Persons, Identity, and AbortionThe recent literature on abortion has moved away from the "personhood question," since Judith Jarvis Thomson demonstrated that one's position on that question by no means settles the larger questions concerning the morality of abortion. Her argument concedes -- but only for the sake of argument -- the personhood of the prenate. Even this concession, she argues, does not entail that abortion is morally impermissible, so arguments about the moral status of abortion need not linger on it. Still, there have been many challenges to Thomson's position, such as, notably, Baruch Brody's criticism that Thomson does not adequately distinguish between the right not to save or preserve a life and the duty not to take a life. My intent here is to develop an account of personhood that is both feasible in its own right and of significance in the abortion controversy. Even if Thomson is correct in arguing that the personhood issue does not in itself resolve the abortion controversy, it is at the very least crucially relevant to the important question of whether abortion is homicide. The answer to that question cannot plausibly be held to be irrelevant to the larger moral issues. In this paper, I shall develop and compare two accounts of the personhood of the prenate. They are both diachronic accounts, as I believe any adequate account must be. I shall therefore begin with some discussion of what is required of a diachronic account of personhood. Persons in TimeThe problem of formulating criteria of personhood is not peculiar to the context of the abortion controversy; it is touched on in disputes about the possibility of immortality, the possibility of artificial intelligence, and elsewhere. At the heart of the matter there is a set of intuitions about what is important about persons. Most would agree that the possibility of nonhuman persons is intelligible and that therefore personhood is not reducible to membership in the human biological species. The various accounts that have been offered tend to focus on the cognitive, linguistic, and social capacities of paradigm persons: fully competent adult human beings. Persons are rational animals; they are language-users; they have a self-concept; they bear certain kinds of relations to other persons; they have certain kinds of desires and intentions, possibly of different orders. These are a few of the landmarks on this familiar philosophical terrain. I shall not attempt in this essay to tinker with these accounts or play one against the other. I am satisfied to grant that there is some set of cognitive and social attributes that are sufficient for personhood, even if formulating necessary and sufficient conditions remains a more elusive -- and controversial -- goal. Furthermore, these attributes are central to the status of persons as moral agents, with obligations and rights. After all, to be a moral agent requires certain capabilities, and the cognitive, linguistic, and social capabilities on which personhood discussions focus are precisely the sort of things that make it possible for beings to participate in the community of moral agents. Membership is not merely honorific. As a consequence of membership in the community of moral agents, persons have a right to life, therefore to kill them is homicide, which is presumptively wrong.[1] First, however, we need a term to refer to this set of attributes. I know of no English word that fits the bill exactly. The term "sentience" is widely used to denote mere consciousness or awareness; the attributes relevant to personhood obviously include more than that. I shall use the term "sapience" in this essay. Although sapience means wisdom, I don't think it is out of bounds to construe wisdom in the widest possible sense, as it is perhaps implicitly construed in the term homo sapiens.[2] Thus, individuals are persons in virtue of their sapience. The question that arises is: Is an individual a person only while sapient? This question arises because sapience comprises attributes which individuals do not exemplify continuously. In particular, they undergo regular periods of unconsciousness during sleep and, less regularly, other periods during which sapience is absent. Moreover, they do not achieve sapience until they have grown at least beyond infancy. Thus, if the term "sapience" is used synchronically to denote only properties exemplified at the time of predication, then we have the highly counterintuitive result that sleeping or otherwise temporarily unconscious individuals are not persons. This doesn't show that there is something wrong with linking sapience to personhood; it shows that a synchronic account of personhood just won't do. An adequate account must take heed of the fact that persons exist over time. An individual is not a person solely in virtue of attributes exemplified at the moment of being referred to as a person. To suppose otherwise is to be committed to the absurd view that there are no sleeping persons, only sleeping non-persons. To avoid this absurdity, a person must be regarded as a four-dimensional entity, a being extended in space and time.[3] This is what a diachronic account of personhood must make clear. An individual can be sapient in the present, the past, or the future. Present sapience is paradigmatically a sufficient condition of personhood, but to make it a necessary condition is unacceptable, since it forces us to deny personhood of the sleeping, the temporarily comatose, and those in infancy. Indeed, regarding the latter, it is the first step toward arguments such as Tooley's that purport to justify infanticide. An alternative is to suppose that while present sapience is sufficient for personhood, either present or past sapience is also sufficient. This allows that sleeping humans, infants, and the temporarily comatose are persons. It also follows that humans in irreversible vegetative coma are persons (unless the onset of the coma occurred in infancy), since such individuals clearly were sapient in the past. The latter is a questionable, if controversial[4], consequence. My own view is that once personhood is linked to sapience rather than biological identity, there is good reason to suppose that personhood can end before the organic death of the individual. In fact, the latter reflection suggests that future sapience is precisely what matters in questions of survival. If one is given a choice between organic death and permanent vegetative coma, there is nothing much to choose between. Future sapience is what separates the sleeping individual and the temporarily comatose individual from the permanently comatose individual. It also blocks arguments such as Tooley's against the personhood of the newborn infant. The onset of permanent unconsciousness is the end of sapience and the end of the person. Thus, the account of personhood that does the least violence to accepted moral practice and intuition is this: A person is an individual who has either present or future sapience. Turning to the more controversial domain of the status of the prenate, the clear consequence is that the prenate is a person in virtue of future sapience. Some will object that this is merely a re-wording of the old "potentiality" argument, according to which the prenate is not an actual person but a "potential person" in virtue of its future states. Although there are some similarities between the two notions, there are also important differences, which I shall analyze below. First, we must ask what warrants attributing future sapience to an individual now? We cannot read its future states from its present states. The answer to this question can only be given in pragmatic, fallibilistic terms. We are warranted in attributing future sapience to an individual if we have every reason to believe that it will be sapient, and no reason to believe that it won't be. Although some prenates do not survive to birth, or beyond birth to sapience, in most cases we have every reason to believe that the prenate will become sapient. This is not quite the same as saying that the prenate has the potential to be sapient. The difference can be brought out by the following example: Consider a child from a family of very musically talented people but who is unfortunately born with a congenital crippling condition that prevents her from playing an instrument or singing. While it makes sense to say that in some sense this child has the potential to be a skilled musician, we have good reason to believe that she will not become a skilled musician. We should not attribute "future musicianhood" to her, despite her potential. To sum up, anyone who grants that irreversibly unconscious individuals are no longer persons and that temporarily unconscious individuals and newborns are persons must grant that something along the lines of what I am calling future sapience is at least a sufficient condition of personhood. From that it follows that the human prenate is a person, with a right to life, and so forth. The Future Sapience theory of the person in the context of the abortion dispute is similar in some respects to a theory advanced by Don Marquis, concerning the reason why abortion is prima facie wrong. As I shall make clear, there are also important differences between our views. He calls it the "future-like-ours" theory, and writes, The claim that the primary wrong-making feature of a killing is the loss to the victim of the value of its future has obvious consequences for the ethics of abortion. The future of a standard fetus includes a set of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identical with the futures of adult human beings and are identical with the futures of young children. Since the reason that is sufficient to explain why it is wrong to kill human beings after the time of birth is a reason that also applies to fetuses, it follows that abortion is prima facie morally wrong.[5] Although Marquis himself distinguishes his approach from a "personhood" approach, it is only non-diachronic personhood approaches from which it can be said to be pointedly distinct. Sapience just is what makes one's future valuable. Thus, while Marquis might agree that killing an individual is prima facie wrong because it takes from that individual the value of its future sapience, I would add that killing a person is wrong for that reason and because a person is uniquely the sort of being who can be deprived of such value. Furthermore, on my view homicide always violates the right to life of a person who now exists, rather than a person who never will exist, but could have. Persons as ContinuaI mentioned at the beginning that I would compare two diachronic accounts of personhood. The future sapience account avoids the pitfalls of any synchronic account, but it is not the only possible diachronic account. The second account, according to which persons are psychological continua, follows closely along lines developed in detail by Derek Parfit. Parfit, although he does mention the abortion dispute in passing in Reasons and Persons, is primarily interested in addressing problems related to personal identity and survival. His view is that what matters in survival is the preservation of a certain kind of psychological continuity and connectedness, which he refers to as the "R-relation," defined as "psychological connectedness and/or continuity, with the right kind of cause."[6] A central characteristic of this continuity is memory. A given continuum of person-stages is distinguished from other continua by its memories being the causal consequences of the experiences of earlier person-stages. On this view, a person is a continuum of R-related stages. This continuum begins at the first stage to which later stages are R-related and ends at the last stage to which earlier stages are R-related. Although the continuity is broken by intervals of unconsciousness, these intervals are "bounded" and woven into the life of the person by the R-related stages on both sides. Intervals of dreamless sleep, though not remembered, are nevertheless situated in memory as discontinuities in the stream of experience. Like the Future Sapience account, the Continuum account entails that personhood ends with the permanent cessation of consciousness, since permanent unconsciousness is not bounded by R-related experience; it is not situated in memory as a discontinuity in the stream of experience, because no experience is subsequent to it. The two accounts differ, however, on the question of when personhood begins. On the Continuum account, personhood cannot begin before the R-relation, and a being can only be R-related to a being that has psychological states. This implies that the being has experiences that are in principle susceptible of being remembered, making it a "sentient" being, in the minimal sense of that word. According to the Continuum account, if there is a developmental interval during which psychological states have not yet arisen, then no person yet exists. Although such a being may be causally continuous with some future person, it is not R-related to that person. Using the most conservative plausible assumptions, the very earliest developmental point at which a prenate might be said to have experiences is the point at which its central nervous system begins to function. Thus, on this view it makes sense to say that personhood begins at the onset of sentience, even though sentience is not non-diachronically sufficient for personhood. This point is certainly not the moment of conception. In contrast, according to the Future Sapience account, personhood begins as soon as there is an individual to whom we have good reason to attribute future sapience, and this is the moment of conception. Note that even the Continuum account must rely on something like sapience to function as a full account of personhood. That is, there is nothing in Parfit's theory that prevents the various stages of a dog's life from being R-related. This is because it is a theory of personal identity (More accurately, it is a theory of what matters in survival.), not an account of what distinguishes persons from non-persons. Thus, a person is not simply a continuum of R-related stages, but an R-related continuum of person-stages. What makes a stage a person-stage? On my view, a person-stage is a stage of a being that is R-related to other stages that are sapient. Is there good reason to prefer one theory to the other, apart from preferring one or another answer to the abortion question? According to both theories, the personhood of a six-month fetus is dependent upon attributes that it will come to have, but the Continuum theory goes further to claim that it is in virtue of its sentience now that it makes sense to say that there will be some future person-stage who is R-related to it. When we consider a two-week embryo, in which there is no well-differentiated nervous system, the two theories part company. This is not a being to which any future person-stages will be R-related, although it is an entity that has sapience in its future. A further consideration is this: The Continuum theory is embedded in and in fact derived from a psychological continuity theory of personal identity. The Future Sapience theory has to rely on a physical continuity theory of identity because, in the form in which I have described it, it claims that the pre-sapient prenate is (identical to) an individual who will be sapient. Since the prenate is pre- sapient and, if it is at a sufficiently early developmental stage, pre-sentient, this identity claim cannot be based on psychological continuity. It would seem, then, that the choice between diachronic theories of personhood hangs on a choice between theories of personal identity. I believe that there are good reasons to prefer a psychological continuity theory, but I shall not argue the general case here. There is, however, a further consideration that may help to resolve the issue. The Future Sapience theory is committed to a psychological account of what persons are and a physical account of who they are. This is problematic to the extent that it invites the familiar polemic of the physical continuity of individual spermatozoa and ova with future adult sapient humans. Sperm and ova can have sapience in their future even though it is impossible to say which ones do and which ones don't. They are physically continuous with individuals who will be sapient. The ascription of personhood and rights to these cells may safely be accepted as a reductio of the physical continuity theory applied to prenates. The Continuum theory, precisely because it is based on a psychological theory of identity, is not subject to this objection. Single cells are not R-related to anything. Both of the theories sketched here entail conclusions about the personhood of the fetus that would be regarded as politically conservative. But the Continuum theory is slightly less so in that it denies that the pre-sentient prenate is a person. Therefore, the destruction of such a being, perhaps by abortifacient means, is not an act of homicide. The Homicide QuestionThere is such a thing as justifiable homicide, but abortion is seldom defended as such an act. Thomson, for example, argues that the right to life does not entail a right to whatever is necessary for one's survival. She does not argue that the right to life does not entail a right not to be the victim of homicide because this is precisely what the right to life does entail. It is important, therefore, to decide whether an abortion is an instance of denying someone what is necessary for survival and only that, or whether it is also homicide. To characterize abortion as merely denying (or failing to provide) someone what is necessary for survival seems to mask what is actually happening. It's rather like saying that the motorist who ran over a jaywalker simply did not yield the right of way. It's true as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Abortion is often glossed as "termination of pregnancy," but this is evades the homicide question entirely. Abortion is termination of pregnancy by means of the destruction of the prenate, in most cases. That is, termination of pregnancy is the end and destruction of the prenate is the means.[7] It is homicide when one person acts in a manner intended to bring about the death of another. Since the abortion procedure is a clear example of such an action, I think it is safe to conclude that all analogies that merely involve failing to save or preserve a life, or withholding the necessities of survival, are not morally relevant. Homicide can be justified in self-defense, and this justification can certainly be invoked in those cases where the pregnant woman's life is at risk.[8] In the more typical case of pregnancy as a result of consensual intercourse, the woman's life is not at stake. It is difficult to see what other grounds might be adduced in justification of homicide in such cases. Certainly, the reasons for which abortions are commonly chosen in these cases are not reasons that could justify homicide in general. This is not to underestimate the gravity of those reasons, as opponents of abortion sometimes tend to do. An unwanted pregnancy often represents an immense psychological, financial, and social burden for the woman. But unwanted pregnancy is not the only case in which the existence of another person represents an immense psychological, financial, or social burden, unfortunately. Homicide is not considered a justifiable option in these other cases, so it is hard to see what would make it a justifiable option in the case of unwanted pregnancy. The so-called "pro-choice" position is that any reason, or no reason, is sufficient justification for abortion. Alternatively, one could say that the pro-choice position is that abortion does not need to be justified. But if abortion is homicide, this cannot be so. If, as I have argued, most abortions are homicides, then they are not justified merely in virtue of being chosen. Homicide is presumptively wrong, which means that it automatically stands in need of justification. It does not follow that they are never justified. I cannot pretend that the above remarks fully respond to the issues raised by Thomson and many others in the enormous literature generated by her arguments. They are the barest sketch of a response, just enough to suggest why I think that the personhood question is still important in the abortion debate. To conclude, if the Continuum Theory is the best available diachronic theory of the person, then the pro-choice position is perfectly appropriate if and only if the termination of pregnancy is undertaken when the prenate is not yet sentient, and hence not R-related to any sapient being. It follows that the least morally problematic course is to terminate at this stage. As I write this, what appears to be the safest and most effective known means for accomplishing this is the abortifacient drug RU-486, developed in France. It is therefore a matter of some moral urgency that this drug be evaluated for use in those countries where it is still illegal. Obviously, this does not settle the abortion question, but it makes sense to move ahead with the less problematic option while the jury is still out on the more intractable questions. Notes
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