18.
"Pet cat"or "pet dog" is an appropriate characterization of the present legal status of the fetus in many states.
If the owner likes it, she is free to care for and nourish it. But if not, she is free to euthanize it.
In New York State, the "pet animal" status lasts until the verge of birth (which in some cases implies "abortion" just after birth when verge-of-birth abortion fails ).
Which one of Gov. Cuomo's three children would have been OK to sacrifice at the verge of birth? Would he have been fine with his then-wife Kerry deciding, just before delivery, to terminate the pregnancy?
Is the unintended uterine object (does that sound mechanical/objective enough?) your son or your daughter? If you are the woman, is that thing your male partner's son or daughter? If so, how can it be that the State denies him all rights in the decision of termination?
Again, is that entity -- at whatever stage you choose -- your son or your daughter, or is it only your potential son or potential daughter, analogously to an acorn being a potential oak tree -- but no one thinks an acorn as a right to grow into a mature oak.
Those questions should be faced by the woman before she decides on abortion. But, we all know of the human tendency to dodge such thoughts when we are grasping for excuses to rationalize what we may believe is a morally tenuous decision. Those in the "us girls" world and their male associates think that they should help shield the woman from that sort of self-examination. Help her to dodge. Don't listen to those
men. And so on. But, how are they doing her a favor by urging her, or smoothing the way for her, to make a hasty and quite possibly ill-considered decision? They are imposing their own mental wall onto her mind, which, true, may be what she wants. But, we never do another person a favor by "enabling" them to avoid thinking out what they are doing. If they won't, they won't. But we should not further that.
In fact, women who smooth the way for others to have abortions really have a moral duty to poiint-blank ask the abortion-seeker: "Do you see this internal entity as an actual daughter or actual son or as a potential daughter or potential son? Come back tomorrow after you have thought this over."
I realize that feminists will react: that is just what pro-lifers want, to scare and deter the woman! But that emotional reaction screens out the point that it's the feminists, if they really care about the abortion seeker, who should be defending her need to make an informed, considered choice.
19.
The penchant for rationalization is seen in the recent referendum in Ireland, in which voters were told that "this way, women need not travel all the way to Ulster to have the procedure, as they do at present. Obviously, many things may be legal in some other jurisdiction but are not necessarily moral justifiable. In Stone Age Greece, the power of the father was supreme. If he decided that his wife's newborn must be left exposed to the elements to die, no one would stop him. Yet, we cannot imagine rationalizing going up to Ulster or staying in the south on a mission to kill a newborn.
The woman prime minister of course felt that this is something to which modern women are entitled. Without "reproductive rights" women who don't abstain from sex will remain subject to males, the thinking goes. That is, the feminist believes -- and persuades many others -- that women's empowerment hinges on the right to be rid of the unwanted uterine growth.
This modern position stems from the Protestant (Lockean) concept of self-ownership. The individual owns his or her body and may do with it as he or she sees fit. Of course, there are exceptions. Conscription during wartime, usage of outlawed drugs, public drunkenness (even when no one else is threatened).
In any case, self-ownership comes from the Protestant idea that every adult is competent to determine his or her relationship to God, that others need not impose their beliefs on him as to how to worship or what to believe. Many people have taken this concept to mean that each self is utterly autonomous, and so entitled to control his or her future to the nth degree. (The fact that such goals are unrealistic doesn't deter anyone... best laid plans etc.)
So what we have is the need of the one self to override the other self on ground that it isn't really a self. I own my body but it doesn't own its. Self-ownership for me, but not for the new being.
20.
Rights and Wrongs of Abortion, ed cohen... p6. Jarvis's (Defense of Abortion) argument requires (so far) that the "right to life" position has no exceptions or admits no fuzzy boundaries.
But is this fair? People in a lifeboat or in an arctic hut may draw lots who dives into the icy or shark-riven waters or walks off into the blizzard in order that the remaining person or persons have a chance at survival. Similar situations occur in wartime. That is, even for the most ardent pro-lifer, there can be extenuating circumstances. Once in a while, there is nothing for it but to forcibly remove the fetus -- otherwise both woman and fetus die.
Other difficult situations: a girl who is essentially too young to have been able to make a proper decision (say 10 to 12 years old).
A girl who is a victim of incest from a young age.
A rape victim.
A couple who discover that the fetus, who may be rather far along, has a terrible congenital condition.
These are tough cases. But, morally speaking they don't differ much from the choices of the lifeboat or the Arctic hut.
Yet, this tragic cases should not be used to rationalize any desire to "terminate a pregnancy." There is even a battle over the language. "Terminate pregnancy" has a nice, cool clinical sound to it (of the sort that Nazis were proficient at devising). One doesn't say "Terminate a baby." "Terminate a human life." It's the social method of providing evasions. The press has pretty much rolled over and accepted the whole feminist vocabulary and line. So women are even further influenced by such propaganda techniques.
In the case in which the choice is between whether the prospective mother or the fetus lives, the modern view that the woman's life is inherently more valuable than the fetus's stems from our fear of death. We fear that death ends all our hopes and dreams, that we are annihilated. The self cannot brook that thought. So better the other self die before it knows what hit than this (subjective) self. Of course loved ones identify with the woman far more than with the pretty much invisible fetus. And that's the real issue. Who identifies (empathizes) with the fetus?
Though we deny it, our society has become increasingly focused on "every man/woman for him/her self."
21.
PA Feinberg. p71. A problem with much of the debate on abortion [at least in this book of 70s and 80s articles] is that there is inadequate attention as to the sorts of things going on in the woman's mind when she is thinking of aborting.
Such as:
1. Why should YOU MAKE ME have a baby if I don't want to?
2. The father of the "baby" doesn't love me, and so I don't feel as though WE are having a baby together.
3. I am afraid the baby will look too different from my husband, or boyfriend, and he will get mad.
4. If I have a baby now, my parents will be mad.
5. If I have a baby now, I won't be able to proceed with my career aspirations.
6. My boyfriend wants me to have one so he won't have to take care of it. And I love my boyfriend.
7. I'm embarrassed to have a baby before I get married. I was planning on a big wedding, and it's not the same when you already have a baby.
It is easy to say, Well, these are all about Self. But the woman, like the man, finds it difficult to step beyond self, especially in a society which emblazons self-love and smirks at or ignores God, as we see from the grist of the daily media which so strongly influences our perceptions and beliefs. That is, even for women strongly grounded in religious or spiritual ways, it is very difficult to overcome the incessant barrage of the gospel of self-interest (only).
Later, the woman may regret her decision. But, as the old saying goes: Sin in a moment, repent at leisure.
In any case, a major part of the problem is that women see, and have been taught to see, as being about POWER. Women's empowerment is the rallying cry. Of course, the power to abort is the power to kill. But that's not what they mean. They mean the power to be like a man, free of responsibility as used to be the case when many young men started babies and then vanished from the scene (modern laws and technology make that much more different to do). I want to be free to run, to fly free, like the men. Anyone can understand this desire. But is it really OK to translate that desire into the right to kill? (It's not really killing; it's terminating something that doesn't have an inherent right to live.)
Agreed that in the days before wide availability of birth control, and particularly before the advent of the pill, most women were de facto disempowered. Having sex meant having kids meant forsaking career dreams. Nature, more than the Church, had placed women at a disadvantage in so far as being forced to rely on men, even those they no longer loved. Those who had to work outside the home scrabbled to get what they could. They weren't so much Super Moms with swell careers as unfortunates who had not attained Middle Class ease in which they did not work outside the home, except for volunteer work.
The pill was the real dynamite of the sexual revolution. Now there was no need to keep bearing children. Fun sex became the "in" thing, which young people actually rather often as opposed to a few times before marriage became necessary. Now young women could realistically aspire to careers.
But, what happens when prophylactic birth control fails -- for whatever reason? "You're going to take away MY future because of one slip-up?!" Thus the lure of an "easy, simple procedure."
And, legalization makes it even more appealing. If everybody is doing it, maybe it's OK.
That's how young people who turn to looting think. Everybody's doing it, so I can too. The police aren't stopping us ("legalization"), so we might as well.
In other words, social acceptability -- as promulgated by opinion leaders and lawmakers or others -- tends to legitimize behaviors that are morally questionable. This is why pro-lifers compare the whole socially conditioned abortion system as akin to Nazi rationalizations of genocide. Similar propaganda methods are used.
The propagandists and opinion leaders take advantage of the fact that many young people -- and not only young -- are very hazy on the difference between socially acceptable and morally justifiable. The arguments used by young looters are rationalizations give a sheen of moral justifiably to greed and theft.
I don't doubt that it is often the case that a woman uses the same sort of rationalization -- self-deception -- to excuse what she wants to do. Like the young looter, she may lack a firm moral footing. And very often her boyfriend is no different in that regard.
She does not wish to be immoral -- or at least to be seen by herself or others that way. So the various slogans of feminism are perfect substitutes for deep reflection, enabling avoidance of certain areas of thought. Do you suppose the abortion-prone woman has thought through what it means to be human? It's easier to project resentment at "men" and "bishops" than to look inward.
I don't doubt that the abortion liberal assumes that he or she is right. Liberal arguments in favor of abortion permissibility tend to stem from moral relativism -- a consequence of the background ideology of agnostic (de facto atheist) Darwinism. Two outgrowths of moral relativism are -- most assuredly -- Nazism and Communism. Yes, true liberals find those ideologies abhorrent. Yet, just as moral relativism suits "the survival of the fittest," so is it the moral framework of war. "All's fair in love and war," said the bard. We normally don't deliberately kill people we don't know, sight unseen. Except when at war.
Yet moral relativism also is the fallback position of many during peacetime. It is essentially a criminal outlook, even though held by a very nice liberal professor.
But not only liberals think that way. Good ol' American competitiveness is, on the part of all too many, taken to absurd, not to say tragic, extremes. Too much Self. Not enough Other. "Love your Neighbor, as your Self." Is your fetus your neighbor? Is her fetus your neighbor?
Note that I have not addressed the question as to why abortion might be morally wrong -- in some fundamental human sense. We will talk about that elsewhere.
22.
RFSS Martin p73. Of an aborted fetus, Augustine believed that the afterlife body would be beautiful and fully formed.
Well, that's quite a puzzle.
Augustine answers the cannibalism poser with an atomic theory. God will simply use the pre-cannibalistic state of affairs to put all a body's original atoms back where they belong. But that doesn't quite work. Suppose a child was fed cannibalistically all his life, and suppose further his life was short and so all his food came from one body, which he consumed in its entirety. Then, a large number of the corpse's atoms are also his.Augustine says that God will make up the difference and supply any needed atoms.What this is all about is whether resurrection implies a single materialistic body/soul.
23.
PA Feinberg. Mary Anne Warren. "The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion."
Unfortunately[?], however, the fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side effects does not, in itself, show that the restrictions are unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless of the consequences of prohibiting it; and the appeal to the right to control one's body, which is generally construed as a property right, is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of abortion. Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property, and indeed I am apt to be held responsible if such people injure themselves while on my property. It is equally unclear that I have any moral right to expel any innocent person from my property when I know that doing so will result in his death.
Furthermore, it is probably inappropriate to describe a woman's body as her property, since it seems natural to hold that a person is something distinct from her property, but not from her body. Even those who would object to the identification of a person with his body, or with the conjunction of his body and mind, must admit that it would be very odd to describe, say, breaking a leg as damaging one's property, and much more appropriate to describe it as injuring oneself.
She favors abortion on ground that even a nine-month-old fetus is not a conscious, active person. Though her criteria also hold for the newborn, she argues that social custom militates against infanticide, though such killing would not necessarily be immoral. This was 1982. See how infanticide is today acceptable at abortion clincs.
24.
PA Feinberg. "Understanding the Abortion Argument." Roger Wertheimer.
According to the liberal [1971], the fetus should be disposable on the mother's request until it is viable; thereafter it may be destroyed only to save the mother's life. To an extreme liberal, the fetus is always like an appendix, and may be destroyed on demand anytime before its birth. A moderate view is that the viability of the fetus should be disposable if it is the result of felonious intercourse, or if the mother's or child's physical or mental health would probably be gravely impaired. This position is subject to wide variations. The conservative position is that the fetus may be aborted before quickening but not after, unless the mother's life is at stake. For the extreme conservative, the fetus, once conceived, may not be destroyed for any reason short of saving the mother's life.
Also,
For the moderate, the fetus is not a human being, but it's not a mere maternal appendage either; it's a human fetus, and it has a separate moral status just as animals do. A fetus is not an object that we can treat however we wish, neither is it a person whom we must treat as we would wish to be treated in return.
Of course, no law codes require that you and I follow the Golden Rule with respect to our fellow humans. Yet, I suppose you can imagine yourself in the womb, trusting that nothing terrible will happen to you. Yes, we are retrojecting a feeling of empathy with a fetus in the womb. But, doesn't it make sense to extend our human empathy to those who are, or should be, en route to being born? Even though the logic doesn't strictly work, you can imagine yourself in the womb hoping you won't be killed by your mother and her doctor.
No one, except perhaps the mother, feels grief for the object of a spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage. Isn't that a meaningful fact?
25.
RFSS Martin p31. Epictetus boosted the idea of individualism. "Remember, you are an actor in a play." In fact before him the notion of persona was associated with the mask and role of a character in a religious drama. People did not see themselves as anything but their social role and job -- how they fit in. Most were not independent agents.
26.
RFSS Martin p56-57. I suspect that the human soul, as an image of God, is always manifested as a body -- except in cases where something has gone wrong (no disembodied souls). The manifestation may depend on what "holodeck" the soul has arrived in.
27.
RFSS Martin p99. Grosseteste had maintained that the rational soul is infused at conception but uses only its lower vegetative and sensitive powers until the body develops. Instead of this, Aquinas claimed that since the generation of one thing necessarily entails the corruption of another, "when a more perfect form arrives, the prior form is corrupted; provided, however, that the succeeding form" can perform all the functions of the preceding forms. The rational soul can do this.
To Aquinas, the rational soul is created by God "at the time of human generation."
p101. Aquinas on the cannibal argument: The cannibal's resurrection body will lack the component material (atoms, we would say) of other humans he had eaten. God would make up the difference by supplying any atoms already "claimed" by the eaten person.
Of course, if God would do that, why worry at all about which atoms go where?
The "thought experiment" concerned whether the resurrected body/soul was the same as the body/soul which died.
28.
An often-overlooked factor with respect to the protection of human life is the ability to empathize with the other -- to identify, that is, with the other. We at least to a degree rend to place ourselves in the shoes of the other.
The process of dehumanization of others is a process of coming to see them as very much other, as very much not human. A form of dehumanization occurs under stress of combat, or other very difficult situations, making a person overly focused on the self and one's little ? to the point that the death of the other carries with it little meaning. Then one doesn't identify with the other.
Another form of dehumanization occurs when the foe is distant and unseen. One's job is to destroy the target, and one avoids thinking about the humans there who are not visible. One must use one's imagination to conjure up sympathy for the human "collateral damage" victims, something that it doesn't pay emotionally for the soldier to do. Still another aspect of dehumanization is to continually propagandize that members of a particular group are not really human -- i.e., their lives are worth nothing.
In all these cases, there is a struggle over language. The enemy isn't killed, he is "zapped" (like in a video game). The people who are killed are not people, they are "targets" or "collateral casualties."
Whatever one thinks of the rights of the fetus or newborn, the same psychological process of dehumanization occurs. One doesn't identify or empathize. It's not really human. In fact, it's not even a person. The fetus is not distant, but it is unseen as far as the woman is concerned. She avoids looking at images of fetuses, because she has a need to dehumanize the fetus. That's not so easy in the case of a newborn, but infanticide of newborns has been justified -- both in the past and currently -- on ground that the baby is not actually yet a person.
Also, one doesn't use the word
kill, since that connotes destruction of something that could have some right to remain alive. One uses such terms as
abort and
terminate, which help to psychologically buttress the Otherness of the other. As long as the other is sufficiently Other, then there is no need to consider its rights. We don't identify with the other that has been made that much of an alien. An Other that has become sufficiently alienated -- an Alien -- lacks in one's eyes intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is assigned to only those we accept on one level or another.
So the question of abortion reduces to When does a human life have intrinsic value, if ever? Moral relativists will have difficulty with that question.
29.
Though John T. Noonan's view ought to be taken seriously, nevertheless I point out that it is based on Aquinas's theory of the threefold nature of the soul, which he got from Aristotle. There seems no particular reason for Christians or others in the current era to adopt this philosopher's system. Aristotle is worthy of respect and still worth reading (not everything!), but I doubt he has much basis for his claim. I can see his point, as I can Aquinas's. But, even if valid, does that make early abortion not so bad, as Noonan says?
30.
A group of atheists has waged an effective campaign that portrays atheism as the proper fallback position of judges, legislators and bureaucrats. Anything but the implicit tenets of a mechanistic, atheistic world theory amounts to religion, and the state must always separate itself from religion. Of course, by that argument, euthanasia of handicapped people should present no moral problem (and in fact we may expect that this idea will be vigorously pressed in various states, as it is only one step from the "right" to state-assisted suicide).
Many people who believe --to some degree or other -- in a God, have been divided and silenced by that propaganda. If the majority believes that a personal, active God exists, the courts do not have to disregard this as "religion." It is no more religion than the belief that no God exists (or both are religion).
There has always been a blurry line between theological views and general political beliefs. To say that we can draw the line sharply by making atheism the go-to position for the government is clever propaganda, but logically flawed otherwise.
Hence if most people believe that the "growth in the womb" has an intrinsic right to life, that is not so much a religious point of view as a general cultural point of view. Well, what does that matter? It matters because the cultural background is the milieu in which government operates. We don't expect everyone to have precisely the same beliefs. But recognizing that most people have a belief in God does not violate the clause against establishment of a religion (by which the founders meant some specific denomination or cultic activity). They were not saying that lawmakers should not take God into account. Again, belief in God is no more religious than non-belief. Neither God's existence nor his non-existence has ever been proved to everyone's satisfaction.
Though I daresay most people do believe in the intrinsic worth of the "womb growth," their views differ on practical application. Yet, though many may have become desensitized to the issue, most on reflection agree with the notion that abortion should be only rarely performed.
31.
RFSS Martin p111. Marcello Ficino (1433-1499), leader of the Florentine Platonic Academy, had been profoundly influenced by Petrarch and by Aristotelianism.
Ficino's universe hierarchy: human soul at center, God and angels above, the bodily below.
Due to its central position, the human soul mediates the upper and the lower halves of reality -- between the intelligible and the corporeal -- and hence participates in both time and Eternity.
32.
RFSS Martin p116. Zarabella followed an Aristotelian tradition: he adopted biology as his primary model of understanding nature. Substantial forms -- rather than shape or motion -- dominated his conception of nature.
So here we have an ancient cosmic theory: the organism as archetype, as opposed to the modern machine archetype.
I suppose I must dig further into Aristotle's views on this matter, though I'm not enthusiastic about reading the old gent myself. Too long. Well, maybe.
We can then tie this in, perhaps as a side note, to the Ryle piece.
33.
PA Feinberg <-148-> "Potentiality, Development and Rights" by Feinberg. In describing the suite of traits (variable by writer) which he calls 'c'...
Perhaps in the first few days the infant is conscious and able to feel pain, but it is unlikely that it has a concept of self, which is a trait of c, or of its future life, that it has plans or goals, that it can think consecutively and in fact lacks the whole complex of traits that make up c, none of which are obviously present before the second year of childhood.
[Right. Meaning c is not sufficient for defining a human being. And what is lacking is the concept of soul, which has been relegated to the dustbin of history by atheists. But without that concept, the human universe falls apart into a bunch of nonsense.
[In any case, Feinberg says that infanticide is immoral on the face of it. But why so? Doesn't really have an answer. The why is in the soul.]
Well, this brings up something important. Parents detect right after birth the differences in personality between their children. That awareness implies some kind of "spiritual" or special force through which the child and parents immediately interact. This force is usually called consciousness, though that word has become too fuzzy as a common handle. A more scientific word is needed or perhaps we can assign a specific scientific meaning to Consciousness, though I suspect we don't know enough for that route to be very effective.
34.
If we do not know what time is, how can we simply adopt the materialist paradigm? How can we say that there is no region of non-time existence? That is, of eternity? In the four-dimensional spacetime block of physics, time doesn't really "exist" when viewed from outside the block. Goedel's theorem means that that spacetime block, as described by theory, is either inconsistent or incomplete. If incomplete, we must assume a fifth dimension... ad infinitum. What is time in an n>4 dimension? Not time as we know it. So then, we have a right to posit eternity "beyond" the block of denumerably infinite dimensions. It's not mere metaphysics. We are talking about a highly plausible logical consequence.
So then, why should we not consider as a real possibility a soul that exists not only in the temporal arena of the 4-D spacetime block, but also in the arena outside that block, in eternity?
35.
RFSS <--125-->
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseusgarble decides that the ship of Theseus remains the same. But this is just his subjective choice. On its own merits, "it" is neither the same nor not the same. In fact, the word "it" implies subjective description. So the idea of the continuity, or actually discontinuity, of a morphing "object" actually casts doubt on the materialist's notion of human being. What is it that is human? If all the planks of the ship of Theseus have been replaced, we may choose to say that what we behold remains the same ship as the one we beheld years ago. Or, we may as well say that it is a replica of the old ship, but not the same. For the materialist, continuity of identity is a matter of choice, not of intrinsic merit. So the human thread really ain't there. There is no essence.
Are we just playing with words?
It seems to me that a human being requires an essence that does indeed account for continuity -- the you of today is the you when you were born and before -- and that does not change in a materio-temporal sense, as opposed to the thought that garble would be the garble.
36.
PA Feinberg.
I think the notion that the immorality of killing a fetus grows with its growth may reflect the moral relativeness of popular opinion.
That is, the older the fetus, the more people will see its destruction as, in most cases, immoral.
I notice that all these philosophical arguments on abortion (in PA and other books) are so objective that they lose something of importance. I suppose when doctors are receiving their education, or talking professionally, description of patient's cases must be objective, and yet many do retain a sense of compassion and a desire to heal.
These philosophers, though, are so clinical that they sound very much like Nazis discussing the necessary termination of undesired and undesirable lives.
37.
RFSS p124. "A [congenitally] blind person can understand the physics of color. Only the sighted person can understand what it's like to experience the greens of grass."
[In fact, color blindness applies here.]
Observation is "in" the observer's brain, if anywhere "in." The epiphenomenon -- if that be what it is -- may originate in the brain, but the actual thought or awareness doesn't seem to have extension, and so cannot be located in the materio-temporal universe.
124. Quotes Galileo: primary qualities (weight, texture...) are inherent in bodies, while secondary qualities (taste, perceived color...) are not in the external world but in the mind of the observer. Primary qualities are objective, secondary subjective.
But as we know, perception is far more subtle than that, so that the "objective" qualities are to a great degree constructed by the brain.
Still, Galileo achieved a brilliant scientific simplification, whereby a convenient fiction is used in order to facilitate compartmentalization and calculation. Newton, the man who stood on Galileo's shoulders, achieved the breakthrough of a unified spacetime theory by deciding on, as it turns out, the fiction of an absolute space and an absolute time. It worked famously, until Einstein at last corrected it.
38.
RFSS p124-25. Cites Galileo's thought experiments. He argued that the secondary qualities of thoughts should be understood as effects of the primary qualities of those things. In the absence of each effect, secondary qualities would not even exist. In Galileo's view, natural philosophy can make progress only by attending to primary qualities and ignoring secondary ones.
126. The main question for Descartes, and his critics, was how could the soul fit into an otherwise wholly materialistic world governed by mechanistic laws?
This is the great error, the great delusion: that the world is entirely mechanistic or if not entirely, then, at root, mechanistic. Mechanistic materialism is a way to deal with the world; it does not describe the world in toto. If it did, one could "see God," which is to say, comprehend him. But that rash assumption has proved false over the millennia, as the trail of corpses of philosophical schema demonstrates.
39.
How can a machine have a will? How can it be held accountable for a good or a bad choice, a moral or an immoral choice? Certainly, we may expect that some advanced AI machine program will be able to display a
pseudo-will. It may bring enough data into the mix, with enough selection algorithms, to make a very effective android -- i.e., a human-like machine. But, it still is only re-active, not pro-active. If we humans believe in the necessity of a will, then we must ask what would be the basis for that will. There must be some
non-machine core that enables us to make pro-active decisions. There must be some
non-machine rudder or pilot that permits us to not only make decisions, but to be held morally accountable for those decisions.
Some philosophers will respond that while that may be so, it does not follow that a god must exist. (See Thomas Nagel, for example.)
And I agree that for the moment we may avoid a discussion of God and "his" existence. Yet, in doing so, we do not avert the issue of what we may mean by some non-mechanical, presumably non-materialistic substancce that to which we resort when we invoke our will. In other words, a soul by any other name is still a soul.
Yes, I realize you have assumed that this Cartesian argument has been effectively refuted. But, in point of fact, it has not. On the other hand, I am not really a Cartesian, because I do not hold a materialist view of phenomena, even though the science of "materialism" calculates well, in its sphere. That is, being able to calculate the motions and radiations of phenomena does not mean that these phenomena are composed of unconscious bits of energy only.
Behind and
beyond the phenomena we have already concluded is the soul. Other substances like one's soul -- in being non-material and "core" forces -- would also be expected to exist. That is, the "material world" is the outward projection of various immaterial dynamics.
Lacking a soul, there is no reason not to shelve the fetus as an only partly activated software program. Who cares what you do to a bit of software? Aborting software is nothing. Of course, you can say that about a just-born infant -- and a number of abortion advocates do say that children under age 2 don't fulfill the criteria of sentient, conscious, self-aware humans, so that there is nothing intrinsically wrong in killing them -- though social aversion might have to be taken into account. They are right. Even a software program that has been running a number of years has no intrinsic right to life. The state can kill anyone at anytime. Murder is, at bottom, meaningless. How can you murder a software program?
Of course the abortionist/infanticide folks don't think you should kill them. Hey, that's against the law! But, if they lack souls --as they seem to believe -- then their will to survive is simply a machine feedback loop, and really means nothing. So much for their right to life.
Well, THAT'S different, they say. People with desires, expectations and self-awareness do have a right to life. But, why do they think so? What's the big deal about shutting off a machine?
Typical of "abortion philosophy" thinking: "To be brief, human beings are paradigmatically self-aware intentional beings who stand in complex relationships of social indeterdependency with other human beings" (PA Feinberg ed, "Being a Person -- Does It Matter?" p164). What does the author mean by intentional? An AI program follows a pattern that appears to be
intentional; that is, it calculates and updates its calculations in accordance with a set of (perhaps nested) goals. Yet, we don't care at all about shutting off that "intentional" program. It's what we -- perhaps subliminally -- assume is behind intentionality that is important to us. That force or soul should not be arbitrarily disconnected, we strongly feel.
So, another point here is that those who believe in a right of a "self-aware intentional being" to life are, whether they like it or not, forced to concede the necessity of human souls. Of course, most of these persons are neither scientist nor logician. So they assume there must be some epiphenomenal way out of the conundrum. But, not so.
40.
For the Christian, the question may be asked: "Is a fetus your neighbor?"
