Persons and the Moral Relevance of Their Capacities

Those who accept the following Rights Principle (RP) presumably also accept as a codicil thereto a Capacities Principle (CP):

RP. All persons have a right to life.

CP. All persons have a right to life even at times when they are not exercising any of the capacities whose exercise confers upon them the right to life.

I take it that most of us would take CP as spelling out what is implicit in RP. Thus few if any would hold RP in conjunction with the logical contrary of CP, namely

CCP. No person has a right to life at a time when he is not exercising at least one of the capacities whose exercise confers upon an individual its right to life.

Thus few if any will say that Jones, an adult human, lacks the right to life when he is sleeping, or passed out drunk, or under general anaesthetic, or temporarily incapacitated due to an auto crash, or having a serious stroke or heart attack, or reversibly comatose, or in some similar state. Nor would we say that Jones' right to life varies with his alertness (or any other mental variable) or his age. Suppose a male is at his prime (all things considered) at age 50. Few would say that a person under or over 50 has less of a right to life. And if anyone were to say that, I wouldn't consider it worthwhile to discuss moral questions with him.

RP, explicitly stated, is CP. Now suppose someone, call him 'Peter,' tries to mount an argument against CP. He begins by reminding us of a couple of conceptual truths:

CT1. A capacity C's being unexercised at time t excludes C's being exercised at t. (This is an analog of the principle that a thing's being a potential F at t excludes its being an actual F at t.)

CT2. The properties that make an exercised capacity exercised, or supervene upon a capacity's being exercised are not properties of the corresponding unexercised capacity. (This is an analog of the principle that the properties that make an actual F actual are not properties of the same thing when it was potentially F.)

From these conceptual truths, Peter then infers that CP is false. He reasons as follows. "Since the right to life supervenes upon the exercise of such capacities as rationality, agency, and the ability to make and implement plans, there is no right to life when none of them are being exercised." Suppose Peter's argument is sound and shows that CP is false. Then Peter's argument will have 'proved too much': it will have proved that RP is also false since CP is just an explicit statement of RP.

Of course, Peter might bite the bullet in one of two ways. He might concede that RP entails CP and reject both of them. Or he might cleave to RP while prising it apart from CP. He would then be holding RP in tandem with CCP. Either way, I would consider the discussion to be at an end. For then we would lack common moral ground for profitable discussion.

The right thing to say is that a person's right to life, which supervenes upon such capacities as rationality and agency, is had by the person not just at the times at which the capacities are exercised but at other times as well. It is the person's having of the capacity (whether exercised or not) that confers the right to life.

Young children lack even the capacities associated with moral personhood and rights-possession. But they have a second-order capacity, the capacity to develop these capacities. The potentialist grounds the right to life in the potential to develop the first-order capacities. If one argues against the potentialist by invoking the truisms that the potential is not actual and the properties of the actual are not properties of the potential, then one should also argue that first-order capacities are not enough to ground a right to life, and that the actual exercise of these capacities is necessary. But then one must accept the counterintuitive consequence that a person's right to life is had by him only when he is fully exercising such capacities as rationality, agency, and the ability to make and implement plans.