Defining the Human Species
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.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
