Further remarks from Robert George on the criteria for affording human standing

Dear Steve:

 

I would add the following thoughts to those offered by the anonymous priest you quoted.

 

Infants can't think.  Nor can very severely retarded persons.  Comatose individuals can't think or feel.  Yet infants, retarded persons, and comatose individuals are rational animal organisms.  As humans, that is the kind of thing (=substance) they are.  A human creature's nature is a rational nature, even if the individual has not yet developed, or has lost, immediately exercisable capacities for characteristically human mental functions.  Indeed, a human individual is a rational animal organism even if, due to severe retardation, he or she never developed and never will develop these immediately exercisable capacities.   Infants possess, as do embryos, the primordia (which are most fundamentally epigenetic) for self-directed development to the point at which they can immediately (though intermittently, of course, due to the need for sleep) perform characteristically human mental acts.  They possess in radical (=root) form the basic natural capacity that will in the course of development unfold to the point at which, if all goes well, they will be able to engage in conceptual thought, deliberation, and choice.  It is the possession of the basic natural capacity (shared by all human beings, even if blocked in the severely retarded), and not immediately exercisable capacities (possessed by some human beings but not by others, and possessed by some to a greater degree than by others), that determine the kind of substance a human being is, namely, a rational animal organism.

 

It is, of course, logically possible to deny this basic point.  I have, in at least one of the papers I shared with you, given several reasons why I think denying it is a serious error.  I won't repeat them here.  I'll simply emphasize the first one.  To suppose that embryos are something other than human beings---rational animal organisms of the human species---is to undercut the ground for believing that infants, severely retarded persons, and comatose individuals are human beings.  This is a move that people like Peter Singer, Michael Tooley, and some others rightly see as necessary if they are to deny the standing of humans in the embryonic and fetal stages, and they are willing to bite the bullet and make it.  (I've offered rebuttals to their arguments in various places, including in the paper on the embryo question I sent you.)  But (even apart from the direct arguments to be made against identifying immediately exercisable capacities, as opposed to the basic natural capacity, for characteristically human mental functions as the criterion for human standing) most people recognize that eliminating the grounds for regarding infants and retarded and comatose people as human being is too high an ethical price to pay.  The fact that this view, when all is said and done, licenses infanticide, euthanasia of the seerely handicapped, and worse atrocities is a reductio ad absurdum.

 

Yours faithfully,

Robby

 

PS:  I agree with the anonymous priest that the proposition that all human beings, and not just those who have moved far enough down the developmental path to manifest immediately exercisable capacities, possess profound, inherent, and equal dignity is progressive.  Political liberals should be at least as eager as political conservatives to endorse it.  There was a time---not all that long ago---when many did (including Edward Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Albert Gore, Richard Durbin, and, if I am not mistaken, Bill Clinton).  It was a tragedy for the progressive movement, and the nation, when they abandoned the pro-life cause, embracing first abortion and now cloning and embryo-destructive research.  What a blessing it would be if the progressive movement began to find its way back.