Kurieuo wrote:Interestingly, it are pro-choice/abortion advocates who like to whimsically introduce such a metaphysical distinction such that a "person" is distinct from a "human".
Whereas in the past, blacks while being human were not deemed "persons", today the unborn while human are not deemed "persons" by many.
A pure naturalistic approach should see such metaphysical distinctions as irrelevant.
In their defense, I don't think they believe they are making a metaphysical distinction. Or, to put it differently, we and they are using the word "person" differently. They don't see a "person" as a metaphysical entity, a whole reality which is the real subject of real predication. Rather, they seem to use it as a kind of shorthand for a complicated set of ethical statements. Assume naturalism for the sake of argument. When you say you are grounding moral value in personhood, do you really think that "moral value" is a real thing that needs to be really "grounded" in an objective reality called "personhood"? I don't think so. Rather, by "moral value" you are talking about those ethical propositions that can be enforced on others whether they like it or not (which usually turns out to be some sort of libertarian ethic--ignore for now the obvious problem with why
that ethic ought to be enforced); by "grounded" you are talking about the logical bases or premises from which you are reasoning. It's a matter of fact that premises need to be metaphysical truths. A social contract is a perfectly legitimate premise. The difficulty, which we need to be careful about jumping the gun and pointing out at this juncture, will be, of course, the warrant for assuming those premises. But that's all they mean by "grounded." Finally, "person" refers to a particularly interesting notion. Because it isn't a metaphysical truth, it's really just a circular argument in the naturalistic worldview. A "person" is just "that which is morally valuable." In other words, you become a person precisely because you are morally valuable. We, of course, would say that you are morally valuable precisely because you are a person, but we are dealing with their position, not ours.
The result of this line of thought is that the moral value of a person is grounded in arbitrary assumptions about what is morally valuable. That arbitrariness is illustrated by looking at pro-choice literature itself. Some argue that what makes a person a person (remembering what that means--the real idea here is what makes something morally valuable) is that the thing itself has self-interest; some argue that it is consciousness; some argue that it is self-awareness. Whatever it is, it is always some
property. When a thing gains a certain property, it is considered the subject of moral rights because having that property is what makes you of moral value. Naturally, other than the property "being human," there is really no property that is common to all people that all have from the moment of conception to death. Most of the commonly appealed to properties (e.g., those mentioned above) are gained sometime conception and lost either at death or sometime before.
So it seems to me, in light of that, the real issue isn't that naturalists don't have the right to make a metaphysical distinction between persons and humans. With that, they would agree, if they used "person" and "human" they way you do. But they don't, because, frankly, they don't think that such metaphysical discussions are really terribly meaningful in the first place. The real problem they have isn't even that the moral statements they DO want to adhere to ultimately REQUIRE such metaphysical foundations, as demonstrated by the moral argument. The problem is their metaphysical assumptions that "persons" don't really exist in the first place. To litigate this in classical terminology, it is their nominalism. That, I think, is much more fertile ground for critique, for if nominalism fails, the so does moral anti-realism. Things become morally valuable not by declaration, but because they are rooted in something REAL. The question becomes what that is, and at that point, "Person" takes on real meaning. A "person" isn't a short-hand term for an entity possessing a set of properties (e.g., self-awareness, rationality, etc.), but rather, personhood is becomes the
ground for those very properties.
So, again, in my view, the problem is what it has always been: nominalism v. realism. It's another reason that Descartes was foundational the the absolute ruin of the modern world.
The unborn are physically human. And being physically human they deserve human rights the same as the born. Simple.
Sure, on our view. But that's precisely what they
don't believe. They just don't believe that all humans are morally valuable, because they root moral value in a
capacity of humanity (whatever that capacity or set of capacities is), and then say that upon achieving that, they become morally valuable, which is to say, they become persons. It's hardly surprising that what is basically valued would have something to do with the mind. If you can think, you're valuable. If you can't, you aren't (not even to yourself), and therefore, you aren't a person.
And, as I said before, the sad fact is that a lot of evangelical pro-life people think that way, even if they don't know it. When you ague (as J. P. Moreland does!) that the brain-dead are no longer persons, you've undermined your entire case. By making the unifying principle of personhood (or the soul) something in the brain, then it stands to reason that the being without that brain capacity is not a person. Moreland, of course, would strongly disagree with my assessment. He would point, in the case of the unborn, to his discussion of first and second order capacities, but none of that, I argue, changes the fundamental facts. And the debate gets WAY too complicated at that point (I dissect it in some detail in the course I teach on ethics). Suffice it to say, anecdotally, that while Geisler used to agree with Moreland, he has come around after seeing this very debate to the view I'm describing here.
So I've gone way longer than I intended. The TL;DR to all of this is just that it is NOT enough to declare that the unborn are human and therefore deserve all the same rights as other humans. The debate has long been on what constitutes a PERSON. We argue that personhood is rooted in the soul (which you and I have a very, very similar view on, though not identical); the naturalist that it is rooted in some mental capacity. We need to do the hard work of showing why our view is philosophically and ethically superior to theirs. We have been doing that. We just need to keep doing it and do it on a more popular level.
