I think we’re getting somewhere, but not to agreement, not yet.
It’s interesting to me that you wouldn’t regard a hydroencephalic person as having rights. Not sure what to make of that, honestly – not sure whether I agree with your judgement. In any case, it’s good that you don’t have a strictly genetic criterion for granting rights; that’s one of my biggest problems with lots of anti-AR folks.
This raises a question and an objection. Could you tell me what characteristics of human thought are the ones that are relevant? Or is it just what follows in that sentence: any being capable of making moral decisions and acting as a moral agent qualifies?
The objection: it isn’t enough, from a social contract perspective, to discover that the severely disabled person is capable of thinking morally; they must also be capable of acting morally. If someone is born sufficiently disabled that they cannot endanger you, then your self-interest is not in any way preserved by protecting their right against harm.
You WOULD have rights in a coma. Because you’re now a MSC, you can make prior arrangements with people. “Look, buster,” you implicitly say. “If you fall into a coma, I’m not going to sell your organs for profit, okay? And if I fall into a coma, you don’t sell my parts either.” You get other people in on the deal, and everyone monitors the behavior of all MSCs to make sure they don’t harvest organs from any comatose MSC.
The important thing is that you possessed the two sine qua non features of an MSC at one point:
- You were capable of harming other people; and
- You were capable of agreeing not to harm other people.
The agreement is understood to have been struck with those other people as soon as you met both the criteria.
Someone born mentally incompetent hasn’t met the criteria until they become mentally competent; if they are CMD, they’ll never meet the criteria.
I reject the idea of including potential moral agents. First, if I kill a kid during infancy, then they never achieved moral agency; of what significance is it to talk about what Might Have Been if one day they’d gained the two characteristics of a MSC? They never had those characteristics, never joined the social contract, and so never benefited from its protections.
Second, once you start protecting “potential” MSCs, you run into the prolifer’s slippery slope: at what point does a potential gain protection? At birth? at viability? at conception? once a boy and a girl love each other very very much? There’s no percentage in such a vague standard: much better to pay attention to what exists now, rather than what may or may not exist at some undetermined point in the future.
A kid at a certain age might be a limited moral agent. With a little bit of care, however, young children (say, 5 and younger) can absolutely be kept from intentionally harming any MSC; even if they have a limited ability to abide by the social contract at that age, if they can’t do real harm, there’s no self-interest in extending its protections to them.
Remember, it’s not the potential for moral thought that gets someone into the social contract club: it’s the actual capacity both to harm members of the club and to agree not to harm members that gets you in the front door.
The rest of the post, wherein you talk about a parent’s obligation toward children, is great – but I don’t think it can be based on social contract theory, since it relies on granting direct rights, not indirect rights, to those children, and social contract theory does not (I believe) grant any such rights. Switch to a different philosophical underpinning, and I’ll applaud the paragraphs about parental obligation to children.
Finally, your follow-up post mentions the confluence of your own interests and those of your children. Again, this is laudable – but you’re not the one the social contract is designed to constrain. The question is whether it can constrain the Susan Smiths of the world. I do not believe that a theory based purely on enlightened self-interest can do so.
Daniel