[Peace-discuss] Re: [UCprogressives] Re: Pro-choice [was Re: letter to my former comrades]

[Carl Estabrook]

Paul--

Yes, I think you're right to say, "... the central issue is the question
of the humanity of the fetus during the first and early second trimesters
of pregnancy, when most abortions are performed."

The procedure you propose ("...we need to ask ... what traits do humans
possess such that killing them is wrong; given an answer to this question,
we can then ask whether first trimester fetuses possess the needed
traits") is precisely that of philosopher Don Marquis in a famous article,
"Why Abortion Is Immoral," The Journal of Philosophy 86:4 (April 1989),
reprinted in "Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical
Ethics," 5th ed., ed. Ronald Munson (1996).  The article is a bit hard to
find, but there's a summary on the web, "A Non-Religious Anti-Abortion
Argument" <http://brindedcow.umd.edu/140/marquis.html>.

The difference between you and Marquis is that you answer the first
question ("What traits do humans possess such that killing them is
wrong?")  by suggesting a list of characteristics, while Marquis argues
that what makes killing someone, adult or child, wrong is that it deprives
them of a future like ours.  Marquis writes, "The loss of one's life
deprives one of all the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments
that would otherwise have constituted one's future. Therefore, killing
someone is wrong, primarily because the killing inflicts (one of) the
greatest possible losses on the victim."

Your argument depends on a description of personhood (or as you say
humanity) that includes the traits of "self awareness, higher
cognition..., the ability to learn and use a language, and the capacity
for emotional experience," such that, if a organism lacks all of these, it
may legitimately be killed.  (That list would seemingly grant humanity or
personhood to many mammals -- my dog has the fourth characteristic,
probably the first, and she certainly has the "particularly important ...
ability to anticipate the future," when I park the car in the vet's
parking lot...)

But unlike that of my dog, "The future of a standard fetus includes a set
of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identical with
the futures of adult human beings and are identical with the futures of
young children," writes Marquis. "Since the reason that is sufficient to
explain why it is wrong to kill human beings after the time of birth is a
reason that also applies to fetuses, it follows that abortion is prima
facie seriously morally wrong."

Marquis argues, it seems to me persuasively, that correctly to understand
why killing a human being is wrong is to see that that's also true of
fetal life.  He argues for "...the serious presumptive wrongness of
abortion subject to the assumption that the moral permissibility of
abortion stands or falls on the moral status of the fetus. Since a fetus
possesses a property, the possession of which in adult human beings is
sufficient to make killing an adult human being wrong, abortion is
wrong...."

Regards, Carl

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 ppatton at uiuc.edu wrote:

> Carl- I agree with you that a woman's right to control her own body is
> not, by itself, a sufficient argument that abortion should be allowed.
> I think the central issue is the question of the humanity of the fetus
> during the first and early second trimesters of pregnancy, when most
> abortions are performed.  The question we need to ask is what traits do
> humans possess such that killing them is wrong.  Given an answer to this
> question, we can then ask whether first trimester fetuses possess the
> needed traits.  I think it is especially instructive to imagine what
> traits a non-human (such as an intelligent machine) would need to have
> before we would consider destroying it to be murder.  I would like to
> suggest that the valued traits include self awareness, higher cognition
> (the ability to anticipate the future is of particular importance, since
> killing a person thwarts all of their future plans), the ability to
> learn and use a language, and the capacity for emotional experience.
> Note that I am not suggesting that a person must possess all of the
> valued traits, just some of them.  A person suffering from aphasia (the
> inability to use language, usually due to damage to Broca's or
> Wernicke's area of the cerebral cortex), for example, can still
> anticipate the future and experience emotions.  A person suffering
> damage to their cinguate cortex may exhibit a loss of emotional affect,
> but can still talk and think.  Developmentally disabled people still
> exhibit the valued human traits to a degree, and often possess "islands"
> of surviving normal human cognitive ability for particular tasks.  All
> of the valued traits that I have mentioned depend on the functional
> integrity of the cerebral cortex.  Many states recogize the special
> importance of the cerebral cortex by defining death as the irreversable
> cessation of cortical function.  The cerebral cortex is a late
> developing brain component.  At the end of the first trimester of
> pregnancy, the cerebral cortex is little more than a sheet of
> proliferating cells.  The entire body of the fetus, at this point, is
> smaller than a newborn baby's brain (size matters, because it is a rough
> indicator of complexity).  An organized cortical electroencephalogram
> isn't detectable until late in the second trimester.  I'm pro-choice
> because I don't believe it's reasonable to equate aborting a first
> trimester fetus with murdering a fully formed human person.  It's more
> like removing the feeding tube from a brain-dead patient. -Paul P.
> __________________________________________________________________ Dr.
> Paul Patton Research Scientist Beckman Institute Rm 3027 405 N. Mathews
> St. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois 61801
> work phone: (217)-265-0795 fax: (217)-244-5180 home phone:
> (217)-344-5812 homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html
>
> "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is
> the source of all true art and science." -Albert Einstein
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