When do we become a person?

Great Debates
21

I agree with most of what’s been said above. To summarize a few points:

A “person” is a living thing with a high degree of sentience.

“Human” is the more popular term, but is misleading since it’s simply a label indicating that the thing in question is associated with our species.

In order to have a sufficiently high degree of sentience, a sufficient degree of brain development must have taken place.

Althoug a newborn infant has clearly not reached the same level of sentience and brain development as a chimpanzee etc., this is still a valid creiteria. We simply make an exeption and classify a newborn as a person with rights for statutory reasons. The grey areas alluded to above exists and must be dealt with by drawing a line which provides for an ample margin of safety, just as we do with things like drinking age and speed limits. In this case, the moment of birth provides a pretty obvious place to draw the line, with tight restrictions on third trimester abortions being appropriate as well.

22

Wait, sqweels, you’re saying that killing newborn babies would be fine with you because they aren’t sentient? And that we only forbid killing babies for practical reasons?

23

I can’t speak for Stoid’s intent any more than you, Scylla, but I took the stem-cell issue to simply be a starting point for the broader discussion.

I’d personally rephrase the question, “At what point is there a rudimentary someone there, rather than something?”

I’d also agree with you and several others here that it’s a blurry process.

I agree that the issue of what the brain is like, at what point in development, is very relevant to the discussion. Whatever I am, take away my brain and all that’s left is a cadaver. I don’t find it defensible that there is a person there before a brain is present. How the development of the human brain during gestation, from a reptilian to a mammalian to a fully human brain, fits into it, I’m personally wrestling with.

I also think there are a couple of other things going on that are worth considering, in deciding how to evaluate what’s there, as opposed to deciding on its personhood.

One is that the embryonic/fetal homo sapiens will, if all goes right, become a person someday, while a full-grown cat will never be anything more than a cat. I personally feel strongly that that potential has to be factored into the equation somehow, though I’m far from sure exactly how to do so. That’s JMHO, though, regardless of its strength.

Another is this: when we first started talking about having children, my wife said, “if I’m unconscious in the delivery room, and the doctors say they’re going to have to choose between saving me and saving the baby, you’d damned well better choose me.”

To which I say, darn tootin’. There’s no way I’m gonna flip a coin, in such a situation, to decide whether it’s the mother or the baby that gets saved, even if the mother wasn’t my wife. And I daresay most people probably feel the same on this.

What this says to me is that, regardless of how God, if there is one, sees the issue, we consider the fetus to have less moral value than an already-born person. Maybe we should see it that way, maybe we shouldn’t. And by how much we value the soon-to-be-born fetus less, I can’t say. But we do.

24

I think if you were to take a fetus of six months, remove it from the womb and leave it to its own devices, it would certainly die. Likewise for a two-year old.

25

This is kind of a weird take on the subject, but…

My mother claims to have some old photos around the house of her ultrasound when she was pregnant with me. To tell the truth, I hope she accidentally threw them away, because I honestly have no desire to see them.

That’s because I don’t consider the fetus in the ultrasound to be me - firstly because it’s just a fetus that my parents pinned a lot of hopes on without having any idea what I would really be like. What I am now, and even shortly after I was born, are very different ideas that what I was “supposed” to be before I was born.

Along those lines, I judge the beginning of my life to be the moment I was born, because prior to that fetus had accomplished nothing on its own, just floating around in there and depending on my mother for even simple things like oxygen. Even a second after I was born, I had taken a breath and cried, my heart began beating its own blood, my organ systems started working on their own without any help from my mother’s nerve impulses.

The things which I can’t help about myself - my pale skin, my birthmark on my arm, my German ancestry, etc. - would have been there regardless, they are not truly a part of ME, tsarina. I consider the true ME to be a compendium of everything, good or bad, that I have accomplished since the moment I was born.
Maybe I’m just a success-driven beeatch. And maybe I just don’t like my mother much. :slight_smile:

26

I take it that you didn’t notice my usage of the word “reasonable”. It’s “reasonable” to assume that a fetus can survive outside the womb as early as three months premature, since, well, it’s happened. It’s also “reasonable” to assume that a 2-year-old will survive. Your comment, in contrast, was very “UNreasonable”.

27

I don’t know. I was there when I became a person, but I don’t remember it.

I wish someone had asked me. I would have rather been a housecat.

[sub]You think I’m only joking?[/sub]

28

I noticed the word “reasonable” just as I did the phrase “on its own.” I won’t argue that fetus can survive outside the womb as can a two-year-old; however, they couldn’t do so “on their own.” That wouldn’t be reasonable.

29

I agree, wholey and entirely, with Sqeels.

Humanity is a matter of sentiance. That sentiance takes a while to form. I would argue that a newborn baby is not a person, because it has no sense of itself or its world. But, birth makes a good, neat and logical cutoff point.

30

Wait a minute tsarina. Your heart was beating before you were born. You kicked, you flipped, you could respond to light and sound. There was essentially no difference between you at birth and you at birth-1 day. Birth makes no sense as a cut-off point for personhood, any more than conception does.

All these assertions that a fetus cannot be a person are post-hoc rationalizations. You start with the premise that we have no choice but to allow abortions, and then decide that since abortions should be allowed the entity destroyed during the abortion must not have been a person.

And of course this rationalization is worse than useless, since it cuts off more coherent moral arguments that will nevertheless still allow abortions in many cases.

In my view, abortion is merely the first and simplest example of biotechnology applied to human reproduction. Here we have a developing fetus/embryo and we decide whether to allow it to continue to develop or to destroy it. But we are now facing much more complicated biotechnology. Genetic engineering, cloning, eugenics, etc etc etc. If we can’t even get the morality of abortion worked out then how are we going to be able to use genetic engineering humanely?

If we decide that a fetus is a thing, that it has no moral significance, to the point were a mother can destroy it if she wishes to, then how can we argue that she wouldn’t have the right to do anything she wants to it? If she could destroy the embryo, why not turn it into a monster? People are allowed to sell or give away their gametes. They are allowed to give away or sell embryos too. Isn’t this troubling?

I believe that we must have a consistent set of ethics to deal with reproductive choices. Up until now we have sort of muddled along with a sort of common sense ad hoc approach. But given the technology that is coming I believe that we need to do better than that.

31

Damn Nen,
I’ve been wanting to slam that “on your own” bit since the top of the page. You beat me to it. Even a full term newborn at least needs one person to take care of it for years. A 6 month fetus would have needed a team of nurses and doctors. I’d like to meet the person that developed from that stage “on their own”. Went out and got itself some supper / shelter on its own. I want to hire that person.

32

Lemur866:

Whether or not it’s fine with me, personally, is pretty much a moot point. You want it to not be fine with me? Okay, it’s no fine with me. As for “prectical reasons”, what other kind of resons should there be for forbidding anything?

33

What do we call this, kids?

“Ooh, ooh, teacher!”

Yes, Timmy?"

“We call it nipicking, teacher!”

Yes, Timmy, we do! You get a gold star for the day! But get your hand out of Susie’s skirt.

34

All I’m saying is that we should use coherent moral arguments. You posted that you believed that there was no moral problem with killing newborn babies since they were non-sentient and the only reason we don’t kill newborn babies is because people would get upset.

I believe that any moral system that would allow the wholesale murder of newborn babies is a bankrupt moral system, one that should be examined for flaws and improved to the point where the wholesale murder of newborn babies is not allowed. Your mileage may vary.

35

I’m all for moral arguments as it tends to elevate
the debate to something above merely one’s own
convenience. When people make decisions about life
purely from an academic, practical point of view, well
excuse me, lets boogie with the apes. Is there a point
to life, or are we all a new and improved version of
the sludge from the sea? Do we owe anything to our
species, or are we doomed to fail, so damn the torpoedos,
full speed ahead?

36

The best answer to this question is in a short story by Phil Dick. A person is defined as someone/something that has higher reasoning capacity. “Higher reasoning capacity” needs to be defined, of course. In Dick’s world, it is defined in law as the ability to solve algebra problems, this being an indication of abstract thought. Anyone who has not yet passed their algebra exam is at risk of a postnatal “abortion”.
Talk about a high-pressure exam.
(Sorry, don’t recall the title of the story.)

37

Don’t put words in my mouth Lemur.

What exactly is a “coherant moral argument”? The real world consists of many priorities, often conflicting. Giving women the opportunity to end their pregnancies is a high priority. Protecting intelligent life (and endangered species) is a high priority. Curing diseases is a high priority. Giving people the opportunity to kill infants is not a priority. Having laws which make a clear distinction between legality and illegality is a priority.

Since there is no reason not to make infanticide illegal, any reason to make it so will do. If infanticiede were legal, people would encroach on it unitl they were killing 2 and 3 year-olds. And even though newborns apparenty do not display the level of sentience that some animals do, we can afford to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But no such benefit is extended to first trimester fetuses or embryos. Given the pressing needs that killing them can sometimes fulfill, the standards for protecting them needs to be higher, yet the justification is lower.

38

I don’t know what you’re advocating here -
pro or con on infanticide? Your statement that newborns
don’t have the coherence of an animal…? A newborn baby
human has more sentience than that of an equally newborn
ape, for sure. I can see we’re heading to a debate on the
definition of awareness. That seems to be a tangent to this
central argument which is when does “humanity” begin? Is
our so-callled humanity just a matter of intellect, self-awareness, or some such? Is it physical form? (seems rather
lame, imho)I recall the definition of humanity (i.e, sentient life) being the ability to create. Would that definition suffice?

39

Is an acorn an oak tree? Does an acorn possess all the requisite qualities of tree-ness?

Is an egg a chicken? (If an egg and a chicken are precisely the same thing, the “Which came first?” debate is moot, and Colonel Sanders can freely substitute a fried egg for a piece of chicken.)

40

I’ll tell you what I’m advocating here, no change in the law. There is no way a 1st trimester fetus can be considered a person, and young women really really really need to able to gen abortions when they get pregnant. A newborn infant can be “considered” a person and there’s no need to put too fine a point on it. No one needs to be able to kill their newborn, and there certainly is no movement to have it legalized. The system we have right now is perfectly pragmatic and all this talk of infanticide is a red herring.