Category: Ethics

Still More on the Morality of Celebrating the Death of Evildoers

It is not just some Christians who feel the moral  dubiousness of joy and celebration at the death of evildoers.  Here is Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld.  "So our tradition is clear: Public rejoicing about the death of an enemy is entirely inappropriate."  Here is a delightfully equivocal statement by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman.

Interestingly, Dennis Prager is still pounding on this theme.  About twenty minutes ago I heard him repeat his argument against me and others.  The argument could be put like this:

1. The Israelites rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, drowning them.  (Exodus 15)
2.  This rejoicing was  pleasing to God. 
Therefore
3.   To rejoice over the death of evildoers is morally permissible.

This argument is only as good as its second premise.  Two questions.  First, does the Bible depict God as being pleased at the rejoicing?  Not unequivocally.  Prager could argue from Ex 15: 22-25 that God was indeed pleased because he showed Moses a tree with which he rendered the bitter waters of Marah sweet and potable.  The Israelites were mighty thirsty  after three days of traipsing around in the wilderness of Shur after emerging from the Red Sea.  Unfortunately, Prager provided no support for (2).

But more important is the second question. Why should we take the fact that God is depicted as being pleased at the rejoicing — if it is a fact — as evidence that God is pleased?  I grant that if God is pleased at some behavior then that behavior is morally acceptable.  But the fact that God is depicted as being pleased does not entail that God is pleased.

And so, as a philosopher, I cannot credit the (1)-(3) argument.  It assumes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  But this is not to be assumed; this is to be tested.  The Bible has to satisfy reason's criteria before it can be accepted as true. If the Bible violates the deliverances of practical reason (as it quite clearly does in the Abraham and Isaac story, see my Kant on Abraham and Isaac)  then it cannot be accepted in those passages in which the violation occurs as the word of God.

We who have one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem face the problem of how we can avoid being torn asunder.  On the one hand, philosophy can bring us to the realization  that we need revelation; on the other hand, nothing can count as genuine revelation unless it passes muster by reason's own theoretical and practical lights.  This is not to demand that the content of revelation be derivable from reason; it is to demand that nothing that purports to be revelation can be credited as genuine revelation if it violates the clearest principles of theoretical and practical reason, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction and the principles that one may not kill the innocent or rejoice over another man's evil fate.

The problem is to reconcile divine authority  with human reason and autonomy.  Two nonsolutions may be immediately dismissed:  fideism which denigrates reason, and rationalism which denigrates faith.

On Joy at Osama’s Demise: Dennis Prager Responds to Me on the Air

It's been an interesting morning.  At 10:30 AM I noticed that my traffic was way up for the day.  And then at 11:12 AM I heard Dennis Prager reading on the air the first paragraph of a post of mine from yesterday in which I express my disappointment at Prager for rejoicing over Osama bin Laden's death when the appropriate response, as it seems to me, is to be glad that the al-Qaeda head is out of commission, but without gleeful expressions of pleasure.  That's Schadenfreude and to my mind morally dubious.

(Even more strange is that before Prager read from my blog, I had a precognitive sense that he was going to do so.)

In his response, Prager pointed out that the Jews rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, and that this rejoicing was  pleasing to God.  (See Exodus 15)  Apparently that settled the matter for Prager.

And then it dawned on me.  Prager was brought up a Jew, I was brought up a Christian.  I had a similar problem with my Jewish friend Peter Lupu.  In a carefully crafted post, Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong?, I argued for a thesis that  I consider well-nigh self-evident and not in need of argument, namely, that some mere thoughts are morally objectionable.  The exact sense of this thesis is explained and qualified in the post.  But to my amazement, I couldn't get Peter to accept it despite my four arguments.  And he still doesn't accept it.

Later on, it was Prager who got me to see what was going on in my discussion with Peter.  He said something about how, in Judaism, it is the action that counts, not the thought or intention.  Aha!  But now a certain skepticism rears its head:  is Peter trapped in his childhood training, and me in mine?  Are our arguments nothing but ex post facto rationalizations of what we believe, not for good reasons, but on the basis of inculcation?  (The etymology of 'inculcation' is telling: the beliefs that were inculcated in us were stamped into us as if by a heel, L. calx, when we were impressionable youths.)

The text that so impressed me as a boy and impresses me even more now is Matt. 5: 27-28:  "You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. [Ex. 20:14, Deut. 5:18]  But I say to you that anyone who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Not that I think that Prager or Peter are right.  No, I think I'm right.  I think  Christianity is morally superior to Judaism: it supersedes Judaism, preserving what is good in it while correcting what is bad.  Christianity goes to the heart of the matter.  Our hearts are foul, which is why our words and deeds are foul.  Of course I have a right to my opinion and I can back it with arguments.  And you would have to be a  liberal of the worst sort to think that there is anything 'hateful' in what I just wrote about Christianity being morally superior to Judaism.

But still there is the specter of skepticism which is not easy to lay.  I think we just have to admit that reason is weak and that the moral and other intuitions from which we reason are frail reeds indeed.  This should make us tolerant of differences.

But toleration has limits.  We cannot tolerate the fanatically intolerant.  So, while not rejoicing over any man's death or presuming to know — what chutzpah! –  where any man stands in the judgment of God, I am glad that Osama has been removed from our midst.

The Ought-to-Be and the Ought-to-Do and the Aporetics of “Be Ye Perfect”

Is there any justification for talk of the ought-to-be in cases where they are not cases of the ought-to-do?

Let's begin by noting that if I ought to do X (pay my debts, feed my kids, keep my hands off my neighbor's wife, etc.) then my doing X ought to be. For example, given that I ought to pay my debts, then my paying a certain debt on a certain date is a state of affairs that ought to be, ought to exist, ought to obtain. So it is not as if the ought-to-do and the ought-to-be form disjoint classes. For every act X that an agent A ought to do, there is a state of affairs, A's doing X, that ought to be, and a state of affairs, A's failing to do X, that ought not be. The ought-to-do, therefore, is a  case of the   ought-to-be.

My question, however, is whether there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, are there non-agential oughts? Does it make sense, and is it true, to say things like 'There ought to be fewer diseases than there are' or 'There ought to be no natural disasters' or 'There ought to be morally perfect people'? Or consider

1. I ought to be a better man that I am, indeed, I ought to be morally perfect.

(1) expresses an axiological requirement but (arguably) not a moral obligation because it is simply not in my power to perfect myself, nor is it in any finite person's power or any group of finite person's   power to perfect me. Now consider the following aporetic triad: 

1. I ought to be morally perfect or at least better than I am in ways over which I have no control.

2. I lack the power to be what I ought to be, and this impotence is due to no specific fault of my own. (My impotence is 'original,' part  and parcel of the 'fallen' human condition, not derived from any   particular act or act-omission of mine.)

3. 'Ought' implies 'Can': one can be obliged to do X only if one has an effective choice as to whether to do X.

The triad is inconsistent in that (1) & (3) entails ~(2). Indeed, any two limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one.  How can the inconsistency be removed?

 A. One solution is simply to deny (1) by claiming that there is no sense of 'ought' in which one ought to be morally perfect or better than one is in ways over which one has no control.  This strikes me as counterintuitive. For there does seems to me to be some sense in which I ought to be perfect. I feel the force of the NT verse, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect." I have the strong intuition that I ought to be, if not perfect, at least better in respects where I simply lack the power to bring about the improvement.

B. A second solution is to distinguish between agential and non-agential oughts. We can then maintain (1) as true by maintaining that the 'ought' in (1) is non-agential and expresses an axiological   requirement as opposed to a moral obligation. So interpreted, (1) is  consistent with (2) and (3).

We can then transform the above triad into an argument:

4. (1)-(3) are all true.
5. (1)-(3) would not all be true if there were no distinction between agential and non-agential oughts.
   Therefore
6. There is a distinction between agential and non-agential oughts.

C. A third solution is to maintain the truth of (1)-(3) while also maintaining that all oughts are agential. But then how avoid inconsistency? One might maintain that, when restricted to my own resources, I lack the power to do what I ought to do; yet I am morally  obliged to perfect myself; and since 'ought' implies 'can,' the power  that I need must be supplied in part from a Source external to myself.  "And this all men call God."  So God exists!

In short, the inconsistency is avoided by bringing God into the picture as one who supplies individuals with the supplemental power to do what they are morally obliged to do when that power is insufficient from their own resources. This gives rise to an argument for the existence of an external source of moral assistance:

7. I am morally obliged (ought)  to do things that I cannot do on my own.
8. 'Ought' implies 'can'.
Therefore

9. I can do things that I cannot do on my own.
   Therefore
10. There is an external source of moral assistance that makes up the difference between what I can do on my own and what I cannot.

Summary

I have sketched two arguments which need closer scrutiny. The one based on the (B) response to the triad gives some, though not a  conclusive, reason for accepting a distinction between agential and   non-agential oughts.

Potentiality, Abortion, Contraception

This interesting missive just over the transom.  My responses in blue.

I have been pondering your application of the Potentiality Principle to the question of abortion. It is undoubtedly the case that a one year old child has the potential to become an adult possessing rights-conferring properties. It is also undoubtedly the case, for much the same reasons, that a foetus in the third trimester of pregnancy possesses that same potential. However, as we move back along the chain of causality from childhood to birth to pregnancy and before, at some point we no longer have a potential person.

I agree that at some point we no longer have a potential person.  Neither a sperm cell by itself, nor an unfertilized egg cell by itself, nor the unjoined pair of the two is a potential person.  See 'Probative Overkill' Objections to the Potentiality Principle.  This post refutes the notion that one committed to the Potentiality Principle is also committed to the notion that spermatazoa and unfertilized ova and various set-theoretical constructions of same are also  potential persons.

Continue reading “Potentiality, Abortion, Contraception”

Abortion, the Potentiality Principle, the Species Principle, and the Species Potentiality Principle

A reader comments:

In an earlier post, Why We Should Accept the Potentiality Principle  (24 October 2009), you suggest that we should apply the potentiality principle — All potential persons have a right to life — to the unborn to be consistent, as we already apply it to children. What troubles me is this: how do you say that we value children primarily for their potentiality without disenfranchising people who are permanently stuck with childlike capacities? Shall we bite the bullet and say these people are not to be valued or at least valued much, much less? Or will we squirm out of the dilemma by throwing in some ad hoc principle, say membership in the human family, to save our bacon? Maybe the best move for avoiding the repugnant conclusion is to make the unassailable religious retreat to the conclusion that all human beings will not reach their actuality in this life but the next. However, I’m not sure how that could be used to ground a theory of the wrongness of killing. None of these options seems incredibly promising to me. What say you?

Here, in summary, is the argument I gave:

1. We ascribe the right to life to neonates and young children on the basis of their potentialities.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between neonates and young children and fetuses.
3. Principles — in this case PP — should be applied consistently to all like cases.
Therefore
4. We should ascribe the right to life to fetuses on the basis of their potentialities.

What I was arguing was that we already do accept PP and that we ought to be consistent in its application. To refuse to apply PP to the pre-natal cases is to fail to apply the principle consistently.

I concede to the reader that there are severely damaged fetuses and infants the termination of which would be considered immoral, and that such cases are not covered by the principle (PP) according to which all potential persons have a right to life in virtue of the potential of genetically human individuals to develop in the normal course of events into beings that actually possess such rights-conferring properties as rationality.  The severely retarded fetuses and infants (as well as irreversibly comatose adults) lack even the potentiality to function as descriptive persons.  But note that if PP is one source of the right to life, it doesn't follow that it is the only source.  If all potential persons have the right to life it doesn't follow that only potential persons have the right to life.

So, to improve my earlier argument, I will now substitute for (1)

1*. We ascribe the right to life to neonates and young children on the basis of their potentialities, though not only on that basis.

So we should explore the option that the right to life has multiple sources.  Perhaps it has a dual source: in PP but also in the Species Principle (SP) according to which whatever is genetically human has the right to life just in virtue of being genetically human.  Equivalently, what SP says is that every member of the species homo sapiens, qua member, has the right to life of any member, and therefore every member falls within the purview of the prohibition against homicide.

Subscription to SP  would solve the reader's problem, for then a severely damaged infant would have a right to life just in virtue of being genetically human regardless of its potential for development.  Some will object that SP is involved in species chauvinism or 'speciesism,' the abitrary and therefore illicit privileging of the species one happens to belong to over other species.  The objection might proceed along the following lines.  "It is easy to conceive of an extraterrestrial possessing all of the capacities (for self-awareness, moral choice, rationality, etc) that we regard in ourselves as constituting descriptive personhood.  Surely we would not want to exclude them from the prohibition against killing the innocent just because they are not made of human genetic material." To deal with this objection, a Modified Species Principle could be adopted:

MSP:  Every member of an intelligent species, just insofar as it is a member of that species, has a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

The two principles working in tandem would seem to explain most of our moral intuitions in this matter. And now it occurs to me that PP and MSP can be wedded in one comprehensive principle, which we can call the Species Potentiality Principle:

SPP:  Every member of any biological species whose normal members are actual or potential descriptive persons, just insofar as it is a member of that species, possesses a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

Note that I didn't bring any religious notions into this discussion.  It is a bad mistake to suppose that opposition to the moral acceptability of abortion can only be religiously motivated.  And if our aim is to persuade secularists, then of course we cannot invoke religious doctrines.

REFERENCE:  Philip E. Devine, The Ethics of Homicide (Cornell UP, 1978).

Supererogation and Suberogation

It would be neat if all actions could be sorted into three jointly exhaustive classes: the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory. These deontic modes would then be analogous to the alethic modes of possibility, impossibility, and necessity. Intuitively, the permissible is the morally possible, that which we may do; the impermissible is the morally impossible, that which we may not do; and the obligatory is the morally necessary, that which we must do.

Pursuing the analogy, we note that the following two alethic modal principles each has a deontic analog, where 'p' ranges over propositions and 'A' over actions:

Richard Taylor on Goodness: Critical Remarks

Richard Taylor, Good and Evil: A New Direction (Prometheus 1984),  p. 134:

Goodness . . . is simply the satisfaction of needs and desires . . . the fulfillment of purposes. The greatest good for any individual can accordingly be nothing but the total satisfaction of his needs,
whatever these may be.

There seems to be a tension in this passage, between the first sentence and the second, and I want to see if I  can bring it into the open.

Taylor plausibly maintains that nothing is good or evil in itself or intrinsically. If a thing is good, it is good only relative to a being who wants, needs, or desires it. If a thing is evil, it is evil only relative to a being who shuns it or is averse to it. In a world in which there are no conative/desiderative beings, nothing is good or evil. This is plausible, is it not?

Imagine a world in which there is nothing but inanimate objects and processes, a world in which nothing is alive, willing, striving, wanting, needing, desiring. In such a world nothing would be either good or evil. A sun in a lifeless world goes supernova incinerating a nearby planet. A disaster? Hardly. Just another value-neutral event. A rearrangement of particles and fields.  But if our sun went supernova, that would be a calamity beyond compare — but only for us and any other caring observers hanging around.

Taylor's point is, first, that sentences of the form 'X is good (evil)' are elliptical for sentences of the form 'X is good for Y.' To say that X is good (evil) but X is not good (evil) for some Y would then be like saying that Tom is married but there is no one to whom Tom is married. Taylor's point, second, is that these axiological predicates can be cashed out in naturalistic terms. Thus,

D1. X is good for Y =df X satisfies Y's actual wants (needs, desires)

D2. X is evil for Y =df X frustrates Y's actual wants (needs, desires).

It is clear that good and evil are not being made relative to what anyone says or opines, but to certain hard facts about the wants, needs, and desires of living beings.  That we need water to live is an objective fact about us, a fact independent of what anyone says or believes.  Water cannot have value except for beings who need or want it; but that it does have value for such beings is an objective fact.

Taylor's view implies that there is no standard of good and evil apart from the actual wants, needs, desires, and aversions of conative/desiderative beings. Goodness consists in satisfaction, evil in frustration. But satisfaction and frustration can exist only if there are indigent beings such as ourselves. It follows that nothing that satisfies a desire or fulfills a need or want can be bad. (p. 126) It also follows that no desire or purpose is either good or evil. (p. 136) For if good and evil emerge only upon the satisfaction or frustration of desires and purposes, then the desires and purposes themselves cannot be either good or evil.  The rapist's desire to 'have his way' with his victim, qua desire, is not evil, and the satisfaction of desire via the commission of rape is not evil, but good, precisely because it satisfies desire!  (Glance back at the above definitions.)

We now have a reason to toss Taylor's book out the window.  But I want to point out a rather more subtle difficulty with his theory. 

If goodness is relational in the manner explained, how can there be talk of the greatest good of an individual? Glance back at the quotation. Taylor tells us that the greatest good for an individual is nothing but the total satisfaction of his needs.  This is a higher-order state of affairs distinct from a ground-level state of affairs such as the satisfaction of the desire for water by a cool drink. What need does this greatest good satisfy?

Suppose I satisfy all my needs, wants and desires. How can this higher-order state of satisfaction be called good if a thing is good only in relation to a needy being? There would have to be a higher-order need or want, a need or want for total satisfaction, and the goodness of the first-order satisfaction would have to consist in the satisfaction of this higher-order need. But this leads to a vicious infinite regress.

Taylor should say about the satisfaction of desire what he says about desire, namely, that it is neither good nor evil. Consider the desire to drink a beer. By Taylor's lights, drinking a beer is intrinsically neither good nor evil. It is good only insofar as it satisfies some desiderative being's desire. Thus the goodness of drinking a beer is nothing other than the satisfaction of the desire to drink beer. The desire itself, however, is neither good nor evil, and the same goes for the satisfaction or frustration of this desire.

My critical point is that Taylor is using 'good' in two senses, one relative, the other absolute, when his own theory entitles him to use it only in the relative sense. By his theory, a good X is a satisfactory X: one that satisfies some desiderative/indigent being's need, want, desire, for X. But then desire can't be said to be good or evil, as Taylor himself realizes on p. 136. Similarly, the satisfaction of desire cannot be said to be good or evil. Otherwise, the satisfaction of desire would have to be relative to a higher-order desire. Hence Taylor is not entitled to speak of the "greatest good for any individual" as he does in the passage quoted.

The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify

Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage & plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Analogies, Souls, Harm to Souls, and Murder

Peter Lupu comments:

Bill has argued that my murder-argument relies upon a faulty analogy. I have a very general response to this charge: while the murder-argument indeed relies upon an analogy, the analogy upon which it relies is one employed by the soul-theorists themselves. Thus, I contend that if the soul-theorists are entitled to a certain analogy, then I am entitled to use the very same analogy in order to marshal an argument against this or that aspect of the soul-hypothesis. And conversely, if I am not entitled to use a certain analogy, then the soul-theorists are not entitled to it either. But, as I shall show, if the soul-theorists are not entitled to the relevant analogy, then there is an even more direct argument than the murder-argument I have given to the conclusion that according to soul-theorists murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing. [What Peter means to say is not that soul-theorists officially maintain as part of their theory that murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing, but that, whether or not soul theorists realize it, soul-theory entails that murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing.]

Continue reading “Analogies, Souls, Harm to Souls, and Murder”

Souls and Murder

 A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Comments in blue by BV.

If there are immortal souls, would murder be a grave moral breach?

1) Theists, like their atheist adversaries, consider murder a severe breach of morality. Unlike causing a minor physical injury to another or damaging or even completely destroying their home, car, or other belongings, murder is considered to be an altogether different matter. The emphasis upon the moral gravity of murder compared to these other moral infractions is, of course, justified and the justification rests in large part upon the finality and irreversible nature of the consequences for the victim. We can perhaps put these consequences as follows: once dead, always dead! Compared to those other infractions where we can perhaps assess the damage and convert such assessment into some sort of tangible remedy, we have no clue how to even begin such appraisal of harm when it comes to a matter such as ceasing to exist forever. If death would have been a temporary state, such as a long sleep for instance, from which one returns into being once again, I am certain we would have found a way to assess the damage done and assign suitable remedy. But, of course, death is not a temporary state such as sleep. Or is it?

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When Does A Human Life Begin?

This from a reader:

I enjoy reading Maverick Philosopher even though I seldom agree with the conservative viewpoint.  The thing that I find most interesting about your articles on abortion is that they really do not address what I consider to be the central issue and that is when does human life begin.  Zygote, blastomere, embryo, fetus?  I would be interested in your ideas. 

Well, I did address this question on the old blog.  But in philosophy one is never done revising and re-thinking, so let me take another stab at this.

1. Note first that your question — When does human life begin? — is not exact.  Presumably, what you are asking is: When does a human life begin?  Our concern is with the origin of particular human lives, not human life in general.  Even so, the question remains unclear.  Here are two possible disambiguations of 'When does a human life begin?' given that the context is the morality of abortion:

Q1. When does a life become human in a sense of 'human' that justifies ascription of the right to life?

Q2.  When does a life become human in the biological sense of 'human'?

Continue reading “When Does A Human Life Begin?”

All Legislation Legislates Morality

One often hears people say, 'You can't legislate morality!' People who say this are often people who confuse the genus morality with the species sexual morality. But even upon acquiescence in this genus-species confusion, it is obvious that we can, do, and ought to legislate morality. After all, we have laws against rape, and we ought to have them. Rape is both immoral and illegal, and it is right that it be illegal. The fundamental problem, however, is the confusion of morality with sexual morality. That the two are distinct should be self-evident, hence I won’t spare the reader the pleasure of providing his own examples. But perhaps I should give one example to prime the pump of the reader's thinking. Suppose a woman poisons her husband in order to collect on a life insurance policy. The act is immoral but has nothing to do with sex in the way that committing adultery has something to do with sex.

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Deriving Gun Rights From the Right to Life

I take the view that some rights are logically antecedent to anything of a conventional nature such as a group decision or a constitution. Thus the right to life is not conferred by any constitution, but recognized and protected by well-crafted ones. In simple terms, you don't have the right to life because some people say you do; they correctly say you do because you have this right quite apart from anything they say. The right to life is a natural right. It is logically antecedent to anything of a conventional nature such as the positive law.

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‘Probative Overkill’ Objections to the Potentiality Principle

Here is a simple version of the Potentiality Argument (PA):

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
2. The human fetus is a potential person.
—–
3. The human fetus has a right to life.

Does PA 'prove too much'? It does if the proponent of PA has no principled way of preventing PA from transmogrifying into something like:

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
4. Everything is a potential person.
—–
5. Everything has a right to life.

Continue reading “‘Probative Overkill’ Objections to the Potentiality Principle”

Why We Should Accept the Potentiality Principle

The idea behind the Potentiality Principle (PP) is that potential personhood confers a right to life. For present purposes we may define a person as anything that is sentient, rational, and self-aware. Actual persons have a right to life, a right not to be killed. Presumably we all accept the following Rights Principle:

RP: All persons have a right to life.

What PP does is simply extend the right to life to potential persons. Thus,

PP. All potential persons have a right to life.

PP allows us to mount a very powerful argument, the Potentiality Argument (PA), against the moral acceptability of abortion. Given PP, and the fact that human fetuses are potential persons, it follows that they have a right to life. From the right to life follows the right not to be killed, except perhaps in some extreme circumstances.

But what is the argument for PP?

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