This is bioethics bytes with me, David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.
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.
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You a stone on the beach we assume has no moral status.
We can kick or hammer the stone and we've done the stone no harm.
Typical adult human beings do have moral status.
We shouldn't, without a very good reason, kick a man or woman.
Often contentious moral issues such as embryo research or abortion, or whether to turn off a life support machine,
turn a disagreement about the moral status of the embryo, foetus or individual.
So the key questions are who or what has moral status and why?
Geoff McMahon of Rutgers University takes on these tricky questions.
Geoff McMahon, welcome to Bioethics Bytes. Thank you very much.
The topic we're going to focus on today is humans and moral status.
Let's start at the beginning. What is moral status? If it's okay with you, I'm going to call it moral status.
In my view, moral status is a set of intrinsic properties possessed by an individual that grounds the attribution of rights,
or that grounds a requirement of respect for that individual that is in some way independent of that individual's interests.
What do you mean by intrinsic there? Perhaps an example will clarify that a bit for us.
Sure. Something like the possession of the capacity for self-consciousness or minimal rationality or a moral sense.
Usually the foundations for moral status are thought of by most people as psychological capacities of some sort or another.
But some people of a religious inclination think it might be something like the possession of a soul.
Does that mean that moral status is all or nothing, that you either have it or you don't have it?
There are different ways in which the term is used. I imagine that some people use it in that way.
I prefer to think of moral status as a matter of degree, their degrees of moral status.
You could think, for example, that some individuals have more and higher rates than other individuals do.
You might think that there are some individuals who have a minimal kind of moral status.
That is, they might have sentience or bear consciousness, and this would provide a basis for their having interests.
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.
So as I define the notion of moral status,
you might say in a way that those individuals don't have any significant moral status independently of the possession of interests.
So what you're saying is there is both a range of different statuses that can be occupied by human beings,
but also there's a hierarchy so that not all human beings are equal in terms of the moral status.
That would be my view. A more common view, I think, is that all human beings have the same moral status.
So the idea that people all have the same or status comes from Jesus and it might come from Kant.
There are lots of philosophers who think that that kind of equality is a starting point for ethics.
How do you get to a position where you say that there are higher and lower statuses?
Well, one way to do that is by comparing human beings with non-human animals.
And if you take a look at the candidate properties that people have suggested as the foundation or grounds of human moral status,
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.
So could you give me an example of two human beings who have radically different moral status?
Yes. An adult human being with normal psychological capacities, in my view,
has a higher moral status than a human foetus that hasn't yet acquired the capacity for consciousness.
I also think that an adult human being with normal psychological capacities has a higher
moral status than a late term foetus that does have the capacity for consciousness.
I also think that a normal adult human being has a higher moral status than a newborn infant.
Now, that makes everything much more complicated because if you've got a one size fits all approach to moral status,
you can say every human being has the same kind of rights.
We're all equal. When somebody has something bad done to them, you know, automatically that that is something that shouldn't have happened.
Seems to be a consequence of your view that we have to know quite a lot about.
To the victims of some kind of abuse of rights before we can say how bad the action is.
Yes. And I think that's actually quite plausible and will be consistent with most people's intuitions.
Most of us believe, for example, the death of a ten year old child is a terrible tragedy.
But if we hear about the spontaneous abortion of a foetus a month after conception,
most of us won't think that month of foetus was the victim of a terrible misfortune.
We're talking about humans and their moral status.
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.
What we're talking about is a fertilised egg is not a human.
Then we have a kind of society's problem about. At what point does it become a human being?
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
living entity comes into existence as a result of the fusion of sperm and egg cell.
I think it's really quite implausible, metaphysically, to suppose that I ever existed as a sperm or as an egg.
I think there are also good arguments against the idea that we began to exist at conception.
My view is actually quite radical. I don't think that we are human organisms at all.
I think that we begin to exist when a conscious subject begins to exist in association with the human organism,
which actually occurs about five months into pregnancy.
My view is that before that time there is a living human organism,
but that living human organism in my case wasn't me, it was the vehicle through which I came into existence.
So I actually take the same kind of metaphysical and moral view about early
human embryos that many people take of sperm and egg pair prior to conception.
I think that an early human embryo is just the physical materials out of which I developed.
That's interesting. That's not unlike some things John Locke says about the difference between being a person and being a man,
as he puts it, by which he meant man or woman.
So the man is the animal, what you call the organism which exists and may or may not go with the consciousness.
It's the consciousness which makes us as the person, the consciousness which makes us morally significant to each other.
That's right. I see my view as being in the Lockean tradition.
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.
There's a living human organism, and there's me.
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.
I am actually a part of my organism. I am the part of my organism that generates consciousness and mental activity.
Namely, I'm I am, in effect,
those parts of my brain in their active or potentially functional state that are capable of generating consciousness and mental activity.
And it's on the basis of that metaphysical view that I believe that we come into
existence round about the middle of pregnancy or little after the middle of pregnancy,
where we come into existence then as conscious beings that we have that potential before the consciousness emerges.
And lots of people think that it's the potential that's important.
So they may accept your metaphysical account of what it is to be fully human in that sense,
but still believe that the organism is the precursor of that combination.
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.
Well, in my view, it becomes me only in a rather peculiar sense.
It doesn't ever become me in the sense of ever being identical with me.
It becomes me in the sense of coexisting with me.
The form of potential that I think is at issue as here is one that I call non identity potential,
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.
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,
we might say before that that the chair has the potential to become a pile of sawdust,
but once it's fulfilled that potential, it has actually ceased to exist.
What exists after we've run the chair through the grinder is a pile of sawdust.
It's no longer a chair.
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.
It gives rise causally to the existence of the person.
But the person or the conscious subject is, in my view, never actually identical with the organism.
So the organism doesn't have the relevant.
Kind of potential in its relation to the later person to have rights on that basis.
The relevant kind of potential is what I call identity preserving.
It's the kind of potential that Prince Charles has now to become the King of England.
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
chair would not be identical with the pile of sawdust that it has the potential to become.
What does your view entail about the moral status of an early embryo, then?
Well, an early embryo, in my view, is a human organism that is in a quite literal sense, unoccupied.
That is it's an organism that is not host to a conscious subject or a person like you or me.
It is devoid of any intrinsic moral status.
It has the same moral status, in my view, that an individual sperm or an individual egg has.
So if one were to destroy a human embryo, one would not be killing or destroying anybody like you or me.
One would be preventing one of us from coming into existence.
In my view, the destruction of a human embryo is morally indistinguishable from a form of contraception.
So does that mean it would be morally acceptable to use embryos,
aborted embryos for experimentation, say, in preference to animals which have sentience?
Yes, that is actually an implication of my view that I think most people would find morally repugnant.
But I think it's actually correct.
It is permissible to experiment on embryos provided that they are never going to develop into persons that is provided that
their maturation is stopped before they ever give rise to the existence of an individual who would have moral status.
I can think of a what seems like a parallel situation where somebody who has had the
kind of sentience that you're talking about enters a persistent vegetative state.
Does that mean that they then become like an embryo from the point of view of moral status?
Not entirely. Let me say something first about the metaphysical status of individuals in a persistent vegetative
state and then say something about the moral status of individuals in a persistent vegetative state.
There are different types of vegetative state.
In some cases, there are human individuals where the physical basis for consciousness in the brain has been irreversibly destroyed.
In these cases, in my view, the individual person has ceased to exist.
You have something there that is a living human organism,
but metaphysically it is quite like the embryo in that it is a living human organism that no longer hosts a person.
In that kind of case, though, the moral status of the human organism isn't exactly the same as that of an embryo,
because the individual who once coexisted with that organism and whose organism
that was may have had desires about what was to be done to that organism.
And I think we have moral reason to honour those preferences in just the same way that we
have reason to honour people's wishes about other matters after they have ceased to exist.
When a person ceases to exist, they don't cease to exert moral constraint on us and moral pressures of certain sorts.
There's another kind of persistent vegetative state, however, in which the brain hasn't irreversibly lost the capacity to support consciousness.
In that case, the individual continues to exist and is still there as a proper subject of moral concern.
And arguably, even if this individual has suffered certain forms of brain damage,
retains the same kind of status that he or she had prior to going into the persistent vegetative state.
And so we should, to the best of our ability,
do what's in this individual's interests and honour this individual's autonomous preferences insofar as we can ascertain what they are.
Getting these questions right really matters because it could be somebody's life, depending on it.
How do you justify your account, which rests so much on this notion of sentience?
How do you know? You're right. You're right that these issues are extremely important.
They are also extremely difficult. And this is what I think a lot of people don't appreciate.
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.
And it took me a more than 500 page book to give the arguments that support my conclusions here.
So I'm not actually going to be able to give you the arguments, but that's what you should expect.
If you asked me to explain to you the nature of physical reality according to quantum theory and the best contemporary physics.
I wouldn't be able to do that simply in 5 minutes either. A lot of it has to do with the metaphysics here.
We need to understand when it is we begin to exist and when it is that we cease to exist.
We can't understand that, in my view, until we understand what kind of thing we essentially are.
Are we actually. Essentially living biological organisms.
If I were to pose that question to most people, they would say, yes, actually,
most of them don't believe it because they believe that they will survive the deaths of their physical organisms.
They believe that their physical body will die and disintegrate and they will continue to exist.
The view which I have arrived that I think is plausible is that we begin to exist
when there is someone there I can identify as me because there's consciousness.
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.
Until one has those views,
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,
or indeed a human individual who's been declared brain dead,
but whose vital functions are still being maintained by means of minimal external life support.
Once one has done the metaphysics, then one has to confront challenges to the consistency of one's moral beliefs about the remaining cases.
I believe that late term human foetuses are individuals like you and me,
though our natures were very different when we were late term foetuses, our natures were very different when we were newborn infants.
At those times, our psychological capacities were no higher than those of certain nonhuman animals.
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
able to justify their belief that human beings at those stages of their development have a much higher moral status than,
say, chimpanzees who have higher cognitive abilities at that level.
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.
But a consequence of that is that most people aren't actually equipped to make the judgements about moral status.
Unfortunately, I actually do think that that's correct.
These are issues, issues about human beings and other animals, human beings whose nature is in some sense non-standard embryos,
foetuses, newborn infants, adults with certain cognitive impairments or radical deficits.
These are individuals about whose moral status I think we should not have confident intuitions and confident moral views.
Questions about abortion and termination of life support and euthanasia and so on are really very difficult.
We are right to be puzzled about these issues and people who think that they know the answers and have very
strong views about these matters without having addressed these difficult issues in metaphysics and moral theory,
I think are making a mistake. They should be much more sceptical about their own beliefs,
much more tentative about what they are willing also to impose on other people through political institutions.
Geoff McMahon, thank you very much. Thank you very much for letting me have a say about this.
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