Maverick Philosopher

1. Using 'fetus' broadly to cover zygote, embryo, and fetus in the narrow sense, is a human fetus a biological person? I should think so. What else would it be? I would further claim that a human fetus is a biological person at every stage of its development from conception on.

A commenter's remarks suggest a counterargument. Just as a human being has spatial parts that are not human beings, so too a human being has precursor stages that are not human beings. I say the analogy fails. Although it is true that my heart is not a human being, it is false that my earlier temporal cross-sections are not human beings. I am a genetically human individual now, and I was one as a neonate. If so, what principled reason could one have for denying that I was a genetically human individual at the beginning of the third trimester of my mother's pregnancy? And so on all the way back to the moment of conception. But note: the gametes that came together to form my zygotic precursor stage are not precursor stages of me.

2. Is a human fetus a person in the philosophical sense? This is not so clear. Does a human embryo have the capacity to reason? Certainly not in the sense in which I have the capacity to reason even during periods such as sleep when I am not reasoning. Perhaps the most we can say is that a human fetus has the potentiality to develop in the normal course of events into something that we would deem a full-fledged person in the philosophical sense.

3. The main question in the abortion debate is whether or not the human fetus is a moral person, a possessor of moral rights such as the right to life. For if a fetus has a right to life, then there is the moral obligation not to kill it except perhaps in certain extreme circumstances. (If a person has a right to life, it does not follow that there are no circumstances in which I would be justified in violating his right to life.)

One view one could take is to ground the moral right to life in the fetus' potentiality to develop into a person in the philosophical sense. For if one demanded that only actual philosophical persons have the right to life, then one would have to deny neonates the right to life.

4. I assume that the law must rest on a foundation of morality. This is not obvious, but it is reasonable. Laws are enacted to protect rights that are logically antecedent to any and all acts of legislation; it is not acts of legislation that first establish rights.

Thus it is the height of idiocy to say that abortion is legal, as if that settles the matter of its rightness or wrongness. For what is legally permissible might well be morally impermissible. The Nuremberg laws of the Third Reich made it legal to strip Jews of their property; but the laws were unjust. 'Unjust law' is not a contradiction in terms the way that 'illegal law' is. If the morally permissible and the legally permissible were identical as a matter of conceptual necessity, then it would make no sense to say that the Nuremberg laws were wrong.

But note that the existence of identical twins demonstrates that an individual human life can begin after conception. In such cases, two human individuals can be traced back to a single zygote. As such, those two individuals cannot be numerically identical to the zygote, or else - by the transitivity of identity - they would be numerically identical to each other, which they are not. (They are two individuals, not just one.) We must conclude that at least one of the twins (or, less arbitrarily, both of them) began their "individual human life" at a point in time after the zygote/embryo split in two, and thus after conception.

Chappell's point is on target. It is false that every individual human life begins at conception. But all I need is the converse: Every life that begins at (human) conception is an individual human life. Thus the zygotic precursor that later splits is an individual human life that begins at conception and ends when the split occurs.

I might make the following repair: insert the proviso, 'that is not the result of a splitting' after 'individual human life.'

What I was doing in that post was showing the silliness of formulating the abortion question in terms of the question: 'When does life begin?' (As Rudy Giuliani, former NYC mayor, did recently.) That question is hopeless because multiply ambiguous. Are we asking about the beginning of life on earth in general? No. Are we asking phylogenetically about the beginning of human life? No. Are we asking ontogenetically about the beginning of an instance of human life? No, but this is closer to the real question which is the question when the human fetus (in the broad sense) acquires the normative status of being a person or rights-possessor.

I used 'individual human life' to contrast with human life as such, but failed to realize that 'individual human life' is ambiguous as between (i) instance of human genetic material and (ii) human individual. As suggested by its etymology, 'individual' connotes something indivisible, something that cannot survive a splitting operation. But an instance of human genetic material can survive splitting. Or can it? Here things are becoming murky.

(So think twice about making a molecule-for-molecule copy of yourself! If you walk into the North end of the Matter Duplicator and two mutually indiscernible hombres walk out of the South end, which one is you? Which one gets to 'conjugate' your wife? Arguably neither, your wife is now a widow.)

(Similarly, you should have doubts about Ray Kurzweil's roseate hopes for cyberimmortality. He thinks that all you have to do is make a copy of your brain's 'software' and then run that 'software' later on a superior machine once your present body falls apart. But although one can copy software, one cannot copy an individual. Suppose my 'software' is run on two machines: which one am I? Neither! I haven't survived, I have died. Who was it that wrote the paper, "The Importance of Being Identical"?)

There is obviously a lot more to be said on these topics. But now it is time to punch the clock.