- Greg
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Re: The Abortion issue.
I should add that the potentiality argument, along with the psychological conception of personhood which makes it necessary, seems to be open to a "pagan" objection. The reason for endorsing what Vallicella calls the "potentiality principle" (potential persons have a right to life) is to fit our intuition that it is immoral to kill infants. The argument against abortion is made by noting that killing fetuses is not relevantly different from killing infants.
But the intuition that it is immoral to kill infants is a novel one that was felt less intensely before Christianity. Maybe it isn't wrong to kill infants; a pagan might reject the potentiality principle and permit infanticide.
- iwpoe
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Re: The Abortion issue.
Greg wrote:
But the intuition that it is immoral to kill infants is a novel one that was felt less intensely before Christianity. Maybe it isn't wrong to kill infants; a pagan might reject the potentiality principle and permit infanticide.
Just so. This is the essence of the Roman pater familias in principle if not in practice- as well as certainly the Spartan, and to a lesser extent Athenian view of infants. In fact, the ancient greco-roman world was at least in principle inclined to treat the failure to expose infants as a weakness on the part of the Father whose duty it is to purge them from the family.
This view is generally considered reprehensible today.
I myself am willing to gesture towards a third option between substance and psychology: the spiritual/historical/social, second nature, objective spirit, that dimension of life that only we as human beings have in which subsists community, politics, language, and all of the rest of public and objective life above the animal.
One might also add that Christianity, as opposed to both Judaism and Islam, took this realm in in terms of the life of the Spirit in the Church. It is possible to object that the substance view of personhood, while more appropriate to the Spirit on the matter than the psychological view, which is paganism gone mad, is far too Judaic in trying to settle all our free nature in terms of dead law.
Last edited by iwpoe (2/21/2016 10:15 pm)
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
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It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- Mattman
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Re: The Abortion issue.
@greg
I understand your hesitation to endorse a potentiality view most definately.Though, I really do like bill and marquis style of argument. I think it's much more appealing to a secular base.
I go back and forth between whether I think which view is stronger.
One thing that always gets me with the substance view is the idea of human embryos that we know for a fact will die 4 days after implantation.Can we really say that this is a person like you or I? Im really having trouble seeing how. They will never have a future like you or I and what we have now is what enables us to say "I was once an embryo".
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Thread Starter- Mattman
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Re: The Abortion issue.
But the intuition that it is immoral to kill infants is a novel one that was felt less intensely before Christianity. Maybe it isn't wrong to kill infants; a pagan might reject the potentiality principle and permit infanticide.
Just so. This is the essence of the Roman pater familias in principle if not in practice- as well as certainly the Spartan, and to a lesser extent Athenian view of infants. In fact, the ancient greco-roman world was at least in principle inclined to treat the failure to expose infants as a weakness on the part of the Father whose duty it is to purge them from the family.
This view is generally considered reprehensible today.
I myself am willing to gesture towards a third option between substance and psychology: the spiritual/historical/social, second nature, objective spirit, that dimension of life that only we as human beings have in which subsists community, politics, language, and all of the rest of public and objective life above the animal.
One might also add that Christianity, as opposed to both Judaism and Islam, took this realm in in terms of the life of the Spirit in the Church. It is possible to object that the substance view of personhood, while more appropriate to the Spirit on the matter than the psychological view, which is paganism gone mad, is far too Judaic in trying to settle all our free nature in terms of dead law.
Yes, killing infants wasn't viewed as too big of a deal back in the day. And that is unfortunately still the view in certain little pockets of the world today. I really can never understand why people who do not beleive in some kind of fundamental human value can find killing a thoughtlessl goo goo infant to be so horrific. In all seriousness. A lot of pro choice people will say BECAUSE it is "conscious", as if this is something that is incredibly easy to ascertain. But OK so what if it is. It doesn't even know the idea of " ME". There so many different ways of being conscious and I'm really not getting why my newborn cousins causes him to have such value. He's valauble to me because he's my cousin full stop. And I also don't know how desires give a human being their value either. " I have the desire to eat my boogers now". Wonderful.
I'm liking your third option. I don't think I've heard of that take before. Can you tell me a little more about how this can apply to abortion?
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Thread Starter- iwpoe
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Re: The Abortion issue.
It need not apply to abortion at all: it is still possible to think that the prohibition on abortion follows from our first nature rather than our second even if you think that the second nature has a status above and beyond what would usually be called the merely psychological. Its just a question about the status of personhood. I haven't made the full ethical argument because I haven't made the full metaphysical argument. It's an aspect of something I've been working on by way of the German idealist tradition. And in communication with the classical philosophical tradition I'm talking to here, it might not work out. I think that the impulse to stick everything either in psychology or in substance is the same reductive impulse that would drive a vicious naturalism, so I rejected here in principle as much as I would reject it in any other part of metaphysics.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- Mattman
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Re: The Abortion issue.
It need not apply to abortion at all: it is still possible to think that the prohibition on abortion follows from our first nature rather than our second even if you think that the second nature has a status above and beyond what would usually be called the merely psychological. Its just a question about the status of personhood. I haven't made the full ethical argument because I haven't made the full metaphysical argument. It's an aspect of something I've been working on by way of the German idealist tradition. And in communication with the classical philosophical tradition I'm talking to here, it might not work out. I think that the impulse to stick everything either in psychology or in substance is the same reductive impulse that would drive a vicious naturalism, so I rejected here in principle as much as I would reject it in any other part of metaphysics.
Word.I want to know more. Do you have a log or anywhere I can read your thoughts on this. I'm interested in all views.
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Thread Starter- Greg
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Re: The Abortion issue.
One thing that always gets me with the substance view is the idea of human embryos that we know for a fact will die 4 days after implantation.Can we really say that this is a person like you or I? Im really having trouble seeing how.
It doesn't strike me as being too odd. A person (I think) is a substance of a rational nature. To say this is, on the one hand, to claim that it is typical of and normal for persons to behave rationally. On the other hand, to say this is also to distinguish being a person from behaving rationally now or having an immediately exercisable capacity to behave rationally. By defining person in this way we anticipate that in some cases (namely when things go wrong, when things are atypical and abnormal) having a rational nature and acting rationally come apart.
I think embryos that die four days after implantation are such a case. I also think infants that die a year after birth are also such a case.
They will never have a future like you or I and what we have now is what enables us to say "I was once an embryo".
I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. I take you to mean that it's our histories (including mental histories) that allow us to say, retrospectively, "I was once an embryo."
In one sense: Well, sure, I can only look back on being an embryo because I now exist and have the immediately exercisable capacity to look back. There wouldn't be an "I" talking if I'd died as a four-day-old embryo.
But in another sense: To say, "I was once an embryo," is to hold that there was an embryo which I once was. If "person" is a substance concept (i.e. if I persist by virtue of being a person) then I was a person, the same person, when I was an embryo. And this was not because I actually had a future; it was because of what I was at that time. Likewise other embryos generally are persons regardless of whether they in fact survive to exercise their rational capacities.
- Greg
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Re: The Abortion issue.
I really can never understand why people who do not beleive in some kind of fundamental human value can find killing a thoughtlessl goo goo infant to be so horrific. In all seriousness. A lot of pro choice people will say BECAUSE it is "conscious", as if this is something that is incredibly easy to ascertain.
Yeah, I tend to find appeals to consciousness like this fairly post hoc. Peter Singer has made a career making bold claims where liberals tend to settle for implausible justifications.
I feel similarly about consent-based sexual ethics. Consent is important, but I don't think it is really doing the work people put it to and doesn't track the outrage people tend to show toward certain sexual acts.
- Mattman
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Re: The Abortion issue.
One thing that always gets me with the substance view is the idea of human embryos that we know for a fact will die 4 days after implantation.Can we really say that this is a person like you or I? Im really having trouble seeing how.
It doesn't strike me as being too odd. A person (I think) is a substance of a rational nature. To say this is, on the one hand, to claim that it is typical of and normal for persons to behave rationally. On the other hand, to say this is also to distinguish being a person from behaving rationally now or having an immediately exercisable capacity to behave rationally. By defining person in this way we anticipate that in some cases (namely when things go wrong, when things are atypical and abnormal) having a rational nature and acting rationally come apart.
I think embryos that die four days after implantation are such a case. I also think infants that die a year after birth are also such a case.
They will never have a future like you or I and what we have now is what enables us to say "I was once an embryo".
I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. I take you to mean that it's our histories (including mental histories) that allow us to say, retrospectively, "I was once an embryo."
In one sense: Well, sure, I can only look back on being an embryo because I now exist and have the immediately exercisable capacity to look back. There wouldn't be an "I" talking if I'd died as a four-day-old embryo.
But in another sense: To say, "I was once an embryo," is to hold that there was an embryo which I once was. If "person" is a substance concept (i.e. if I persist by virtue of being a person) then I was a person, the same person, when I was an embryo. And this was not because I actually had a future; it was because of what I was at that time. Likewise other embryos generally are persons regardless of whether they in fact survive to exercise their rational capacities.
Understood. But I think if I had the option of destroying a two day old embryo that would die in two days in order to save a ten year olds life or not killing it and letting the kid die, I would kill it. Do you think this has any relevance?
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Thread Starter- Greg
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Re: The Abortion issue.
Understood. But I think if I had the option of destroying a two day old embryo that would die in two days in order to save a ten year olds life or not killing it and letting the kid die, I would kill it. Do you think this has any relevance?
It has some relevance. It's clear that the personhood and moral implications thereof are far more evident in a ten year old than in a two day old. I don't think that it ultimately tells us that the action is moral.