Animalism and the Unborn Human Being

Christopher Tollefsen

University of South Carolina

Recent work in the metaphysics of identity seems indebted to a revival of the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident, a revival possibly to be attributed to David Wiggins’ Sameness and Substance. As Wiggins points out, everything that exists is a “this such,” and it is the concept under which a thing falls as a this such, rather than concepts that indicate what it is doing, or what color it is, and so on, that tells us what the thing is.[1] For at least some things that we ordinarily characterize as particulars, the concept under which they fall as particulars will be their substance concept.[2] It is this concept that tells us what the thing in question most truly is, and, as Eric Olson writes, it is this concept that “determines persistence conditions that necessarily apply to all (and perhaps only) things of that kind.”[3]

The language of substance may not be equally amenable to all, but everyone involved in the abortion debate at a philosophical level has an interest in understanding what you and I and things of our sort are most fundamentally, because this understanding will determine when we come to be, as well as when we cease to be. And, as Patrick Lee has pointed out, what most defenders of abortion have held, implicitly or explicitly, until recently, is that you and I are essentially persons.[4] “Person” was then understood in a quasi-Lockean way to involve such properties as psychological continuity or connectedness, and from this it was inferred that no person existed prior to the presence of such psychological properties. It was an easy step from this to the conclusion that embryos and fetuses, lacking the relevant psychological properties, were not persons, and thus were not entitled to the respect ordinarily due persons.

Problems with the view that you and I are essentially persons have been apparent for quite some time; for one thing, this would mean that you and I were the same kind of substance as intelligent Martians, angels, and perhaps members of the Trinity; but why think we have their persistence conditions? But Eric Olson has raised perhaps the most damning objection. Olson points out that on the received view, you and I were never, for example, fetuses, for you and I are essentially persons, and substances of the person sort do not come to exist until the onset of psychological traits. But fetuses themselves seem to belong to a substance class – they are particulars of the substance sort “human animal.” And this raises problems for the view that you and I are essentially persons. What, for example, has happened to that other substance, the human animal? Does it continue to exist in the same space as the human person? Did it cease to exist with the coming to be of the human person? If the former, how can it not share exactly all of the person’s properties, and if so, why is it not also a person? If the latter, is there now no longer a human animal in the space that I occupy? None of the options seems metaphysically palatable.[5]

The solution is that you and I are essentially human animals; thus you and I were once fetuses, and, at least plausibly, embryos as well. But if you and I are not essentially persons, but animals, what sort of concept is the concept “person”, and when and how do we become persons? Olson’s answer might seem to be the only possible option here: “person” is a phased sortal, like “teacher” or “ambulator.” Human animals move into a stage of personhood, and possibly out of it, while remaining the same substance, just as a baby’s substance does not change when she learns to walk.

This move from the metaphysics of identity has been appropriated in the ethics of abortion. It is no longer metaphysically plausible to hold that you and I are essentially persons which come to be late in the career of an animal; so personhood should, like “ambulator” be viewed as an achievement, rather than a status; and human animals, like other animals, may be killed when they are not persons.

One upshot of this discussion is this: Insofar as defenders of abortion accept that you and I are essentially animals, then they must argue that you and I are not as such worthy of respect. Many philosophers have pointed out how deeply arbitrary such a position is bound to be in determining who is worthy of respect. But it seems to me to be subject to even further difficulties. The earlier view was dualistic, separating the substance that I am, from the animal substance I am associated with. This involves an alienation from that bodily nature, an alienation that Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Joseph Boyle have argued is theoretically untenable.[6] Still, untenable though it may be philosophically, it seems psychologically possible – I take myself not to be that animal, and am alienated from it as from other things that I am not.

The new account seems even more problematic from the first person practical standpoint, however, for it seems to involve, as did the earlier account, a rejection of my bodily nature, but now with that nature understood as mine. That is, under the earlier conception, on which you and I were essentially persons, the animal, the embodied being, was other than I, other than you. You and I were essentially alienated from that bodily nature, but there was perhaps some solace in the essentiality of the alienation. On the new conception, I am that bodily being, but if I am valuable only insofar as I have achieved the status of personhood, then I am not only, on my own self conception, alienated from the embodied animal, but from myself, for I am, by my own self understanding, that embodied animal. I can not, on this view, attribute to myself as such the value and worth that demands respect, from others or from myself. This would seem to be a form of practical alienation from oneself that gives reason to reject the claim that the animal that I essentially am only gradually becomes worthy of respect.[7] So animalism leads quite naturally to the view that respect is due to a human being from the time that it starts to exist as a human being.[8]

Animalism has at least tacitly been a crucial element in another discussion concerning unborn human life in recent years. Discussion of abortion has recently been somewhat surpassed by discussion of embryo creation and research. But the strategy of those favoring creation of, and research on early human embryos is not simply to deny personhood to these embryos but to make the stronger claim that these embryos, because of their potentiality for twinning, are not even human beings at all.

Why should twinning be thought to militate against the humanity of the early embryo? One crucial consideration in the argument concerns the individuality of that early embryo. Recall the Aristotelian suggestion hearkened to by David Wiggins, that everything that exists exists as a this such. So any particular substance will be a member of some substance kind, but it will also be an individual in its own right. Indeed, this consideration is of somewhat unrecognized importance in considering whether certain sorts of entities that appear to be substances really are. For if something genuinely is a this such  a substance  then it should be the case that it has determinate identity conditions, even if it is not always possible to identify them, or to identify whether they are satisfied or not. That is, there should always be a definite yes or no answer to the question: is this the same substance as that (was).

It is clear that this condition is not met by some things that for more or less pragmatic and social reasons are given names and treated as if they were genuine individuals. For example, a pile of trash is not really a substance. Its beginnings and its endings are vague and a matter of convention, as are, in fact, its physical boundaries. When large bits of the pile are replaced, there need be no definite yes or no answer to the question “Is this the same pile of trash as the one that was here yesterday?”

There are other arguments for not treating the pile of trash as a genuine substance. The pile of trash, for instance, does not have its own causal powers. Although it appears to stink, and to thus to cause the wrinkling of noses in its vicinity, and to attract flies, the causal powers of the trash seem entirely reducible to the causal powers of its parts, and ultimately to its smallest parts. This does not appear to be true of organisms: that this is a dog, or a cat, or a human being, enters necessarily into our explanation of why this is chasing a rabbit, or a mouse, or a high paying job.[9]

Philosophers such as Trenton Merricks and Peter van Inwagen have extended these arguments so as to argue that in fact none of the ordinary artifacts that we find around us daily are, after all, genuine individual substances. Merricks and van Inwagen thus conclude that such artifacts are not really entities after all: there are no baseballs, no statues, no flags, merely simples arranged baseball-wise, statue-wise and flag-wise. In essence, it seems to me, there arguments work by showing that everything that is not an individual substance is ultimately a kind of heap, any one of which might be more or less important to us in our social life, but all of which are ontologically on par with one another.

There are of course, counterexamples, but even these serve to bring out the differences between the causality of a substance and that of, especially artifacts. It is true, as Lynne Baker argues, that statues, not statue shaped rocks, raise our insurance premiums, and that flags bring a tear to our eye.[10] But they do not do this in the way that I raise my hand, or the dog brings the ball. The statue and the flag interact with members of the social world in such a way that members of the social world themselves change or bring about change. But while the flag qua flag has this sort of derivative social causality, it has no agency of the sort that humans, dogs, and cats have. Such entities themselves act, albeit in different ways.

The agency of substances, and their individuality in a substance kind, are not unrelated. Individual substances have the sort of agency that they have in virtue of the sorts of things they re – dogs have a doggy agency just as humans have a human agency. And this is in turn related to the claims about the persistence conditions for substances following from what they are: they persist as long as they able minimally to maintain the processes necessary for their particular, i.e., species specific, forms of agency, and to continue, even if in a greatly attenuated manner, some form of their appropriate agency. Substances are self-movers, and their form of motion is species specific; hence any individual substance will play a crucial and unique explanatory role as a substance in a number of causal stories.[11]

This hardly exhausts what can be said about substances, but many of the traditional attributes of substance would seem to follow from these: an individual substance would need to have fairly definite boundaries, for example. But two further characteristics deserve mention here. First, substances must have definite beginnings and endings; I will briefly defend this claim later in the paper. Second, substances cannot be composed of other substances. As discussed above, substances are agents, and their autonomy is not entirely derivative from the action of their parts. But this in turn must mean that the activity of the parts is not entirely intelligible apart from their role in their whole – their substance. Thus Aristotle’s famous claim about the detached finger being a finger in name only – separate a part of a substance from the whole of which it is a part, and it is no longer the sort of thing it was as a part. But if the substance-parts cannot, as such, have this kind of independent agency and intelligibility, then they cannot themselves be substances.[12]

So why, then, does the early embryo’s capacity for twinning render it unfit to be an individual substance? Which specific criterion does it fail to meet? And what is its status supposed to be in the time period in which “it” is not yet a human animal? Two proposals in particular are of importance here.

The first is that precisely because of the early embryo’s capacity for twinning, it cannot be an individual. But if not an individual, then not a substance, and hence not a human animal. This argument seeks to show that because of what the embryo can do, it cannot be an individual; similarly, if some supposed entity was capable of shaking hands and going two separate ways, it too would not be an individual substance.[13]

The second argument relies on a Lockean claim, plausible in itself, about what is responsible for the persistence of some particular organic substance. Peter van Inwagen summarizes the claim:

If an organism exists at a certain moment, then it exists whenever and wherever  and only when and only where  the event that is its life at that moment is occurring; more exactly, if the activity of the xs at t1 constitutes a life, and the activity of the ys at t2 constitutes a life, then the organism that the xs compose at t1 is the organism that the ys compose at t2 if and only if the life constituted by the activity of the xs at t1 is the life constituted by the activity of the ys at t2.(145)

Now a one-celled zygote has a life; it is a single organism. And an embryo at, say, three weeks has a life; it, too is a single organism. But van Inwagen claims that the two-celled “organism”, and similar collections of cells, do not have a shared life:

They adhere to each other, but we have seen that that is no reason to suppose that two objects compose anything. The zygote was a single, unified organism, the vast assemblage of metabolic processes that were its life having been directed by the activity of nucleic acid in its nucleus. No such statement can be made about the two-cell embryo. No event, I should say, is its life. The space it occupies is merely an arena in which two lives, hardly interacting, take place….It seems to me most implausible to suppose that the developing embryo is yet an organism if it is still at the stage at which monozygotic twinning can occur…if an embryo is still capable of twinning, then it is a mere virtual object. (153-4)

Here two arguments run together. The first is an empirical argument about the biological life of the early embryo: in van Inwagen’s view, that “life” is insufficiently unified to constitute a single life, just as the lives of two adhering paramecia would be insufficiently unified to compose one organism. The second argument is the earlier conceptual argument about twinning: anything that can twin cannot itself be a single organism, for this capacity is incompatible with being an individual.

The empirical, biological issue has a certain obvious priority over the conceptual issue here. Surely, it is theoretically imperative first to look at whether the purported entity in question  the early human embryo  seems to have one life, or to be a collection of several lives. For if it is best characterized biologically as a single organism, then this should determine the answer to the conceptual question: can a biologically unified substance have the potential to divide into two independent substances? By way of analogy: one might have thought that it was conceptually impossible for a human organism to come to by any other means than by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. But if human cloning is, as seems most likely, a physical possibility, then the purported conceptual impossibility is not, after all, a conceptual impossibility at all.

I believe that the biological evidence gives good grounds for thinking that the embryo is the subject of an individual life, specifically an individual human life.[14] There is much that could be said about all that is going on in the early embryo, but I wish to make only one general remark about the relationship between the biology and what has been said so far. There are many good summaries of the early development of the embryo. Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard provide an excellent such summary in their article “Sixteen Days.”[15] As they show, the process begins with fertilization, after which there are a number of cell divisions that take place within the physical boundaries of the zona pullicida. Some subsequent steps in the progress towards gastrulation, in which cell folds form the predecessor structures for a variety of bodily parts and organs, and neurulation, in which the initial structures of the nervous system are generated, include implantation, which is prior to gastrulation, and the formation of the morula.

We may note in these names the passive voice of science: the stages are viewed as happenings, somewhat as we say that mistakes were made, when we wish to avoid taking responsibility. But the description as a whole gives the unmistakable impression, apart from other salient features, of a single entity acting with purpose: develop body parts, and implant in the uterus in order that the entity in question can begin to take in nutrition and establish firmer and more rigorous boundaries, in order that the entity in question can continue to grow and develop. Consider the following passage from Smith and Brogaard: