Q&A: Different Degrees of the Right to Life
Different Degrees of the Right to Life
Question
In one of the questions on the site regarding abortions, you answered that if one had to choose between saving a truck full of fertilized eggs and saving a baby, it would be proper to save the baby. The reasoning was that although embryos do have a right to life, that right is weaker or more tenuous than the right of a person who has been born.
In light of that reasoning, I have 2 questions:
- How do we know that an embryo has a right to life that is more tenuous?
- Is there a line at which all human beings are considered to have the same “measure” of a right to life? For example, would you say the same thing about saving 5 newborn babies versus saving one 20-year-old person? Or alternatively, would you say the same thing about saving 5 elderly people versus one 20-year-old person? (Both of these questions assume that the right to life is greatest for a 20-year-old or someone around that age, but that assumption is not necessary; it is only meant to illustrate the question about the measure of the right to life—what distinctions exist in terms of the degree of the right to life at different ages.)
Answer
There is no simple way to quantify such relationships. Moral intuition can teach us about certain cases, but it does not give us a general formula.
Discussion on Answer
In principle no, but there is room to talk about a tereifah, for example. Or someone who is brain-dead (see my article on harvesting organs for transplantation).
I’ll read it, thanks! (And hats off to your memory for all the columns you’ve written.)
There’s an issue here that still isn’t entirely clear to me, and it may be that there is no answer to it at all, but I’ll still try to see whether you have any insights on it.
One can justify the claim that embryos have a tenuous right to life in 2 ways. One can say that we simply do not know when the right to life “enters” the material substance (an epistemic justification for preferring the life of a baby over the life of an embryo), and one can say that the right to life exists but is tenuous (an ontological justification for that preference). I think the second possibility is the correct one, and it seems to me that this is also what you mean. However, if that is so, the question immediately arises: what is the criterion that allows us to say that there is an ontological weakening of the right to life? (Assuming there is such a criterion, and that we are not satisfied with an unarticulated intuition.)
It seems that the essential thing distinguishing a baby, or any other person, from an embryo is the existence of consciousness. Not the level of its development, but its very existence. A two-week-old embryo cannot experience things (apparently), but an embryo between 3 and 6 months old (depending on whom you ask) can.
If so, the thesis here is that an embryo has a right to life, but until it develops consciousness that right is more tenuous. And from the moment it develops consciousness, the right is already “full.” That also fits with what you wrote earlier, that there are no other populations that have such a tenuous right.
But then another question immediately arises: if so, why not say that consciousness is the criterion for the right itself (and not for its upgrading to “full” status)? One could argue that before consciousness develops, there is not a weaker right, but simply no right at all. That is probably not where we want to end up, and so it seems reasonable to stick with the thesis that before consciousness develops, the right to life is tenuous, and afterward it becomes a full right.
Assuming you agree with the ontological justification, is consciousness in your view the appropriate criterion, such that from the moment it is formed the right to life is full? And if not, what in our actual reality (whether material or spiritual, such as consciousness) grants or “raises the level” of the right to life?
Of course, there is always the option of not accepting an ontological justification and going in the epistemic direction, but I think that is not where you are.
I’d be happy to hear your insights, thanks again! 🙂
I am definitely speaking on the ontological plane and not the epistemic one. Still, I do not see why this needs to be a sharp boundary. Even the concept of consciousness is not binary (there either is or isn’t). As I said, I have no criterion for such a boundary, and I think there is no such sharp boundary.
So, the same solution as the sorites paradox? There is some moment from which onward we simply understand that the embryo is a person with full rights exactly like a 20-year-old person or an 80-year-old person in a vegetative state. When does that moment arrive? There is no real criterion distinguishing between the states, and only time plays a role here—as more time passes from the moment of the zygote, the right to life gradually grows stronger. Epistemically, we would know intuitively when that moment arrives.
Do you agree with this explanation and with the analogy to the sorites paradox?
Definitely. At the moment of birth, he becomes a full person.
I understand. I think the more precise question is whether there are other kinds of human populations whose right to life is more tenuous as well (without quantifying it precisely), besides embryos?
One could think of populations of human beings who are in a vegetative state, babies before the age of self-awareness, and so on.