laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (04/02/84)
Recently there has been some talk of how terrible it would be to let some people decide for others that killing a fetus was wrong. If killing a fetus is not wrong then it is true this would be an injustice. However, if killing a fetus is wrong then what is injust is that certain people would kill it. So we are back to the question of whether a fetus is human. Here are the three major theories of ``what it is to be human''. Note that they are all theories. None has been proven. Each has their adherants (I am a reductionist myself), and each predicts a different ``reasonable thing to do'' about abortion. Dualism: This is probably the most widespread belief. Dualists reason as follows: When I think about my *self* I think about the purposeful, thinking being that makes decisions -- not some random chemicals or some aspect of the world, or some random collection of atoms. I do not even think of some *particular* collection of atoms or chemicals. Whatever my *self* is it is distinct from my body which is only tangentally connected to it. Having a haircut does not disturb my self. Therfore my self is independent of my body. This is the position which a good many religions take. If you substitute ``soul'' for ``self'' this will be clear. It is also the position of a good many intellectuals who are not religious -- the sort who identify with their minds, and not their bodies. It is often the position of people who are handicapped and really feel that their self is trapped inside a body-prison. Finally, it is believed by a great number of ``just plain folks'' who simply find the theory reasonable. The problem with the dualist is to explain how one's particular self is attatched to this particular body. There have been many attempts at this, none of which are very satisfactory, except possibly for those who call on ``God'' to have made things this way. While this does a wonderful job of explaining, it presupposes the existence of a creator-God, something which has not been proven either. Holism: Holism is complicated. I am only familiar with one particular type of holism, and so I may be misrepresenting all the other holist sorts. (So post something!) The basic position is that the whole is *greater* than the sum of its parts. When you put a lot of parts together you automatically get more than what you started with. In the case of the human being, you get a self, but the holists I know do not want to stop there and maintain that the individual is too ``small'' a unit and that one should only see the individual as part of a society, and the society as part of the cosmos which includes absolutely everything at all. The holists I know walk around trying to maintain their feeling that they are part of the ``great whole'' and try to supress (remove? destroy?) their ego on the grounds that it causes them to lose this feeling. Holists of this extreme sort are very hard to talk to. Talking is an activity between individuals, and they are bent on transcending their individuality. It is no wonder that they often do not want to discuss anything at all -- since discussion takes one's mind into focus and separates it. No doubt there are holists out there who are not of this extreme sort who might be willing to go into more detail. Anybody who thinks that ``the whole is greater than the sum of its parts'' is a holist to some degree. Reductionism: The reductionist maintains that you can describe anything adequately (in principle) by understanding all of its parts and all the laws that govern its interactions. The self is therefore a linguistic device whereby one refers to a collection of phenomenon which taken together give the semblence of unity. Materialists are reductionists. So are a good many ``secular humanists''. Most atheists are reductionists. Within the reductionist camp there are 2 main groups. The first says that since all behaviour is governed by chemical and physical processes which are subject to the fixed laws of nature, no freedom is possible. Freedom is an illusion which is caused by the fact that we do not know ourselves well enough to be able to predict our own actions with perfect certainty, something which is theoretically possible (much as weather can be simulated to a high degree of accuracy on a computer). The second says that the physical and chemical processes merely set up certain limits within which we are free. One is not free to breathe nitrogen (for instance) but that very self which is a chemical process is capable of modifying other chemical preocesses or itself which produces freedom. The freedom-reductionists have yet to really demonstrate that this really does produce freedom. The fatalist-reductionists have yet to really demonstrate that the illusion of free will is actually an illusion. All reductionists have really not done very much towards describing exactly how the parts which compose a human being (or an animal, for that matter -- they have done a fairly good job with plants) ineract. They haven't even isolated all the parts, let alone figured out exactly how and why and if each part is significant. Okay. Enough definitions. Back to abortion. What would proponents of these theories say about abortion? A dualist would claim that a human being is somethng which has a self. Since the dualist problem is one of determining where and how and why a particular seld is associated with a particular body, it is not surprising that there are a variety of dualist answers to the question. Some say conception. Most are agreed that there is a self at the time of birth, though in the past it was commonly believed by many dualists that the soul did not enter the body until baptism, which made the killing of the unbaptised not murder. I am reading a book by Husserian which seems to state that the soul only is really present in a man who is dying. When I presented this question to the holist extremists they were quite amused and tried to convince me that if I would stop tryuing to be an ego all of these questions would go away. I persisted. The bottom line seemed to be that having an abortion was not wrong, since the individual fetus either did not matter (only the whole does) or is part of the whole whether alive or dead (this also involved a belief in reincarnation). On the other hand, anybody who wants to have an abortion for their own convenience is demonstrating an ego which is cutting them off from the whole, which is a bad thing. I think that amusement summed up the reaction pretty well. Fatalist-reductionists say that people are entirely determined in what they do. Since there is no free will there is no question of choosing whether or not to do an action, so the question is absurd. Freedom-reductionists say that anything with a certain level of complexity is human, given that the laws by which its parts relate to each other are invariant (also not proven, but assumed). Once a fetus gets ``complicated enough'' it is human. There is not enough evidence right now to say what is ``complicated enough''. It is clear that these theories are not compatible. They may all be wrong, but they cannot all be right. And none of these have managed to discredit any of the others. So how is one to legislate? First of all, let us assume that we are interested in being correct. If the fetus is human from the moment of conception onwards we do not want to kill it, and if the reductionist is right in saying that the fetus is not human in the first week at any rate, though from then on they are not certain then you want to make a law which allows abortion in the first week. (This assumes that you do not want to kill human beings merely because it is convenient. If you do, this argument will not hold). So you go look at the evidence for all three claims and you decide that there is not enough evidence to indicate that one is true and the rest are false. Now what? If you really wnat to do what is right by objectie principles you must not then do whatever you desire. Desires are notably bad measures of truth. What you must do is to phrase a law saying ``we don't know when human life begins''. Moreover, you must face the fact that we may *never* know with sufficient certainty to rule out certain theories. In most cases of ethics, if one does not have sufficient information then an individual does whaever they think is best. If they are wrong then they have made a mistake. However, in certain cases this is not what is done. Equipment which ``may be unsafe'' is not allowed to be sold until it is certified safe in certain cases. The principle involved seems to be that if your mistake will only hurt you (and those who have voluntarily chosen to deal with you) then you have perfect freedom to make a mistake. However, if your mistake could seriously damage an innocnet third party, you are prohibited from making it. The seriousness of the consequences of the mistake is also taken into consideration. (The terminal I am using has a horrible keyboard layout. This was a mistake which was not prohibited. If, however, the terminal would have electrocuted me it would not have been allowed to be sold.) Under the assumption that the people whoa re under the law are rational individuals (I know -- one hell of an assumption) this makes sense. No rational person whants to commit a great moral evil like killing another human being. Thus the only people who are having abortions are people whose life is endangered by the pregnancy (such that allowing it to continue would result in the death of the mother) or who are ignorant enough to believe that it is a fact that the fetus is not a human being (as opposed to a theory which may even be correct), or who have decided that in a case where the truth of the matter is not known it is always best to do whatever you want, regardless of the consequences (and not allowing the possible consequences to modify what you want, in a good many cases) or who find it morally justifiable to kill another human being for convenience. I find all of these positions untenable. This is why abortion is morally unacceptable for me -- not because I believe the dualists are right (since my own personal opinion is that they are wrong) but because there is not sufficient evidence to prove them wrong, and if the fetus is always a human being then killing it would be an atrocity. (This last paragraph only refers to a subset of all dualists, of course. I am not going to advocate the killing of anyone who has not been baptised simply because that is/was one dualist position and I am not a dualist.) -- Laura Creighton utzoo!laura "Capitalism is a lot of fun. If you aren't having fun, then you're not doing it right." -- toad terrific
saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley) (04/03/84)
I think you were not very fair in your presentation of
the wholistic point of view of life. Any philosophy
can be taken to an extreme which ends up crippling
the addherents to this particular philosophy rather
than helping them deal with life or whatever.
Given the choices that you proposed, I guess I would put
myself more in the holistic camp than any other even
though I do not know the "official" definition of
holism. My personnal interpretation of the idea that
the sum is more important than the parts is more a
reaction to the prevalent idea that the parts are
more important than the sum and that it is easy to
determine exactly what the parts are. This said and
done, I view abortion as a holistic issue in that it
is an issue in which there are so many parts involved
that it is very hard to get a clear-cut view of it.
It is also an issue which is entirely personnal in that
the parts involved are completely different from one
abortion to another, so I don't believe that there can
be one objective rulling on the "rightness" or "wrongness"
of abortions exept to say that yes it iprobably not right
to kill a fetus, but I am incapable of deciding for other
people whether it is more right not to kill a fetus than
it would be to kill it.
Looking at obortion from a more general point of view as
one of the issues in our society, I also feel that it is
an issue which cannot be dealt with unless you take a
completele look at the problem and everything related to
it. It is an issue which involves much more than murder
does this is why I feel it cannot be treated on the same
level as murder.
Sophie Quigley
...!{decvax,allegra}!watmath!saquigley