This long essay, “A Theory of Human Dignity,” presents and defends a general theory of human dignity, with special attention paid to spelling out its background metaphysics, formulating and justifying a basic set of dignitarian moral principles, and critically addressing hard cases for the theory.
“A Theory of Human Dignity” is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download, read, and/or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay HERE.
This thirteenth installment contains section V.1.1.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. Refuting the Dignity-Skeptic and Debunking a Dignity-Debunking Argument
III. The Metaphysics of Human Dignity
III.2 Real Persons and Minded Animals
III.3 A Metaphysical Definition of Real Personhood
IV. Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory
IV.0 How Nonideal Can a World Be?
IV.2 How to Solve the Universalizability and Rigorism Problems
IV.3 How to Solve the Problem of Moral Dilemmas
IV.4 Policy of Truth: The Murderer-at-the-Door Revisited
IV.5 One Last Thing, By Way of Concluding This Section
V. Some Hard Cases For Broadly Kantian Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory
V.0 How Hard Can Hard Cases Be?
V.1 Abortion and Infanticide: Introduction
V.1.1 The Neo-Person Thesis, Neo-Persons, and Non-Persons
VI. Enacting Human Dignity and The Mind-Body Politic
VII. Conclusion
V.1.1 The Neo-Person Thesis, Neo-Persons, and Non-Persons
By abortion I mean any intentional act that removes a human fetus from the womb of its natural mother, specifically in order to provide an early termination of the pregnancy, either at the explicit rational permission or request of the mother, or when the implicit rational consent[i] of the mother can be plausibly presumed, whether she has been inseminated by natural or artificial means. This characterization is intended to exclude so-called “spontaneous abortions” (for example, miscarriages) or, more accurately, unintended abortions, since there can be various kinds of cases in which a fetus is alienated or removed from the womb of its natural mother by accident or without her explicit or implicit rational consent.
Within the domain of “abortions” so defined that they are all intended, however, we should also carefully distinguish between (i) abortions that detach the fetus from the mother but do not also kill the fetus in the act of detaching it, and (ii) abortions that both detach the fetus and also kill it in the act of detaching it. I’ll call abortions of the first kind detachment abortions, and abortions of the second kind fatal abortions.[ii] This distinction is deeply important, because the moral permissibility of detachment abortions does not necessarily entail the permissibility of fatal abortions. More specifically, in some cases it will be morally obligatory, other things being equal, to try to preserve the fetus’s life during a morally permissible detachment abortion, provided that the medical technology for preserving a detached fetus’s life exists. I’ll come back to this crucial point in sub-sub-section V.1.2.
It should also be noted that I’m assuming that even if the act of detachment does not kill the fetus, the detached fetus might be killed—whether actively ensuring a fatal result by causally intervening in the fetus’s vital processes, or passively ensuring a fatal result by not causally intervening in the fetus’s vital processes—before it reaches actualized real personhood. But that’s infanticide, and not abortion, because by definition according to my account, human infants are all and only the living detached human fetuses prior to actualized real personhood. Similarly, the detached fetus might die by accidental or natural causes before it reaches actualized real personhood. But that’s infant mortality, and neither abortion nor infanticide.
As I’ve mentioned several times already, I’m asserting and defending The Neo-Person Thesis. When explicitly and fully spelled out, The Neo-Person Thesis has five sub-parts, or sub-clauses, each of which is a fairly universal or ceteris paribus moral principle, as follows.
Principle 1. Other things being equal, both detachment abortions and fatal abortions are morally permissible prior to the emergence of fetal consciousness, which normally occurs between 25-32 weeks after conception or fertilization.
Principle 2. Other things being equal, after the emergence of fetal consciousness, fatal abortions are morally impermissible except to save the life of the mother, and when a detachment abortion cannot be performed either for purely medical-technological reasons or because it would seriously threaten the life of the mother.
Principle 3. Other things being equal, after the emergence of fetal consciousness, detachment abortions are morally permissible only in cases of forced involuntary pregnancy due to, for example, rape, or in order to save the life of the mother.
Principle 4. Other things being equal, after the emergence of fetal consciousness, fatal abortions are morally impermissible in cases of forced involuntary pregnancy, and—as stated in Principle 2—morally permissible only in order to save the life of the mother, and when a detachment abortion cannot be performed either for purely medical-technological reasons or because it would seriously threaten the life of the mother.
Principle 5. Other things being equal, infanticide is morally impermissible; nevertheless, when things are not equal, infanticide with respect to an infant X is morally permissible if and only if X is either for some biomedical reason permanently non-conscious, or else X has acquired the capacity for consciousness but for some other biomedical reason Xwill never become a human real person in the natural course of its neurobiological development.
All of these five first-order substantive ceteris paribus objective moral principles obtain because of the existence and specific moral character—that is, the “moral status”—of human neo-persons, as opposed to the existence and specific moral character or moral status of human non-persons. At the same time, the two special exceptions to the ceteris paribus impermissibility of abortion after the emergence of fetal consciousness, and also the special exception to the ceteris paribus impermissibility of infanticide, depend on grounds deriving respectively from the morality of saving and harming others, from the morality of our treatment of non-human animals, and from the morality of “untimely death.”
Obviously, everything turns here on the notion of a neo-person. A human neo-person is a special kind of human real person. More precisely a human neo-person is, literally, a new human real person, that is, a real person at the front end of her whole life. As I worked it out at the end of section III above, here are the first three parts of the metaphysical definition of human real personhood.
Part I. X is a Frankfurtian human real person (personf) if and only if X is a human animal and X has fully online psychological capacities for
(i) essentially embodied consciousness or essentially embodied subjective experience,
(ii) intentionality or directedness to objects, locations, events (including actions), other minded animals, or oneself, including cognition (that is, sense perception, memory, imagination, and conceptualization), and caring (that is, affect, desire, and emotion), especially including effective first-order desires,
(iii) lower-level of Humean rationality, that is, logical reasoning (including judgment and belief) and instrumental decision-making,
(iv) self-directed or other-directed evaluative emotions (for example, love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, pride, etc),
(v) minimal linguistic understanding, that is, either inner or overt expression and communication in any simple or complex sign system or natural language, including ASL, etc., and
(vi) second-order volitions.
Part II. X is a Kantian human real person (personk), aka a human moral agent, if and only if X is a human real personf and also has fully online psychological capacities for
(vii) higher-level or Kantian rationality, that is, categorically normative logical rationality[iii] and practical rationality, the latter of which also entails a fully online capacity for deep (non-)moral responsibility, autonomy (self-legislation), and wholeheartedness, hence a fully online capacity for principled authenticity, at least partially or to some degree.
Part III. X is a human real person if and only if X is either a human real personf or a human real personk; and any other finite, material creature or entity X is a non-person.
Now as I pointed out in section III, the beginning of a human real person’s life, aka its “neo-personhood,” is when a human animal A manifests the psychological capacity for consciousness and the following counterfactual is also true of A:
If A were to continue the natural course of its neurobiological and psychological development, then A would become an actualized human real person.
In other words, a neo-person is not yet an actualized real person, but in fact only a potential real person. Nevertheless, a neo-person still really is a special kind of real person and definitely belongs to the total class of real persons by way of a strict identity relation, precisely because the neo-person possesses an essentially embodied innately-specified psychological capacity grounded in a “dedicated” natural neurobiological matrix—that is, a psychological capacity for consciousness—that is also the basis of all the other essentially embodied psychological capacities and abilities of actualized human real persons. The essentially embodied innate capacity for consciousness, which dynamically emerges only in creatures of suitable neurobiological complexity, is such that it is a true counterfactual fact about each one of them that if that minded S-type (for example, human) animal were to go on living in the same way, then it would be an actualized (for example, human) real person.
This potentiality of a human neo-person is what I call the strong potentiality of a constitutively necessary psychological capacity—more, specifically, it’s a potentiality that supports true counterfactuals about the manifestation of the full range of psychological capacities and abilities that make up the essence or nature of a human real person. This is opposed to the very weak potentiality of a nomological possibility for being an actualized human real person that is possessed, for example, by a given embryo or zygote during the period of totipotency, provided that it neither splits into twins nor fuses into a chimera. And the strong potentiality of a constitutively necessary psychological capacity is also opposed to the moderately weak potentiality that is possessed by a given human animal in the period between the end of totipotency and the emergence of consciousness. In other words, the human neo-person has “all the right stuff” for being an actualized human real person, whereas a mere embryo or a mere post-totipotency human animal does not have “all the right stuff.” Indeed, it is precisely in virtue of this strong potentiality for manifesting the full range of an actualized human real person’s psychological capacities and abilities that a human neo-person constitutes the initial proper part of an actualized human real person’s whole life. So, for example, I’m strictly identical with a certain human neo-person, my third trimester fetus—the new human real person I am at the front end of my whole life as a real person.
It follows from all this, that the notion of “a human life” is a systematically ambiguous notion. In one sense, “a” human life began when my parents jointly conceived a certain human organism possessing various biological functions, although it was not the life of an individual human organism until after the period of totipotency had passed. In another sense, a human life began, after the period of totipotency had passed, in the individual human organism that later became me. But neither of those human organisms were actually me, myself, I. So in a third sense, a human life of my own, hence my own real personal human life, began between 25 and 32 weeks after conception.
Correspondingly, here’s the complete four-part metaphysical definition of human real personhood.
Part I. X is a Frankfurtian human real person (personf) if and only if X is a human animal and X has fully online psychological capacities for
(i) essentially embodied consciousness or essentially embodied subjective experience,
(ii) intentionality or directedness to objects, locations, events (including actions), other minded animals, or oneself, including cognition (that is, sense perception, memory, imagination, and conceptualization), and caring (that is, affect, desire, and emotion), especially including effective first-order desires,
(iii) lower-level of Humean rationality, that is, logical reasoning (including judgment and belief) and instrumental decision-making,
(iv) self-directed or other-directed evaluative emotions (for example, love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, pride, etc),
(v) minimal linguistic understanding, that is, either inner or overt expression and communication in any simple or complex sign system or natural language, including ASL, etc., and
(vi) second-order volitions.
Part II. X is a Kantian human real person (personk), aka a human moral agent, if and only if X is a human real personf and also has fully online psychological capacities for
(vii) higher-level or Kantian rationality, that is, categorically normative logical rationality[iv] and practical rationality, the latter of which also entails a fully online capacity for deep (non-)moral responsibility, autonomy (self-legislation), and wholeheartedness, hence a fully online capacity for principled authenticity, at least partially or to some degree.
Part III. X is a human real person if and only if X is either a human real personf or a human real personk; and any other finite, material creature or entity X is a non-person.
Part IV. If X is an actualized human real person, then the neo-person of X is also a human real person, where the neo-person of X is an individual human animal A that manifests the psychological capacity for consciousness and the following counterfactual is also true of A:
If A were to continue the natural course of its neurobiological and psychological development, then A would become X.
Given this four-part definition of real personhood, when taken together with what, in Deep Freedom and Real Persons, chapters 6-7, I’ve called The Minded Animalism Theory of personal identity, then it follows that the actualized human real person X is strictly identical with its corresponding human neo-person A.
Before moving on, I need to make one further comment about this metaphysical definition of human real personhood. As we have just seen, for each and every actualized human real person, whether this is an actualized human real personf or an actualized real personk, there is a neo-person with whom he or she is strictly identical. So each neo-person who reaches actualized human real personhood is strictly identical with a human real personf or a human real personk. But of course, and sadly, some human neo-persons never in fact reach actualized real personhood. Some sentient human fetuses die—by accident, through disease, or because of abortion, unintended abortion, or infanticide—during the third trimester, at birth, or during early infancy. And some sentient fetuses lose their strong potentiality for actualized human real personhood—by accident, or through disease—even though they continue to live on as human individuals. I will call all such human neo-persons doomed human neo-persons.
Do doomed human neo-persons count as human real persons? Since Part IV of the metaphysical definition is formulated as a conditional whose antecedent specifies actualized human real personhood, then doomed human neo-persons do not, strictly speaking, count as human real persons by the definition of human real personhood given in Part III. On the other hand, however, doomed human neo-persons are not ruled out by Part III as human real persons, until the very moment they either die or lose their strong protentiality, prior to their achieving actualized real personhood. Until then, doomed human neo-persons are candidates-in-good-standing for being actualized human real persons. If neo-persons do in fact manage to become actualized real persons—and I will call all these non-doomed, fortunate human neo-persons successful human neo-persons—then it is a retrospective fact that during their successful human neo-personhood they were human real persons at the very beginning of their lives. But for doomed human neo-persons, until the very moment of their death or of the loss of their strong potentiality for actualized human real personhood, their metaphysical status as human real persons is left open-ended in a specially channelled way.
What I mean is that doomed human neo-persons, just like successful human neo-persons, are not yet actualized real persons. But doomed hman neo-persons are also not non-persons at that time. Instead, at that time, they are prospective actualized human real persons, again just like successful human neo-persons. For all human neo-persons whatsoever, their metaphysical human real personhood status is therefore a retroactive metaphysical and moral status-fact, and that human real personhood status is triggered only if and at the very moment when the actualized human real personhood of that human neo-person really happens. Nevertheless, the moral human real personhood status of all human neo-persons holds just in virtue of their strong potentiality for human real personhood, even if they are doomed human neo-persons and do not in fact manage to reach actualized human real personhood, unlike their luckier counterparts, the successful human neo-persons.
This thesis—namely, that the moral human real personhood status of all human neo-persons holds just in virtue of their strong potentiality for human real personhood, even if they are unlucky, doomed human neo-persons and do not in fact manage to reach actualized real personhood—may seem at first glance very odd. How can a metaphysical or moral status-fact be retroactive? Upon reflection, however, it does seem to capture the truth of the matter accurately. This is for two reasons.
First, there are other distinct, non-question-begging domains in which relevantly similar retroactive status-facts occur as well. For example, consider the following socially constituted retroactive status-fact. A PhD student who begins publishing before finishing their dissertation, defending it, and graduating with a doctorate, is at the beginning of their professional academic career only if they actually successfully complete their dissertation, successfully defend it, and actually graduate with a doctorate. For otherwise they will never qualify for a tenure-track job, or even a contingent faculty job, every one of which (nowadays) standardly requires a PhD, and therefore otherwise they will never have a professional academic career, and so never be at the beginning of that professional academic career. The publications list on their academic Curriculum Vitae will start with their first pre-PhD publication only if they in fact receive a PhD. Now consider the following non-socially-constituted retroactive status facts. The pre-Socratic philosophers existed as such only if Socrates actually later came into existence and actually became a famous philosopher. The pre-Cambrian era existed as such only if the Cambrian era actually later came into existence. And so-on. Therefore the very idea of retroactive status-facts, whether socially-constituted or not, is not in any way ad hoc.
Second, all doomed human neo-persons are physically, mentally, causally, teleologically, and morally indistinguishable from successful human neo-persons. Even a diseased or sick doomed human neo-person is physically, mentally, causally, teleologically, and morally indistinguishable from a successful human neo-person who suffers from exactly the same disease or sickness, and then later recovers and survives. During the period of their neo-personhood, the only significant difference between the doomed human neo-persons and the successful human neo-persons is a forthcoming fact about their futures, that is, neither a settled fact about their pasts, nor a current fact about their presents. Down the line, this forthcoming fact will of course make a huge difference: the doomed human neo-persons will become human non-persons at the very moment they die or otherwise lose their strong potentiality for actualized human real personhood, and never will be actualized human real persons. But, other things being equal, the mere forthcoming fact that A is going to die earlier than B or will lose its strong potentiality for human real personhood even though B will not lose that, cannot change A’s moral status in relation to B, if by hypothesis they are already otherwise morally indistinguishable. All human neo-persons, whether doomed or non-doomed, have the moral status of human real persons and must be morally considered equally and, in certain crucial respects, also morally treated equally, throughout the entire period of their human neo-personhood, even though some of them, for whatever brute, contingent reasons, will never in fact become human real persons. Similarly, all legitimate PhD candidates must be morally considered equally and, in certain crucial respects, also morally treated equally, throughout the entire period of their PhD candidacy, even though some of them, for whatever brute, contingent reasons, are in fact not going to finish or successfully defend their PhDs, and, at the very moment of this non-completion or unsuccessful defense, will become non-PhDs. All doomed PhD candidates-in-good-standing are just as legitimate as non-doomed PhD candidates-in-good-standing.
Even granting me all those points, however, it can nevertheless still seem paradoxical that I, who am currently an actualized human real person, am also strictly identical with a neo-person. According to The Minded Animalism Theory of personal identity,[v] my life as a self-identical human real person began when I was a neo-person, with the onset of my minded animal capacity for consciousness. Thus my human real personal life began at least a year before I became an actualized human real person at the stage of my late infancy or early toddlerhood, in the sense that I then actually possessed all the fully online psychological capacities that constituted my non-autonomous Frankfurtian human person. But how could an actualized human real person could be strictly or numerically identical with a merely potential human real person, even if it is a strongly potential one? Doesn’t such a difference undermine strict or numerical identity? That can seem paradoxical. But this appearance of paradox holds only if one fails to recognize the important distinction between (i) the metaphysics of human personhood, which deals with the “What-am-I” question, that is, the question of the nature or essence of a human person, and (ii) the metaphysics of human personal identity, which deals with the “Who-am-I”question, that is, the question of the singling-out or individuation of a person.[vi]
Human real personhood is an essential structure of a certain kind of thing. By contrast, human real personal identity is an intrinsic spatiotemporal relational property of a whole organismic human real personal life-process that, at some time and place, eventually reaches actualized human real personhood. So human real personal identity presupposes actualized human real personhood. The individual living organism that eventually reaches actualized human real personhood at some time and place therefore must pass through several preliminary stages from the beginning of its complete personal life-process. It starts in the human neo-person stage, which is when the human fetus transitions from human non-personhood to the first channelled open-ended stage of his or her career as a human real person, which is, as it were, the embryo stage, and carries on until it reaches actualized human real personhood in late infancy or early toddlerhood, which is, as it were, the larva stage, and then continues on through childhood and teenagerhood, which is, as it were, the pupa stage, and then reaches its mature adulthood, which is, as it were, its imago stage, and finally proceeds out beyond that stage towards its death, which then closes out its as-it-were metamorphosis as a complete, finite, and unique human real person.
In other words, and using the familiar biological “embryo-larva-pupa-imago” structure of insect metamorphosis as a simple analogy, my personal identity with a neo-person will seem paradoxical only if one fails to realize that human personal identity is a multi-term reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive relation over the several distinct stages of a holistic, spatially situated and temporally irreversible natural complex thermodynamic organismic life-process, and not a merely two-term reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive relation over a single static material thing or single static immaterial soul-substance. To be sure, human personal identity includes singular material-thing-identity, but it is much more than just that, precisely because I’m identical with my complete, finite, and unique human life, not merely with a more or less static material thing that conventionally bears my proper name. For example—assuming, of course, that I do not spontaneously combust like the abominable Mr. Crook in Dickens’s Bleak House, or suffer something equally gruesome that prevents my having an intact corpse when I die—then my corpse will be a more-or-less static material thing that conventionally bears my proper name. But that will not be me: on the contrary it will be nothing but a mere material thing, my lifeless remains.
A crucial element of The Neo-Person Thesis is the notion of a psychological capacity. A psychological capacity is importantly distinct from either a weak potentiality or a strong potentiality in the sense that all psychological capacities are both weak and strong potentialities, but not all weak or strong potentialities are also psychological capacities. More specifically, here’s how I am construing these two notions.
Weak or Strong Potentiality. Something X has a weak or strong potentiality for being an F or for doing Y if and only if X is not currently an F, and X cannot currently do Y, but either (i) X belongs to an actual natural process P such that X’s eventually being F or doing Y as an outcome of P is nomologically possible (weak potentiality), or (ii) if X were to continue the natural course of its biological development, then X would become an For would do Y, other things being equal, because X will eventually develop a natural epigenetic[vii] mechanism for manifesting F-ness or for causing Y (strong potentiality).
Psychological Capacity. Something X has a psychological capacity for being an For for doing Y if and only if X is a living organism, and X has consciousness, and there exists within Xa fully online natural epigenetic mechanism for manifesting F-ness or for causing Y that can be triggered or suppressed under a specific set of contextual conditions.
An innately-specified psychological capacity is a psychological faculty or power, and a learned psychological capacity is a psychological ability. In this way, what makes any capacity a specifically psychological capacity is its being a fully online neurobiological capacity of a living organism with consciousness, consisting in a strong potentiality for manifesting or causing certain special kinds of facts. In turn, these facts—paradigmatically, facts about rational human cognitive or practical free agency—are all facts about essentially embodied minds, aka minded bodies, aka minded animals.[viii]
In any case, something’s having a psychological capacity strictly entails its having both a weak and a strong potentiality; nevertheless, something’s having either a weak or a strong potentiality does not strictly entail its having a psychological capacity. For example, the packet of biological stuff out of which a living acorn is made has a weak potentiality for being an oak tree, but that packet of biological stuff does not have a strong potentiality for being an oak tree. If I were to squash a living acorn flat with a hammer or my shoe, it would be exactly the same packet of biological stuff, at least in a compositional sense, but it’s not true that if that squashed packet continued along in the same way, it would become an oak tree, other things being equal. Strong potentiality requires not merely an appropriate kind of compositional stuff for the causal outcome that is to be produced, but also just the right kind of causally efficacious complex thermodynamic structure for producing that very effect. In short, strong potentiality entails natural goal-directedness or natural teleology.[ix]
By contrast to the mere packet of biological stuff that materially constitutes a living acorn, a living acorn itself has both a weak potentiality for being an oak tree and also a strong potentiality for being an oak tree. Not only is a living acorn’s compositional stuff causally appropriate, but also its complex thermodynamic structure is just the right kind for the causally efficacious production of an oak tree. Otherwise put, once living acorns have undergone a certain process of development, then, other things being equal, they do indeed become oak trees. Furthermore, living oak trees have both a weak potentiality and a strong potentiality for having leaves and producing living acorns. This strong potentiality is triggered in the spring and summer, and suppressed in the fall and winter. But living oak trees did not have this strong potentiality when they were living acorns. Living acorns are not themselves also, under appropriate conditions, oak trees. So living acorns, unlike living oak trees, do not have a strong potentiality for having leaves and producing living acorns, although living acorns do have a strong potentiality for being living oak trees. Hence strong potentiality is not a transitive property. Something X can have a strong potentiality for being an F, and all Fs can have a strong potentiality for doing Y, but X nevertheless fails to have a strong potentiality for doing Y. This is because just the right kind of causally efficacious complex thermodynamic teleological structure, for producing Y dynamically emerges[x] only diachronically—that is, only over elapsed time—and doesn’t exist in earlier stages of the selfsame life-process.
Consider now a slightly different example, taken from the world of rational human animals. When I was a pre-linguistic toddler, I possessed both a weak and strong potentiality for understanding natural languages, and also—if Chomsky is correct about our knowledge of language, as I believe he (mostly) is[xi]—I possessed an innately specified psychological capacity for understanding natural languages, hence I possessed a language faculty or language power. By contrast, right now I have a weak potentiality for playing the piano but no strong potentiality for it, and certainly no psychological capacity for it, innately-specified or otherwise. No matter what the conditions under which pianos were presented to me right now (as it were, pianos appearing before me at all times of the day and night), I still couldn’t play one. But if I intentionally engaged in a certain goal-directed process of learning and training, then (presumably) I could become a piano player and acquire that psychological capacity as an ability. By means of that intentional process of learning and training, I would have put myself into just the right kind of causally efficacious goal-directed complex thermodynamic organization, or teleological structure, for producing music on the piano. But I don’t currently have this ability. I now have a more or less appropriate kind of compositional stuff for playing the piano—for example, I am not made of cotton candy, so that I dissolve when I touch the piano keys. But at the same time, I am not currently thermodynamically and teleologically patterned in just the right way. Nor, I imagine, since (sadly, and no doubt culpably) I have no interest whatsoever in playing the piano, will I ever be.
Finally, let’s consider another example, this time taken from the world of human non-minded animals. When the living human organism that was later me—let’s call this living organism by the palindromic name bobhannahbob, or bhb for short, as opposed to me and my corpse, both of which conventionally bear my proper name, “Robert Alan Hanna,” presumably first applied to me at birth—was still an embryo and still within the roughly 14 to 18 day window of totipotency, then he (or at that stage, it) had a weak potentiality for being a human minded animal, and also a weak potentiality for being a human real person. But at that time bhb had no strong potentiality for being either a human minded animal or a human real person, since twins and chimeras were still possible for him. Later, after the period of bhb’s totipotency had passed but before the end of the second trimester of his fetal development, then he had a strong potentiality for being a human minded animal and also for being a human real person. But at that time bhb had no psychological capacities, since he did not possess a consciousness. Later again, however, after my consciousness had dynamically emerged in bhb at the beginning of the third trimester, then I possessed the strong-potentiality-of-a-constitutively-necessary-psychological-capacity for being an actualized human real person, and was therefore a successful human neo-person at the very beginning of my own life, and literally or numerically identical with the actualized human real person I later became. Of course, all things considered and other things being equal, I’m thankful for bhb: without him, I would not exist; and all things considered and other things being equal, for human real persons, it’s better to be than not to be.[xii] Nevertheless, bhb was not me—just as my corpse (assuming I will have an intact corpse) will be neither bhb nor me, but instead only my lifeless remains, which I hereby dub bob-all-gone.
NOTES
[i] I’ll discuss the important distinction between explicit and implicit rational consent in some detail later in this section.
[ii] See J.J. Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” in M. Cohen, T. Nagel, and T. Scanlon (eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 3-22, at p. 22.
[iii] See R. Hanna, Rationality and Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), esp. chs. 6-7.
[iv] See Hanna, Rationality and Logic, esp. chs. 6-7.
[v] See Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), chs. 6-7.
[vi] See also Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2), section 6.0.
[vii] The thesis of epigenesis in biology says that biological material is initially unformed and that form gradually emerges through the non-predetermined or relatively spontaneous operations of an innate endogenous organizational or processing device in interaction with its environment. See, e.g., J. Maienschein, “Epigenesis and Preformationism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/epigenesis/>; and Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2), ch. 1.
[viii] See R. Hanna and M. Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), esp. chs. 1-5; Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2), chs. 1-5; and R. Hanna, “Minding the Body,” Philosophical Topics 39 (2011): 15-40.
[ix] See also Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2), ch. 2.
[x] For more on dynamic emergence, see Hanna and Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, ch. 8; and Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2), ch. 2.
[xi] See, e.g., Hanna, Rationality and Logic, esp. chs. 1, 4, and 5.
[xii] See Hanna, Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 3) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), ch. 6, for a detailed defense of that claim.
Against Professional Philosophy is a sub-project of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, which is home-based on Patreon here.
Please consider becoming a patron!
