Human Personhood and Human Dignity
Several thoughtful commenters have asked me to say more about human personhood and human dignity after yesterday’s post on Rand Paul’s argument against abortion on the grounds that human life begins at conception.
As I argued there, the fact that human life begins at conception doesn’t actually do any heavy lifting with regard to questions about human personhood or rights. Being a person means more than simply being alive. Think, for example, of the patient in the hospital whose cerebrum is fundamentally injured. The continued existence of the patient is not open to question: so long as she is breathing and her heart is pumping — functions that are regulated by the brainstem rather than the cererum — she is living.
At issue, though, is that the person who existed before the traumatic brain injury is now no longer in existence. All the things that made the patient who she was have left the body of the patient. These things are far more integral to our coneption of personhood — and of life itself — than the mere animal functioning of brainstem, heart, and lungs (which can be duplicated by machine). What cannot be duplicated or replaced is the sense of self, the “I” that I argue makes us persons and from which human dignity, the source of our human rights, is derived.
I don’t want to suggest that we achieve dignity through rational thought or action, i.e., that we earn our dignity in the way that Kant suggests; instead, my argument is that dignity arises from our higher brain function. In particular, dignity is a function of our self-consciousness, our ability to talk and think about ourselves.
The Greek δόξα, from which dignity is derived, is defined as “the opinion which others have of one, estimation, repute.” While this ancient concept was thought to rely on the way we were perceived by others, I want to argue that of far greater importance is the opinion we have of ourselves and, in particular, the stories we tell about ourselves. My dignity is bound up with my answer to the most fundamental identity question, “Who am I? [which] will normally address what is most salient in one’s sense of self.” This narrative identity, David DeGrazia notes, “involves our self-conceptions, our sense of what is most important to who we are.”Bound up with my narrative identity is the sense that I can make something of myself; it is the ability to posit a future that I have a hand in shaping (which can be traced back at least as far as Nietzsche and has been updated by contemporary theorists like Ronald Dworkin and Richard Rorty). DeGrazia puts this especially cogently: “Much of what matters (to most of us, anyway) is our continuing existence as persons—beings with the capacity for complex forms of consciousness—with unfolding self-narratives and, if possible, success in self-creation.”
Ultimately, then, I argue that personhood and dignity are bound up together, that one cannot be a human person without the ability — derived from organized cortical brain activity — to feel as though there is a “I” in the center of one’s brain, pulling levers and adjusting dials (even though we know that, in fact, this is simply an evolutionary strategy developed by our genes to make ours brains better, more clever ones). This “I” amounts to a feeling of selfhood that, finally, accounts for our having dignity and being persons. As I conclude in my book, “It is, in my estimation, the feature that separates human persons from human animals and, so far as we know, from all other animals.”
Though the patient with the traumatic brain injury and the person she was before the injury are the same biological animal, the person died when her cerebral cortex, the self-creating part of her brain, stopped functioning. The patient with the traumatic brain injury is no longer a rights-bearing person because the patient does not possess the equipment necessary for personhood and dignity. The same is obviously true of the blastocyst, insofar as it’s simply a ball of cells and has no brain whatsoever.
In the end, I think human life alone is not enough to provide us with rights, that a heartbeat — which can be accomplished entirely by machines — doesn’t require governmental action on my behalf. Indeed, in the cases at issue here, the idea of “my” in “my behalf” doesn’t really have any meaning, as without higher brain function, I cannot conceive of myself at all. That’s why I argue that our rights hinge not simply on our bodily functions but on our dignity. Certain fetuses, on my reading, cannot properly be understood to be bearers of dignity and are thus not the bearers of rights.
While I have no doubt that some people will want to suggest problems with this argument — and I look forward to hearing them! — I think it’s a much stronger position than the one put forward by people like Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, or my thoughtful commenters. First of all, it contains an explanation about why human persons have special rights that require governmental protection while other living animals do not. Secondly, it provides us with the measuring tool of higher brain function — which ensoulment clearly does not provide — for making decisions that would potentially infringe on the rights of women. And, finally, it keeps religious belief away from a heated public policy debate, ensuring that people who believe that blastocysts are the beloved children of God are entitled to that belief but are not entitled to enforce it on anyone else.
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 444.
![The problem with Peter Singer’s account is not only that a lot of people would consider it to be monstrous but also that it’s based on what I take to be an unsupportable distinction.
At what point, one might justifiably wonder, does a fetus gain a right to life: conception, viability, birth, or some other time? Famously, Peter Singer has argued “that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person” (Writings on an Ethical Life, 160). On this point, he and I are in agreement: fetuses are not self-conscious, cannot engage in self-creation, and are not bearers of dignity.
But Singer goes much farther: “Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either” (Ibid.). The reason, on my reading, that Singer goes too far with his suggestion about the permissibility of infanticide is that he puts too much weight on the psychological aspect of the human mind and not enough on the biological.
It might well be the case that we who are persons do not have strong psychological connections to the infants we were, but – as yet – we aren’t certain. We know, however, that healthy infants’ brains display organized cortical brain activity (OCBA) and, David Boonin argues, we can measure both the beginning and ending of this “electrical activity in the cerebral cortex of the sort that produces recognizable EEG readings” (A Defense of Abortion, 115).Given that, Boonin’s argument for using OCBA as the standard by which to judge whether a fetus is a person makes a good deal of sense. If OCBA is not present, we would be hard pressed to make a case for the self-creative feature of the human mind about which I’ve already said so much. For the cerebral cortex must be working in a organized manner before anyone can claim that the brain has created the sense of self that is the key feature of personhood.
If we are drawing lines – and with questions of birth and death it often appears that we must – then the line should be drawn at the earliest stage possible. With regard to self-consciousness and dignity, it seems to me that Boonin’s line allows much less room for error than Singer’s. Although it might very well be the case that selfhood (as we understand it) begins in infancy – and with it, dignity and personhood – Boonin suggests that we draw the line at the 25th week of pregnancy; the reason is that there is “ample evidence to suggest that [OCBA begins] to occur sometime between the 25th and 32nd week” (Ibid.).
We might push the line back a bit, however, and adopt an even more conservative estimate about OCBA by drawing the line at 20 weeks; as Boonin concedes, “Burgess and Tawia identify 20 weeks of gestation as ‘the most conservative location we could plausibly advocate’ as the beginning of what they call ‘cortical birth,’ because it is at this point that ‘the first “puddle” of cortical electrical activity’ of an ‘extremely rudimentary nature’ begins to appear in brief spurts” (128). Adopting this position – rather than Singer’s – would be to argue for a fetal right to life at the 20th week of pregnancy (the earliest time at which it is possible for OCBA to occur) and, of course, to prohibit things like infanticide.
This is, of course, a somewhat radical position, as it suggests that the ruling in Roe v. Wade – already controversial enough – needs to be reconsidered in favor of limiting some abortions. While many would argue that redrawing this line is wildly problematic, those who would most feel the effect of doing so are those who suggest that fetuses are persons with rights from the moment of conception, for Boonin notes that “even if we push back the gray area from 25 weeks to 20 weeks, it will still turn out that 99 percent of abortions take place before the fetus acquires a right to life” (Ibid.).[1] In the end, tying the permissibility of abortion to the absence of organized cortical brain activity seems to have a limited effect on public policy and squares a difficult issue with the nonreligious understanding of personhood I advance in my book.
[1] This does, however, affect that notion – drawn from the ruling in Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey – that viability is an important moment to consider in the life of a fetus. As William Cooney suggests – in “The Fallacy of All Person-Denying Arguments for Abortion,” 8 Journal of Applied Philosophy 2 (1991) – it is not: “Does a 5-month-old fetus then become a person when that stage of technology exists? Can personhood be a condition relative to and dependent on technology?” (161). If technology were to allow for earlier viability, this would not change the facts about personhood because a viable pre-OCBA fetus lacks a sense of self and, consequently, dignity and rights.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/33b7359f79f1179d0f9fa678e8d3030c/tumblr_mjwuk17nM61qzy2emo1_500.png)
