Living or Dying in the "Gray Zone"

Interesting post, I just stumbled upon it. My first thought is, why is being happy the be all end all? Is happiness the supreme marker of a life? Not for me, I have learned far more from my chronic disease, which does not make me happy than from the moments of "happiness" that mark the high points. I would say that I am a "happy" person though. When picking Downs as you birth defect of choice, you make some errors because it is not a defect that causes "pain" and Downs patients are very happy people. They bring joy to those who know them, so much of the argument is a non-sequitor. Singer is a fool. How can we mitigate suffering by causing more? People mourn for the rest of their lives, I should know I am one of them...

I completely agree. The downs illustration did not contain my thoughts on down syndrome, but rather what many secular minded/utilitarian people say when considering the termination of a downs pregnancy. You are very right - every person I have met with downs has been a joy and great light to others.

My post was an attempt to highlight what you stated - Singer's thinking is indeed foolish - I would even say some of his thinking and ideas advocate that which is wicked.

Thanks for the insightful comment
Reid

I randomly stumbled upon your blog and thought it was interesting, although two things puzzle me about this May 27 post. Perhaps the problem is simply that my non-Christian worldview has occluded my cognitive faculties and prevented me from drawing inferences and accepting descriptions which you take to be transparently obvious, and which ought to therefore be obvious to me, the reader. If so, then there may be no help for me, and no possibility of constructive dialogue for us, and so I'll understand if you don't reply; describing color to the blind could be a futile project.

My puzzles are, first, why you would refer to a 23- week old premature baby as a "tiny, precious, human person"? (Emphasis added.) Unless you are willing to attribute some kind of meaningful rationality to the fetus, or unless your idea of personhood does not entail meaningful rationality, then the attribution is mistaken. The rub is that the ordinary concept of personhood (as I have ever heretofore noticed it used) assumes some kind of rationality; but why assume this of a fetus, even one which is biologically human?

Second, after Singer writes:

"...it can be difficult to challenge the prevailing rhetoric that every possible effort must be made to save every human life"

you immediately interpret (and implicitly criticize) this with

"So trying to save even the most hopeless cases is based only on rhetoric (empty, vacuous thinking, that has no basis in Singer world)."

But why would you think that Singer was committed to this second view? It is manifestly not supported by the preceding quote, except by assuming premises to which it is not clear that Singer is committed. (And I read the Singer article.) Arguably, Singer could be correct that there is rhetoric on this issue, and that that rhetoric can be hard to challenge. But to make these claims is not to make the additional claim that those who advance the rhetoric are therefore "only" committed to rhetoric for its own sake. In your apparent attempt to demonize Singer, it rather appears that you make leaps not supported by logic; and this is particularly unfair to Singer, since he in fact does attempt to engage the considerations and values of the opposition. Being a 'rhetorician' does not preclude having reasons, and so such "rhetoricians" may indeed have reasons and considerations, shared by others; and those reasons and considerations may be, as Singer suggests, somewhat (or perhaps manifestly) worse reasons and considerations, because they do not impartially consider the interests of the parents in the life of the fetus, and perhaps other relevant interests as well. (And an optimally fair reading of Singer would perhaps have pointed out that he thinks this point cuts against absolutists on both sides of the bioethical debate.) You may not actually think that Singer argues for his conclusions successfully (although I doubt you have taken up his serious philosophical work -- I hope you have not, anyway), but that is surely not a good reason to (falsely) accuse him of insincerity or undue uncharitableness towards his opposition, of which you no doubt count yourself a proud member.

Michael,

Thank you for the thoughtful response and questions in your post. I will agree with you at the onset that we all do wear certain presuppositions as spectacles through which we see the world. Yet in order to understand one another and be understood some times we do have to study the glasses of another to engage in helpful dialog. Personally, I grew up without religion and did not become a Christian until I was 20 studying Physics at UNC Chapel Hill. So I find dialog to come easy with unbelief - as I once lived there so to speak.

To your questions. First, Personhood is an evolving concept in western thought so I understand why you wondered how I could call a fetus a person. This of course is at the heart of any discussion of what is ethical in relationship to the unborn. If we relegate the fetus to less than a person we can indeed do things to it that we would never think of doing to a person with a biographical life, sentience, rationality and volition.

The definition of personhood to which I hold is not functional, but ontological. Some would grant personhood only to those beings which rise to a certain rubric or functioning capacity. You are a human person if and only if: you name your criteria. I find this falls short in many aspects. One, we cannot base our definition of a human person based on level of rationality for that would exclude human beings who "fall short" of this level. We cannot base it on genetics as this would exclude children with downs as well as the X-men. We cannot base it on conscious functioning as this would exclude persons in comas. Basing a persons worth on function is also perilous as those who advocate eugenics have and will travel down a dangerous discriminatory path. If we do not have an individual (which is a persistent self over time) which can be identified as a human person, the history and future of western jurisprudence vanishes.

The other alternative is to base a person's dignity on the basis of what "it is." That there is a humanness that transcends mere function and finds its ground in ontology. In my thinking this is grounding in the image of God and natural law - much the same way that the founders of America grounded human rights in the created order. If this is is the case - that humanity as humanity is by its very nature worthy of respect and value, each person is to be given that due. This includes the most vulnerable among us. The handicapped, the unborn, the very old. You and I both were once a fetus - the only difference being that you and I have had more time, more food, more protection - and some education.

Second, Singer's reference to prevailing rhetoric is in direct reference to a certain type of case. His casuistry led me to my conclusion - he was saying that trying to save certain cases is based on rhetoric, and his article was written to challenge that prevailing view. My reasoning is that he is not to determine that such cases are a waste. Yet again, my problem is with consequentialist/utilitarian ethics. Such views presume in arrogance that we can calculate far more than we can. I am not saying that the ends of our actions should not be considered - of course we should wrestle and reason with consequences. My point is that the ends cannot justify the means, the means must be justified in and of themselves. It might be stated or argued that "decision X" will bring more net happiness therefore we should do it. My point is that whether X itself is moral must be considered.

Additionally, human suffering is seen as pointless in a utilitarian worldview. There can simply be no good reason for suffering in this view. Personally, I do not like suffering - but I do know that it is used greatly in our lives. Any ethic which does not consider what might be learned in our suffering I find very deficient in its vision of the human condition.

As to Singer, I have read him some, mainly portions of his works for an ethics lecture...He is such a prolific author one has to be in the field full time to keep up.

I will say that he is a consistent naturalist. We see this is attempting to extend rights to apes and such. His functional definitions of value extend to chimps as they have similar function to my small children. I just find his first principles deeply flawed. A chimp may be smarter, more functional, and more pleasant to have around than a severely disabled two year old boy. But in my thinking they ARE not the same - one is a monkey, the other is a boy. There is a difference.

As to whether he is charitable to others positions is certainly a topic for debate. In my opinion he seems to look down upon those who disagree with him, particularly those who eat meat.

If you found my tone or rhetoric to be full of arrogance, accept my apologies. Perhaps my passion got in the way - I am sure it has happened to you some time in your life as well. When one is personally around these tiny human beings as our family has recently been - the idea intentionally killing them is a bit much.

Thanks again for your time - I do understand his position and I do find it very troubling.

Thanks for the reply. Please, no apologies; my second point is of course less important than my first. I mostly wrote it because you seemed to be dismissing Singer as someone who doesn't make serious arguments which wrestle with the concerns of people such as yourself -- when he does. Singer didn't say or necessarily imply that the concern of people such as yourself was "only based on rhetoric"; you said it, and I thought it was a cheap shot, setting Singer up to look like a more frivolous thinker than he is. Yes, Singer is a consequentialist and you are entitled to question this framework; but within his framework Singer is consistent and not nearly as cavalier as you seemed to be suggesting. Perhaps I snapped; I've heard many people with your viewpoint treat Singer in (what I took to be) the same casually dismissive manner, and I must confess to being irritated by this: on the one hand, Christian intellectuals want to be taken seriously, on the other hand, they (sometimes, seemingly) refuse to take serious challenges seriously! I am somewhat glad to discover that you are a Christian intellectual of the type who aspires to a wider dialogue, and not merely the snide comfort of the Christian clique. Singer deserves some credit, even if he has the wrong framework, draws the wrong conclusions within that framework, or you disagree with him.

But whether or not Singer gets his due is a small point, and tangential to the main issue, of course, and probably not worth discussing further.

As to the main issue, just to clarify slightly, I took rationality to be a necessary condition of the ordinary concept of personhood, not a sufficient condition ("x is a person if..."). Under this analysis, it would obviously be incorrect to regard x as a person if x lacked any rationality -- and this will be true without having to define / embark on the quest for a sufficient criterion of personhood. In other words, we don't have to complete the sentence, "X is a person if and only if..." in order to realize that we have an issue of contention, and discuss it.

So, one of the points at issue between us is that you deny that the relevant concept of personhood requires any notion of rationality. There may be a concept of personhood which does entail rationality, but you would then suggest that we ought not be using this (ordinary) concept of personhood when considering fetuses.

"One, we cannot base our definition of a human person based on level of rationality for that would exclude human beings who "fall short" of this level." (But why can we not do this? Why can't we assume for example that an x could be a human and not a person?)

Obviously, this leaves you with an operative concept of personhood in which no kind of meaningful rationality is ever necessary. This by itself is a highly unusual conception with respect to ordinary use, even if the concept is 'evolving.' Since, on one plausible interpretation of your view, it seems that literally everything in your case hinges on the value which you place on personhood -- a state you identify with 23-week old fetuses -- you might tip your readers off to your particular odd conception. We, the reader, may not see any use for such a concept apart from the (too) highly particular project of maintaining that all human life is significantly valuable all of the time, or some such. (I say that this is "too" highly particular because whether or not all human life is valuable is precisely the question at issue!) This could pose a significant problem for you, as your concepts would essentially amount to an exercise in defining your way to success. I certainly can prove any proposition at all as long as I'm allowed to define the relevant words however I like and then say "but that's just the way it IS -- see my definition!" I assume you could do the same; but of course this kind of arguing is presumptively invalid.

But brushing all that aside, I am most puzzled as to what could be a "humanness that transcends mere function." (HTMF) Since you suppose that this is the thing of value underlying personhood (or is it the other way around?), it is worth asking: What does this even mean?? Is "humanness" a thing? Are you perhaps just claiming the existence of a metaphysical soul and saying that that is what makes persons valuable? Or is HTMF identifiable with a set of abilities, or with a set of potentialities? And, you should also notice that, if you intend to treat HTMF as a necessary condition of personhood, you will be committed to attributing HTMF to God and the angels, at least if God and the angels are persons, which they presumably are. This could be a highly odd result, depending on what you take HTMF to actually mean.

As to the rest of it:

- I respect the contention that consequentialism has theoretical problems, and I'm actually sympathetic to the view that one of these problems is the problem of ever being able to predict the future. Still, that might be a kind of epistemic problem which does not wholly defeat consequentialism as an ethical theory. As you point out, we are sometimes concered with consequences, and so we do sometimes suppose that the future is somewhat predictable -- and all of this enters into our judgment of what counts as moral. If you allow even that much, then there is a sense in which consequentialist arguments have to be addressed in their own terms.

- Structurally, this suggests that you might separate: a) your argument against consequentialism generally, if you have one, from b) your argument against Singer's conclusion that consequentialism entails somewhat devaluing 23-week-old fetuses. There is no reason in principle why you couldn't accept consequentialism in arguendo and yet argue for your substantive conclusion. You could say, for example, that the consequence of a fetus dying is that something of great value has been lost (a manifestly bad consequence), although my point is that you ought to give some coherent account of the thing of value which is at stake.

- Just to be precise, it's not relevant to the argument in logical terms that any of us were ever fetuses. Plus, for all you know, I might not be human, I might be a highly evolved new species of rational ape. ;-)

- In either case, and this is the real point to all of this, I STILL don't think you have explained how it could be appropriate to describe a 23-week-old fetus as a "person," a concept which I will grant you carries a notion of value.

- "If this is is the case - that humanity as humanity is by its very nature worthy of respect and value, each person is to be given that due." Wait a second, so your conclusion is not that humans are valuable as persons, but that persons are valuable as humans? Or are you suggesting that there are two separate things of value here, humanness and personhood? are these essentially the same concept? Or, are you suggesting that there is (metaphysical/ontological) "humanness," which is something valuable, and which is a necessary condition of personhood, and which gives personhood its value in turn? Or something else?

In short, you must forgive me if I still doubt that you have any clear and even halfways defensible notion of the related concepts and arguments. It's not that you haven't convinced me to regard a 23-week old fetus as a person, it's that you haven't given me any particular reason to suppose that one even could regard a 23-week old fetus as a person without also being committed to some rather silly stuff. (Depending on how you clarify your claims and explain what HTMF means, you could turn out to be committed to the view that God is not a person OR that God is a person because he possesses 'humanness' OR that all fetuses have the abilities or potentials which constitute the HTMF OR that your concept of Personhood is a concept lacking any necessary conditions OR that there can be no non-human persons OR that some biological humans are not persons (or that some biological humans lack humanness!) OR that your view is only defensible given a view of a substantive metaphysical soul, and maybe some combination of these. I regard most of these options as problematic even if I would grant you the requisite metaphysical notions (like souls) for the sake of argument. (Of course, I think that the notion of souls is itself silly and/or confused.)

In other words, I am suggesting that it still looks like your view possibly fails even within your own terms. So I am still contending that either you are either conceptually confused, or that you are committed to some variety of silly stuff.

Michael, I will try to reply next week. We have had a death in our family and I must go and do the funeral. Plus, I have 3 little kids under 6. Lots going on.

My first response I composed trying to get little ones in the bath and into bed.

In our further interactions here, I think we should reserve terms like "silly" for a different context. It will not profit our conversation. I will do so for some of your ideas for which I may find the term appropriate. I ask you to do the same. To say someone's ideas are silly is a bit smug and smacks of an arrogant superiority. For instance you almost state that believing in metaphysical notions is either silly or confused. You can just say mistaken if that is your opinion...but silly insinuates "childish/easily dismissed" and "confused" points to intellectual wimpiness. Smile. If you desire to tell each other how silly we think each other's world view is, we could go down that road. I think we would find it to be more of the same theist/atheist rhetoric you can find too often on blogs.

You wrote "Christian intellectuals want to be taken seriously, on the other hand, they (sometimes, seemingly) refuse to take serious challenges seriously!"

Let me say that this can be true of anyone - certainly we say this of the other side of the debates.

But Christian intellectuals are not looking for charity - they are taken seriously. Now, perhaps it makes one feel confident about one's views to look downward towards another's, but we need not overstate things. There are Christian academics working in every field today and are beginning to take a very prominent position in philosophy depts in America. Perhaps due to the complete disarray of a field which was decimated by skepticism. You know Postmodern thought was born from the skeptical deconstruction of all things.

Thanks - I look forward to interacting with you later next week.

I'm very sorry to hear about your loss. My condolences.

We can pick this back up whenever you are ready. One small point, please don't take appellations like "silly" and "conceptually confused" personally. Even among my best friends, I may disparage (what I take to be) unfortunate positions in similarly "abusive" language. (Except that it is not abusive in that context of conversation, as it happens.) I distinguish *you* from your positions, and you should understand me as only aiming insults at positions, and only when I think I have given some reason for why it's deserved. I certainly bear no animus towards you *personally*.

Michael,
Agreed - I do the same with my friends - believer and unbeliever. Feel free to call my "views" silly, stupid, etc. I will not disparage you either - but will feel the freedom to beat around the ideas.

Until I get back in the mix, feel free to check out my post on naturalism - and the atheist myth I wrote therein. You may find it here

Many thanks for the condolences.
Reid
PS - do you have a web site?