Katerine: Human Being or “Human Doing”? [Michael Spencer]

My daughter, Katerine, was born with Cerebral Palsy. As a result, she is unable to walk, has extremely limited use of her hands, and at 17, functions mentally at the level of a four year old.

When Barb and I take Katerine to a restaurant or anywhere in public, perfect strangers frequently open doors for her. At concerts and sporting events she is sometimes ushered to the front to take the best seat in the house. Why such preferential treatment for a child bereft of any political power or celebrity status? It is because God has placed in each of us a moral intuition that wells up when we see need, vulnerability or handicap. We naturally want to help. In fact, the greater the need, the greater our urge to offer assistance.

Unfortunately, not everyone responds to the voice of moral intuition. Katerine’s biological father didn’t. He abandoned her on the side of the road at 6:00am in Guatemala City (her birthplace) to fend for herself at 6 years of age. She was eventually discovered by a security guard and spent the entire day, until 10:00pm, in the police department before an orphanage was found to take her. This is where she spent the next 3 years of her life. Katerine’s father’s actions are revolting. In many wombs, however, she would be aborted for the very same reason strangers now open doors for her: she is handicapped. Cerebral Palsy has severely arrested Katerine’s level of development, rendering her disposable in the minds of many.

Today, many defend the abortion choice by drawing an artificial line between “humanness” and “personhood”, arguing that it is morally permissible to kill humans so long as they’re not actual “persons.” And when does a human become a “person”? According to many it is when he/she reaches a certain level of development. When does this happen? Good luck getting a straight answer from abortion supporters; they don’t agree on which “standard” confers personhood status. One says it occurs when measurable brain activity is detected. Another says it happens at viability – that moment when the embryo could survive outside of the mother. Still another insists the embryo must be free of any fetal abnormality before the honor of “personhood” is bestowed on her.

In short, these tiny womb-dwellers are only deemed worthy of life if they pass whatever arbitrary test the big and powerful establish for them. If they don’t, they’re crushed like vermin and disposed of like trash. Conveniently for the abortion industry, none of the above-mentioned milestones are compelling enough to build consensus among abortion supporters, which means none of these tests make any difference in the end. The only real “test” is whether or not mom wants her baby.

Although we undergo a myriad of developmental changes from the time we are conceived until the time we die, our nature never changes. We are the same person now as we were then. As Randy Alcorn says,  “Something nonhuman doesn’t become human by getting older and bigger. Whatever is human is human from the beginning.” He’s right. Katerine’s disabilities do not alter her human nature, nor do they diminish her value. She is intrinsically valuable and Barb and I are blessed to be her parents.

Clinton Wilcox, who serves on our staff at Life Training Institute recently wrote, “The question of when human life begins is not a difficult one. It only becomes difficult if you want to justify killing people.” How true. Katerine escaped the womb with her cerebral palsy undetected. Many others aren’t so lucky.

We’re not “human doings,” we are human beings. In other words, Katerine is valuable, not because of what she can do, but simply because of what she is: God’s image-bearer. This makes all the difference.

Let's apply our compassion consistently across the spectrum to all human beings.  Recognizing the worth of all humans as God's image bearers, may the same hands that would open a door for a young girl in a wheel chair hold back the door of death as it slams on her no-less-human neighbors in the womb.   

Monkeying Around With Personhood [Clinton Wilcox]

Wesley J. Smith has written about a case in Argentina in which an orangutan named Sandra has been declared by the court to be a non-human person. This ruling essentially would grant Sandra her freedom because it is unethical to hold people captive unlawfully.

The BBC has even written about litigation in the United States to try to get Tommy, a chimpanzee living in captivity, recognized as a "legal person."

Peter Singer and Michael Tooley are two atheist philosophers who have long supported this notion that certain animals, like chimpanzees and dolphins, ought to be considered persons and human infants, embryos, fetuses, and the severely disabled ought not to be. Now it seems that fight has gotten bigger, even being won in at least one part of the world.

This line of thinking is atheist at its heart. If we are just the product of random mutations, a blind, naturalistic process of evolution, then really we are no more special than any other animal species out there. [1] This isn't just my interpretation, either. In Matter and Consciousness, Paul Churchland wrote: "The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process...We are creatures of matter. We should learn to live with that fact."

In fact, Singer and Tooley both (in Practical Ethics and Abortion and Infanticide, respectively) have argued that this idea that humans are intrinsically valuable is a religious idea, and we need to do away with these "antiquated" notions. The only reason we now view infanticide as wrong is because Christian morality has permeated Western civilization.

So if you are going to argue that certain animals deserve personhood, one of two things must happen:

1) You raise those animals to the status of human beings. So if Tommy and Sandra are persons, and infants are not, that means that killing a chimpanzee is more serious than killing a human infant. If you "murder" a chimpanzee, you deserve to be locked away in jail for life or executed. [2] If you kill an infant, you don't. At most, you would be guilty of a property crime, if you killed the infant against the parents' wishes. This is a highly counterintuitive idea.

2) You lower humans to the status of mere animals. After all, if we're no intrinsically different than animals, then it's really not seriously wrong to kill another human being. This is also highly counterintuitive, since we have very strong intuition that killing any human being, especially ones that are younger and more vulnerable than we are, is seriously wrong.

The bottom line is chimpanzees don't deserve personhood status. Personhood is not some arbitrary idea that we can just ascribe to entities and consider them "one of us." Being a person is inherent in being the kind of entity that you are (in our case, a human being made in God's image, or to state it in a secular way, an entity with an inherent nature as rational agents). Those who believe you are a person based on the functions you currently perform are guilty of a simple confusion: confusing being a person with acting as a person. As you must be a human before you can develop human parts, so you must be a person before you can develop personal properties.

I do not believe that animals are rights bearing entities. That's not to say that we can mistreat them. They are still entities that feel pain, and we should respect that. And a human being who mistreats an animal is at risk of becoming animal-like, themselves, becoming desensitized to pain in others. However, even if you believe they are rights bearing entities, you can ascribe rights to them without ascribing personhood to them. But what we also have to understand is that with rights comes duties. I have a right to live. This means that I am also obligated to respect everyone else's right to live. Apes cannot understand or abide by any obligations.

Sandra and Tommy are both blissfully unaware of these court proceedings. In fact, they don't care one iota about whether or not you consider them persons. This is an important difference between apes and humans. Apes may be highly intelligent -- but only when compared to other animal species (this is often lost in the animal rights debate). Apes are not very intelligent when compared to human beings. No ape will ever write like Tolstoy, or paint like Michelangelo, or compose music like Bach, or fly other apes to the Moon. And while apes may be able to use certain rudimentary tools -- that's all it is, a rudimentary tool. No ape will ever open a hardware store for the carpentry needs of other apes. And while infants may not yet be able to understand these rights and obligations, they will. And that's the crux of the matter. Human embryos/fetuses/infants will naturally develop these abilities, whereas apes never will.

So trying to ascribe personhood status to lower animals is unnecessary and makes a mockery of human dignity. Animals have been part of the ecosystem for a long time. Animals kill each other, protect each other, copulate, and do all manner of things without human help and will continue to do so without human intervention and without caring a bit about personhood or what it is. There is just no reason to ascribe personhood to animals. The only possible reason would be to ensure that humans don't mistreat animals or cause them to go extinct. But ascribing them personhood status is not necessary for that, either.

[1] I'm not wanting to get into a debate about evolution. It's certainly possible that God used evolution as the mechanism by which to create humanity. The operative idea here is if naturalistic evolution is true, this is the idea that would follow.

[2] Again, the debate regarding capital punishment is beyond the scope of this article. This idea here is that whatever the penalty for murder is, that's what you deserve if you "murder" a chimpanzee.

‘Pregnant woman leaves prolife advocates speechless’ – A Response to a viral Pro-abortion/choice video

Over the last week the abortion debate has been reawakened in the UK, after a viral video of a pro-choice/abortion women criticising prolife campaigners went viral and has been seen nearly 5 million times. The abortion debate has been on the front of newspapers, on the TV, Radio and all over the internet, the first time to such an extent for quite some time. Borrowing the words of Francis Schaeffer, the roof has come off and people have been made aware of the point of tension. Simply that abortion is a violent, dehumanising act that kills a whole, living distinct human being and abortion imagery makes that fact impossible to hide from. This has made a lot of people very angry and the UK press are not happy about it!

The viral video has been extremely popular but I have written a response to it which you can read here, and there is also a link in the first paragraph to the viral video.

Who is the Subject of Our Experiences? [Clinton Wilcox]

Allons-y!* Yes, it's high time I out myself as a huge nerd. Last night I attended a screening of the two-part Doctor Who adventure, "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel," seamlessly combined to make a feature film. It was glorious. Now, I know that science fiction is not what the "cool kids" watch, but it really does offer a great medium for exploring philosophical questions, especially in areas like personal identity and the philosophy of mind. Even many analogies surrounding the abortion issue are science fiction scenario (e.g. Thomson's violinist and Warren's captured astronaut).

This episode is one that should seem familiar to veterans of science fiction: The Doctor and his two companions, Rose and Mickey, find themselves trapped in a parallel universe, on an Earth that is very much like their own but with minor variations. On this parallel earth, a man by the name of John Lumic and his staff have created a race of cybernetic creatures as a way to transplant his own brain (and the brains of everyone on Earth) into an immortal body. Of course this makes the President of England (parallel Earth, remember?) uncomfortable, and he denies allowing the project to go forward. In a fit of rage, Lumic unleashes the Cybermen on the people of London, forcing them to surrender for "upgrade" or be exterminated.

Personal identity and personhood tend to be a favorite subject for science fiction franchises. Like the Borg of Star Trek fame, human beings are turned into cybernetic beings. But unlike the Borg, in which the organic parts of the person assimilated remain largely intact, to upload someone's brain into a Cyberman, the organic body must be destroyed and the brain is transplanted into the cybernetic body. Supposedly their identity remains intact, though there is a chip that suppresses their emotions so that they can kill without remorse and not be troubled by the new body they find themselves in.

The question of personal identity is an important one, because it has far-reaching implications. If a person commits a crime and becomes literally a different person later, we can't justly hold the new person responsible for the crime. Thankfully, we have very strong intuitions that we retain our identity throughout our entire lives -- when I think back to when I was a kid, I can be confident that those really were my parents and it really was my school that I attended, not a similar person whose memories I now have and thinks myself to be the original. So it seems that whatever view of personal identity we hold, it has to account for the fact that we retain our identity throughout our entire lives.

Many people (including philosophers) tend to believe that a person is the sum total of all of one's memories and personal experiences. But this doesn't seem correct, since it doesn't account for who, exactly, is the subject of our experiences. Plus, I was still "me" even at the points in my life that I can't remember, or before I was able to form memories. As philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote in his book Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing, Expanded Edition (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA, 1989, p. 176), "The only thing whose presence can make an all-encompassing difference, a difference to everything in my life, to something not contained by but containing my life. That's me. I am the constant amid millions of variables that make up my life. All my experiences are not X or Y or Z, but all my experiences are mine. Each experience is 'I experiencing X and Y in way Z'. X, Y, and Z are the variables: I am the constant."

There are many drastic changes we go through from the time that we are conceived until now, but all of these changes are identity-preserving changes. My five-year-old self and my present-day self are drastically different: I am several feet taller, I have gone through puberty, I have gained many more and new experiences, my skin cells have died and been replaced, I am now able to engage in higher thought, etc. Yet that was still "me."

But the problem with science fiction scenarios is that we can only speculate regarding them -- we cannot test them, empirically. There may come a time when it becomes scientifically possible to transfer someone's brain into a machine and have them continue to live, or it may never happen because it's simply not possible to do. You could transplant the brain but the person may not survive the transplant. In fact, if all we are is a sum total of our memories and experiences, then if our brain is transplanted, how do we know the original person hasn't died? What we may be left with is a similar (but different) entity, with all of the original person's thoughts, experiences, and memories, believing himself to be the original.

As a Christian, I believe that what accounts for my continuity of existence through all points in my life is the soul, and I believe that our continuity of existence is evidence for the soul. I think that trying to adopt an alternate view regarding personal identity and personhood leads to many absurdities. I can't remember what it was like to be an embryo, but that was certainly "me" in my mother's womb. I can look back and say there was a time in which my mother was pregnant with me, and "I" was born.

*Allons-y is a French phrase which means "let's go!" It's a phrase that the Tenth Doctor repeated often.

On Bodily Rights and Personhood [Clinton Wilcox]

In my recent debate with Matt Dillahunty, he made a claim that bodily rights arguments "include" arguments from personhood. This apparently means, to him, that he doesn't have to make a case against unborn personhood, it just means that whether or not the unborn are persons because of bodily rights abortion is permissible because no one has the right to use your body against your will. I believe this to be mistaken, and I will explain why bodily rights arguments don't "include" arguments from personhood; in fact, bodily rights arguments assume unborn personhood. This will be my last article written about my recent debate, but I feel that this is an important point to make. The debate is already over, so I'm not trying to score additional points with my articles. Debates are won or lost based on what is argued in the debate. I am here just explaining this topic in greater detail.

The reason that bodily rights arguments don't "include" personhood arguments is simple: if I make a case that the unborn are persons, then arguing bodily rights does not address personhood arguments. Bodily rights is not a defeater to the personhood argument; it doesn't even address it. If I make a case for unborn personhood, and you argue bodily rights, you've completely avoided the argument and the argument goes through. If I make the case that the unborn are persons because they don't differ from adults in any morally relevant way, and it's our inherent capacities, not our presently-exercisable capacities, that ground our personhood, then going to bodily rights arguments does not address these. In order to address my argument from personhood, you must show that the unborn actually do differ from us in morally relevant ways, or that our presently-exercisable capacities, rather than our inherent capacities, are what ground our personhood.

So Matt apparently thinks I was lying when I said he didn't address my arguments, but an honest listen to the debate will exonerate me on this point. He refused to address them because he didn't respond to them. Arguing from bodily rights is not addressing personhood arguments, it is avoiding them. But even Thomson, in her famous essay "A Defense of Abortion," understood this. She wrote, "I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person's right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed."

Thomson then went on to give her famous violinist thought experiment, in an attempt to show that by granting the major premise of the pro-life position, that the unborn are full human persons with a right to life, abortion is still permissible. Bodily rights arguments, again, do not "include" personhood arguments, they assume the personhood of the unborn. If the unborn are not persons, there is no need to argue bodily rights because if the unborn are not persons it is not seriously wrong to kill them. Or if the unborn are a mere part of her body, then abortion would literally be no different than having a tooth pulled or a mole removed. But as I indicated in my last article, several times during our debate, Matt actually assumed the unborn are not persons, which is not an option a proponent of bodily rights has open to them, especially if their debate opponent made a case for the personhood of the unborn.

There are good reasons to consider the unborn to be persons. I also believe there are good reasons to make abortion illegal. But we must take care to be logically consistent in our arguments. Not only did I make a case that the unborn are persons, but I also made a case for why, in light of bodily rights arguments, a discussion of personhood is important. We are all persons from fertilization and because of this, we also have our basic rights from fertilization which includes a right to life.

Hadley Arkes on the Problem of Personhood Language [Scott]

Speaking of a previous personhood campaign, Arkes writes:

The pro-lifers in Colorado have brought forth, for the ballot this November, a Personhood Amendment to their constitution: “the term ‘person’ shall apply to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.” The proposition is certainly correct and defensible. And yet it has the form and tenor of an assertion. Cast in that way, it promises to trigger the perversity and relativism of judges who have absorbed liberal slogans: They begin with the premise that the beginning of human life is an inscrutably religious question; that it hinges on matters of belief, not truths. They know that people are brazen enough to contend that they don’t know when human life begins – even with a pregnancy test – and so the amendment simply looks like an exercise of brute force: One faction has simply imposed its “opinion” on the community with the force of law.

I would prefer another approach. We could begin with the old-fashioned mode of a preamble, which sets forth the premises in the bill. And the trick is to set down premises that even judges would be embarrassed to dismiss, because even they could not contest their truth. The preamble could begin then by citing passages from the textbooks on embryology – e.g., “The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.” [Langman, Jan. Medical Embryology. 3rd edition]

And then:

“Nowhere in the chain of development does the offspring undergo a shift in species. It is human, and nothing less than human, from its first moments. Taller, heavier people are not more human than shorter, lighter people. No alteration in human standing can come with these changes in growth – or decline. Therefore, the ground of justification for the taking of this human life in the womb must be reconciled with the grounds that are required for the taking of any other human life in the laws of this state.”

Something in that vein – the legislative language may be sharpened and perfected. A commission could be authorized to hear cases and pass on the “justifications” that are offered. In all strictness, the legislation would still leave intact the right to order an abortion under certain circumstances – with the justifications yet to be tested. But at the same time, it implicitly calls into question many kinds of abortions now readily performed. Since there is no license to kill the children around us afflicted with Down syndrome or spina bifida, there would no longer be such a ready license to dispose of children in the womb with these afflictions.

This is not to say that judges, with more craft than shame, may not find a way to tie up these kind of law. But why not make them strain their wit to do it? And why not work, on our side, by seeking to plant in the law the truths that even the judges cannot dissolve.

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