Are Babies Not Persons? Seeing Patterns

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 05, 2012

A recent article in The Journal of Medical Ethics argued that infanticide is morally equivalent to abortion, and therefore perfectly justifiable. This might have been surprising, except that a month earlier the same journal had published an article arguing that it is morally permissible for doctors to kill patients if their organs might be used for effective transplants in others. So let us recognize the pattern and realize that The Journal of Medical Ethics has an agenda.

There are, of course, other patterns that we should recognize here. The first pattern would be that ethics is meaningless unless rooted in something that transcends the ethicist. The fact that anyone who argues for any moral position can claim to be an “ethicist” lowers the bar to the point of non-existence. It makes no sense even to reason about morality if we do not believe that nature has a moral order which the human person is capable of discerning. And of course, to recognize a moral order in nature is to recognize the necessity for a lawgiver and a judge, that is God. There is a pattern there.

Another case of patterns helps us to recognize how it is we know things. As I have argued elsewhere (most recently in Proving God), the human person has an innate ability to grasp the natures of the things he observes, and to discern their purposes and ends. Indeed, this capacity is absolutely essential for moral thought, which cannot with any intelligibility be based on either opinion (the domain, apparently, of what we might call the new ethics) or empiricism (which is the form of inquiry used in modern science and limited to physical measurement).

We must first acknowledge the human capacity to discern the nature of things before we can see the folly of the opinion of these authors in The Journal of Medical Ethics. They claim that, while a human being is present from the moment of conception until natural death, only a person has a right to life, and a person cannot be said to exist until a human being develops to the point of reflecting on the worth of his own life. Only then does it become an injury to have life taken away.

But this line of thought ignores how we actually discern the reality of what it means to be human. Rather, we know both within ourselves and from countless examples outside of ourselves that human beings have a fundamentally different nature from other bodily creatures. If we were to sum up this difference in a single word, we would say that unlike all other bodily beings, humans are fundamentally moral beings. As I have already hinted, this simply means that, because they possess intellect, human beings can discern the natures of things, their purposes and ends, and so discern what is right and wrong; and, because they possess will, they are capable of choosing in light of this knowledge to do either good or evil. These characteristics also mean, by the way, that human beings possess some sort of spiritual core which other bodily creatures lack. Moreover, the individual beings who by nature possess this consciousness of reality, including this profound moral awareness and the capacity to interact with reality in a moral way, are called persons.

But this fundamental grasp of what it means to be human is not the only human pattern we recognize. We also discern that human beings are physically different from every other creature, and we learn to recognize easily which embodied beings are human beings and which are not, without the slightest need for a “personhood” quiz. Again, patterns. I know you are a human being with a human nature the moment I see you, and you know the same of me. We just do. And we do not need to demonstrate our competence to each other for this recognition to obtain. We instantly recognize each other as persons.

Now it may be that this or that human being fails to develop in the normal way physically or intellectually, or that through disease or accident he may lose one or more of his physical and mental abilities. For many reasons, including developmental reasons, he or she may be unable to express the full potential of his nature at any given time. He cannot do so, for example, before he has learned—as bodily beings must learn—to express it, nor can he do so while sleeping, or in a coma, or with a broken leg, or with an injured brain. Nor does each person rise to the same level of expressiveness. When this expressiveness is limited through illness or injury, we rightly regard it as unfortunate, but we still understand that the fundamental characteristics of human nature are present, including that spiritual core and moral trajectory which makes this person unlike any non-human bodily being, that is, unlike anything that is not a person.

Again, we are designed to see real things whole, neither bound by the limitations of empirical measurement nor divorced from reality by ungrounded fancy.  Thus do we understand natures and purposes and ends. Though our understanding is neither infallible nor complete, and though it is generally strengthened by discounting peculiar individual observations in favor of more universal experiences, in a fundamental way we humans simply gaze out at the world—or inward to ourselves—and in so doing we perceive and we know. In fact, we must deliberately train ourselves—that is, deliberately confuse ourselves, generally under the influence of some inordinate desire—to ignore what we cannot not know.

At the same time, we must acknowledge that the authors of the infanticide article did get something right. They were right to point out that there is no moral difference between infanticide and abortion. Moreover, had they done so, the authors of the organ transplant article would have been right to point out that there was no moral difference between killing patients for their organs and infanticide or abortion. All three actions take the innocent life of a human person; all three are murder. This, of course, is the slippery slope which all those who have opposed abortion from the first warned we could not escape slithering down. There is a pattern here, too, and a very consistent one.

One part of this last pattern is convenience—the convenience of those with power taking precedence over the convenience of those without it. Even language follows power, as it is a great convenience to dignify such arguments from convenience with the name of ethics. But the editor of The Journal of Medical Ethics has extended this ethic of convenience still further by the words he used to defend his authors and condemn their critics (see the London Telegraph, Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say). Noting that the authors of the infanticide article had received death threats, editor Julian Savulescu responded thus:

This…has been an example of “witch ethics”—a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.

But how convenient these words are! How convenient to advocate the killing of whole classes of human persons in the name of what Savulescu elsewhere termed “well-reasoned argument based on widely-accepted premises” while accusing those who wish to kill only two specific persons for crimes against humanity of being on a witch hunt! We have seen this self-serving pattern again and again: No matter what our betters may do or say, it is always their detractors who are at fault. Indeed, in the universe of convenience, form always trumps substance.

But once again, and fortunately, we human beings can discern the nature and meaning of the patterns of life. This is, among other things, how we recognize the difference between the innocent physical danger of a train hurtling down a track and that other kind of danger—that far more clever and very human danger. I mean moral danger, the danger that kills not only the body but the spirit, the kind of danger posed by The Journal of Medical Ethics.