John C. Wright's Journal

A hypothetical, yet not entirely impertinent, question:
It is a normal yet wonderful part of human existence to love. There are but few of us who do not cherish another more than life itself. Be it a brother, a friend, a mother, child, or wife, there is one in our lives we would die to protect. Imagine your loved on is a baby girl.
Now imagine this one, this one you love more than life itself, has been turned into a frog by the enchantment of an evil witch. Imagine further that the nature of the enchantment is such that, inevitably, invariably, the spell will gradually wear off after nine months, and can never be cast again, by that witch or any other.
During those nine months when your beloved little girl is temporarily a frog, is it proper to kill the frog or to allow her to be killed? Is it morally acceptable? Would you nonchalantly stand idly by while a French chef chopped off your little girl’s legs to eat?
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are not so shallow a wretch as to stand idly by while your little girl is threatened: you selflessly throw yourself between the frog and the knives of the salivating chef.
The chef objects: he tells you to move out of the way.
You say, “But this is a person, my little girl, my baby, the person I love best in all the world!”
The chef says, no, no. Observe: this frog has neither hands nor upright posture, nor intelligence, nor human features. Scientific examination of the brainwaves show the nervous system is primitive, froglike, not manlike. It is clearly not a human.
You say, “The frog under a spell; in ninth months, the spell inevitably wears off, and all the features you mention, human face and form, human speech and mind and soul, will be present then: they are merely in abeyance now, and exist only in potential.”
The chef says, caring for a frog for nine months will produce a terrific financial burden, and the action of the magic spell, when it breaks, might cause you pain and turmoil: it is the nature of the magic that there is a risk to you.
You say, “But this is my best beloved one, the one I love above all others. What kind of parent would I be if I let such considerations stand between me and the life of my child?”
The chef says, ah, but what if you decide you do not like your child? By the time she regains her human face and form, her blue eyes and golden curls, it will be to late to kill her then. Now, while she is a frog, it is both legal and moral, for there is no law against killing frogs.
You say, “But if it is illegal to kill human beings, surely it is illegal to kill a human being merely because he is under a spell, and temporarily does not exhibit the outward signs of his humanity?”
The chef says, oh but no! Truly enlightened thinkers, progressive thinkers, hold it to be not merely moral to kill enchanted human beings, but a matter of right and moral duty; a personal and private choice that is the exquisite essence of liberty itself.
You say, “Aren’t we talking about killing my child? What should it matter if she looks like a frog for nine months?”
The chef says, yes, but surely it is your choice, your right to chose, whether or not you love your child; and surely, if you chose not to love your child, you are well within your rights to kill her while she is a frog.
Dear reader, is there anything wrong with the chef’s argument?

Second hypothetical, given the same circumstances as the first. The frog that is your beloved daughter has been placed in a box with nine other frogs. These nine frogs will still be frogs in nine months, whereas your daughter will return to you once the spell is broken in nine months. The chef wants to take merely one frog from the box at random and boil it up for lunch. He argues that the chances that your daughter will die is only ten per cent. Do you let him reach into the box and kill one of the frogs at random, or do you shield the nonhuman frogs from harm in order to be sure your daughter will live?

If you choose the second option, please note that you must protect all organisms who live in the box, even those whose humanity is unknown or undetermined. If it is an organism living in a human womb, whose humanity is still a matter of legitimate scientific debate and doubt, do you shield all products of conception from harm in order to be sure that those products of conception we call babies will live?

There are but three possible moral standards a man can use towards another being.

First, he can treat the other being as a man, that is, as if the other is a free and adult human being, sound of mind, responsible for his deeds. This is the relationship of justice. When treating another man justly, one neither fails to reward what is praiseworthy with praise, nor fails to condemn what is blameworthy with blame. No excuses, no justifications, are requested or made.

Second, he can treat the other was a child, that is, someone who is not responsible for his actions, but who may learn to be responsible one day. This is the relationship of mercy, and it is a condescending relationship. Only someone in a position of strength and authority safely can show mercy to someone who petitions mercy. Mercy is shown, either out of charity and humanity, or from a hope that the child might learn, in time to come, to behave responsibly. It is hoped that the act of mercy will soften the child’s stubborn heart.

It should be noted that acts of mercy, when the mercy is repaid by contrition, makes for an inspiring tale in the fashion that grim justice does not. By the very nature of their practice, artists, poets, writers and playwrights are encouraged to praise the virtue of mercy beyond its due merit.

The tale where the boy removes a thorn from a lion’s paw, and is later eaten by the lion, is no very uplifting tale. Likewise, the tale where the death-row inmate is electrocuted for his crimes by an anonymous executioner is not as entertaining as one where he is shot during a running gun-fight with an heroic policeman; because a man shooting back, even a bad man, still shows admirable courage, and the chase still is exciting. In real life, however, given a choice, we would prefer criminals not to shoot back, and to be slain cleanly under the hands of an executioner who bears them no malice. The inspiring nature of tales of mercy convinces some men that justice is a vice, not a virtue, and that mercy will always have the benevolent effect that it has only in the rare cases that find their way into stories. Such men forget that stories are told only of extraordinary deeds, not or ordinary ones. Ordinarily, showing mercy to a criminal, or to an enemy, is tantamount to inviting further crimes and further attacks. Showing mercy to children aids their development into charitable and humane human beings.

Often a child misbehaves due to a lack of understanding, or a lack of wisdom. In such cases, sympathy and education can bestow adult understanding and wisdom on the child as he grows from youth to manhood.

Finally, he can treat the other as an animal, that is, a creature to whom the category of moral judgment does not apply. A dog can be a “good dog” or a “bad dog” as judged by it’s obedience to its master, it serviceability to human needs. A bloodhound is a “good dog” when it tracks who or what its master sets it to track. A “good” bloodhound is not condemned of moral wickedness merely because it tracks an innocent Jew escaping a Gulag; nor is it praised for moral goodness merely because it tracks a guilty murderer escaping a jail. The judgments was make about the instincts of animals are not moral judgments: at most, we might judge the trainer to be an efficient or inefficient trainer; we might say certain dogs or horses are ungovernable and useless, because they are too wild, or we might say they are gentle and come of good stock. In these cases, we are making observations about their nature, their spirit, or their training, and we call them “good” and “bad” as they are serviceable to human needs: but in no case will we be complimenting the nicety of the moral judgment of the animal.

Each of these three moral categories has its proper object. If a man commits a crime, and that man is sane and sober, it is proper to mete out the punishment that one equal metes out to another. If a child misbehaves, and the child lacks understanding, it is proper to educate the child. If an animals behaves in a fashion that this displeasing to its master, it is proper to domesticate and train the animal, if it can be trained; or otherwise to be rid of it: but in no case is there room for moral judgment.

When a man asks that a criminal be treated with loving education or “treatment” rather than with punishment, he asks that we treat our fellow man as a child. When a man asks that a criminal be excuse of all wrong because the criminal cannot help what he does, he asks that we treat our fellow man as an animal.

A man who asks us to condescend to our fellow man in this way often couches his plea in terms of showing respect to the fellow. In fact, the opposite is being asked of us. One can respect the moral judgment of a fellow adult who has come to a conclusion different from one’s own. A moral judgment can be a sober one, even if one does not share it. One cannot respect a childish folly or animal instict as being equal to sober moral judgment.

A man who excuses his own criminal behavior with the claim that he cannot control his own nature, is asking to be treated as something less than an animal, because he is asking that we excuse or ignore the behavior as being a product of unchangeable inner nature, but he is also asking that we do not domesticate and train that nature to be serviceable to his fellow man.

The application of this analysis to the current issues of the day should be clear. Those who wish to “treat” rather than punish crime condescend to criminals, treating them like children, and, of course, encourage them. Those who claim that sexual perversions are part of a pervert’s unchangeable nature condescend to the perverts in a fashion even more insulting, treating them like animals; and, at that, untamable animals, for the inner nature of the pervert, whatever psychopathology it is that drives them to their disgusting deeds, is regarded as being sacrosanct from any moral condemnation.

Forgive the length of his response, the question raised, namely, the definition of human life, is a profound one, not answered lightly.

Q: I have two arguments that I would like you to address.

First: if you equate a blastula with a human being, what about sperm and eggs? They also have a potential of becoming a full-fledged human being. And fertility clinics regularly destroy them. Would you call that murder?

Is the blastula human without what it gets from the mother? If it is, how is it different from sperm and eggs? They also have a _potential_ to become human beings. But we don’t consider them human, do we?

A: The short answer is, that a developing creature is logically the same creature at all stages of development, by the definition of the word “development”; whereas the components or elements used to create the create that exist before development begins are not the same creature, since, logically, they could have been composed in a different way to make a different creature.

With all due respect, you are perhaps conflating two different types of “potential”.

(1)The sense in which a baby turns into an adult is the sense where we say the baby is potentially an adult. The word “baby” has no meaning without reference to the adult form of the creature. (A creature cannot be a baby without being a baby of some species).

(2)On the other hand, the sense in which a stand of lumber is “potentially” a house, or a lump of rock is “potentially” a statue, is a separate sense of the word, where we are indicating that, out of all possible futures, the one in which this lumber becomes a house as opposed to a houseboat or a bonfire, is not logically impossible; likewise with the rock. It is the difference between “shall” and “may”. A baby shall grow into an adult because it is his nature to do so: unless an accident prevents him. A rock may turn into a sculpture because it is not impossible that this might come to pass, but nothing in its nature makes this the case.

My child has the same name he had in the womb, he has the same sex (male), the same genes. He is identifiable as the same entity. Hence, it is justified to say, while he was in the womb, that he “shall” be born and grow into a toddler, barring accidents.

My sperm and my wife’s eggs, on the other hand, could not have been given this same name, since a different combination of them would have given rise to a man of different sex and different genetic characteristics. Sperm and eggs are no more members of the species “homo sapiens” than a stand of trees is a house or a ship. The carpenter “may” turn the tree into a house or a ship, but, before the trees are felled, the ship does not yet exist as an entity.

Here is a more detailed answer. Let us proceed by a process of elimination.

When my son was in my wife’s womb, was he animate or inanimate? Well, since the point of an abortion is to render inanimate certain material that is otherwise animate, I dare say he was animate: that it to say, living tissue.

Is this animate tissue part of my wife, in the same why that a mitochrondria or cancer might be? Well, since my son is male and my wife is female, it is clear that he cannot share the same genes; further, he has genes. If not part of my wife, then, logically, he is a separate creature.

What kind of creature? Plant or animal? In the womb, the boy does not respire after the fashion of animals, and he does seem to be rooted to the spot, attached to the womb lining by tissue that will one day form an umbilicus. However, I might be accused of drollery, were I to say he was a plant. So let us say he is an animal.

What kind of animal? This is a puzzling question. He does not have the outward features we associate with homo sapiens, as, upright posture, opposable thumbs, and so on. These things develop later in the pregnancy. But if he is not a fish nor fowl nor dog nor wolf, libbard, ounce or pard, our two choices are to say either (1) he is a human being or (2) he is a type of animal different from human beings, but an animal that only exists in the human womb which then transmogrifies or changes into a human being from a previous condition, having different outward features than a human at this stage, but having the same DNA as a man throughout the process.

If we accept definition (2), then we must define the word “species” in a very limited way, so that acorns are not the same species as oak trees, nor chickens as eggs, nor catepillers as butterflies, nor old men as young men. In effect, this would render the definition of the word “species” useless; and whatever word was then employed to refer to the concept of the defining essential characteristic of a group of beings, would stand in its stead. So, instead of defining the word “species” to refer to everything but the young of the species, and inventing a new word to refer both to young and old, we are better off taking the first definition at face value, and say that human young are human, even before developing hearts and heads and hands and so on.

So, to answer your question: yes, by any rational definition, the blastula is human without what it gets from its mother, in much the same way that an adult is human without what he puts in his mouth to eat, or draws in through his nose to breathe. Was your question whether or not children will die without nourishment? Assuredly, they will.

Let us analyze, by the same argument, whether a sperm and a egg is a human being. There are live sperm and dead sperm, so it is an living thing. However, sperm do not form a species. They are not members of any race or class or genus: they do not carry their genetic information forward from generation to generation, since, obviously, sperm do not generate child sperm.

If the sperm or the egg were an organism properly so called, it would reproduce, either sexually or asexually. If asexually, the sperm would reproduce by division: which is not the case. If sexually, there would be male-egg and female-egg, which is, again, not the case. Therefore sperms and eggs are not properly called organisms. It is more correct to speak of them as the germ, the elements, or the seed, from which a organism is formed. When the baby exists, the sperm and the egg that combined to form him no longer exist as identifiable entities. However, in contrast, a baby in the earliest stage of development and a baby in later stages of development is identifiable as the same entity: it occupies the same space and is composed of the same matter, and the form it takes on exists in potential in prior stages, and is therefore the “same” from a formal point of view (i.e. human blastula do not grow up to be fish or trees or bricks or inkwells, but grow into something with human form; on this grounds we say these other forms do not exist in potential within them, but that human form does).

Sperm do not reproduce. On the other hand, a blastula, in the ordinary scheme of things, will grow, be born, wet his diapers, go to college, fill his head with big ideas, fall in love, marry, and reproduce. By “in the ordinary scheme of things” of course, I mean, if not killed by an abortionist.

Let me ask you a question in return: is a child a human? My youngest child neither speaks nor crawls. Hence, they do not have the defining outward characteristics of human beings: they lack upright posture, use of opposible thumbs, speach, formation of civilizations, tool use, control of fire.

If you admit that babies are human, I must ask, on what grounds? Is there some property that young and old both share, that animals of other orders do not share? (And do not say it is intelligence, for my cat is smarter than my youngest child, and takes care of her own waste products.)

Once you have identified this property, we can discuss whether or not babies in the womb partake of it also, or whether it exists at certain stages of development and not others.

Q: Second: lets say the sailor in you example is floating in water. And the cabin boy (who, let’s say for the sake of the argument can’t swim) attaches himself to the sailor. Would the sailor be justified in pushing him off? Would that be murder?

A: In general, the law of rescues is, that the rescuer not place the victim in a worse situation than he would have been in, had no rescue been attempted. Hence, if the sailor is attempting to rescue the boy, and he finds it is beyond his strength, and he abandons the attempt to let the boy drown, he would not be liable for the wrongful death of the boy.

But perhaps I am reading too much common decency into your question. Do you mean a situation where the drowning boy, without invitation, clings to a sailor in the water, and the sailor, whose life in not threatened, merely for his own pleasure and convenience, shoves the boy aside to watch him drown?

The sailor would be guilty of a wrongful death, perhaps of murder, depending on whether or not the boy’s actions threatened the sailor’s life. The boy, by touching the sailor, is at most guilty of a trespass or a battery: by a very long-standing tradition in law, these acts are excused by necessity. The boy, if he lived, would owe the sailor some compensation for the tort. Defending yourself from a trespass or battery with lethal force is allowed only in situations where a reasonable man in you shoes would have felt he was in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury.

It is part of the morality that used to be called “natural law” to assume that a grown man would help a drowning boy in such circumstances, or that mothers would care for and protect their young, rather than kill them, despite the attending inconveniences. This terminology was current in a day and age when personal convenience was not deified as the goal and standard of morality.

Article One: that abortion is murder.

Murder is the unjustified killing of a human being;
Children are human beings, differing from adults only by their youth, that is, by their pending natural development;
Children in the womb are children, differing from children only by their youth, that is, by their pending natural development;
Abortion is the unjustified killing of a child in the womb; therefore, abortion is murder. QED.
more here