1. You’re still chasing an irrelevant absolute. That it is “self-evident that personhood is valuable to people” is enough. Given this fact, it makes no difference to our behaviour or outlook whether or not personhood IS valuable, or whether WE are valuable, according to some definition of value which is independent of people’s opinions and beliefs. The status and fate of the unborn is inextricably linked to a consensual definition of personhood, and whether or not it applies.

2. You’re still parsing me backwards. Did you miss where I said the personhood of adults is a premise, not a conclusion? I assert both that and the non-personhood of pre-conception tissue, based on total consensus and the above, and focus on the more important bit about unborn candidates for personhood.

Since as we agree there is no true moment of transition, it’s merely a judgement call, but that call has to be based on something. In order to justify declaring something a person it must have qualities of personhood.

This is where we actually do ask ourselves, “Why is an adult a person?” The difference is that we aren’t questioning an adult’s personhood; we have to deduce qualities from undisputed people (by consensus) like adults, children and newborns. They can be physical, like the presence of a brain or heart, or mental, like the ability to feel pain (perhaps possible in the nerves before the brain), or behavioural, like bringing thumb to mouth (a criterion additional to the existence of the thumb and mouth).

Here, in the specific qualitative analysis of personhood, we do NOT have universal consensus. That’s why it’s difficult to place a threshold precisely. My ultimate point is that as the ovum develops into a baby, gradually more and more people’s criteria for personhood are satisfied until we reach consensus at birth. Immediately before birth we still have near-total consensus, because little has changed.

Immediately after conception, however, the previously undisputedly non-person tissue has not had time to develop anything. Therefore the only people who think it’s a person at this stage are those who define personhood in observable terms solely using the occurrence of conception. That’s you.

The true reason in your case, and millions of others, is that you believe the soul enters at that point. If not for that, your criteria would likely be different. You do have secular arguments for personhood and human worth at conception, but 1. they are not unassailable and 2. you only sought them out in the first place to support your belief.

This is why I don’t need to define personhood exactly to know that personhood immediately after conception has nothing approaching consensus among those whose criteria are based on the observable, and probably never will. There are no criteria with this effect besides the arbitrary. It doesn’t hold up without invisible means of support.

We agree (largely) on conclusions (eg X is clearly not a person, Y clearly is a person).
But it seems – show me if I’m wrong – that you can’t offer any consistent basis for reaching those conclusions. WHY – beyond consensus – is an adult a person?

My point is this: when you hold true conclusions, but they don’t follow from your premises or lines of argument, you’ve really got to wonder about your lines of argument.

You know my lines of argument, and they are at least consistent, even if you dispute their verifiability.
But I can’t see how your conclusions follow from your lines of argument.

Example 1: I know that personhood is valuable, but that doesn’t make it valuable. It’s clearly self-evident that personhood is valuable to people, but that isn’t what makes it valuable. The fact that we *are* people doesn’t make it valuable – I’m brown-haired, but that doesn’t make it valuable to be brown-haired.
I have a consistent reason for why personhood is valuable, but I can’t see how you do. But you’ve said you do, so I’ll assume that the error is mine and move on to the second, more problematic part of this:

Example 2. We know that non-person X must become person Y at some stage, but you hold a hermeneutic of identifying that stage which rules out all possible transitions. So while we agree on the judgments of X and Y, according to your principle X simply cannot become Y. It’s not a matter of identifying the time, there is no time.

You’ve jumped straight to something I was trying to establish: there is no moment of transition to personhood, it’s a judgement call at every stage. Personhood an abstract concept whose definition, like love, is ultimately not biological or even physical. (Think about it – in science fiction, robots or even computer programs can be people.)

It is however an abstract concept which is critically important to us human beings. In the book 1984, it’s a fate worse than death to be declared an “unperson”. The first step in many anti-Semitic atrocities was to portray Jews as something less than people. The existence of personhood AS AN ABSTRACT CONCEPT functions the same as if it were a physical thing, unlike some invisible things like gods.

This is how I show that personhood is valuable – I point to people. We value our OWN personhood, no matter how poorly we’ve defined it for ourselves. I don’t deal in absolutes so I can’t assign it an absolute value, but the fact that personhood is valuable TO PEOPLE is self-evident.

Moving ahead in your conclusions, I did not merely assert that a non-person becomes a person. I pointed to a universal or near-universal consensus on the matter, which you don’t seem about to contest. Either side of pregnancy we can point to different phases of the same matter, and say it’s not a person and then it is. A non-person becomes a person as certainly as personhood exists, which may be only in everyone’s minds, but that’s all it needs.

To expand on the base logic, the personhood of a born baby or an 80-year-old is not a conclusion, it’s a premise. It is itself asserted, by everyone. I’m not making an argument from majority, I’m saying that personhood itself only reaches this level of reality and is accepted, so the transition within the pregnancy period (remember, we’re finding a RANGE and not a moment) is just as valid.

I am a person, inasmuch as there are any people on this planet. Personhood matters to me, so if human tissue is to be terminated then I want to know whether it’s a person. If it isn’t, it’s still unfortunate because it could become a person. if it is, it is a clear and present individual “life” which is entitled to protection by any principles of human rights, and it inspires the greatest possible empathy. That’s why pre-pregnancy personhood is important to establish, and that’s why abortion always matters to me.

Materialistic assumptions don’t mean everything has to be physical. The abstract is meaningful, and through consensus is powerful. In a world full of people with complete consensus on a great many unspoken things, the abstract is almost omnipotent, let alone significant.

(I’m going to go hard, but not from hostility. So if the tone of this sounds harsh, it’s not that I’m attacking you but merely that I’m not pulling my punches rhetorically.)

What follows is what conclusions I think would be reached if we debated each of these points. Of course, you might contest that. But for the sake of brevity, rather than make the arguments, I’ll just give the conclusions.

It seems to me that if you were to apply everything you’ve said, and take things to their logical conclusions,
– you can’t show that personhood is valuable
– even if you could, you can’t show why we shouldn’t do it anyway.
– you can’t define personhood in a way that clearly and defensibly distinguishes it from non-personhood
– and you can’t show that a non-person ever becomes a person.

In short, based on materialistic assumptions we’re not qualitatively different from an unfertilised egg, the property personhood doesn’t actually exist, and even if it did it wouldn’t have any significance for our behaviour.

The challenge, if you disagree with that conclusion, is to show it wrong using only materialistic assumptions.

Thanks for your honesty regarding the precise threshold of a person. I want to keep digging there, if I may?
I don’t contend that it’s significant that you can’t point to a specific point… that’s of no consequence.
Rather, I contend that, if you are consistent in your views, there IS NO specific point – cells never become people.

Let me explain:

“If you compare the foetus one minute prior to birth to one minute after, what’s the difference? Very little”
This argument is another form of this one:
““An ovum fertilised seconds ago which has divided once has the whole human genome together for the first time. That’s all that distinguishes it from the unfertilised egg and the sperm, which together had the whole thing but in pieces.”

Do you see what I mean when I say that this style of logic proves too much?
I’ve tried to explain my thinking, but I don’t think I’ve done it well.
I base my contention on the assumption that right principles rightly applied give right results. The right result is that a baby is a person while (we’ll say, for the argument) unfertilized egg and sperm are not a person.
My contention is that if you consistently apply your principle to the whole process, you never get a person. i.e. you never get the right result. Every single moment along the developmental path is subject to the principle.
Conclusion: there’s something wrong with the principle.

So the argument I’m making is not: you can’t point to *the moment*, therefore there is no moment.
It’s this: according to your principle, it follows (ex hypothesi) that there is no moment.
I agree that when we look at the start and end points it’s apparent that there was one… but if your principle is consistently applied along the way, there can’t have been.

I’d conclude that this shows the principle doesn’t work.
Or, that if the principle works, the conclusion (the baby is a person) is misguided).

You’re both with me now in pursuing the threshold of personhood as a crucial issue, except when Hayesy questions the value of personhood itself. You’re going right back to the old issue of secular values and morals, and the absence of an absolute basis. There need not be one; personhood is valuable to us because we all see ourselves as people.

We oppose the murder of people because of 1. self-interest and 2. empathy for other people. We can’t say whether murder is ultimately permissible or not, because even if there are moral absolutes we don’t know them. Outlawing murder works for us regardless.

As for the key definition and precise threshold of a person, I don’t know, and I’m trying to be open about this. I can however establish a range based on what I do know. Aristotle didn’t know the value of pi, but by constructing easily measurable polygons just inside and just outside of a circle he established that 223/71 < pi < 22/7. That’s pretty close.

I begin with what we all agree on, regardless of definitions: the human tissue (sperm, egg) prior to conception is not a person, and the thing which is eventually born (one’s son or daughter) is a person.

From there it gets more difficult because the everyday unspoken definition of a person is not often applied this early. Since we now have a consensual example of both a person and a non-person, what is it that the born baby has or can do that the early tissue hasn’t or can’t? Lots of things. Think of a few and remember them.

If you compare the foetus one minute prior to birth to one minute after, what’s the difference? Very little, so it’s very probable that any accepted definition of personhood still applies before birth and is therefore independent of birth. We still agree up to here.

Here’s the crux: if you compare the tissue one second before conception to one second after conception, which of the additional qualities of the complete baby you came up with earlier suddenly appear in this period? If you want to define the “essence of life” as beginning in this two-second period, you need to point to something right here. You might argue for something intangible, but you still need to establish that it’s suddenly present in whatever capacity it can be. If not, then it’s more probable that a commonly acceptable threshold would be later than this.

Kate, you brought up the loss of human qualities through injury or illness. Those human qualities which can be lost in this way, as far as I can imagine, are all qualities of the brain. As long as some functions persist there is a living person there to care for. When they’re all gone, the person is brain-dead and legally dead-dead. One second after conception, for comparison, there is no brain.

Kate – no harm done!

“the problem does extend a certain distance, but well before 80 years of age the collection of cells has realised its potential and IS a person (based on any existing definition of “person”) and the whole “becoming” thing is done.”
Prove it. I know you say that nobody knows when, but do you find that a satisfactory answer to my regress argument?

What is the key step, where you go… “that’s a bunch of cells… there! that’s a person!”?

To go deeper – what IS a person? Can we get a definition approaching precision?

Supposing that definition is based on “capacity to feel, to remember and to suffer”, what makes those capacities sacred but not capacities to respirate, duplicate, create (eg proteins). What’s the difference anyway, they’re all biological after all.

Deeper still: what makes person-hood itself so valuable? If we’re ultimately cells anyway… in your view, what makes murder unpermissible?

hayesy – i just read over my comment to you again… i actually didn’t intend it to sound harsh … i forgot tone doesn’t come across well… sorry brother!

Who declares when? Nobody, because it happens before birth and nobody can watch during the transition. We can only set criteria for ourselves and each other so that when we do look at an X-ray or ultrasound we can make a decision based on its status at the time. Your only criterion is that it’s there at all.

I don’t apply dualism that to this. Here’s what “distinguishes the value of *alive* stuff from *A Life* stuff”: people. The criteria as I said are in the realm of identity and personhood, and just like the idea of murder these are abstract concepts set down by people. Some of those people at least think there’s a god that agrees with them, but still.

You’re with me on religious and secular arguments: you use them to convince others, not yourself. To convince you the other way would take either a religious argument, which isn’t my department, or a change in your faith. Incidentally “secular” in this context means not contingent on the existence or nature of any deity, even if there is one.

Kate, consider a newborn baby. Notwithstanding the fact that it’s been born, what is it about that baby that actually makes it a person? Gives it an identity? Signifies a human life? Your answer would differ from mine, even if you left souls out of it. Whatever else you decide, however, what of it is present one second after the moment of conception? The kinds of things I’ve come up with, memory, senses and so on, are just not there until later. That’s how, without having criteria set in stone, I am still confident that the transition to personhood is after conception and not during.

Hayesy just means he hasn’t got the time to reply in depth to anything right now. He’s a busy student. He feels strongly about it, all right, he’s written enough posts on it.

assuming you have exams soon – go well!