Fetal and our potentiality

Consider this standard story:

Whatever value fetuses have derives from their potentiality (and here various distinctions matter) to grow into humans that actually have various valuable features, features that are not simply potentialities. Typical human adults actually have the valuable features that ground their moral status, while fetuses only potentially have these features. The question of the moral status of the fetus, then, is the question of how far their potentiality makes it possible to extend to them the moral status that typical human adults have (and, likewise, to extend the moral status of typical human adults to atypical ones).

I have argued in earlier posts that the kind of potentiality fetuses have does call for the extension of moral status. But I now wonder if this whole line of thought doesn't presuppose a mistaken view, namely that the moral status of typical human adults is grounded in the actual possession of valuable non-potentiality features. Specifically, I worry that this line of thought has too optimistic a view of the human race.

The feature of human beings that matters most centrally seems to be the moral life. But in practice our moral life just isn't all that good. We are full of self-deceit, akrasia and dollops of malice, in different combinations. Is it really the case that typical human beings are morally good in such a way that their actual moral goodness gives them the kind of moral status we are thinking about?

And in any case, even if, say, 70% of adult human beings do have such moral goodness, what about those of us who are in the other 30%? They, too, have moral status. No matter how many crimes one has committed previously, no matter how wicked one is, one has the moral and legal right to a fair trial, to a punishment that does not exceed the gravity of the offense.

What I said about the moral life also goes for the intellectual life: the typical human's intellectual life just isn't much to be proud of. Just think of all the fallacious forms of reasoning we engage in. Plus, I do not know how central the intellectual life is to moral status. Suppose there was a race of super-intelligent mathematicians who had no drive but to prove interesting theorems and no moral life to speak of. Would they have the kind of moral status humans have? I don't know. (It could be that they would have to have the rudiments of a moral life, in that they would have to be attuned at least to the values of truth and beauty to practice mathematics well. So it could be that the thought experiment is impossible.)

Now, it may well be that the above thoughts are too pessimistic. The George MacDonad quote here seems quite significant. But I still think this is worth thinking about, and I think there is something to the idea that the moral status of typical adult humans comes not so much from actual valuable properties, but from their innate potentiality for the good moral life. It is what we should (eventually?) be, not what we are, that is central to our dignity on this suggestion.

Fetal potentiality

Jarrett Cooper raised an important and interesting question about the potentiality of fetuses to become adults in a comment, and I thought I'd make a post with a response. The center of the question is:

There are those who dislike the use of the potential verbiage that is used for pro-life arguments. Namely, to ground the moral worth of fetuses in that they have the potential (albeit undeveloped) to become beings with consciousnesses, intellect, language, etc. They argue that the word "potential" has a very broad scope and therefore defending the use of potential with regards to fetuses becomes arbitrary.
What I gather is that their concern is there are many things have potential to be such and such. After all, it is said that we are star dust, but yet we don't view exploding stars nor the mere star dust remnants themselves as human beings. This is because even if we are just star dust, there's a whole bunch of processes that have to occur to get a human being.

I think we can identify two relevant distinctions between how an F (say, a fetus, a bit of star dust, or some clay) becomes a G, and corresponding to these two distinctions there are relevant distinctions as to F's potentiality to become a G.

The first distinction is implicit in the rest of Mr. Cooper's comment and may be on a continuum. This is the distinction between F's changing itself into a G and F's being changed into a G.

For instance, an acorn changes or transforms into an oak tree, but an oak tree is changed or transformed into a canoe. In both cases there is both internal and external causal agency. The acorn needs water, soil and sunlight to become an oak tree. The oak tree needs cutting and joining to become a boat. Note, however, that the second of these two sentences, while having an interpretation on which it is true, sounds odd. For while the acorn seems to be primary agent when it becomes the oak tree, the boat-builder is the primary agent when the oak tree becomes a boat. The water, soil and sunlight have a supportive role in the transformation, and the acorn, driven by its DNA, has a primary active role. In the case of the boat, however, the boat-builder does not merely have a supportive role in the process. Either she is the primary agent, or else she and the oak tree are jointly primary agents.

Corresponding to this distinction there is a distinction between an F's potentiality to change itself into a G, and an F's potentiality to be changed into a G. Neither the human ovum nor star dust have the potentiality to change themselves themselves into an adult. In the case of the human ovum, that is because a genetically equal or almost equal input from the sperm is required (almost, since DNA may not be the sum total of the genetic code; cytological context matters, for instance). And a fortiori star dust can't change itself into an adult human.

There is a second distinction, perhaps more principled. There are three ways in which we can say that an F changes into a G. First, we have accidental change, where the entity that is initially identical with an F is eventually identical with a G. Thus, the child becomes the adult: the same individual that was the change is later the adult. Second, we have substantial change, where the entity that is an F perishes an a G comes into existence. For instance, this happens when a book burns into smoke and ashes. There is no one entity that once was a book and later is smoke and ashes (though there may be particles that once constituted a book and later constitute smoke and ashes). Third, we have what we might call constitutional change, where the F comes to constitute a G. In this case, the "be" in "F comes to be a G" is the "to be" of constitution rather than of identity. For instance, sticks become a house. But it is never literally true that the sticks are identical with a house. To be more precise, we should say that the sticks come to constitute the house.

It is never true to say that the entity that was identical with star dust is now identical with a human. What we can say, depending on difficult metaphysical questions, is at most that the star dust comes to constitute a human (or, better, a human's body) or that the particles that constituted star dust now constitute the human. Likewise, the ovum is not identical with the adult human. It changes substantially into a human adult: the ovum perishes, by merging with the sperm, and a human comes into existence from its death, like smoke and ashes come into existence from a book.

On the other hand, a fetus's change into an adult is an accidental change: the same entity that was identical with a fetus comes to be identical with an adult.

A potential to change oneself accidentally into an adult human is a much more morally significant potential than a potential to be changed substantially or constitutively into an adult human.

It may sound strange to say that a potential for an accidental change would give rise to a more important status than a potential for a substantial change. But the reason for that is that the fact that the fetus's change into an adults is an accidental change means that there is only an accidental difference between the fetus and an adult.

Memory, animals and personhood

Consider the following plausible theses:

1. Some non-human animals that are not persons (maybe dogs and maybe even rats) have experiential memories, i.e., memories in which they remember having lived through past events.
2. Human intellectual development is continuous and relatively slow.
3. It is an essential property of me that I am a person. In particular, if personhood begins at some point t after conception, then t is when I come to exist.

Interestingly, we cannot hold on to (1)-(3) as well as this thesis:

4. Personhood requires developed capacities for distinctively personal functioning.

For suppose for a reductio ad absurdum that (4) is true. Then at some point a year or two after conception, just when I developed capacities for distinctively personal functioning, I came into existence. Now imagine me on that first day of personhood and of existence. Because of the continuity of human intellectual development, a day earlier I was also a very sophisticated animal, presumably sophisticated enough to have formed experiential memories. After all, it seems very plausible given (2) that I've gone through all intermediate levels of intellectual development, and those stages, by (1) and (4) (we need (4) here to guarantee for the sake of argument what I ultimately deny, namely that personhood is a level of intellectual development), include a level where there are experiences but no personhood. These memories surely carry over.

So let's suppose that on my first day of personhood I remember myself as playing blocks with my dad a day earlier. But according to (3), I did not exist before personhood, and if I did not exist, I did not play blocks with my dad, either. And hence this experiential memory, inherited from the non-person human animal that preceded me, is incorrect and unveridical. This is absurd enough.

And here is a further, more serious, oddity. That experiential memory was veridical in the human animal a day before personhood came to be. It presumably still is correct in the human animal. So both the human animal and the human person have the same memory, or apparent memory, but it's only correct in the human animal and not in the human person. So the two memories have different content. This is very weird indeed. Furthermore, such formation of animal memories surely continues during personhood. So I have memories of having eaten breakfast and my animal has memories of having eaten breakfast, and these two memories have different content—for one can be correct (if, say, one remembers a breakfast prior to the advent of one's personhood) while the other is not. All this is very weird. (Of course, there is a non-coincidental resemblance here to Olson's arguments for animalism, but I find these versions add something, though maybe not.)

This is all too odd. So we really can't hold on to all of (1)-(4). I think one should deny (4). Some (e.g., Jeff McMahan) will deny (3) instead.

Fetuses and capacity

One of the abortion debates is between those, like Mary Anne Warren, who think that personhood requires a "developed" capacity for distinctively personal functioning (including all or many of features like: self-awareness, general communication, freedom, problem-solving, etc.), or at least that such a developed capacity is needed for the prohibition on killing to apply, and those who think an undeveloped capacity is sufficient, either for personhood or the prohibition on killing or both. Of course, normal fetuses have an undeveloped capacity for distinctively personal functioning.

Here is a line of thought. Imagine an alien species that suffers through a boiling hot season every ten earth years ("The Boiling"). Most species on that planet die off at that time, leaving some hardy spores or seeds. But one species, the cysters, evolved intelligence and an ability to gather experience over a period of time longer than ten earth years. A biological cycle triggered by increased temperatures records one's memories and character traits in a hardy storage module that can survive The Boiling, and the body entirely sheds its brain and other soft tissues, becoming a kind of cyst. When The Boiling passes, the brain and other soft tissues regrow based on the genetic code, in the same way that they grew in the first place, and memories and traits from the storage module are written back into the regrown brain.

We would expect the cysters to have strong prohibitions against destroying normal fellow cysters once they have gone into the cyst stage (say, with a time bomb). And it is intuitively very plausible that these prohibitions would be correct: killing normal cysters in the cyst stage is wrong. Furthermore, it is plausible that a cyster in the cyst stage is still a person, though I am not insisting on this.

But notice that in cyst stage, the cysters do not have a developed capacity for distinctively personal activity. They have no brains! Granted, they have a module that holds memories and character traits. But they no more have developed capacities for distinctively personal activity than an embryonic gecko has a developed capacity for eating insects. The embryonic gecko presumably has genetic information sufficient to produce a vertebrate brain that will guide its eating of insects. All the information is there, just as in the cyster's memory module. But the presence of the information is insufficient for a developed capacity.

Moreover, imagine that Sam is a cyster who has acquired a capacity for distinctively personal activity an hour earlier, and has since had an hour of experiences. Moreover, suppose Sam does not remember anything prior to the acquiring of that capacity and Sam's character's non-genetic development only started when Sam acquired that capacity. And now the signs of The Boiling show up, and Sam goes to cyst. Clearly it's wrong to kill Sam. But it would be weird to think that the hour of experience makes the crucial difference here.

So it is false that the prohibition on killing requires developed capacities for distinctively personal functioning. And it is likely also false that such capacities are required for personhood.

Neonates' cries influenced by native language

This is rather neat.

Was I once a fetus?

Let x be the fetus in my past that grew into me. Here is a valid Aristotelian argument (though Aristotle himself would probably deny (4)).

1. (Premise) The identity of a bodily organ depends on the identity of the individual whose organ it is, so that if A is c's unshared heart (sharing occurs in the case of Siamese twins), and B is d's unshared heart, and c and d are distinct individuals, then A and B are distinct organs.
2. (Premise) x has exactly one heart, h_x, and it is unshared.
3. (Premise) I have exactly one heart, h_I, and it is unshared.
4. (Premise) h_x=h_I.
5. Therefore, I am x. (By 1-4)

The controversial premises are (1) and (4).