Eid Mubarak!

Allah (SWT) bless the Ummah of Rasulullah (SAW) on this, our Eid.

Ameen.

Pro-Life Presentation on Campus

(Nota Bena: This is not an argument that abortion is permissible under all circumstances. Clearly this is not the case under Islamic Law. My point here is to demonstrate the problems associated with acting on unaided reason in one's moral life. What can be considered an self-evident truth varies from person to person; it is too subjective a measure to serve as the foundation of ethics. Divine guidance is needed for this reason.)

I attended the pro-life presentation on campus and talked with the speaker extensively afterwards. While I agreed with her refutation of some of the commonc pro-choice arguments (which depend on the context, or on an appeal to privacy, or to the dependence of the fetus, etc. and avoid the issue of the nature of fetus) I vehemently disagreed with her arguments establishing the moral considerability of the fetus. She
equivocated on the term human, establishing that the fetus's were genetically members of our species, and then asserted that all humans possess certain inalienable rights (such as that to life) in virtue of a shared human nature. She did not establish how simply being biologically human, in and of itself, gives rise to rights that must be respected. She clearly rejected any definition of personhood in functional terms (equating it with the horrors of Naziism and Slavery) and when challenged stated that the truth that it is wrong to kill an innocent human being (and, again, this is being defined in purely biological terms) is inherently self-evident. When she saw that I was quite clearly skeptical, she condemned this skepticism but did not offer a justification for her own position. She insisted that personhood was a legal term, despite the fact that it has a long history as an ethical and philosophical term going back at least to Locke. When I presented a version of the definition of personhood which is common among current applied ethicists (and is based upon a sense of an enduring self which has a past and can see itself existing into the future and possesses purposes and goals, including a desire for continued existence), she simply dismissed it as subjective, saying that the Nazis had their definition of person as did the Southern Slave holders. She asked me why she should accept my definition. My answer was that it should be accepted on the basis of argument, at which point she seemed to imply
that this made untenable because it was, to her lights, ambiguous and subjective. She then appealed to the scientific data regarding humanity, stating that it began at conception (i.e. that a new member of species homo sapiens comes into being at conception), implying that it was the only objective criterion. She did not establish why this biological characteristic (i.e. being of a certain species, having a certain dna sequence) has moral weight. She simply asserted that we are all equal within our species; I assume this is another self-evident truth that only miscreants like myself deny. What really frustrated me was her equation of membership of species Homo Sapiens with possessing a common human nature which carried with it certain ethical entitlements. This really seems to be equivocation of the first order, especially since she ruled out functional characteristics (thought, feeling, sense of self, etc.) as having any moral relevance. Being a Muslim and being skeptical of her notion of self-evident moral truths, I asked her whether she thought
the principle that 'it is wrong to kill an innocent human being' is binding on all moral agents. She agreed. I asked her if God is a moral agent. She agreed. I asked her if this principle was therefore binding on God and she demured, refusing to complete the syllogism. Besides natural disasters, there are, of course, incidents when Biblical figures were ordered by God to kill innocent human beings (such as male infants). This would mean that, granted the argument above, God had (nauzubillah) commited wrong doing. So she must reject one of the premises. Either God is not a moral agent (which seems absurd, at least to a Catholic) or her principle is not binding on all moral agents. If it is not binding on all moral agents it is difficult to see how it is a self-evident moral truth. There is one argument she presented which I need to think about: that in order to have a sense of self, to think, to feel, there must be something already in existence to do those things. There has to be an 'I' in prior existence in order for there to be the self-indentification as I. There has to be a thinker in order for there to be thought. In Sarte's phrase, existence must precede essence. We could, of course, argue for a Buddhist/Humean non-substantial self, in which there are only bundles of memories, intuitions, sense impressions, volitions, and the like. In this case, the self is simply an abstraction and not inherent in the things themselves. We would have to situate the locus of moral concern in either one of these bundles or a set of them. Of course another response could be to invoke the distinction between a phenomenan being dependent on other phenomena and a phenomena being those other phenomena. A self may be dependent on the existence of certain properties in an organism (memory, volition, abstract reasoning capacity, etc.). I may have a computer (the organism) which has certain capabilities due to it having a certain arrangement of memory, a certain type and size of hard drive, and certain softwares (the Operating system, emulaters, etc.)[[properties such as will, memory, etc.). These properties in turn allow me to run cerain software (the self). It would seem odd to argue that the self (the software) had to already exist in order to do those things which actually give rise to it (the capacities of the PC). Hmm... maybe this is not clear. Of course, even if there has to be a substanding self, the crucial becomes when it comes to be. I have been given no reason to believe that it has always been there in what was initially the fertilized cell. What does it mean to say that a fertilized egg is a self? Why would a single cell of homo sapiens have a self and not a single cell of e coli? Honestly, I'm open to the idea that all living things have some kind of innate mental nature of some sort. But if this is true, I am forced to ask whether this can be made the basis of an ethical theory which attempts to treat humans (meaning members of species homo sapiens) in a preferential manner. Certainly it is not self-evident to me that the reason I should not punch someone in the face is that they are a member of my species. It seems more intuitively obvious to me that I ought not to do this because it would cause them both physical pain and emotional distress (destroying their sense of security). These are factors are dependent on the functional characteristics of persons (such as the capacity to suffer or to worry about one's present or future state) and not on their merely being members of my species. Species membership is incidental; there are members of other species that can undergo these same experiences. Why should they be discounted? When I brought this up to the speaker (I used the example of aliens who are just as intelligent, insightful, rational, and capable of feeling as us), she said we may come to give such beings respect, but this is no reason to disrespect human beings. This is quite beside the point. I'm not suggesting that we ought to treat humans worse because we ought to treat animals better (or aliens or self-aware robots the same as us). I'm inquiring into what the criteria would be for recognizing their moral claims on us. When I told her why I brought up the example of aliens, she didn't have an answer. She instead simply re-asserted the importance of species membership as a criteria of moral consideration. She had earlier objected that grounding moral consideration in the functional capacities of a organism lead to the domination of the strong over the weak because it allowed the strong to define out of existence the personhood of the weak. But is she not doing the very same thing? Doesn't her approach simply amount to what Peter Singer calls 'species-chauvinism?' Doesn't it allow us to disregard the suffering of every other form of life we may encounter, no matter how self-aware, capable of feeling, or capable of communication it may be? Concievably, we could create a whole new species
which is genetically distinct from us but intelligent and self-aware enough to perform those tasks which normally require human labor. Could we, in this way, bring into existence a new slave race to whom we have no ethical obligations simply because of a difference in genetic endowment? Would the fact that we couldn't interbreed with them be sufficient to render their lives without the intrinsic worth that she attributed to human beings? It seems to me that it is her position that allows the strong to exploit and dominate the weak and that justifies inflicting horrible amounts of suffering and premature death on innocent beings of whatever species.