Abortion and Personhood: What the Moral Dilemma Is Really About | Glenn Cohen | Big Think

In the 1970s, we have the Roe v. Wade decision in the United States. It was a decision relating to a woman's right to have an abortion. It introduced the trimester framework. It basically allowed first trimester abortions, made it very difficult to have third trimester abortions.

And essentially, this was really met very quickly thereafter with the sort of backlash. And really, the last 40/50 years of American history have more or less been a backlash against Roe v. Wade and an attempt to kind of criminalize abortion in all sorts of interesting ways without overturning the decision. So that's kind of the legal playing field.

I mean, we can talk about some of the specifics, but the more interesting question I think is thinking about the morality of abortion. And I'll say that I think abortion is an extremely difficult question. So one of the first questions people have to think about is: are fetuses persons?

And that's a very important linguistic question: persons. I didn't say human beings. I didn't say alive. Those are three different issues. Something can be alive but not be a person. Your dog is a good example. You love your dog. It's a wonderful thing, but it's not a person.

Something can be human and potentially not be a person. Some people think the embryo, for example, before 14 days or stem cells being derived are members of the human species but may not be a person. So what do we mean by persons? We mean something that has a certain set of moral and/or legal rights, most important of which is a right against in viability. They can't be killed or destroyed or harmed without very good reason.

And we have the attitude that we're all persons, so we have an index case we're pretty clear we're persons and the question is who else is a person? Well, to answer that, you need to have a theory about what makes something a person. And there are a few different kinds of theories you can have.

One could be just to say if X is living and a human being, X is a person. Now, some people have problems with that. So Peter Singer and some animal rights advocates, for example, think that that's a speciesist attitude, that by saying human equals person it's problematic that we're excluding animals. Instead, we ought to have some criteria that looks at capacity.

So other people have sometimes what are called a capacity X view where they say in order to be a person you have to have X capacity and then we have to fill in what X is. Is it the ability to think complex thoughts, the ability to plan and look towards the future, the ability to feel pain whether you understand it? Is it about continuity of an identity over time or is it merely being alive and breathing?

And some people think it's a single criteria, others think it's a compound criteria. And then there are complex questions about what happens for things that have the potential to have capacity X or had a capacity X but lost it. So, for example, a fetus doesn't have the abilities; early fetus, let's just say an embryo just to make it very easy. An embryo before 14 days doesn't have the capacity to think deep thoughts about the future or have future orientation.

I think that's pretty well accepted by everyone, but it certainly has the potential to do so. And the question is: is that enough? What kind of theory or potentiality? Hydrogen and oxygen each have the potential together to become water. Does that mean that they are water? They have the metaphysical properties of water.

Or do we require more of a kind of potentiality, something like in the natural course of things they will become something? The other difficult set of categories are things that once had the capacity but now no longer have and perhaps never will again.

So those that are brain-dead, for example, are a good example. They are certainly human beings. In most cases, they have been persons. But now if your capacity for personhood—how do you define personhood, is something like the capacity to think deep thoughts about the future or do you have future orientation? These are entities that no longer have that capacity and we don't bel...