create memories from, and seek or avoid later. From this definition of sentience, a dog and a child are both sentient. A cauliflower or someone in a persistent vegetative state is not. While there may be biological processes that cause some forms of "memory" or change even on a cellular level, that�s not quite the kind of sentience above.
So, I have to wonder as to who is being harmed when early fetuses are aborted. They don't feel pain, any more than do sperm and egg cells, and certainly aren't self-aware. Hence, there is no harm being done to (at least some) fetuses when they are aborted, there being nothing there that can be harmed. (Unless, of course, you believe that there is some moral status conveyed by the likely or possible existence of future beings causally linked with the present entity. Again, if this is the position of your interlocutor, that would necessitate further discussion in that vein.)
And here is the sticky point. It�s true that early fetuses have rudimentary at best sensation with minimal to no awareness or processing of those signals. But it�s those who assign moral status to these fetuses anyway: which is often the pro-life side of any abortion discussion. For those who assign such status, personhood is somewhat irrelevant as it is defined here.
One final point: I, at least, consider moral considerability to issue in reasons for action (so, I have a reason not to kick my dog), but these reasons are defensible in the fact of other reasons for action. I might (and in fact do) have all sorts of reasons for action, most of which are incompatible with each other. However, reasons can be weighed and compared. Hence, I may have most reason to exercise, because even though I have a reason not to (assuming that I find exercise in itself unpleasant), I have a greater reason to do so (my health).
I wish this point had been developed more. Basically, the point is that moral considerability rests on a continuum of things pitted against each other, in which one "wins" � resulting in action. It is very much like a list of moral pros and cons, with the most and least important of all reasons weighed together, and producing a final outcome. It�s hard to do this. Reasons don�t come with a 1-10 scale of importance, but for each of us, we have a decent gut feeling as to what is more important to (or of equal importance for) us. Moral consideration isn�t just one hard and fast rule; it comes out of a variety of related rights, wrongs, betters, and worses. The rigor is showing the logic of the underlying considerations to the resulting action.
BTW: you can go ahead and attribute anything of what I said to me, but it should probably be made clear that it's ultimately derived from Singer (first chapter, Animal Liberation). --C.S., Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, Washington University (St. Louis, MO). Thanks!
Another note: questions might be best answered by examining some of what Singer himself wrote, as well as the responses of his critics. Many of the points and counterpoints have doubtlessly been brought up in more local discussions, and I think the authors themselves clarify their words better than third parties. Thanks for your interest � Namaste.