SR and Michael have been commenting on Wednesday's post, "What are human embryos?" Neither one of them are impressed enough with my argument that the protection of all humans is justifiable, simply because the human has human parents. Actually, one of the best markers of what is "human" is that we, alone of all the animals, have this concept.
And the conversation continues. . .
They cant be measured or defined easily, and they fail one vital test - they dont apply to newborns, whose thinking abilities are extremally limited. Below those of many animals, I would estimate. The moral consequences of this problem are clear, and unacceptable. Yet so is an arbitary boundry. No, I think that is the wrong path...
Michael might be on the right track though. It does make an intuitative sense - if you wish to provide a way to measure a continuium, you use a continuous scale.
The continuum? A scale?
Now, this is where I say that the "moral consequences of this problem are clear, and unacceptable."
Talk about "Who will certify the weights on that scale? Who gets to decide which criteria they'd have any of us meet before we are human enough for them? For how long? And how will the protection be enforced, since it's negotiable in the first place? All that would leave is the far too prevalentcircumstance in which at one instant a human embryo is not a "human" and the next it is, or the protection appears and disappears when crossing national borders.
The continuum is just one way of saying there is no right not to be killed, putting human ethics back to the personal preference of the powerful.
Of course, no one is measuring any of these criteria in the embryos we are discussing. And none of us get to choose who will be protected and who will not under the current laws, even in the US. Roe v. Wade, Casey, and all the other abortion laws trump consensus and our representative legislatures in the various States. (We may find out that even the Federal Legislature is helpless to affect that definition when the Supreme Court rules on the partial birth abortion ban.)
As I've pointed out, that definition of "human" and "person" varies according to the weights on the scale. In Saudi Arabia, I could not be a person no matter what my functional abilities, since I'm a woman. In our own history,
We may not be able to measure art, truth, beauty, justice or love, but we - and as far as we know only we - are the only species that even looks for these. We consider them our highest goals. We understand that every one of our children have the capacity for either demonstrating genius in one or more of these qualities, or bringing them out in others.
Take love, for instance. No one would be happy with love that is given if we meet certain measurable criteria. We want to be loved "just for ourselves." The traditional (Western) marriage vows even say, "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health." Our society looks down on marriages of convenience or when the assumption is that one person marries for the other's money.
Who could deny the value - and genius - of a couple that is genuinely in love, or the way that a mother is able to love her child?
In fact, the three of us are demonstrating our own search for truth and justice by this conversation. Who have we killed by destructive research, abortion, and prejudice that leads to murder and genocide? We may have killed as many Ghandis and Mother Teresas as we have killed Machiavelli's and Ted Bundy's. Or it could be the other way around. But destruction according to any criteria other than the fact of human origin cannot be the answer to the question of who is human.
1 comment:
It always amazes me how much cultural value can be placed on love - no more than an interaction of hormones and geneticly-derived responses evolved to strengthen pair-bonds.
My point about newborns was actually to reject any definition of human that doesn't include them. Its an easy problem to create. Set a standard that seems too high, and you create a situation in which baby-killing seems acceptable. Since the overwhelming consensus is that baby-killing is not acceptable, there must be a flaw in any standard that allows it.
Your own talk of love, art, truth and justice, for example. These are uniquely human concepts (appologies to any aliens monitoring this :)), but are not found in all humans. A newborn mind is little more than a bundle of instincts and reflexes. Touch its palm, and it will grip. Brush its cheek and its head turns in search of milk. Less than an animal? Most animals at least have some level of reasoning ability and memory. The newborn cannot understand any of those things you speak so highly of - and yet its quite clearly human and worthy of protection. So, those standards are not suitable for use in determining *how* human someone is or what rights they have.
The continum concept is just obviously right. There is no magic transformation at fertialisation. Nothing but some interesting genetics. There is no single moment of humanity. A search for it will never succeed, for there is nothing to find. Legally, limits can be set for purposes of convenience - but these will be only an approximate reflection of the underlying biology.
I doubt even our host Life would see a freshly-fertalised embryo, one implanted and growing, a large and kicking fetus and a newborn baby as exactly morally equal. Should some highly unusual situation require choosing one or two of these to be sacrificed to save the others, then the choice of which should go is clear. But not viewing all of these as equal is the essence of continuous development.
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