Don’t get me wrong, I love animals (I’ve got two adorable and ridiculous westies of my own), but a recent article in Slate presents the issue of framing the abortion debate around consciousness. This presents the obvious problem of removing human exceptionalism. An ape who is self-conscious comes to have more rights than 22-week unborn baby who isn’t yet self-aware. A dog’s rights trump a newborn baby’s. Unfortunately, this idea isn’t new. Bioethicists such as Peter Singer have taken this idea to the extreme and, for decades, have been making arguments that animals are, in fact, persons and some humans are not, such as newborn babies and disabled people. I think it’s important that we not let other people frame the debate for us, but that we take control of it. Humans, whether they are unborn or born, disabled or perfectly healthy deserve to live for the simple fact that they are human.
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Consciousness is a red herring in this discussion. The key point is that human beings have a rational nature. They have the capacity to make morally signifcant choices, and that capacity exists from the beginning (ie. fertilization). See for example:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/daed.2008.137.1.23
It follows that if we were to discover an alien species with the capacity to make morally significant choices, we would have to acknowledge that they also deserve moral respect. Other species that currently exist on earth, however, do not have this capacity.
Yes, consciousness is a very arbitrary definition of whether someone is worthy of life or not, however, qualifying with capacity to rationalise doesn’t necessarily work either. What would you do about a sociopath? They don’t really fit into this tidy definition. This why defining factors by a person’s ability, mental capacity or state or other such things doesn’t work. People are born different. The thing that makes us all the same is that we are human and that’s what makes us unique, special, and worthy of life. We shouldn’t need anything more qualifying factors than that.
As a Trekkie, however, I don’t mind saying that Klingons and Vulcans and various other alien life may very well be worthy of life for the simple fact that they are Klingons and Vulcans and they, too, are special for who they are. Tribbles on the other hand . . . no. 😉
My wording above was not precise enough. Robert George (in the article linked above) says it much better:
Each individual of the human species
has a rational nature, even if disease or defect
blocks its full development and expression in
some individuals. If the disease or defect could
somehow be corrected, it would perfect the individual
as the kind of substance he is; it would
not transform him into an entity of a different
nature.
I think this covers off the case of the sociopath and many others for whom the capacity to make morally significant choices is not realized in practice.