The Unborn Human: Potential Person or Person with Potential?
Proponents of abortion choice (PACs) often make the distinction between a human being and a human person. On this view, all human persons are human beings, but not all human beings are human persons. In their view, a person has something in addition to being human that a mere human lacks. Whatever this happens to be, this additional thing confers rights upon the human that it would lack without personhood. Because the mere human lacks rights, it lacks the right to life, and therefore it is morally permissible to choose to abort a mere human.
Contrast this with the substance view of human persons. In this view, a human person is a single, unified thing, composed of parts, and maintains identity over time in spite of the changes it undergoes. Every development it undergoes is an unfolding of the capacities and potentialities it has by nature. In other words, it is because an individual is a human person he develops those classical personal attributes.
Non-persons not only do not but cannot in principle, develop those personal characteristics because they are not persons by nature. On this view, a parasite lacking any personal characteristic is not the moral equivalent of a fetus who is also currently lacking personal characteristics. The fetus has built-in potentials that will, all things being equal, become actual and result in personal behavior. The parasite does not. Things develop according to the kinds of things they are. Persons develop as persons, non-persons as non-persons.
Returning to PACs, what might they suggest is necessary to be added to the mere human in order to make it a person? Here I summarize David Oderberg’s discussion of the question as well as his response in his book Applied Ethics.
PACs typically say it is the currently exercisable capacity for self-awareness, rationality, or desire(s) for the future, or other behaviors we might take to be typical of persons. “Current exercisability” is key. Until the fetus (or born infant!) has developed to the point of actually exercising its personal characteristics, it is not yet a person. Prior to that, it may be aborted.
But there is a famous objection to this that has caused PACs to modify this view: A human being sleeping in his bed is not at the moment currently exercising self-awareness, rationality, his desires for the future, etc. If the “current exercisability” of these characteristics is what confers personhood, it follows that the human being sleeping in his bed is not a person! And if the lack of personhood entails that it is permissible to kill the thing in question, then I suggest you learn to sleep very lightly.
So how is the view modified in order to hold off this objection? The personal characteristics noted above are said to continue to exist in some way in the sleeping person. In fact, none of these characteristics are present at all times even in the awake and alert person. He may not at any particular moment be self-aware (perhaps transfixed intently on something), he may not be thinking rationally or at all some moments, and he may not have the future and his desires in mind at any point in time. But these things can be exercised if the right conditions materialize.
Given what was said above regarding the substance view of human persons, it should be obvious what is wrong with this. The concept of potentialities, regarded by PACs as irrelevant in the case of the fetus, has just been appealed to in order to preserve the right to life of sleeping persons. But there is no principled reason why potentialities should matter in the case of sleeping persons but not also in the case of the unborn.
As David Oderberg notes, “the fact that [they] regularly speak of capacities and capabilities about as much as they speak of actual desires and states of awareness shows that they do, at least implicitly, recognize the crucial role of potentiality in ascribing personhood, since a capacity just is the potentiality for exercising a given function” (Applied Ethics, 36).
To insist, therefore, that the actual exercise of some capacity is necessary for personhood looks only like a blatantly arbitrary and ad hoc move to preserve abortion rights. It raises some obvious difficulties, and the counter move only ends up presupposing the very concept PACs must deny in order to deny personhood to the unborn.
Author Bio
Neil Nelson is a Catholic convert, husband, and father. His research interests include arguments for God’s existence, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and contemporary moral issues. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife and baby girl. When he’s not reading and writing for the Classical Theism Research Team, he is busy losing at disc golf to people who cannot throw as far as he can.
Related Podcast Episodes
For more discussion on personhood in dialogue with pro-choice arguments, check out these episodes of the podcast. Richard Playford did his doctoral dissertation under the direction of David Oderberg.
Ep. #138 – Pro-life Philosophy & Arguments w/ Trent Horn
BONUS|Twinning and the Metaphysics of Embryos w/ Dr. Richard Playford
BONUS| The Ethics of Abortion w/ Dr. Chris Kaczor
