EMBRYOS AND STUFF: I’m a shank. Although I’d skimmed Julian’s last post in our argument over abortion (which turned into an argument over infanticide; some slopes really are slippery), I hadn’t read it carefully until I was reminded of it by his notes from his speech at the America’s Future Foundation cloning debate. So I’d like to briefly revisit points he made in both those posts. I don’t know that either of us will be able to make the best possible case for our respective positions–we are both struggling to hit the highest notes in our philosophical registers, and our voices show the strain. But I do think that my muddle is more coherent than his muddle….

I apologize in advance if I bring up points that he responded to directly during the panel. I wasn’t there; in one of life’s sardonic little rhymes, I had to volunteer that night at the pregnancy center. I’m also only going to address one of the many issues that group themselves under the heading “cloning”; I’m only going to talk about the destruction of pre-rational human individuals, whether they be cloned embryos, regular old embryos, newborns, or pre-linguistic young children. I’m not going to get into stuff like reproductive cloning, giving your baby a higher IQ or bat wings, and all that stuff, because the issues there are different. If you look to your left you’ll find two longer essays I wrote on embryo-destructive (therapeutic) and reproductive cloning. I have two things to say–one thing about alien babies, and one thing about mourning.

ALIEN BABIES: Julian asked me how I would respond if I met a rational alien. He assumed, correctly, that I would not kill the rational alien. (“Rational” here means–I think, although Julian’s fought rather shy of confirming this–simply being able to use language. It doesn’t mean fulfilling a Randian telos, or behaving as a perfect rational actor, etc. A four-year-old is “rational” in this sense, but a newborn is not.) I should make clear that saying, “All individual humans have value,” is not the same as saying, “Only individual humans have value.”

I wouldn’t kill the alien. But neither would I kill a baby alien! (assuming that these aliens have pre-rational stages, just as we do.) Julian wants to claim that I am really, in my heart of hearts, concerned only with rationality–with “mentality.” (For a cashing-out of that term, take a look at the previous posts in this dispute; here, this is probably the best place.) If I would treat a rational alien species differently from a non-rational alien species, doesn’t that mean that I really value rationality-as-such?

I think Julian is ignoring the difference between valuing individuals in a rational species, and valuing currently-existing rational mentalities. Will Wilkinson does this too, actually, when he accuses anti-cloners of assigning metaphysical status to a tangle of DNA. (Later, here, Wilkinson conflates not-gonna-be-rational-again individuals with pre-rational individuals. OTOH, he posted more complete notes than Julian did, so he wins in that regard.) The important thing about DNA is not that it happens to be a clump of human DNA–so is a toenail, or a foot, or a cancer, or a corpse. The important thing about the human DNA in, specifically, an embryo, is that it marks the presence of a living human individual. It is that individual whom I value. Individual rational beings go through more and less rational stages; our rationality develops; thus there is a period before we are rational. If I came across aliens who had rational and pre-rational stages, I would value these individual alien lives as I value individual, developing human lives. I would do this partly because the most plausible alternative–Julian’s “mentalities” view–has a lot of problems which I deal with here and which I don’t think he’s resolved; partly because until I am convinced that I have to, I won’t sanction infanticide (more on this at the end*); and partly because, as I’ve said before, I believe that the physical component to our individuality is both important and good.

* EDITED TO ADD: Oops, I forgot that I promised to talk about this. Will post on it later.

Moreover, let me just make a couple quick points on the alien analogy. It’s striking how human Julian’s aliens are! They’re sort of like the aliens on the original “Star Trek,” where an alien is basically a funny-colored human with a clipped, vaguely British accent. In order for the hypothetical to work here, the aliens must a) be “rational” in a way that humans can understand, and b) be able to express that rationality in a way that we recognize. In order for the parallel to really work, they need to go through pre-rational stages of development, just like humans. Now possibly an alien would tell me that its people don’t have a human-like conception of “individuality”; perhaps its species really does think of itself as mentalities. I’d listen to this alien, on the grounds that it probably understands itself better than I do; but I’d also be willing to subject its self-understanding to the same scrutiny I gave the “mentalities” position earlier, because I really do think that position is incoherent. I can, if I stretch, imagine aliens for whom a “mentalities” position would be coherent–this might make an excellent science fiction premise (I mean that, not trying to be snarky)–maybe. But those aliens would be extraordinarily difficult for us to understand. How would they set up their laws? Without physical individuality, how would we handle contracts between two mentalities, who were housed in bodies but have since vanished, leaving the new mentalities housed in their old bodies to pay the consequences? And so forth. What these confusions teach me is that it makes more sense to look at what we know about human life, and try to understand hypothetical aliens in terms of that, rather than trying to understand human babies in terms of hypothetical aliens. Or to put it more bluntly, some hypotheticals obscure more than they reveal. However, if this hypothetical has allowed me to clarify the difference between “all humans have value” and “only humans have value,” then it’s served some good purpose.

FOR WHOM NONE WILL GO MOURNING: In his AFF notes, Julian argues: “What do we think is so awful when someone we care about is killed? What makes it worse than a hamster’s death? Not, surely, the microstructure of the particular organism — we don’t lament that a particular kind of physical entity is gone. No, it’s that this person — with a unique perspective, with a way of being in the world, with projects and goals to pursue, who hated the smell of onions and liked Bob Dylan — because THAT has been snuffed out.”

Now, I think in context he’s attacking a position I don’t hold (the “only humans are valuable” position); but his argument would also apply to my position (“pre-rational individuals have rights too”). And I think he’s just straight-up wrong here in a bunch of different ways.

First, he’s wrong, factually, about what we mourn. Obviously the projects, goals, and perspectives are part of what we mourn–and a significant part, when we mourn someone who has had a chance to develop those projects, goals, and perspectives. But–what do we think is so awful when a baby dies? What do we think is so awful when a woman miscarries? It is the death of an individual who has never even had a chance to develop the projects, goals, and perspectives of a rational human.

Julian could respond that we actually value our own desires for that child–parents grieve because they wanted a baby, not because their baby died, if you see the difference. Again, I think this is just false. It is generally part of the truth–of course parents grieve partly because their hopes for their child will now never be realized. But they also just plain old grieve the death of the child. They grieve not only for their own closed-off futures, but for the snuffed-out future of the baby. Moreover, this account doesn’t explain grief over an abortion. There, the woman typically is not grieving the loss of her own goal of having a child. She simply grieves for the dead child. (I have no idea what the stats are on grieving after abortion. All I know is that one of the most surprising things about my work at the pregnancy center has been how many of the women we see either are personally grieving from one–even if they are considering aborting again–or know someone who is. Some of the women we counsel are startled at how strong and persistent their grief is. Some aren’t–some quickly move on, and that’s OK; emotions aren’t ethics, so I’m not trying to make someone feel bad about something she did that she can’t undo. Anyway, this whole digression was just to explain that I’d read a lot about how “post-abortion syndrome” is a myth, and I was pretty startled to see how frequent that sorrow is among the specific population [mostly black, low-income women; about half are members of Christian churches, the other half are mostly nothing-in-particular] I counsel. Sorry for digression.) Julian can respond here by saying that our culture has conditioned us to mourn the deaths of pre-rational individuals; but that cuts both ways, of course. If we allow that culture provokes mourning (which it does; I don’t know that the Romans got all too worked up over the children they exposed) then Julian can’t appeal to mourning to support his own position.

Second problem: This position strays close to defining people’s worth by the feelings they provoke in others. If I do not care for myself, and no one cares for me, then my death interrupts no one’s plans or hopes. Does that make my life worthless? Does that make the action of killing me morally equivalent to the action of persuading me to live, or covering me so I don’t die of exposure, or getting me to a hospital so I can take my medication?

Third problem, related to something I touched on above: What we mourn in other people’s deaths, and what we fear in our own, to some extent varies by culture. Does that mean that human worth similarly varies by culture? I assume that Julian would argue that in fact, some reasons for mourning are the kind of reasons he would encourage and/or base policy on, whereas other reasons for mourning he would discourage (not by being a jerk to individual mourners, of course, but through influencing the surrounding cultural climate–though this distinction is hard to pull off in practice, cf. discussion of mourning an abortion as “the forbidden grief”) and/or reject as a basis for policy decisions. So… how come?

AND FOR A CHEAP SHOT: In re Julian’s account of “summoning reasons into being”–a friend of mine once described this position as, “He wills reason; I will tacos.” She said snarkily.