Brief in Support of Rational Laws On Human Life
It has become commonplace among pro-life writers to claim that the question of when human life begins is settled by empirical science. While there is a sense in which this is true, in a broader sense, properly speaking, the question belongs not to the empirical sciences, but to ontology. Therefore, a serious answer to the question, while it will certainly have to incorporate the findings of empirical embryology, is, for purposes of law, a question of philosophy, specifically jurisprudence. We need an accurate answer to the question of when human life beings to inform our practical reasoning about the ethics of abortion and the treatment of human embryos and to create a rational system of laws.
Those who rely on the ancient Greek philosophy for their pro-life position are impeded by the “successionist” view of embryology held by Aristotle on empirical grounds. He based his theory of three ontologically distinct stages of life on the presence or absence of specific empirical signs, specifically the differentiation of parts (or organs), drawn from the deficient sciences of that era.
For the ancients, the absence of organs and observable movement was a sign that no soul was present. Precisely because the successionist view depends on these false empirical views, it is no longer tenable. Instead, the contemporary evidence confirms the presence of parts, in Aristotelian terms, “organs”, on an intracellular level even in the zygote. Contemporary empirical science also reveals the fundamental continuity of embryonic development. This means there are no plausible ontological inflection points, marked by physical changes, such as the supposed initial presence of parts at forty or ninety days. Without any such ontological inflection points, the successionist view is philosophically impossible.
Science certainly gives us definitions that form the basis for law. One of those definitions is a definition of what it means to be alive. We identify life by certain powers that exist in living things—maintaining homeostasis, metabolizing food, excreting waste, assimilating oxygen, maintaining its boundary, etc. The powers that are essential to (and definitive of) life are best understood in terms of what “begins with the agent and terminates in the agent for the sake of the agent.”[1] A living thing exercises immanent causation precisely insofar as its internal activity is ordered towards its own good as such. Because only living things can possess a good, per se, outside of animate nature there is only transient causation, that “is the causation of one thing or event (or state, process, etc.) by another where the effect terminates in the former.” Of course, the biological activity of living beings involves many instances of transient causation. However, within a living creature, all of its transient causal processes serve a higher end– the end (telos) which constitutes its good. Living things, and only living things, are characterized by sets of causal processes that together serve the good of the individual organism.
Return to the original question, when does human life begin?, we will be able to answer this question if we can determine at what point in the normal course of human generation there exists an ontologically unique biological organism with a human nature. At first, this might seem to be simply a question for empirical science. However, unless we beg the question of what an organism is, a full answer requires a philosophical judgment informed by the empirical findings. This is because, given the observations above about the non-reductive character of life, what
counts as an organism is itself a philosophically loaded question. In the Aristotelian context already introduced, the question can be re-articulated in terms of immanent causation. When in the course of human development does a proper subject of continuous immanent causation exist? At this point, understanding empirical embryology is essential.
As in all science, we can understand nature, that is, we can have sure and certain knowledge through causes. It is this metaphysical concept that makes science possible. In light of the causal relationships of ontological reality, we can begin by working our way backwards from a paradigmatic adult human being, and we encounter no serious problems in recognizing the metaphysical identity of the self-same organism though the conventional stages of adolescence, childhood, and infancy. The enormous changes across even these conventional stages pose no great difficulties because what underwrites the relevant continuity is neither strictly material nor psychological.
The same is true in the prenatal stages as well. Birth involves no intrinsic change in the child despite significant extrinsic changes. The fetus is unambiguously the subject of the same kinds of immanent causal processes throughout its growth and development in utero that the child is after birth. In fact, the contemporary evidence suggests no plausible break in the continuity of immanent causation of the self-same organism at any point after the development of the primitive streak at approximately fourteen days post conception. This is not a religious viewpoint, it is a philosophical and scientific viewpoint. Only the philosophical selfishness of other persons can deprive the unborn of his or her personhood in law.
What is necessary for our purposes is not to establish that every living adult human being is, in fact, ontologically identical with some previously existing single celled zygote, or that every human being comes into existence with fertilization. Respect for human individual does not depend on such esoterica. The argument from the characteristics of the zygote does not support a conclusion that the zygote itself is not a “human individual” (i.e. an ontologically unique substance with a human nature). This is a lack of proper reasoning. It is “unreasonable” and a fallacy. To show that the early embryo is not a human individual would require showing it is a different kind of thing altogether than the mature human. This is grossly implausible.
For our purposes in thinking about the embryo, the regularity with which zygotes develop along a continuous path into infants is exactly what requires explanation. It is not as if some human embryos develop into giraffes and some into peanuts and some into infants. Rather, insofar as they develop properly, all human embryos develop into mature instances of the natural kind human being. Of course, this is not to deny that many actual embryos do not survive or properly develop for a variety of reasons. It is also not to deny that some of the ones that do survive suffer various defects. The point is that, conceptually as well as ontologically, those defective individuals are defective precisely insofar as they fail to instantiate some important aspect of human nature.” Without final causality there is no real explanation of causal regularity in nature.
This is exactly where the finality of an individual natural kind comes into play. Human embryos regularly develop into infants, and not into giraffes, because they are teleologically ordered to do so in virtue of possessing a human nature. Once we see this, we can recognize that immanent causality, which we saw above as definitive of life, itself involves an appeal to finality insofar as the immanent causal processes are ultimately directed to the good of the individual to which they belong. Furthermore, that individual’s good is itself determined by its nature as an instance of a particular natural kind. Accordingly, the zygote is, and can be nothing else than, a human individual, fully possessed of the exact same nature as any other human individual at whatever level of development. Furthermore, as possessed of a human nature, all the essential properties of that nature necessarily belong to it, including rationality. Of course, that does not mean that the embryo manifests any of the actions that typically characterize rationality, such as abstract thought or use of language, and the writing of legal arguments.
Not even the writing of irrational arguments against the obvious humanity of life makes a human not rational in nature. Rather, the pro-choice position is simply a failure to manifest the rational nature of the writer. The embryo will manifest rationality upon maturing precisely because it is an instance of the natural kind human being, to which rationality belongs as an essential property. Only a rational being can abstract, that is, understand the characteristics that constitute the “nature” of a thing. The failure to recognize the nature of an unborn child is itself de-humanizing, that is, it is conduct unbecoming of a rational being. This is a philosophical conclusion from a set of scientific observations and related propositions, a view from correctly structured human reason and not a religious view at all.
[1] See, e.g., David S. Oderberg, Real Essentialism (2008).