1 00:00:01,330 --> 00:00:05,230 This is bioethics bytes with me, David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton. 2 00:00:05,500 --> 00:00:12,970 Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Vox, which we here are Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by a grant from the Wellcome Trust. 3 00:00:13,270 --> 00:00:23,169 For more information about bioethics bytes go to WW w dot practical ethics dot oecs docs ac dot UK or to i-Tunes. 4 00:00:23,170 --> 00:00:27,460 You a stone on the beach we assume has no moral status. 5 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:31,570 We can kick or hammer the stone and we've done the stone no harm. 6 00:00:32,290 --> 00:00:35,320 Typical adult human beings do have moral status. 7 00:00:35,650 --> 00:00:38,620 We shouldn't, without a very good reason, kick a man or woman. 8 00:00:39,040 --> 00:00:45,550 Often contentious moral issues such as embryo research or abortion, or whether to turn off a life support machine, 9 00:00:45,910 --> 00:00:50,050 turn a disagreement about the moral status of the embryo, foetus or individual. 10 00:00:50,650 --> 00:00:54,850 So the key questions are who or what has moral status and why? 11 00:00:55,270 --> 00:00:59,200 Geoff McMahon of Rutgers University takes on these tricky questions. 12 00:00:59,830 --> 00:01:03,790 Geoff McMahon, welcome to Bioethics Bytes. Thank you very much. 13 00:01:04,420 --> 00:01:08,290 The topic we're going to focus on today is humans and moral status. 14 00:01:09,010 --> 00:01:14,410 Let's start at the beginning. What is moral status? If it's okay with you, I'm going to call it moral status. 15 00:01:14,560 --> 00:01:26,980 In my view, moral status is a set of intrinsic properties possessed by an individual that grounds the attribution of rights, 16 00:01:26,980 --> 00:01:36,340 or that grounds a requirement of respect for that individual that is in some way independent of that individual's interests. 17 00:01:36,970 --> 00:01:41,050 What do you mean by intrinsic there? Perhaps an example will clarify that a bit for us. 18 00:01:41,410 --> 00:01:50,110 Sure. Something like the possession of the capacity for self-consciousness or minimal rationality or a moral sense. 19 00:01:50,410 --> 00:01:58,180 Usually the foundations for moral status are thought of by most people as psychological capacities of some sort or another. 20 00:01:58,180 --> 00:02:04,930 But some people of a religious inclination think it might be something like the possession of a soul. 21 00:02:05,590 --> 00:02:10,180 Does that mean that moral status is all or nothing, that you either have it or you don't have it? 22 00:02:10,420 --> 00:02:15,070 There are different ways in which the term is used. I imagine that some people use it in that way. 23 00:02:15,310 --> 00:02:20,680 I prefer to think of moral status as a matter of degree, their degrees of moral status. 24 00:02:20,770 --> 00:02:28,390 You could think, for example, that some individuals have more and higher rates than other individuals do. 25 00:02:28,840 --> 00:02:35,260 You might think that there are some individuals who have a minimal kind of moral status. 26 00:02:35,260 --> 00:02:45,970 That is, they might have sentience or bear consciousness, and this would provide a basis for their having interests. 27 00:02:46,060 --> 00:02:54,940 And in the case of those beings, many philosophers think that our treatment of those beings should be governed just by a concern for their interests. 28 00:02:54,970 --> 00:02:57,340 So as I define the notion of moral status, 29 00:02:57,610 --> 00:03:04,600 you might say in a way that those individuals don't have any significant moral status independently of the possession of interests. 30 00:03:04,900 --> 00:03:12,040 So what you're saying is there is both a range of different statuses that can be occupied by human beings, 31 00:03:12,490 --> 00:03:18,970 but also there's a hierarchy so that not all human beings are equal in terms of the moral status. 32 00:03:19,660 --> 00:03:25,510 That would be my view. A more common view, I think, is that all human beings have the same moral status. 33 00:03:26,170 --> 00:03:32,260 So the idea that people all have the same or status comes from Jesus and it might come from Kant. 34 00:03:32,380 --> 00:03:37,630 There are lots of philosophers who think that that kind of equality is a starting point for ethics. 35 00:03:37,870 --> 00:03:41,620 How do you get to a position where you say that there are higher and lower statuses? 36 00:03:42,430 --> 00:03:47,500 Well, one way to do that is by comparing human beings with non-human animals. 37 00:03:48,280 --> 00:03:57,370 And if you take a look at the candidate properties that people have suggested as the foundation or grounds of human moral status, 38 00:03:57,370 --> 00:04:06,130 you will find that, in fact, there are some human beings who seem to lack those properties and their animals that seem to have them. 39 00:04:06,910 --> 00:04:11,590 So could you give me an example of two human beings who have radically different moral status? 40 00:04:11,950 --> 00:04:16,659 Yes. An adult human being with normal psychological capacities, in my view, 41 00:04:16,660 --> 00:04:22,390 has a higher moral status than a human foetus that hasn't yet acquired the capacity for consciousness. 42 00:04:22,930 --> 00:04:28,419 I also think that an adult human being with normal psychological capacities has a higher 43 00:04:28,420 --> 00:04:33,850 moral status than a late term foetus that does have the capacity for consciousness. 44 00:04:34,240 --> 00:04:40,180 I also think that a normal adult human being has a higher moral status than a newborn infant. 45 00:04:40,630 --> 00:04:46,240 Now, that makes everything much more complicated because if you've got a one size fits all approach to moral status, 46 00:04:46,240 --> 00:04:49,720 you can say every human being has the same kind of rights. 47 00:04:49,930 --> 00:04:56,890 We're all equal. When somebody has something bad done to them, you know, automatically that that is something that shouldn't have happened. 48 00:04:57,140 --> 00:05:00,730 Seems to be a consequence of your view that we have to know quite a lot about. 49 00:05:00,870 --> 00:05:06,930 To the victims of some kind of abuse of rights before we can say how bad the action is. 50 00:05:07,710 --> 00:05:13,860 Yes. And I think that's actually quite plausible and will be consistent with most people's intuitions. 51 00:05:14,460 --> 00:05:19,200 Most of us believe, for example, the death of a ten year old child is a terrible tragedy. 52 00:05:19,740 --> 00:05:26,219 But if we hear about the spontaneous abortion of a foetus a month after conception, 53 00:05:26,220 --> 00:05:30,510 most of us won't think that month of foetus was the victim of a terrible misfortune. 54 00:05:31,230 --> 00:05:34,770 We're talking about humans and their moral status. 55 00:05:35,010 --> 00:05:43,650 When does a human start to exist as a human? I know some religious people argue that sperm is sacred, but most people don't believe that. 56 00:05:43,680 --> 00:05:47,910 What we're talking about is a fertilised egg is not a human. 57 00:05:48,180 --> 00:05:51,479 Then we have a kind of society's problem about. At what point does it become a human being? 58 00:05:51,480 --> 00:05:59,760 About point is this don't have any rights at all. Most people believe that people like you and me began to exist at conception when a new 59 00:05:59,760 --> 00:06:04,080 living entity comes into existence as a result of the fusion of sperm and egg cell. 60 00:06:04,530 --> 00:06:10,020 I think it's really quite implausible, metaphysically, to suppose that I ever existed as a sperm or as an egg. 61 00:06:10,050 --> 00:06:15,450 I think there are also good arguments against the idea that we began to exist at conception. 62 00:06:16,110 --> 00:06:22,710 My view is actually quite radical. I don't think that we are human organisms at all. 63 00:06:23,280 --> 00:06:31,139 I think that we begin to exist when a conscious subject begins to exist in association with the human organism, 64 00:06:31,140 --> 00:06:34,740 which actually occurs about five months into pregnancy. 65 00:06:34,770 --> 00:06:39,060 My view is that before that time there is a living human organism, 66 00:06:39,420 --> 00:06:47,010 but that living human organism in my case wasn't me, it was the vehicle through which I came into existence. 67 00:06:47,010 --> 00:06:52,889 So I actually take the same kind of metaphysical and moral view about early 68 00:06:52,890 --> 00:06:58,200 human embryos that many people take of sperm and egg pair prior to conception. 69 00:06:58,530 --> 00:07:04,920 I think that an early human embryo is just the physical materials out of which I developed. 70 00:07:05,370 --> 00:07:12,359 That's interesting. That's not unlike some things John Locke says about the difference between being a person and being a man, 71 00:07:12,360 --> 00:07:14,310 as he puts it, by which he meant man or woman. 72 00:07:14,640 --> 00:07:21,660 So the man is the animal, what you call the organism which exists and may or may not go with the consciousness. 73 00:07:21,670 --> 00:07:27,210 It's the consciousness which makes us as the person, the consciousness which makes us morally significant to each other. 74 00:07:27,840 --> 00:07:32,280 That's right. I see my view as being in the Lockean tradition. 75 00:07:32,400 --> 00:07:40,770 The view that I hold implies that there are actually two distinct entities sitting in the chair that I'm sitting at at the moment. 76 00:07:40,770 --> 00:07:44,010 There's a living human organism, and there's me. 77 00:07:44,400 --> 00:07:52,500 And if you want to ask, Well, what am I? I think I'm not a soul or an immaterial substance or something like that. 78 00:07:52,500 --> 00:07:59,940 I am actually a part of my organism. I am the part of my organism that generates consciousness and mental activity. 79 00:07:59,940 --> 00:08:02,159 Namely, I'm I am, in effect, 80 00:08:02,160 --> 00:08:10,830 those parts of my brain in their active or potentially functional state that are capable of generating consciousness and mental activity. 81 00:08:11,460 --> 00:08:14,820 And it's on the basis of that metaphysical view that I believe that we come into 82 00:08:14,820 --> 00:08:20,130 existence round about the middle of pregnancy or little after the middle of pregnancy, 83 00:08:20,550 --> 00:08:27,660 where we come into existence then as conscious beings that we have that potential before the consciousness emerges. 84 00:08:27,930 --> 00:08:31,139 And lots of people think that it's the potential that's important. 85 00:08:31,140 --> 00:08:37,500 So they may accept your metaphysical account of what it is to be fully human in that sense, 86 00:08:38,190 --> 00:08:42,629 but still believe that the organism is the precursor of that combination. 87 00:08:42,630 --> 00:08:50,100 Of the two things that you mentioned has rights just because it has the likely potential to become a human being in the fullest sense. 88 00:08:50,730 --> 00:08:55,140 Well, in my view, it becomes me only in a rather peculiar sense. 89 00:08:55,590 --> 00:08:58,890 It doesn't ever become me in the sense of ever being identical with me. 90 00:08:59,370 --> 00:09:02,580 It becomes me in the sense of coexisting with me. 91 00:09:02,700 --> 00:09:07,140 The form of potential that I think is at issue as here is one that I call non identity potential, 92 00:09:07,500 --> 00:09:14,820 where the thing that has a certain potential actually will never be identical with the thing that it has the potential to give rise to. 93 00:09:15,540 --> 00:09:24,150 So if you think of this wooden chair that I'm sitting in, if we were to put it through a grinding machine and turn it into sawdust, 94 00:09:24,870 --> 00:09:29,340 we might say before that that the chair has the potential to become a pile of sawdust, 95 00:09:29,730 --> 00:09:33,570 but once it's fulfilled that potential, it has actually ceased to exist. 96 00:09:34,260 --> 00:09:37,860 What exists after we've run the chair through the grinder is a pile of sawdust. 97 00:09:37,860 --> 00:09:38,940 It's no longer a chair. 98 00:09:39,570 --> 00:09:47,850 Now, that doesn't happen in the case of the human organism in the person, the human organism continues to exist in association with the person. 99 00:09:47,850 --> 00:09:51,030 It gives rise causally to the existence of the person. 100 00:09:51,030 --> 00:09:56,550 But the person or the conscious subject is, in my view, never actually identical with the organism. 101 00:09:56,910 --> 00:10:00,120 So the organism doesn't have the relevant. 102 00:10:00,270 --> 00:10:06,030 Kind of potential in its relation to the later person to have rights on that basis. 103 00:10:06,030 --> 00:10:09,120 The relevant kind of potential is what I call identity preserving. 104 00:10:09,630 --> 00:10:13,620 It's the kind of potential that Prince Charles has now to become the King of England. 105 00:10:13,830 --> 00:10:21,780 If Prince Charles becomes the King of England, the King of England will then be identical with Prince Charles in a way that his wooden 106 00:10:21,780 --> 00:10:25,950 chair would not be identical with the pile of sawdust that it has the potential to become. 107 00:10:27,290 --> 00:10:33,860 What does your view entail about the moral status of an early embryo, then? 108 00:10:34,340 --> 00:10:43,010 Well, an early embryo, in my view, is a human organism that is in a quite literal sense, unoccupied. 109 00:10:43,520 --> 00:10:49,730 That is it's an organism that is not host to a conscious subject or a person like you or me. 110 00:10:49,970 --> 00:10:53,550 It is devoid of any intrinsic moral status. 111 00:10:53,570 --> 00:10:58,430 It has the same moral status, in my view, that an individual sperm or an individual egg has. 112 00:10:59,210 --> 00:11:07,130 So if one were to destroy a human embryo, one would not be killing or destroying anybody like you or me. 113 00:11:07,430 --> 00:11:10,340 One would be preventing one of us from coming into existence. 114 00:11:10,460 --> 00:11:16,400 In my view, the destruction of a human embryo is morally indistinguishable from a form of contraception. 115 00:11:16,820 --> 00:11:20,450 So does that mean it would be morally acceptable to use embryos, 116 00:11:20,450 --> 00:11:27,620 aborted embryos for experimentation, say, in preference to animals which have sentience? 117 00:11:28,280 --> 00:11:34,219 Yes, that is actually an implication of my view that I think most people would find morally repugnant. 118 00:11:34,220 --> 00:11:35,840 But I think it's actually correct. 119 00:11:36,410 --> 00:11:45,050 It is permissible to experiment on embryos provided that they are never going to develop into persons that is provided that 120 00:11:45,350 --> 00:11:54,200 their maturation is stopped before they ever give rise to the existence of an individual who would have moral status. 121 00:11:54,860 --> 00:12:00,679 I can think of a what seems like a parallel situation where somebody who has had the 122 00:12:00,680 --> 00:12:05,390 kind of sentience that you're talking about enters a persistent vegetative state. 123 00:12:05,930 --> 00:12:10,820 Does that mean that they then become like an embryo from the point of view of moral status? 124 00:12:11,300 --> 00:12:19,400 Not entirely. Let me say something first about the metaphysical status of individuals in a persistent vegetative 125 00:12:19,400 --> 00:12:23,450 state and then say something about the moral status of individuals in a persistent vegetative state. 126 00:12:23,480 --> 00:12:28,160 There are different types of vegetative state. 127 00:12:28,850 --> 00:12:37,220 In some cases, there are human individuals where the physical basis for consciousness in the brain has been irreversibly destroyed. 128 00:12:37,970 --> 00:12:43,280 In these cases, in my view, the individual person has ceased to exist. 129 00:12:43,610 --> 00:12:46,580 You have something there that is a living human organism, 130 00:12:46,760 --> 00:12:55,690 but metaphysically it is quite like the embryo in that it is a living human organism that no longer hosts a person. 131 00:12:56,120 --> 00:13:03,800 In that kind of case, though, the moral status of the human organism isn't exactly the same as that of an embryo, 132 00:13:03,860 --> 00:13:09,889 because the individual who once coexisted with that organism and whose organism 133 00:13:09,890 --> 00:13:14,960 that was may have had desires about what was to be done to that organism. 134 00:13:15,080 --> 00:13:20,239 And I think we have moral reason to honour those preferences in just the same way that we 135 00:13:20,240 --> 00:13:25,370 have reason to honour people's wishes about other matters after they have ceased to exist. 136 00:13:25,370 --> 00:13:33,200 When a person ceases to exist, they don't cease to exert moral constraint on us and moral pressures of certain sorts. 137 00:13:33,800 --> 00:13:42,260 There's another kind of persistent vegetative state, however, in which the brain hasn't irreversibly lost the capacity to support consciousness. 138 00:13:42,710 --> 00:13:49,730 In that case, the individual continues to exist and is still there as a proper subject of moral concern. 139 00:13:50,030 --> 00:13:54,739 And arguably, even if this individual has suffered certain forms of brain damage, 140 00:13:54,740 --> 00:14:00,560 retains the same kind of status that he or she had prior to going into the persistent vegetative state. 141 00:14:01,040 --> 00:14:03,409 And so we should, to the best of our ability, 142 00:14:03,410 --> 00:14:10,580 do what's in this individual's interests and honour this individual's autonomous preferences insofar as we can ascertain what they are. 143 00:14:11,330 --> 00:14:17,000 Getting these questions right really matters because it could be somebody's life, depending on it. 144 00:14:17,120 --> 00:14:23,150 How do you justify your account, which rests so much on this notion of sentience? 145 00:14:23,270 --> 00:14:29,210 How do you know? You're right. You're right that these issues are extremely important. 146 00:14:29,720 --> 00:14:35,450 They are also extremely difficult. And this is what I think a lot of people don't appreciate. 147 00:14:35,510 --> 00:14:42,920 Most people have views about these issues. If you were to ask them to defend those views, they would give you a fairly simplistic response. 148 00:14:43,550 --> 00:14:51,310 And it took me a more than 500 page book to give the arguments that support my conclusions here. 149 00:14:51,320 --> 00:14:57,260 So I'm not actually going to be able to give you the arguments, but that's what you should expect. 150 00:14:57,260 --> 00:15:06,020 If you asked me to explain to you the nature of physical reality according to quantum theory and the best contemporary physics. 151 00:15:06,320 --> 00:15:12,790 I wouldn't be able to do that simply in 5 minutes either. A lot of it has to do with the metaphysics here. 152 00:15:12,800 --> 00:15:18,910 We need to understand when it is we begin to exist and when it is that we cease to exist. 153 00:15:19,280 --> 00:15:24,800 We can't understand that, in my view, until we understand what kind of thing we essentially are. 154 00:15:25,250 --> 00:15:30,040 Are we actually. Essentially living biological organisms. 155 00:15:30,400 --> 00:15:33,610 If I were to pose that question to most people, they would say, yes, actually, 156 00:15:33,610 --> 00:15:39,810 most of them don't believe it because they believe that they will survive the deaths of their physical organisms. 157 00:15:39,820 --> 00:15:46,180 They believe that their physical body will die and disintegrate and they will continue to exist. 158 00:15:46,330 --> 00:15:51,459 The view which I have arrived that I think is plausible is that we begin to exist 159 00:15:51,460 --> 00:15:58,420 when there is someone there I can identify as me because there's consciousness. 160 00:15:58,780 --> 00:16:06,700 One really I think, has to do a bit of metaphysics seriously to have defensible views about when we begin to exist and when we cease to exist. 161 00:16:06,910 --> 00:16:08,500 Until one has those views, 162 00:16:08,800 --> 00:16:18,010 one really isn't entitled to strong moral views about the moral status of an embryo or an human individual in a persistent vegetative state, 163 00:16:18,430 --> 00:16:22,360 or indeed a human individual who's been declared brain dead, 164 00:16:22,750 --> 00:16:29,330 but whose vital functions are still being maintained by means of minimal external life support. 165 00:16:29,350 --> 00:16:39,190 Once one has done the metaphysics, then one has to confront challenges to the consistency of one's moral beliefs about the remaining cases. 166 00:16:39,790 --> 00:16:44,979 I believe that late term human foetuses are individuals like you and me, 167 00:16:44,980 --> 00:16:51,970 though our natures were very different when we were late term foetuses, our natures were very different when we were newborn infants. 168 00:16:52,360 --> 00:16:58,450 At those times, our psychological capacities were no higher than those of certain nonhuman animals. 169 00:16:59,380 --> 00:17:07,300 And there is a question how people who believed that we had a higher moral status when we were late term foetuses hard to be 170 00:17:07,300 --> 00:17:15,490 able to justify their belief that human beings at those stages of their development have a much higher moral status than, 171 00:17:15,490 --> 00:17:20,080 say, chimpanzees who have higher cognitive abilities at that level. 172 00:17:20,590 --> 00:17:29,770 So what you're saying is that before you can make a judgement about moral status, you have to understand the metaphysics of what it is to be a person. 173 00:17:30,580 --> 00:17:37,240 But a consequence of that is that most people aren't actually equipped to make the judgements about moral status. 174 00:17:37,930 --> 00:17:40,570 Unfortunately, I actually do think that that's correct. 175 00:17:41,080 --> 00:17:51,760 These are issues, issues about human beings and other animals, human beings whose nature is in some sense non-standard embryos, 176 00:17:51,760 --> 00:17:58,570 foetuses, newborn infants, adults with certain cognitive impairments or radical deficits. 177 00:17:58,840 --> 00:18:06,910 These are individuals about whose moral status I think we should not have confident intuitions and confident moral views. 178 00:18:07,240 --> 00:18:13,990 Questions about abortion and termination of life support and euthanasia and so on are really very difficult. 179 00:18:14,230 --> 00:18:20,320 We are right to be puzzled about these issues and people who think that they know the answers and have very 180 00:18:20,320 --> 00:18:26,140 strong views about these matters without having addressed these difficult issues in metaphysics and moral theory, 181 00:18:26,770 --> 00:18:31,870 I think are making a mistake. They should be much more sceptical about their own beliefs, 182 00:18:32,110 --> 00:18:38,560 much more tentative about what they are willing also to impose on other people through political institutions. 183 00:18:38,920 --> 00:18:43,660 Geoff McMahon, thank you very much. Thank you very much for letting me have a say about this. 184 00:18:43,930 --> 00:18:52,480 For more information about bioethics bytes, go to W WW dot practical ethics dot oecs dot ac dot UK or iTunes U.