IF GOD DOESN’T WANT US TO EAT BABIES, WHY ARE THEY MADE OUT OF MEAT?: Why Sanchez’s notion of identity and moral worth is wack. For those of you coming late to the party, this started out with Russo’s post on science and abortion; Sanchez then said, Yeah, Russo’s right that if infanticide is wrong then abortion is wrong, but infanticide isn’t wrong unless you’re a random groundless theist. (You may have guessed that I’m paraphrasing.) You can follow the back-and-forth via the links on Russo’s page.

I’ve tried to indicate in earlier posts reasons for taking physical continuity and physical individuality seriously; but I think those claims slide quickly into the realm where reason is ineffectual because the premises clash too much, so the two sides can only rely on what Richard Rorty calls “redescription”–I give what I hope is the most compelling account of my position, and I try to connect it with your experience. Note that the fact that an argument must at some point become redescription does not mean the argument is flawed–in fact, if one disputant disagrees with the other deeply enough, any argument becomes redescription. For example, if the two parties disagree on the definition of reason, appealing to rational arguments just won’t go anywhere; first, a shared definition of reason would have to be accepted, and such a definition can only be proposed through redescription. Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying that this post will instead be about why Sanchez’s own position doesn’t meet the standards he himself has set. I know negative argument is always easier than positive, and I would offer positive if I thought it would actually address Sanchez’s concerns.

Final caveat, before we hit the main body of the post: You’ll notice that there are several different types of argument below. I take some of them more seriously than others; some I’m advancing not because I agree with them, but because I’m trying to speak from within Sanchez’s conceptual framework rather than my own; some are more “syllogistic” and others more “suggestive” or prudential. So if one argument leaves you really cold, please do keep reading; it’s possible you’ll be struck by something later on.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS POLICE

Sanchez: “‘[I]dentity’ is just, as I’ve said earlier, a shorthand for a cluster of other things like links of memory and disposition and character.” These things seem to include, for him, consciousness; reflectiveness; possibly the use of language (I can’t come up with another good reason that he separates our duties to consciousness-having humans from our duties to other kinds of beasties); hopes; plans; and desires. Throughout this post I’ll use the shorthands CRLHPDM (the M is memory) and “mentality” to signify this stuff.

A) This is awful shaky stuff on which to build a (libertarian!) case for abortion and infanticide. Once you’ve demonstrated these subjective attributes (the least subjective of which is probably the use of language, but even that can certainly be fudged), the state protects you; ’til then you’re fair game. I’d think a libertarian would see the danger here–that’s why I pointed out earlier that when the definition of who gets to live is this subjective, there are strong incentives to keep raising the bar. How much reflectivity, etc., must an unwanted, living human individual show before he merits state protection? Whatever you think about many popular slippery-slope arguments (I’ve posted about which ones I think do and do not work before), this seems like a swift and deadly slide waiting to happen.

B) Sanchez describes the body or physical continuity as a “placeholder” for what we really value: CRLHPDM. But what makes these things, in themselves, worthy of moral protection? Why couldn’t one argue that CRLHPDM are themselves placeholders for worthy, or beautiful, or loving, etc., states of mind? There’s nothing self-evidently valuable about a plan to watch “Animal Planet” with the sound off for a few hours (…I’ve done this), a desire to gossip and backstab, or a hope to get all the way down the sidewalk without once stepping on a crack. We value the abilities to CRLHPDM because they signal the potential for states of mind that are worthy in themselves; we don’t bother specifying which states of mind because, as Hayek or Postrel would leap to tell you, you can’t specify that stuff in advance. But if you argue, “Oh, but the person desiring/hoping for/reflecting on things in a lousy or base way–the person with a base consciousness–is nonetheless valuable because she has the potential, and is probably even now moving towards, deeper, richer, greater states of mind”–well, you’re in a bit of trouble. Because the infant, the fetus, the blastocyst also has this potential and is also even now moving toward its fulfillment–perhaps more slowly than the “Animal Planet” watcher, but hey, perhaps not.

C) To put matters another way, by rephrasing a challenge Sanchez offered to me: I know that Julian has a basic conviction that it’s wrong to kill beings with consciousnesses, but not why.

WHO IS JULIAN SANCHEZ?

Sanchez’s identification of personhood (or, more relevantly, individual human identity) with CRLHPDM gets him in trouble. I think he was starting to acknowledge this in his comments section: “…[A]s I suggested earlier, ‘personal identity,’ unlike the more precise logical concept of identity, is mostly a way of talking about certain kinds of continuity we care about and find morally important. … I don’t find (2) all that disturbing, though. Consider: is falling asleep really necessary to die? In other words, is even our waking consciousness really ‘continuous’? Perhaps it’s more like a high-speed strobe light; we wouldn’t notice the gaps because, of course, we’re not conscious in the gaps. If that’s the case, it might even be that we ‘die,’ in your sense, with every thought. But that doesn’t strike me as an important or frightening way of dying.”

This won’t do. It doesn’t matter how it “strikes” him; it strikes me as pretty frightening to be ripped limb from limb while still within one’s mother’s womb, but that doesn’t seem to matter to him. The problem of continuity of personal identity is bigger than he’s making it appear here.

For Sanchez’s view, personal identity is a flux, a will-o’-the-wisp; a new constellation of CRLHPDM emerges and changes from moment to moment. The life of a “person”–a mentality–is thus less than a second.

Sanchez tries to salvage personhood by saying, “Of course, Eve has done things she doesn’t remember, and it really was ‘still her’ that did them, in that the actions arose from a set of character dispositions sufficiently overlapping with the ones she currently holds.” But what can “sufficiently overlapping” mean? I’d wager that there are other 23-year-old Catholic chicks for whom the sum total of their CRLHPDM is more like mine right now than the sum total of the CRLHPDM of the-person-then-known-as-Laura-Eve-Tushnet’s were at age 7 or age 18 (“You converted to what?!”). Are these other Catholic chicks me, and Laura-at-age-7 not me?

I think this problem emerges most clearly in a hypothetical Sanchez uses to support his own position: the neural scan. I have big problems with this hypothetical (I still think it begs the question–although it’s a different question from the one I thought it was begging before!), but leave that aside–I’m planning a separate post about Sanchez’s hypotheticals, and the use of hypothetical arguments in general, which you’ll get later, maybe next week. For the moment, let’s just tweak the hypothetical. (When I revisited Sanchez’s comments section today, I was reminded that someone there had already gestured toward this approach.) Suppose instead of replicating my current neural patterns, the scan replicated neural patterns very slightly different–a mentality I could have, but don’t.

Is it me?

Let’s stipulate that the scan is more like me than my 18-year-old “self” would be. If you destroy my body, do I live on via the scan?

More fun: What if the scan replicates my mentality of four years ago?

What if you scan my mentality just as it is, but the new brain develops (due to either free will or the necessarily different surrounding circumstances, it doesn’t matter which) in a different direction? Perhaps it makes some sense to say, then, that my mentality has been “cloned.” But as those who support reproductive cloning are quick to remind us, my clone is not myself.

As far as I can tell, even accepting Sanchez’s understanding of identity, the neural-scan-brain is only “me” for the split second it perfectly mirrors “me”; and, consequently, I am only “me” for that split second.

Sanchez’s actual position turns out to be, “A person in a body once occupied by a person, or a body which was in the past and probably will be in the future occupied by a person [e.g. if the body is sleeping or unconscious or whatever], has the right to life. But a body that will probably be occupied by a person in the future, but hasn’t yet hosted a person, does not have the right to life.” Hence all the dead babies. Sanchez says he is not forced into this position (“Are the capacities that account for our moral worth less fully realized when we are unconscious, or just in a daze? Yes. Does our moral worth vary correspondingly? No. Does our moral worth vary with the maximum potential for (or past instantiation of) the realization of those capacities? Not above the minimum threshhold, because the difference between a very self-consciously reflective being which represents values and goals to itself [insert other features I’ve cited, etc.] and one which does all those things to a lesser extent is one of degree, not kind. Not to say that animals and other nonhuman beings deserve no moral respect, but my view is that our obligations to them are qualitatively very different”), but as they might say in Monty Python, that’s not argument, it’s just assertion.

Possibly Sanchez would prefer to define identity not as the constellation of CRLHPDM, but rather as the consciousness containing this constellation. But the consciousness is then defined by its contents. If “I” am “the consciousness containing constellation of CRLHPDM #436377A,” then when the reflections, memories, and/or desires (I’m not sure how much would have to change, since again, this is a flexible standard of identity in which I’m really not sure what Sanchez considers “minimal functioning necessary for rights,” “sufficient overlap to prove continuity of identity,” and so forth) change, the consciousness–the “I”–vanishes. How about a different definition of identity, not as CRLHPDM nor as the consciousness containing CRLHPDM but rather as the being who has this consciousness? I suspect that’s what Sanchez is actually getting at when he says my past (but unremembered) sixth-grade self is “sufficiently overlapping” with my current self. Maybe not; anyway, I think it’s the only coherent notion of identity he can hang on to. But if he does grab that notion–dude, what is this “being” if not the “further fact” of identity that Sanchez denies? What is this disembodied consciousness-having being, if not a soul?

WHY I AM WRITING THIS: Why spend so much metaphorical ink trying to convince Sanchez that killing babies is wrong? Five reasons, really: 1) I like the guy, 2) He’s smart, 3) Therefore I can sharpen my brain on his, 4) I think he tries to be a mensch, and 5) I hope our discussion will convince others that the “human is just a state of mind” (“human is just another lifestyle choice”? “human is a journey, not a destination”?) abortion-rights position is immoral, infanticidal, and incoherent. Thus, not menschly.

As in my previous post on this subject, I want to again stress that although the stuff above has gone in all kinds of wacky science-fictional, abstract directions, infanticide is for real. The ancient Romans, famously, did it. We’re doing it–check out partial-birth abortion. If there’s a slippery slope, we’re pretty far down. For all his argumentation, I doubt that Sanchez would actually counsel a female friend to smother her unwanted baby; I doubt he would help her do so. What he can do, though, is help to create a climate in which the abortion-rights argument slowly, slowly mutates into the infanticide-rights argument. The press is already helping him along, as witness all the headlines saying that the Born Alive Infants Protection Act is about “fetuses born alive” or “fetuses surviving outside the mother.” So as bizarre as all this might sound, I do think there are practical reasons to work on this particular line of argument.

All for now.