The Human Embryo as a Subject of Inalienable Human Rights—Part II The theory that being a "human being" is not necessarily identical with being a "human person" can be termed the "evolutionistic" or "marker" theory in that it posits that personal status may only be acquired when certain markers along the continuum of human development are reached such as implantation, the formation of the central nervous system, or the formation of the cerebral cortex. Others argue that a human being does not become a human person until he or she is in possession of certain intellectual capacities. The common sense answer to these theories is to ask: "How could a human individual not be a human person?"[29] If granting personal status to the embryo is contingent on where a marker is placed along the continuum of human life after fertilization, then what is there to stop vested and powerful interests in society shifting this marker to whatever point along the continuum that will enable them to legally extinguish the right to life of any particular group of people they deem unfit to live? Indeed, philosopher Michael Tooley has stated, "new-born humans are neither persons nor even quasi-persons."[30]
Peter Singer and Gregory Pence, both of whom are well-known defenders of therapeutic cloning and abortion, argue that while human embryos and fetuses may be human beings they are not however human persons. Singer even justifies infanticide in certain circumstances on the grounds that infants are not human persons either. Singer is an Australian philosopher who was the first President of the International Association of Bioethics and who is currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. Pence is a professor of philosophy in the Schools of Medicine and Arts/Humanities at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
In 1998, Pence authored a book titled Who's Afraid of Human Cloning? In which he defended all forms of human cloning. In reference to the status of the human embryo, Pence says: "I believe that embryos are not persons because they fail to meet the cognitive criterion of personhood." According to this criterion, says Pence, "to be a person is to be able to think, to remember one's life, to be capable of cognition." He adds that "what separates a normal, adult person from say, a rat, is certain capacities — for reasoning, reflective self-awareness, communication, agency (motivated action), and consciousness of the external world."[31] "For these reasons," he adds, "I do not believe human embryos are persons; and so I do not believe that they should be treated as such. I believe they become persons by degrees over a continuum, such that it makes sense to think that an eight-month-old fetus is almost a person but an eight cell-embryo is not."[32] Finally, to bring his ideas full circle, Pence goes on to say: "The basic idea here is quite simple: consciousness is the foundation of value ... the cognitive criterion has a nice symmetry for both ends of life. It explains why several years of irreversible persistent vegetative state is the real death of a person."[33]
Pence is a disciple of Joseph Fletcher — "Call me Joe Fletcher's clone" — he says.[34] Pence's notion of personal criterion as the basis for defining the moral status of human beings at various stages of consciousness is borrowed from Fletcher who he says was the first person to champion it in modern medical ethics.[35] Fletcher was an Episcopalian priest who died in 1991 at the age of 86. He is regarded as the father of Situation Ethics; he renounced his belief in God in 1960 but remained a priest because he found the Episcopalian Church useful for advancing his ideas. He was pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia — being an advocate of "mercy-killing" and a member of the board of directors of the Euthanasia Council (now called "Concern for Dying"). His writings had a certain futuristic aspect to them in that he spoke approvingly of fetal experimentation and the possibility of manufacturing human beings. Fletcher's wife of 60 years, Forrest Hatfield, worked closely with Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) who was the founder and first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation that is the biggest promoter of abortion worldwide.
Peter Singer also finds inspiration for his work in the writings of Joseph Fletcher. He draws on Fletcher's personal criterion (which he refers to as "indicators of humanhood") to establish a demarcation line between those human beings who are granted the status of personhood and those who are not. He lists Fletcher's indicators of personhood as "self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication, and curiosity."[36] Interestingly, like Pence, Singer makes no mention of the fact that Fletcher also included an IQ of greater than 40 as one of his indicators of personhood.
Like Fletcher, Singer asserts that personhood is not something inherent to every human being but is contingent on the development of self-consciousness — "I propose to use 'person' in the sense of a rational and self-conscious being," he says.[37] On this basis, he distinguishes between two types of members of Homo Sapiens — those who are 'persons' and those who are not. He says that an essential qualification for the status of personhood is that a being "be capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future."[38]
In regard to the assertion made by philosophers such as Peter Singer and Michael Tooley that unborn babies and infants are not persons because they lack certain exercisable cognitive abilities, Professor William May says that this is "fallacious" because "it fails to distinguish between a radical capacity or ability and a developed capacity or ability." Explaining the significance of this distinction, Professor May says:A radical capacity can also be called an active, as distinct from a merely passive, potentiality. An unborn baby or a newborn child, precisely by its membership in the human species, has the radical capacity or active potentiality to discriminate between true and false propositions, to make choices, and to communicate rationally. But in order for the child — unborn or newborn — to exercise this capacity or set of capacities, his radical capacity or active potentiality for engaging in these activities — predictable kinds of behavior for members of the human species — must be allowed to develop. But it could never develop if it was not there to begin with ... A human embryo has this active potentiality or radical capacity to develop from within its own resources all it needs to exercise the property or set of properties characteristic of adult members of the species. One can say that the human embryo is a human person with potential; he or she is not merely a potential person. Those, like Tooley and Singer, who require that an entity have exercisable cognitive abilities, recognize that the unborn have the potentiality to engage in cognitive activities. But they regard this as a merely passive potentiality and fail to recognize the crucially significant difference between an active potentiality and a merely passive one.[39] Singer subscribes to utilitarian ethics that holds that actions are morally good if they increase the sum total of pleasure and happiness and reduce suffering. According to Singer's ethical system, selective killing of infants should be permissible or even desirable.
In regard to the question of killing, Singer says: "When we consider how serious it is to take a life, we should look, not at the race, sex or species to which that being belongs, but at the characteristics of the individual being killed, for example, its own desires about continuing to live, or the kind of life it is capable of living."[40] Consistent with his belief that "there could be a person who is not a member of our species," and that "there could also be members of our species who are not persons,"[41] Singer asserts that in order "to avoid speciesism we must allow that all beings who are similar in all relevant respects have a similar right to life — and mere membership in our own biological species cannot be a morally relevant criterion for this right."[42] After stating that "there will surely be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standard, are more valuable than the lives of some humans," Singer goes on to say: "A chimpanzee, dog, or pig, for instance, will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility. So if we base the right to life on these characteristics, we must grant these animals a right to life as good as, or better than, such retarded or senile humans."[43]
In regard to abortion, Singer argues that "an abortion late in pregnancy for the most trivial reasons is hard to condemn unless we also condemn the slaughter of far more developed forms of life for the taste of their flesh."[44] After saying that the fetus is not a person and hence its life "is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel etc," Singer goes on to add that "it must be admitted that these arguments apply to a newborn baby as much as to a fetus."[45] Consistent with this position, Singer asserts that "the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants" since "newborn babies cannot see themselves as beings who might or might not have a future."[46]
Applying his utilitarian calculus and "non-speciesist" reasoning to the question of infanticide, Singer says that just as fetuses are sometimes aborted because they are discovered to be carrying some disability or other and are thus treated as replaceable insofar as the mother intends to have another child after the abortion, so also "when the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed."[47] He adds that his position in this regard "does not imply that it would be better that no people born with severe disabilities should survive, it implies only that the parents of such infants should be able to make this decision." Hence, drawing his discussion of infanticide to a conclusion, Singer says: "So the issue of ending life for disabled newborn infants is not without complications ... Nevertheless, the main point is clear: killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."[48]
In his attempt to justify infanticide, Singer says that the "present absolute protection of the lives of infants is a distinctively Christian attitude rather than a universal ethical value." He says "infanticide has been practiced in societies ranging geographically from Tahiti to Greenland and varying in culture from the nomadic Australian aborigines to the sophisticated urban communities of ancient Greece or mandarin China."[49] He holds that these cultures "were on good ground" insofar as they "practiced infanticide."[50] Singer even gives a Malthusian twist to his discussion of infanticide. He says "in the case of infanticide, it is our culture that has something to learn from others, especially now that we, like them, are in a situation where we must limit family size."[51] Obviously, Singer hasn't yet caught up with the now widely acknowledged fact that the only demographic problem in Western countries is declining fertility rates and aging populations.
At times, Singer packages his more controversial propositions in soothing terms. For example, in reference to infanticide he says: "We should certainly put very strict conditions on permissible infanticide; but these restrictions might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than on the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant."[52] However, one columnist, George F. Will, caught the barbaric "logic" of Singer's ethical system well when in a 1999 Newsweek article he said:Actually, the logic of his position is that until a baby is capable of self-awareness, there is no controlling reason not to kill it to serve any preference of the parents ... During the Senate debate on partial-birth abortion — in which procedure all of a baby except the top of the skull is delivered from the birth canal, then the skull is collapsed — two pro-choice senators were asked: Suppose the baby slips all the way out before the doctor can kill it. Then does it have a right to life? Both senators said no, it was still the mother's choice. To what the senators said, Singer says briskly: 'They're right.'[53] The arguments of philosophers like Singer and Pence who grant personal status to human beings only after they meet certain physical or cognitive requirements are totally unreasonable and unjust. The qualities they demand, such as rationality and self-awareness, all admit of differences in degree. In the case of Singer's defense of infanticide for example, who is to decide what constitutes a meaningful life and the point at which parents should be able to request that their child be put to death? No matter how great a margin of error Singer would grant, the decision is still arbitrary, as different observers would assign different weights to different criteria.
Indeed, Singer himself admits the arbitrary nature of his position. He says that it is "difficult to say at what age children begin to see themselves as distinct entities existing over time." He adds that "even when we talk with two and three-year-old children, it is usually very difficult to elicit any coherent conception of death, or of the possibility that someone — let alone the child herself — might cease to exist."[54] Nevertheless, Singer still insists that a "line" can be drawn on one side of which the child dies while on the other he lives. He says: "Of course, where rights are at risk, we should err on the side of safety. There is some plausibility in the view that, for legal purposes, since birth provides the only sharp, clear, and easily understood line, the law of homicide should continue to apply immediately after birth." However, he follows up this statement by saying: "Since this is an argument at the level of public policy and the law, it is quite compatible with the view that, on purely ethical grounds, the killing of a newborn infant is not comparable to the killing of an older child or adult."[55] Then, to make provision for those parents who may request that their disabled child be murdered, Singer says: "It is, however, worth considering another possibility: that there should be at least some circumstances in which a full legal right to life comes into force not at birth, but only a short time after birth — perhaps a month."[56] Endnotes for “The Human Embryo as a Subject of Inalienable Human Rights—Part II” [29] Sacred Congregation For The Doctrine of the Faith. Donum Vitae ["Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation"], I, 1. [30] Professor William Brennan. Dehumanizing The Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives [Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1995], page 7. [31] Gregory E. Pence. Who's Afraid of Human Cloning [Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998], page 88. [32] Ibid, page 89. [33] Ibid, page 88. [34] Ibid, page 175 [35] Ibid, page 88. [36] Peter Singer. Writings on an Ethical Life [London: Fourth Estate, 2000], page 128. [37] Ibid, [38] Ibid, page 323 [39] Professor William E. May. Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life [Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 2000], pages 159 and 160. [40] Ibid, page xv. [41] Ibid, page 128. [42] Ibid, page 44. [43] Ibid, pages 44 and 45. [44] Ibid, page 177. [45] Ibid. [46] Ibid, page 161 and 162. [47] Ibid, page 189 to 91. [48] Ibid, page 193. [49] Ibid, page 163. [50] Ibid, page 229. [51] Ibid, page 209. [52] Ibid, page 164. [53] Newsweek Magazine, September 13, 1999, pages 80 to 82. [54] Peter Singer. Writings on an Ethical Life [London: Fourth Estate, 2000], page 162. [55] Ibid. [56] Ibid, pages 162 and 163.
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