Thoughts in a Haystack

The threat of excommunication aside, the cardinal does have a point. Both cases involve the deliberate and unnecessary killing of the embryo which, if it is regarded as human and entitled to the right to life, must be immoral, even if it is not illegal.
 

He might remember, however, that up through most of the 19th Century, the Church had a definition of when a "human being" appeared in the womb much more akin to modern views than the bogus attempt to call a zygote an "embryo" and an "embryo" a "human being." That being the case, their present position is not, you should pardon the expression, sacrosanct.

The attempt to force mideval scholastic concepts of potentiality and actuality on modern society will have about the same result as what happened when they tried to enforce authortarianism on science.
 

He might remember, however, that up through most of the 19th Century, the Church had a definition of when a "human being" appeared in the womb much more akin to modern views than the bogus attempt to call a zygote an "embryo" and an "embryo" a "human being."

You at five years old were not the same as you are now. You now are not the same as you will be, barring any further accidents, ten years from now. Is it a bogus argument to claim that all three 'you's are one and the same individual human being?
 

It is a bogus argument that I am, at 5 years old, the same under the law as I am at 21. At 5, I cannot be convicted of a crime, my parents can be made to support me and I cannot vote.

Ten years from now I may be brain dead and doctors will be allowed, with the blessing of the Catholic Church, to disconnect me from feeding tubes, something they would never be allowed to do to me before my brain died.

At 5 hours after fertilization, when my brain had yet to develop, I was not a "human being" for purposes of the law and, as a matter of historical fact, never was considered to be one -- fetuses were never treated under the law as full human beings -- the argument that they are was only made after Roe v. Wade was decided, as far as I know.

And if you want to claim that the change in attitude is due to our increased knowledge, why then isn't there a hue and cry to do something about the 50% of all fertilized human eggs that spontaneously abort? If people really think zygotes are full human beings, why aren't billions being raised for the medical cure for a condition that is killing some 130 million such "human beings" a year?
 

The issue being raised here can be simply put: Is a human embryo a "human being"?

If it is, then the death of such a being entails serious moral questions. We incur a serious moral burden to prevent such deaths if possible. We don't destroy human beings because it is inconvenient to have them around; we don't destroy human beings against their will so other human beings can live more comfortably; etc.

On the other hand, if a human embryo is not a human being, the burden is considerably less.

Although the issue can be simply posed, the resolution is far from easy. In fact, it isn't clear how one can even approach an answer.

I'll consider just two arguments that are often attempted. The first actually starts with a scientific fact.

We start with the fact that a human embryo is human - after all, it isn't a cow embryo. It has a complete human DNA sequence - which differentiates it from a egg cell or a sperm cell. But that fact actually doesn't help us get to resolution - human skin and hair exhibits the same complete human DNA, and no rational person would confuse either of them with a human being.

A second argument, raised by John, is that since millions of embryos are dying unrecognized, this can somehow resolve the issue of whether they are human beings. But then, millions of people have died unrecognized over the course of history, and that did not make them any less of human beings because of that. Maybe the lack of recognition for embryos is merely an accident of history as well. So that philosophical argument really doesn't do it either.

I don't have to prolong this. My feeling is that neither the scientific process nor philosophical argument is going to resolve the issue.

So, almost by default, we are left with only two problematic approaches: (1)a legalistic fiat, driven by either positivism or pragmatism; or (2)personal knowledge driven by religious belief.
 

It is a bogus argument that I am, at 5 years old, the same under the law as I am at 21.

I agree that it would be a bogus argument to claim that a five-year-old is regarded for all legal purposes as being exactly the same as a 21-year-old. Fortunately, that is not part of my case.

As an aside, however, it does undermine the argument, made on another thread, that entitlement to rights always entails acceptance of responsibilities.

My case has has always been that it is arbitrary to limit the right to life to only part of the individual human lifespan.

In my view, rights are general principles which a society agrees are necessary for the purpose of regulating the behaviour of its members. The right to life, in effect, prohibits people from killing one another. The only exceptions allowed are those cases where to uphold the right would cause greater harm than setting it aside.

Ten years from now I may be brain dead and doctors will be allowed, with the blessing of the Catholic Church, to disconnect me from feeding tubes, something they would never be allowed to do to me before my brain died.

I think it is reasonable to assume that the right to life no longer applies when the person is dead.

As to the question of whether or not someone who has suffered severe brain damage is really dead, I would put it to the test by withdrawing all life support apart from the supply of food and water. Nature can then take its course.

At 5 hours after fertilization, when my brain had yet to develop, I was not a "human being" for purposes of the law and, as a matter of historical fact, never was considered to be one -- fetuses were never treated under the law as full human beings -- the argument that they are was only made after Roe v. Wade was decided, as far as I know.

I accept that in the past fetuses were never regarded by the law as being persons but so what? In the past, there was a widespread acceptance of slavery as being a normal function within human society. We now take what we believe to be a more humane and enlightened view of it. Should precedent always be binding?

And if you want to claim that the change in attitude is due to our increased knowledge, why then isn't there a hue and cry to do something about the 50% of all fertilized human eggs that spontaneously abort?

As I said before, in my view, rights exist to regulate human behaviour. The right to life is the right not to be killed by another human being. There is no right not to be killed by a tiger or a bolt of lightning or a deadly disease.

If fetuses are granted the right to life they are protected from abortion at the hands of other human beings. Spontaneous abortion, while possibly a tragic loss for the mother and something we should work to prevent, is not a breach of that right.

If people really think zygotes are full human beings, why aren't billions being raised for the medical cure for a condition that is killing some 130 million such "human beings" a year?

I do not regard the zygote as being the same as an adult human being, but it is human and, as such, should be entitled to the right to life.
 

First of all, Ian, "rights" are ideals that people argue over. What we call "rights" in our Constitution are simply laws we agreed to be bound by very early on in our government.

"Laws," in a democratic form of government, are more-or-less agreed-to norms of behavior. Neither the argument about the historical status of fetuses nor the spontaneous abortion argument were offered to show that pre-implantation "human beings" have less rights than post implantation "human beings." It was offered to show that, at a very visceral (and, therefore, more reliably true) level, nobody really believes that a zygote is a "human being." The pretense to the contrary is nothing but posturing in aid of political and social arguments over completely different forms of behavior, such as premarital sex. People are free to make these kinds of arguments for their preferred norms, but I'm also free to point out that it is hypocrisy.

You agree that the zygote is not the same as an adult human being but still seem to think that it has a "right" that somehow is comparable to an adult human being's. Otherwise, what possible chance would a few hundred cells (whose only claim to a "right to life" over that of the sperm or the egg that you can give is that those cells have a complete set of human DNA) have in a competition against an adult human being with Parkinson's disease or a child going blind from diabetes? Certainly you aren't going to reduce the definition of a "human being" to DNA, are you? Besides the obvious conceptual problem of such a definition insofar as what then do you do with the cancerous tumor, which has a full complement of DNA, there is also the danger of then defining people with "defective" DNA as less human than those with "good" DNA.

Your "test" for when a person dies is not coherent. If the test of death is the withdrawal of all life support apart from the supply of food and water, then many people with a fully functioning brain would fail that test. For the same reason, if you mean it as a test of a working brain, it obviously is unsatisfactory, since not only isn't it testing the state of the brain, some people with obviously dead brains survive your test. You obviously mean it as some additional test, above and beyond brain death for a person's death but give no rationale for it. But in any case, given the reaction during the recent flap over Teri Schiavo in the U.S., the majority of people in this country favor brain death as a test of death and, in the absence of any Constitutional protection of brain dead persons, society can agree to that as a norm of behavior. It logically follows that, once you accept a test of brain death for the end of human life, brain beginning is a consistent point at which to hold that human life begins.

Then begins the really interesting arguments about when and why you can kill one person in the interests of another. Suffice it to say that your statement that the only exceptions allowed are those cases where to uphold the right to life would cause greater harm than setting it aside is hopelessly naive and demonstrably false but that is an area probably beyond what I want to discuss here.
 

The ideal of human rights, even if not viewed in earlier times as we understand them now, preceded the laws by which they are guaranteed. So the first question is, to what extent can these rights be considered 'legitimate' if they lack the authority of a higher power such as God? After all, the Universe, so far as we can tell, is not aware of our existence and, even if it is, appears to show no interest in our well-being.

In my view, the concept of rights is best grounded in "interests theory". All human beings have certain interests in common such as personal survival, the survival and security of spouse and family, the freedom to live as they choose and so on. Rights are formal statements of recognition that all people are entitled to have these common interests respected by others. Laws are the statutory prescription and definition of those various rights enacted so as to enforce respect for them.

The crucial question here is whether or not the zygote/blastocyst/embryo/fetus can be held to have interests which are entitled to protection under the law.

Rights apply to individuals within the domain of human society and, hence, the laws which assert them are intended only to regulate human behaviour. As I wrote before:

The right to life is the right not to be killed by another human being. There is no right not to be killed by a tiger or a bolt of lightning or a deadly disease.

By that argument, if a fetus is entitled to the right to life, abortion at the hands of other human beings would be a breach of that right whereas spontaneous abortion would not. Any claims about the number of pregnancies that fail due to natural causes are thus simply irrelevant.

You are probably right that most people, if asked, would say that a zygote was not the same as a "human being". But we both know that it is possible to elicit a particular answer by the way the question is framed. If you asked the same people whether a human zygote was different from that of a cow, for example, they would probably say it was. Further, if asked for a reason, most would probably point to the fact that a human zygote would develop into a human being and not a cow.

This brings us to the crux of the matter, which is what is meant by a "human being"? If we asked the same hypothetical group of people we polled earlier, they would probably think first of human adults. If pressed on the point, they would probably concede that newborn babies, toddlers, adolescents and old people were also human beings, even though they differed significantly one from another. If shown ultrasound images of near-term fetuses, they would probably allow that they were also human. It would be interesting to show our panel images of fetuses at progressively earlier stages of development to see at what point, if any, they were judged to be no longer human. Perhaps even, if the panel were given a crash course in human developmental biology, they might recognise the seamless process of development which leads from the zygote to the adult and that all stages could reasonably be described as human. It might even be possible to get them to grasp the concept of a human being as having temporal as well as spatial extension, that we are events spanning many decades as well as being objects. Mind you, given the difficulty of persuading people on the blogs to accept this concept, I have my doubts about that last sentence.

As for the question of the impact of an abortion ban on stem cell research, are you justifying the denial of the right to life to fetuses on the grounds that we need their cells for medical research? That sounds perilously close to allowing that the ends justify the means. Besides, as I asked on Pharyngula although without answer, why not harvest stem cells from those embryos which abort spontaneously? I imagine that it could be more difficult but not impossible.

On the question of my "test" for when a person dies, I was only suggesting it for those cases where there is still some doubt about whether the brain still has the capacity to sustain life at all. As I understand Terri Schiavo's case, prior to her death, the majority of medical opinion was that she had suffered irreversible brain damage and CAT scans showed large dark areas which were taken to be loss of brain tissue, but the full extent of the damage to her brain was only revealed post mortem. Nonetheless, she was able to live while food and water were supplied and even survived their withdrawal for a period.

Regardless, I most certainly do not accept that because brain death is accepted as a conclusive test of the end of life that the onset of brain activity in the fetus should mark the beginning of human life. It is a truism that it is much easier to destroy than to create but it applies here. While the brain can be destroyed by a few minutes of oxygen deprivation, it takes far longer for it to develop. In fact, there are many ways by which one human being can destroy the brain of another which require no particular expertise. Yet it is still far beyond the capabilities of our best scientists to construct a human brain from scratch, apart from initiating the process the old-fashioned way, that is, by fertilizing a human egg with human sperm.

As for my claim that exceptions to the right to life are based on the principle of the lesser of two evils being demonstrably false, I await the demonstration when you have a moment.
 

Ah, so there is no right to not to be killed by a disease? So we can withhold medical treatment from everyone over the age of 65 and make it illegal for doctors to treat them? What a neat way to deal with the Medicare crises!

I have no idea where you get the idea that rights precede law. Can you give any examples?

And do you actually think a zygote can reasonably be described as human as you are? The evidence I've already given shows that you are in a small minority and, by any reasonable analysis of overall social interests, your position loses.

As to justifying stem cell research, I am denying that a few hundred cells have any such thing as a "right to life," anymore than sperm and eggs do or cancerous tumors do. You haven't justified that position yet by any of the things you've mentioned.

Teri Schiavo lived after her brain died? Well, I suppose that if you are going to hold that a zygote is a human being, thinking a vegetable is one makes a weird kind of sense. It's just not the kind that I would admire.

Your actual claim was that the only exceptions allowed to the prohibition against people killing one another are those cases where to uphold the right would cause greater harm than setting it aside. The last time someone was executed, who made that calculation and how? Not some vague and insupportable claim about punishment generally being good for society, but a determination that, in that case of that killing of that person, the benefit outweighed the killing? I won't even ask you whether the dead Iraqis, including insurgents, was weighed in the "calculation" to go to war or whether they were given equal weight with American and British lives. The answer is too obvious to even dispute.
 

One more time - human rights are statements of entitlements which apply to human individuals and only apply within the domain of human society. They are only intended to regulate human behaviour.

If I were to kill someone by deliberately infecting them with typhoid that would be a breach of their right to life and, since there is also a statutory prohibition against such behaviour, I could be charged with murder.

If the same person died after being accidentally infected with typhoid, no right would have been breached. If you think there was, what would you do, charge the bacteria with murder?

And since laws do not spring into existence fully-formed, unless you believe in some form of legal creationism, it is reasonable to assume that the concept of a right which needs to be upheld precedes the law by which it is protected.

As for concepta, What is a human zygote other than human? Are you saying it is equally bovine or equine or feline? Just because it lacks the attributes of an adult human being does not make it any the less an essential stage in the process which leads to that adult.

Further, if you assert a general human right to life then, like innocence before the law, it is presumed to apply unless an exception is demonstrated. If you believe there is a human right to life then it is for you to show why it should not appy to the zygote or blastocyst or embryo or fetus.

Teri Schiavo's body lived on for a period after food and water were withdrawn which suggests that there was sufficient brain function remaining for that. The fact that brain damage was so extensive that her personality had been lost irretrievably is a different issue. Most of us would agree, I think, that if consciousness or personality or whatever you want to call it cannot be restored there is little point in keeping the body alive. But an adult personality is not all that a human being is. Near-term fetuses, newborns, infants and young children all lack features of the adult personality to varying degrees but we still assume that they have the right to life.

I ground my support for capital punishment in two well-established principles: first, that the severity of a punishment should be proportionate to the gravity of the offence and, second, that the offender should not be allowed to profit or gain any advantage from the offence committed. My argument is that the second principle is consistent with the lesser-of-two-evils exception in that the harm caused to society, in particular faith in the justice system, by being too lenient with offenders is greater than that caused by the breach of the offender's right to life.

The principle also stands in the case of a just war since it is assumed that to allow the enemy to prevail would result in greater harm that if it were defeated.
 

You may misunderstand my point. The very concept of "rights" does not exist in a vacuum. Until there is a society that has laws, the notion of "rights" is meaningless. Rights grow out of lawful behavior, not vice versa. "Rights" are not some idealist entity with existence of its own (the soaring rhetoric of the American founders notwithstanding) it is a practical agreement within a society of humans.

I don't know what point you are trying to make with the typhoid example. What if I had a simple injection that would cure the person and refused to give it to him? Inaction is potentially as criminal or, at the very least, morally reprehensible, as action.

There lots of things that can be said to be "human" simply because they come from the physical bodies of human beings, including sperm, eggs, tumors, malfunctioning gall bladders, etc., that we actively kill or allow to die thoughtlessly. If you have an actual argument for giving more legal rights to the few hundred cells of a zygote that comes from H. sapiens than are given to one from B. taurus, you are not making it by just heaving around the word "human".

So, lets see, you'll agree that it takes more than a few trillion human cells to make up a human being. And I'll agree that, for reasons that may not be quantifiable but need not be for making legal distinctions, a near-term fetus is close enough to being a "human being" (a legal term here in the US), to at least have some rights (even though they have never been given full rights in any society). Why is there any question at all about a zygote? It clearly does not have anything even approaching a personality.

As to your "well-established principles," there is more than a little dispute over "an eye for an eye" and simply living in permanent incarceration is not obviously "profiting."

But, more importantly, the fact is that your claim about the supposed calculation of the prohibition against killing rules unless to uphold the right would cause greater harm than setting it aside is simply not made on an individual basis. You do not even claim that the death of that murderer or whatever has to have an identifiable benefit for others. It is a social benefit claim dressed up in high faulting language. On a social benefit analysis, the zygote loses easily and without question.
 

If rights exist to regulate human behaviour within society then, plainly, a society must exist in which the members recognize the need for such regulation before the concept of rights can emerge. But the various recognized human rights must have existed as concepts before they could be codified in formal declarations or statutes. For any legislature to
enact a law prohibiting unlawful killing,for example, there must first be a consensus that such killing is wrong, in other words, that members of society should have a right to life.

Given that rights exist only to regulate human behaviour within the domain of society, it would be absurd to expect that they would have any influence over the behaviour of the typhoid bacterium, for example. Accidental infection with the disease, therefore, cannot be a breach of the victim's rights. If the victim were deliberately injected with typhoid by another person, however, that would be a breach since it would be the action of a human being who is bound to respect the rights of the victim. Similarly, if someone were to withhold treatment for typhoid from a victim so that they died, that would also be a breach of the victim's right, in my view, since respecting the right to life of another should entail taking positive action to uphold it where possible. Withholding treatment
would be a deliberate decision by a human being to refrain from doing what was in their power to uphold the right to life of the victim.

Further, if doctors excise a tumour or remove a malfunctioning organ such as a gall bladder those operations are carried out with the intention of saving the life of the individual suffering from those disorders. Surgeons now also operate on fetuses in utero with the intention of saving the unborn child, not just the mother. This implies that the fetus has a right to life at least as far back as medical science has the power to sustain it.

In fact, you could argue that our willingness to extend the right to life ever earlier in pregnancy parallels the capacity of medical science to intervene effectively. If this improvement continues we can foresee a time when it will be possible to artificially sustain
the development of a person from zygote to adult. This in turn would raise the question of
extending the right to life to conception. And if that is likely to be the case in the near future, why not do it now?

And, yes, I agree that an individual human being or person is more than the few trillion cells which comprise the human body. But that adult human body is not created whole ex nihilo, neither is the much smaller third-trimester fetus. Both are the outcome of a long process of development that begins with the fertilization of a single egg. Futher, when we grant the right to life to an individual, it is not just to protect the individual at that particular stage of development or when he or she has that particular form. It is intended to protect the individual throughout his or her lifespan. The application of the
right implicitly recognizes that an individual human being is an event spread over a number of decades. If we accept that the process of development that leads to the individual adult begins at conception, if we accept that the right to life is intended to protect that individual however they might develop over time, then it is inconsistent, to say the least, to deny that protection to the first few months of that process.

A set of scales is often used as the symbol of justice, expressing the concepts of balance and fairness. "An eye for an eye", as we are both aware, although it now stands for excessive vengeance, was originally intended to limit vengeance, meaning only "an eye for an eye". That sense - of a proportionate response - is expressed by the different
sentences that are incurred by different offences in our justice systems; the offence of taking a motor vehicle for the purpose of joyriding is treated more leniently than armed robbery, for example. These principles of balance, proportionality and fairness, taken to their logical conclusion require that the worst offences attract the most severe
punishments.

While no one is pretending that imprisonment is a pleasant experience, a convict is still able to breathe, eat, drink, read books, listen to music, watch TV, take educational courses, associate with others, communicate with relatives and friends, possibly even get married and have conjugal visits and pursue appeals against the sentence. The victim or victims of a murderer can do none of these. I should say that a murderer on a life sentence has a considerable advantage over the victim. In fact, a you are probably aware, the situation in the UK is even worse. Although murder attracts a mandatory life sentence, the average tariff - the period that must be served before the offender becomes eligible for release on licence - is an absurd 12-14 years. There are cases of offenders who have served sentences of less than 20 years for murder who have gone on to kill again. As far as I am concerned, those are gross and utterly unacceptable miscarriages. They not only deny the original victim the justice to which they are entitled, they say that all future victims will be similarly deprived of any expectation that their killers will be dealt with effectively - despite all high-minded or "high-falutin'" rhetoric to the contrary.