Transcript 16 Days and 16 Falla.. - Buffalo Ontology Site

16 Days and 16 Fallacies I
The Moral Significance of the Question
When a Human Being Begins to Exist
The Target
Barry Smith, Berit Brogaard:
Sixteen Days
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. In
Press.
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Smith and Brogaard on When a
Human Being Begins to exist
Smith and Brogaard
provide an account,
in ontological terms,
of the multi-stage
process whose
result is the
formation of a
human individual.
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The Thesis
The human being begins to exist no later
than sixteen days after fertilization.
(a priori)
The relevant substantial change occurs at
the very end of the sixteen day period.
(a posteriori)
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The Moral Insignificance
“What follows is an exercise in ontology, and clearly no
conclusions of an ethical sort can be drawn directly from
the answer to any ontological question. [...]
It seems to us, however, to be equally clear that an answer
to the question as to when a human organism begins to
exist can be of some help in settling the difficult problems
which arise in connection with the issue of abortion and
embryonic stem cell experimentation.”
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The Moral Significance for
Speciecists or Potentialists
According to such views, human beings
have a special moral status qua their being
human, they have a different moral status
from that of beings of other kinds.
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Speciecism
Human beings possess a special moral
status because their species is a species
that has its special moral status essentially.
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Potentialism
Human beings possess a special moral
status because members of this species
share a unique additional property which is
of special moral status (e.g. the dispositional
property or potential dispositional property of
being self-conscious or of having an interest
in one's own future existence).
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The Beginning of Human Life
There are two senses of the term "life", the
mass sense and the count sense.
Are both equally deserving of protection?
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A common view
It is human life (mass sense) that is
of essential moral significance.
Smith and Brogaard: Only the count sense matters.
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Why take the life rather than the
human being?
One life might lead to two beings and two lives
might lead to one, but all these lives potentially
lead to human beings and if – as for potentialists –
potentiality is considered to be of any significance
at all, the lives of two human beings could be
gained by the protection of a single life and the
eventual saving of only one human being after a
case of fusion should be worth the protection of
two human lives.
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Significance for Peter-Singerists
Find a point at which the species member in question starts
to gain a morally significant feature actually (as opposed to
merely potentially), and this will presumably be a feature
additional to that of species-membership.
At the stage of gastrulation there is no such new morally
significant feature that is gained by the species member in
question.
So even for these ethical views, Smith's and Brogaard's
conception cannot serve as an ontological plug-in.
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The Metaphysical Significance
Smith and Brogaard criticize the
philosophical tradition since Locke for
locating the beginning of existence of a
human being at the beginning of selfconsciousness.
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Locke
“And whatever is talked of other definitions,
ingenious observation puts it past doubt, that the
idea in our minds, of which the sound man is the
sign, is nothing else but of an animal of such a
certain form: since I think I may be confident, that,
whoever should see a creature of his own shape
or make, though it had no more reason all its life
than a cat or a parrot, would call him still a man
[...].”
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Equivocation
For Locke the question of when a human
being begins to exist is thus a biological
question.
The interesting metaphysical problem is the
problem when we, as persons, begin to
exist.
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