Robert George on Reiman

Robert George emailed me regarding the Reiman abstract I posted the other day, and, with his permission, I'm posting his message, which I thought readers would also find interesting (especially the forthcoming book):

I'm not sure whether you've read Jeffrey Reiman's book on abortion, but you might want to have a look at it.  It is entitled Abortion and the Ways We Value Human Life.  In it, Reiman is explicit about his belief not only that embryos and fetuses, but also infants, are not persons and therefore have no right to life.  He allows that we may have, in most (but not all) cases, independent reasons for not killing infants (their parents tend to love them, etc.), but our reasons for not killing them, where they obtain, have nothing to do with the inherent dignity or human rights of the infants.  According to Reiman, infants do not have these qualities.  (Reiman recognizes, I believe, that the only way to make a principled case in favor of abortion is to bite the bullet and say that humans in the infant stage have no more dignity or rights than humans in the fetal and embryonic stages.)

 

Now, for reasons I've stated in various places, I think that the view held by Reiman (and also by Petter Singer, Michael Tooley, Mary Ann Warren, and some others) that infants are not persons and therefore lack inherent dignity and human rights is wrong.  There is no valid reason for supposing that what makes a human individual a person (i.e., a being with inherent dignity) is the immediately exercisable capacity for characteristically human mental operations (above all, the powers to engage in conceptual thinking and exercise practical deliberation and choice), as opposed to the basic natural capacity (possessed by human individuals from the embryonic stage forward) for such operations.  I have made the point that the immediately exercisable capacity for mental functions is only the development of an underlying potentiality (the basic natural capacity) that the human being possesses simply by virtue of the kind of entity it is.  But it is certainly my view that if one is prepared to bite the bullet and say that infants lack inherent dignity and human rights and that killing them (to harvest vital organs for transplantation, for example) is not an injustice against them, it is much easier to make a plausible case in favor of abortion and embryo-destructive research than it is for those who want to say (as most people want to say) that infanticide is the gravely unjust killing of a person in the infant stage of his or her life.

Pat Lee and I criticize Reiman and the others I mentioned in a book we have coming out soon from Cambridge University Press entitled Self-Body Dualism and Contermporary Ethical and Political Controversies.  Since it went to press before we had a chance to see Reiman's reply to Pat's earlier critique of his views, Pat will respond to that reply independently (probably not in a piece devoted exclusively to Reiman, but in one addressing recent efforts of various people to justify abortion and embryo-destructive research).

George also has a book (co-authored with Christopher Tollefsen) on the embryo question coming out in January with Doubleday.  Both that and the Self-Body Dualism book are sure to be must-reads.