0.
PA Feinberg. Introduction. p4:
To assert that a single-cell zygote, or a tiny cluster of cells, as such, is a complete human being already possessed of all the rights of a developed person seems at least as counterintuitive as the position into which some liberals are forced, that newly born infants have no right to continue living.
1.
The Problem of Abortion ed Joel Feinberg = PA. "An Almost Absolute Value in History" John T. Noonan Jr.
If a spermatozoan is destroyed, one destroys a being which had a chance of less than 1 in 200 million of developing into a reasoning being, possessed of the genetic code, a heart and other organs, and capable of pain. If a fetus is destroyed, one destroys a being already possessed of the genetic code, organs and sensitivity to pain, and one which had an 80 percent chance of developing further into a baby outside the womb who, in time, would reason.
The positive argument for conception as the decisive moment of humanization is that at conception the new being receives the genetic code. It is the genetic information which determines his characteristics, which is the biological carrier of the possibility of human wisdom, which makes him a self-evolving being. A being with human genetic code is man.
2.
PA Feinberg. Noonan:
The perception of the humanity of the fetus and the weighing of fetal rights against our human rights constituted the work of the moral analysts. But what spirit animated their abstract judgments? For the Christian community it was the injunction of Scripture to love your neighbor as yourself. The fetus as human was a neighbor; his life had parity with one's own. The commandment gave life to what otherwise would have been only rational calculation.
The commandment could be put in humanistic as well as theological terms: Do not injure your fellow man without reason. In these terms, once the humanity of the fetus is perceived, abortion is never right except in self-defense. When life must be taken to preserve life, reason alone cannot say that the mother must prefer a child's life to her own. With this exception, now of great rarity, abortion violates the rationalist humanist tenet of the equality of human lives.
For Christians the commandment to love had received a special imprint in that the exemplar proposed of love was the love of the Lord for his disciples. In light of this example, self-sacrifice to the point of death seemed in the extreme situations not without meaning. In the less extreme cases, preference for one's own interests to the life of another seemed to express cruelty or selfishness irreconcilable with the demands of love.
Noonan was a Notre Dame law professor who went on to become a U.S. district judge.
3a.
PA Feinberg. Joseph F. Donceel SJ. "A Liberal Catholic's View." Cites Aquinas Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 88-89; De Potentia, Q. 3, Art, 9-12; Summa Theologica, I.Q. 118, Art. 1-3.
Traditional Catholic philosophy holds that what makes an organism a human being is the spiritual soul and that this soul starts to exist at the moment of its "infusion" into the body. When is the human soul infused into the body? Nowadays the majority of Catholic thinkers would not hesitate to answer: at the moment of conception. This is known as the theory of immediate animation. However during long centuries Catholic philosophy and theology held that the human soul was infused into the body only when the latter began to show a human shape or outline and possessed the basic human organs. Before this time, the embryo is alive, but in the way in which a plant or animal is alive. It possesses, as the traditional terminology puts it, a vegetative or animal soul, not yet a human soul. In more modern terms we might say that it has reached the physiological or the psychological, not yet the spiritual level of existence. It is not yet a human person; it is evolving, within the womb, toward hominization. This is the theory of mediate or delayed animation.Well, I think he mispeaks by saying a fetus can have attained the psychological level of existence but not the spiritual. The whole issue has to do with what, exactly, is the psychological plane here.
Donceel says that Aquinus held the doctrine of hylomorphism. An analogy is the shape of a statue. The shape does not exist before the statue (unless you are a Platonist). Similarly, the soul does not exist wihout a body (unless you are a Platonist).
The Church, which was convinced of hylomorphism, forbade baptism of any premature birth that showed no sign of human shape or outline. And, I remark, in practical terms, such spontaneous abortions are not routinely baptized today either, whatever the belief system. It's called a miscarriage and that's that. Nothing else is done, except possibly emotion counseling of the parents.
But in the 17th Century the homunculus, or preformation, theory was the "new (and wrong) science." Catholic thinkers then turned the soul clock back to conception. Eventually the preformation theory was replaced by epigenesis [the whole is greater than the sum of its very complex and complicated parts which grow like a tree's branches].
Why did not Catholic thinkers return to hylomorphism? Cartesian dualism. For Descartes, the soul and the body are discrete substances. The soul is a thinking substance, the body an extended substance. Rather than a shape in the statue conception, we now have a ghost in the machine conception. If the soul is no longer the body's formal cause, it may yet become its efficient cause. That is, the soul can be steering, with God's help, the formation of the body -- from the moment of conception.
The Cartesian outlook, though today unfashionable, has been held by many great thinkers [even before Descartes].
The Church's anti-Darwinism may have influenced its rejection of the Thomist doctrine, Thomas having spoken in evolutionary terms, though not as to species. But, says Donceel, now that the Church has come around to acceptance of evolutionary theory, why should it not revive Thomas's hylomorphic views?
A fertilized human ovum is "virtually a human being." Donceel admits that, but "it does not affect my position" because the "fertilized human ovum, the early embryo, is virtually a human being, not actually. Correctly understood, the hylomorphic conception of human nature ... cannot admit the presence of an actual human soul in a virtual human body."He goes on,
Experimental embryology tells us that every single cell of the early embryo, of the morula, is virtually a human body. It does not follow that each of these cells possesses a human soul. When embryologists carefully separate the cells of a morula in lower organisms, each one of these cells may develop into a complex organism. Starting with the pioneering attempts of Hans Driesch, such an experiment has been performed on many animal species. We do not see why it might not eventually succeed with the human embryo [cloning from stem cells]. As a matter of fact, nature frequently performs [this experiment] on human ova. Identical twins derive from one ovum fertilized by one spermatozoon. This ovum splits into two at an early stage of pregnancy and gives rise to two human beings. In this case the defenders of immediate animation must admit that one person may be divided into two persons. This is a metaphysical impossibility.So it's OK to kill a fetus that, purportedly, has only a vegetative or animal soul?
Or, it's OK to kill the virtual human before it splits into two virtual humans?
Yes, if there are serious reasons, rather than flimsy pretexts. Opposes such abuses (which are now rampant). A prehuman embryo cannot demand from us the absolute respect which we owe to the human person, it deserves very great consideration, because it is a living being, endowed with a human finality, on its way to hominization.
Now we're talking about potential. But isn't everything human about potential?
Donceel was a scholar of psychology, philosophy and theology at Fordham University from 1944 until the 1990s.
3.
Humanzee was reputedly killed by panicked scientists
https://archive.vn/xFsYj
Scientist claims human-primate hybrids are very feasible.
This might yield an argument as to why souls are necessary.
4.
PA Fienberg p23. "The Scope of the Prohibition Against Killing" Philip E. Devine.
Finally, the species principle provides an adequate answer to the "acorn" argument, which has a surprising persistence in debates about abortion.* Whatever may be the case in dormant acorns, a germinating acorn is, while not an oak tree, still a member of the appropriate species of oak. If oaks had a serious right to life in their own right, so would oak saplings and germinating acorns. And the same reply can be made to those who would argue from the premise that a caterpillar is not a butterfly.**
Devine's footnotes:
* It is employed in Judith Jarvis Thompson, "A Defense of Abortion," Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1 (1971), 47-48, and in Marvin Kohl, The Morality of Killing (New York, 1974) p. 42. It also makes appearances in Roger Wertheimer, "Understanding the Abortion Argument," Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1 (1971), 74, 82.
** Lawrence C. Becker, "Human Being: The Boundaries of the Concept," Philosophy & Public Affairs, 4 (1975), esp. pp. 337-345.
5.
Much of the abortion argument revolves around whether human life is sacred or whether personhood is simply a function of the human robot reaching a particular stage of complexity. This is the question: does human life have intrinsic value or is value relative, dependent on social contracts which stem from the needs of human robots (who don't know that they are only robots)? But even if a human being is only a robot, should robots assume there is no higher power that values robot life? Further, what does consciousness imply?
6.
Level II.
Martin, Barresi RSFF p49.
Thus, one of Paul's contributions was to elevate the doctrine of the resurrection to one of the central tenets of Christianity: "If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." [1 Corinthians 15:32] Easy enough to say, but from the beginning the doctrine of the resurrection was extremely puzzling, as Paul's pagan critics were quick to point out.The question of personal continuity isn't only found here, but in discussions of how, if everything is in flux, you remain the same person from one moment to the next. Related to this question is the background materialism assumed here. That is, does reality really work the way typical materialists assume? We are used to the limitations of our bodies. But are those limits what we think? Consider the diminutive wife who suddenly has superhuman strength to lift a car off her husband following an accident. Such events have been reported in news media, though they are very rare, of course.
At Corinth, Paul had encountered people who doubted the possibility of resurrection, and wanted a detailed explanation of how it would come about: "But someone will ask, 'how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?' " [1 Corinthians 15:35] Probably Paul accepted from tradition that the resurrected Jesus was able to eat and that his body was solid to the touch. Yet, according to the same tradition, Jesus was able to appear and disappear at will, even passing through locked doors. There was a question, then, about the nature of Jesus' resurrected body. By implication, there was a question about the nature of anyone's resurrected body.
Paul seems to have concluded that a resurrected body -- anyone's -- is material but differs in significant ways from bodies humans have during their earthly lifetimes. He compared the relation of one's earthly body to one's resurrected body, which for him was equivalent to a resurrected person, to a plant that, in seeming to die, leaves a seed, from which its life continues in another plant of the same sort: "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body." [I Corinthians 15:37-38]
But if this is the model for resurrection, questions about identity quickly arise. Chief among these questions, for those who are sensitive to the distinction between exactly the same and exactly similar (that is, between numerical and qualitative identity), is whether the plant that produces a seed and then dies is numerically the same as the plant that subsequently grows from that seed or merely one of its ancestors. Ordinarily we suppose that a single plant remains the same plant throughout its life, in spite of changing in various ways, but that plants that grow from its seeds, even if exactly similar to the parent plant, are different plants. So, if the relationship of a person on earth who dies to his resurrection replica is like that of a present plant to future plants that grow from its seeds, then a resurrection replica is not numerically the same person who died but merely a qualitatively similar descendant.
In fact, it is the need to explain personal continuity that points to a need for the soul.
7. Level II
Martin, Barresi. RFSS p62.
Origen claimed that since the body changes so much in life and yet retains its identity, there is no special problem about its changing in death and retaining its identity [how is the resurrected individual not a clone which replaces someone who remains dead?] . He reasoned that even if the bits of flesh present at the moment of death could be reanimated, there is no particular reason why God would want to reanimate them. It is appropriate that the body should change from this life to the afterlife. Just as people would need to have gills if they were destined to live under water, those who are destined to inherit the kingdom of heaven will need spiritual bodies, Yet, in the body's transformation to this "more glorious" state, it retains its previous form, that is, its eidos. "The very thing which was once characterized in the flesh will be characterized in the spiritual body."We have here an adaptation of the Platonic theory of forms, which pre-exist any actualizations. I suppose with Plato, we must conclude that there is only one form or idea(l) for humans. Despite Plato's distinctions, it is hard not to think of the human eidos as the template soul. But Origen is implying, whether wittingly or not, that each human has an individual template eidos, which seems to be an equivalent of a soul. Yet we can accept that he did not think this template eidos/soul could exist without a bodily expression.
If the difference between the eidos/soul and the actualization/body is more supple than the authors think, then their distinction between between numerically the same and similar may likewise be more blurred than they accept.
8.
RFSS p31. As Plotinus describes the human soul, although "our reasoning is our own" and "our senses think the thoughts that occupy the understanding," our intellectual capacity is nourished from above and our instinctive capacity from below -- an approximation of what I think. Even the spiritually dead cannot think in a human way without God. This is also true of the sifter? apparatus. But the level is different. To be made in the image of God means that the human mind reflects God more or less directly -- though that reflection is distorted by the wall of spiritual death.
9.
p40. Mishna are commentaries on Scripture that interpret it in light of practical applications, parables and stories.
10.
Many people have the idea that if one thinks there is a God, then one is injecting religion into affairs of the state. Thus, they think, a de facto atheism is the proper way to deal with moral concerns at the state level.
But this reasoning is specious. Theorizing that no God exists is the philosophical and logical equal of theorizing that God exists. In other words to relegate all moral concerns to some kind of social machinery is a choice made by an individual to ignore the choice made by someone else. It does not follow that the establishment of religion clause voids any consideration of how the greater universe operates and the role of humans in it.
That's a favorite ploy of the militant atheists, who do not wish us to notice that Atheism is not only an ideology, it is a religion, and its tenets must be taken on faith.
Similarly, we accept that the concept of sanctity of human life is a religious notion. Yet, we should face the fact that the concept of the non-sanctity of human life is based on a priori (unproved) assumptions, and hence is an ideological claim, which is to say a faith-based claim. Thus, to rule out the sanctity of human life means to uphold a faith-based claim of non-sanctity.
In other words, when lawmakers and courts attempt to heed the demands of pro-abortion choice advocates that "religion be kept out of it," what they are doing is bowing to the ideological/religious beliefs of the advocates.
11.
RFSS p71. On Augustine:
By going inward [which leads to upward], the first truth one discovers is one's own existence. The second is that the knowing of this truth does not depend on the body but on direct self-awareness. Reflecting on this reveals something about our nature: since we know ourselves directly and do not know ourselves as any sort of material object, we are not a material object. In the seventeenth century, Descartes would build on this argument to develop an extreme form of substance dualism -- and declare that the self is essentially a thinking, unextended substance.Augustine did not go that far. Yet, as a substance dualist, he was among the first to become self-conscious about a problem that would persist in the tradition of Christian dualism at least until the eighteenth century: how to explain the relation of the soul substance to the body. Plato had maintained, in effect, that the soul is related to the body like a pilot to his ship. Augustine's view, in contrast, was that soul and body together form an intimate unit: "A soul in possession of a body does not constitute two persons, but one man."
12.
PA/feinberg. A Third Way. L.W. Sumner p81.
However callous and chauvinistic the common run of our treatment of animals may be, still the view that killing a dog or horse is morally no more serious (ceteris paribus) than weeding a garden can be the considered judgment of only a small minority.Americans' industrial-scale consumption of meat occurs as a result of the de-sympathization of the target animals. Psychologically, it follows the same pattern as dehumanization. One does not see the animal(s) being killed nor the fear as they approach death nor the sufferings in their short lives. The invisibility of all that de-sympathizes them. Thus, animal rights activists face an uphill battle. Out of sight, out of mind is a favorite method of mass killing, whether of human or animal life. There are few visceral effects, and so we need not deal with feelings of revulsion. Yet, a meatless diet is no protection for the unborn. In India, where meat-eating is generally not done among the non-Muslim propulation, abortion based on trivial things like sex of the preborn is common. Such people, when they shun meat at the table, are responding to a cultural norm and not to a real focus on any sacredness of life. In any case, no matter what they might say, Americans in general do not see life is all that sacred. St. Francis may be venerated here, but his ideals are honored in the breach by most people. But I wonder whether we would eat so much meat if we personally had to kill the chicken, pig or cow as used to be common on farms across the land? Maybe so. One gets used to such tasks...
The standard that we apply to other species we must in consistency apply to our own [?]. The greater the number of animals who [that?] are excluded by that standard, the greater the number of human beings who will also be excluded. In the absence of a determinate criterion it is unclear just where the moral line will be drawn on the normal/abnormal spectrum: will a right to life be withheld from mongoloids, psychotics, the autistic, the senile, the profoundly retarded? [Recall Nazi Germany even before WWII.]
13.
From the entry "Abortion" by Donald Marquis in the Supplement to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Simon and Schuster Macmillan 1996).
Although personhood theorists (like antiabortionists) tend to say little about the moral theories on which their views rest (Englehardt, 1986, is an interesting exception), presumably most personhood theorists will turn out to be, when driven to the wall, social contract theorists. Such theories, according to which morality is a self-interested agreement concerning rules of conduct among rational agents, tend to have problems accounting for the moral standing of those who are not rational agents -- beings such as animals, young children, the retarded, the psychotic and the senile. Thus, the personhood defense of the prochoice position tends to have problems that are the inverse of those of the classic antiabortion argument.
Both standard antiabortion and personhood arguments appeal, in the final analysis, to the characteristics fetuses manifest at the time they are fetuses as a basis for their arguments concerning the ethics of abortion. This appeal may be a mistake both defenses share. My premature death would be a great misfortune to me because it would deprive me of a future of value. This is both generalizable and arguably the basis for the presumptive wrongness of ending human life. Such a view tends to imply that abortion is seriously immoral, seems to have a defensible intuitive basis, and seems to avoid the counterexamples that threaten alternative views (Marquis 1989). However, this view is subject to two major objections. One could argue that the difference between the relation of fetuses to their futures and the relation of adults to their futures would explain why adults are wronged by losing their futures but fetuses are not (McInerney 1990). One might also argue that because human sperm and ova have valuable futures like ours, the valuable future criterion for the wrongness of killing is too broad (Norcross 1990). Not everyone believes these objections are conclusive.
14.
RFSS martin. p14. In Phaedo, the argument sof Simmias and Cebes are the first in the West that we know of to explicitly question the immortality of the soul.
p15. To Plato, the soul is the essence of the person. It is the basic building block, or, really, the foundation of the remainder of the building. Death of the body occurs as the result of decomposition of the body's building blocks. They may scatter to the winds. But the soul, being simple cannot decompose and so perforce is immortal. Simple substances cannot break up into parts.
p20. Phaedrus and Laws: souls are self-movers that are in perpetual motion. Since it never stops moving, it must be immortal (motion is the pre-eminent sign of life). So, other self-movers are also immortal [as in continually reflecting and reflecting on God?].
p23. Aristotle:
Vegetative soul associated with vegetation. Accounts for assimilation and reproduction.
Sensitive soul associated with sensation. (Qualia of feeling(s)). Animals possess. Associated with imagination, memory and desire, as well as local motion.
Rational soul possesses all the powers of the lower souls, plus nous -- ie reason or intellect.
Aristotle on conception and fetal development:
The vegetative soul, having existed potentially in semen comes into being actually when it provides heat to the vital matter supplied by the mother. The sensitive soul, having existed potentially in the vegetative soul, is activated/actualized in a similar way. In the rational soul, there is a power of acting and a power of being acted on, the former of which -- agent or active? intellect -- is regenerated and incorruptible. [See 2d graph]
p25/26. Stoics were radically egalitarian. They favored self-ownership, as we do today in America. For them, the world is divinely planned and permeated by reason. The world is an ideally good system, our organism?, the best world possible. The atoms join themselves in the best way possible. The world is evolving toward a great all-encompassing fire. [Fire next time.]
p26. Stoics: as soon as an animal is born, it becomes self-conscious. Cites John Locke's view here that humans are both "lumps of matter" and "persons" and that their identity as lumps may be ascertained/asserted? on a brief? basis than their identities as persons.
..., as with other Stoics, held that each individual has some unique property or essence that remained unchanged throughout the life of the individual, and by which, despite other radical changes, the individual can be identified.
15.
Those who object to the "potential" argument, with respect to abotion might consider why society sees murder of a child or adult as wrong. Aren't we aghast at the thought in part because the person's ability to enjoy and/or fulfill his or her life has been abruptly terminated. They have been denied their potential? We mourn what could have been but now is not.
No, some respond. The prohibition of murder is a collective response to the desire of the self for preservation. A social contract. Yet, why do you or I wish to avoid death? Isn't it that we feel that there is yet much potential left to be fulfilled. Of course there is the gut instinct that our animal natures come with that needs no rationale of itself. But if the rationale comes down to a gut instinct only, then there is no special reason to value the life of anyone but oneself. So those who point only to the social contract theory probably are extraordinarily self-centered and quite likely to be sociopaths.
Further, what makes us hate the notion of the death of a loved one? Because we will be deprived of that loving and, hopefully, affirming relationship. The person in our eyes has value. The loved one still has much potential in our eyes. It's true that a fetus may be unloved, even by the woman. So she doesn't feel the potential for love of a blossoming person. But everything in life is about potential. In fact, that's why she wants an abortion. She is foreseeing the potentialities of this human and fears potential troubles.
In any case, I suppose a major influence with respect to the denial of potential is the modern "scientific" rejection of all the Aristotelian causes other than the effective cause. The final cause is seen as old-fashioned. But when someone, say, commences to build a house, isn't there a "final cause" -- that is a plan, or at least a vision, of the completed house? Isn't all the work going toward fulfillment of that template? Without the architect's blueprints there wouldn't be much of a house.
So when one detects a fetus, we know that it has the potential to become a living child outside the womb. But we may question whether that is the intent associated with that fetus. Is it supposed to grow into a child? If so, who says it is supposed to? Well, if we accept that there is a final cause associated with the fetus, then it becomes obvious that its right destiny is to complete its course. But, if we regard the world as mechanistic, then we don't believe that anything has a destiny or proper course. We short-circuit Nature every day. What's one more hatchet job?
So again, those who reject the potential argument have an easy time of it because it is unfashionable to uphold the value of the final cause concept.
16.
Book on Jaynes
p172. J.N. Limber. Jaynesian Consciousness.
Jaynes proposed that changes in language use over some thousands of years transformed everyday interpersonal group communication into an interpersonal garble system capable of a variety of new tasks, including expanding imagination and autobiographical memories.
p173. Does this mean Jaynesian consciousness is simply an epiphenomenal linguistic manifestation of some cognitive process?
p176. I doubt anyone would agree with this: "To paraphrase Jaynes, language evolved in social interactions and become transformed over time into subject versus consciousness."
p187. Anecdotes abound about different individuals being taught a conventional sign language reporting a dramatic change in consciousness.
Re consciousness.
Are we conscious between sentences? If so, then those who think/talk when awake have an awareness that is more than verbal. If not, then what of persons who have grown up with no ability to speak or sign -- whether because of congenital problems, severe child neglect or abuse or some wilderness experience? Though they cannot articulate much if anything verbally, they seem able to relate to others. Yet, the type of consciousness is limited. They cannot relate to a world of images and metaphors used not only among people but within most people when they think to themselves.
Yet, are we correct in assuming that such a type of consciousness is only on an animal level? Just because they tend to think? in highly concrete terms doesn't mean they should be deprived of their humanity or right to life. Perhaps because they look human and are moving around, they are similar enough to "real" humans that we would have qualms about terminating them. They are not out of sight out of mind. But if there was a special government program to quietly euthenise such "useless eaters," would that bother us much?
You respond, such humans -- though not quite filling the bill as "persons" -- are developed enough so that they should at least be given the status of a pet cat. Well, maybe a little more, since pet cats have no intrinsic right to life in this society.
But, it is objected, the fetus doesn't even have a low level of consciousness. But then, neither do comatose people. We don't "pull the plug" on them without a great deal of soul-searching. In any case, merely because someone's eyes are closed does not mean there is no consciousness of any kind. There may not be what we regard as everyday wide-awake consciousness. But a slumbering person, even when not dreaming, seems to qualify as having some sort of consciousness -- somewhere or somehow.
17.
RFSS martin. p29. The word prosopon originally meant playing in a drama or religious ceremony. That is the emphasis was on the social task, function. People were little more than placeholders, ciphers, I'd say, as Greece declined after Alexander and pessimism set in. Cynics and Stoics emphasized individual resources for adoption, promoting the rise of individualism.
p36. In regard to the comparison to the 18th century, it is noteworthy that Plutonius's thoughts about the unity of consciousness are similar to Locke's description of what, in our own times, have come to be known as fusion examples. These are hypothetical examples in which a person's consciousness to divide into two parts, each of which is mentally complete in itself and neither of which is conscious, from the inside, of the other's mental state.
i.e., we have the Platonic ideal (which occurs only for the born again): the sensitive? principle is "our secret"; the intellectual "our king." (looks like garble)
But that is still only a part of how it works.
No comments:
Post a Comment