Maverick Philosopher

Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

Here at MavPhil Strictly Philosophical

Why Are We Discussing This?

Here:

. . . members of the media were mostly interested in my finding that 96% of the 5,577 biologists who responded to me affirmed the view that a human life begins at fertilization.

It was the reporting of this view—that human zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are biological humans—that created such a strong backlash. 

Why is this being discussed? There is simply no reasonable question as to when an individual biologically human life begins.  It begins at fertilization. That is not to say (but neither is it to deny) that normative personhood begins at conception.  That is a further and much more difficult question. It  is the question about when a biologically human individual becomes a rights-possessor, where one of the rights is the right to life. 

Consider a fetus, using the term in the narrow sense as above. If it is the offspring of biologically human parents, then, self-evidently,  it is biologically human. What else could it be? Bovine? Porcine? Lupine?  Not even Wolfman Jack was lupine in his pre-natal existence.

You don't need to be a biologist to know that biologically human parents have biologically human offspring. You also don't need to be a biologist to know that in the typical case human fetuses are living organisms. What else would they be? Dead? Is every birth still birth?  You would have to be profoundly ignorant to think that a biologically human being begins to live when it takes its first breath.  One does not come into existence as a human individual when one is born.

Don't ask: When does life begin?  This question is insufficiently specific to be tractable.  It is ambiguous as between phylogeny and ontogeny, and as between human and non-human.  Presumably you are not asking when life first appeared on Earth. Nor are you asking when human life first appeared on Earth. Define your terms and formulate the question precisely. These are interesting questions, but they are not relevant to the abortion debate.

Ask this: When does an individual biologically human life begin?  The answer is clear: at conception. There is nothing to discuss and you don't need no stinkin' survey of 5, 557 biologists to know the answer! (And what's with the dissenting 4%?)

Ask this: When does an individual biologically human life first acquire rights? There is much to discuss here, and the answer is not obvious.

See the entries in my Abortion category for my answer to the last question, especially those having to do with the Potentiality Argument.

The Orwellian Left and Abortion

For leftists, words are weapons. Nothing new here. If you have been paying attention, however, you will have noticed that their weaponization of language is becoming increasingly Orwellian.

Case in point: OPPOSITION to abortion is now 'racist.' 'Racist' has long been a verbal cudgel in the hands (mouths?) of leftists, elastic in its meaning, but now an Orwellian twist is added. It makes some sense to say that abortion is 'racist' because it disproportionately affects pre-natal blacks. But to say that OPPOSITION to abortion is racist is just insane.

Not only is truth not a leftist value, sense isn't either. Being a lefty means not having to make sense.

The Democrats are now a hard-left party. So I ask one more time: Why are you still a Dem?

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

Why do the powerful arguments against abortion have such little effect?

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence.  Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail.  Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media -- combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right?  Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer.  But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot. 

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo. 

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony. 

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves. 

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

Shakespeare on the Fire Down Below

Like a Moth to the Flame (on the lessons to be learned from Anne-Marie Zamora's murder of the logician Jean van Heijenoort)

Addendum

The Latin above is 1 John 2:16: "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." (KJV)

Omne quod est in mundo, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et superbia vitae . . . .

Why do the powerful arguments against abortion have such little effect?

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence.  Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail.  Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media -- combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right?  Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer.  But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot. 

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo. 

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony. 

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves. 

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

Shakespeare on the Fire Down Below

Like a Moth to the Flame (on the lessons to be learned from Anne-Marie Zamora's murder of the logician Jean van Heijenoort)

Addendum

The Latin above is 1 John 2:16: "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." (KJV)

Omne quod est in mundo, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et superbia vitae . . . .

Orwellianism of the Day

"Abortion is health care." 

I didn't make that up. It is from a protester's sign.

Advice for Leftists: Don't Call it Infanticide

Call it fourth trimester abortion. That should appeal to your twisted Orwellian sensibility. Why shouldn't infanticide also be celebrated?

Jews and Abortion

Here:

Jewish law does not share the belief common among abortion opponents that life begins at conception, nor does it legally consider the fetus to be a full person deserving of protections equal those accorded to human beings. In Jewish law, a fetus attains the status of a full person only at birth. Sources in the Talmud indicate that prior to 40 days of gestation, the fetus has an even more limited legal status, with one Talmudic authority (Yevamot 69b) asserting that prior to 40 days the fetus is “mere water.” Elsewhere, the Talmud indicates that the ancient rabbis regarded a fetus as part of its mother throughout the pregnancy, dependent fully on her for its life — a view that echoes the position that women should be free to make decisions concerning their own bodies.

The above illustrates the pathetically low level of public discourse about abortion. Mere biology refutes the "mere water" nonsense, and the first clause of the first sentence. The only bit worthy of comment is the final sentence.

Many say that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body and any part thereof.  This is the Woman's Body Argument:

1) The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2) A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3) A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (1) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (2) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction or the removal of swarts and tumors, etc.  Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (2) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (2) is acceptable, but (1) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

The argument falls victim to an equivocation on 'part.'

For those who cannot think without a pictorial aid:

No doubt, women have reproductive rights. For example they have the right not to be forced by the state to procreate. But it cannot be assumed that the right to an abortion is automatically one of them. There is a grave moral issue here that Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and others of their ilk do not want you to see. But it is not going to go away and you need to address it as honestly as you can without obfuscatory rhetoric and with attention to biological fact.

Slavery, Abortion, and 'Skin in the Game'

Slavery is is widely and rightly regarded as among the worst of moral evils. Abortion is not. On the contrary: the latter is now celebrated in some circles. Why the difference? Why the difference when both are grave moral evils? 'Skin in the game' plays an explanatory role. Not the whole role, perhaps, but a major one.

No one owns slaves or has an economic interest in them. There's no  skin in the game. But everyone is naturally concupiscent. There's plenty of skin in that game both literally and figuratively.  Add to the natural the social: Western societies do little or nothing  to restrict, and quite a lot to facilitate, the pursuit of sexual gratification for its own sake.  Now add to the social the technological: safe and reliable birth control and safe and reliable abortion. The resulting trifecta of mutually reinforcing factors has brought us to the current decadent and hedonistic pass.

It is easy to think clearly and disinterestedly about slavery and its immorality since we have no stake in it. There are no passions or interests to suborn the intellect. Denunciation of slavery and its real or imagined consequences such as 'institutional' or 'systemic' racism also allows one a cost-free way of displaying one's supposedly high moral status. One doesn't have to give up anything or do anything. One signals one's virtue by one's bien-pensant attitude. At most one will be called upon to mouth some politically correct pieties.  One's 'thinking' merges easily with thoughtless groupthink.

To think clearly about the immorality of abortion on demand at any stage of fetal development for any reason, however, requires one courageously to cut against the grain of groupthink and to resist one's natural desire for unlimited sex without consequences.

For one whose mind  is in the grip of the Zeitgeist and his loins in the grip of concupiscence, rational argument arrives too late. 

Can One Reasonably Hold that Abortion is Murder but Ought to be Legal?

Victor Reppert poses the following important question on his Facebook page:

What, if anything, is wrong with holding, at the same time that a) Abortion is murder, and b) abortion should be legal?

It's not a logical contradiction, is it? Is it merely counterintuitive? Is it un-Christian?

One way of reaching this position might be to hold that, given a metaphysical or religious perspective, you view abortion as murder, but, living in a society where large segments of the population don't share that perspective, you don't think it reasonable to pass laws imposing that view on the general public.

The propositions in question are not logically contradictory. But one can generate a logical inconsistency by adding an eminently plausible  proposition.  Consider the following antilogism:

a) Abortion is murder
b) Abortion should be legal
c) Murder should be illegal.

The triad is logically inconsistent: the constituent propositions cannot all be true.  

Now (c) is the least rejectable (the least rejection-worthy) of the three propositions. For if the law does not proscribe murder, what would it proscribe? The purpose of the State, at a bare minimum, is to protect life, liberty, and property. (Call it the Lockean triad.) If the State is morally justified, then its passing and enforcing of laws is morally justified. Among these laws are laws pertaining to the killing of human beings. Without going any deeper into it, I will just assert what most of us will accept, namely, that the intentional killing of innocent human being is morally wrong and therefore ought to be made illegal by a morally justified State.

In short, we ought not reject (c). Therefore, one who accepts (a) ought to reject (b). Transforming the antilogism into a syllogism, we get:

Murder should be illegal
Abortion is murder
Ergo
Abortion should be illegal.

Reppert ought to be persuaded by this argument since he accepts the minor and I have given a powerful argument for the major.

Reppert asks whether it is reasonable to pass laws against abortion in a society in which large segments of the population do not oppose abortion.  Well, was it reasonable to pass laws against slavery in a society in which large segments of the population did not oppose slavery?

Suppose we become even more morally depraved than we are now. We get to the point where the majority considers infanticide  morally acceptable. Would it be reasonable to do away with the laws proscribing it?  Or the laws proscribing child pornography? Or rape laws? Should the law merely reflect the going moral sentiment no matter how decadent it becomes?

I'll leave you with these questions.

Chelsea Chucklehead the Orwellian

According to Chelsea Clinton, who is self-avowedly "deeply religious," to stem the slaughter of the pre-natal would be "unchristian." But of course one cannot expect the child of Bill and Hillary to have a functioning moral compass. 

Mockery and derision are essential weapons in modern political warfare for the simple reason that our enemies, bereft of moral sense, cannot, most of them, be engaged on the plane of reason. We do well to turn their Alinskyite tactics against them. 

But if there are a few lefties still in possession of a modicum of moral sense, I offer the following argument, sincerely meant and free of invective.

Suppose I want to convince you of something. I must use premises that you accept. For if I argue from premises that you do not accept, you will reject my argument no matter how rigorous and cogent my reasoning.

So how can we get through to those liberals who are willing to listen? Not by invoking any Bible-based or theological premises. And not by deploying the sorts of non-theological but intellectually demanding arguments found in my Abortion category. The demands are simply too great for most people in this dumbed-down age.

Liberals support inclusivity and non-discrimination. Although contemporary liberals abuse these notions, as I have documented time and again, the notions possess a sound core and can be deployed sensibly. To take one example, there is simply no defensible basis for discrimination against women and blacks when it comes to voting. The reforms in this area were liberal reforms, and liberals can be proud of them. A sound conservatism, by the way, takes on board the genuine achievements of old-time liberals.

Another admirable feature of liberals is that they speak for the poor, the weak, the voiceless. That this is often twisted into the knee-jerk defense of every underdog just in virtue of his being an underdog, as if weakness confers moral superiority, is no argument against the admirableness of the feature when reasonably deployed.

So say this to the decent liberals: If you prize inclusivity, then include unborn human beings. If you oppose discrimination, why discriminate against them? If you speak for the poor, the weak, and the voiceless, why do you not speak for them?

 

More Proof that 'Progressives' are Morally Obtuse

Re: Twitter's Content Blockage:

Some examples of this supposedly offensive content include pictures of children developing in the womb and even simple ultrasound images of babies — like the ones that expectant parents hang on their refrigerator doors. 

Twitter's actions suggest it’s OK for Planned Parenthood to tweet that a woman has a right to an abortion, but when I tweet and try to promote that a baby has a right to life, Twitter considers that inflammatory. 

Twitter's actions suggest it's fine for Planned Parenthood to tweet that taxpayers who don’t want to fund the nation’s largest abortion chain are "extremists," but when I tweet that there are alternative options to Planned Parenthood, Twitter calls that an offensive violation of policy.

And you are still a Democrat?  Please be aware of what you are voting for when you vote Democrat.

The Left: Morally Obtuse and Economically Retarded

As witness the Deep Thoughts of Chelsea Clinton:

Has abortion made America more prosperous? Chelsea Clinton seems to think so.

The former first daughter spoke recently at a “Rise up for Roe” event in New York City, one of a series of meetings organized by NARAL and Planned Parenthood to oppose the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In the course of her remarks, she suggested that one way to strengthen support for keeping abortion legal and readily available is to emphasize what a boon Roe v. Wade has been for the US economy.

Read it all, as we say in the blogosphere.

Chelsea in 2020!

Are There Reproductive Rights?

I should think so. The right to procreate is one; the right not to procreate is another.  But no one has the right to kill an innocent human being. So no one has the right to kill an innocent human recently born, not even the mother.  Infanticide cannot count as a reproductive right. Now if there can be no right to infanticide, how can there be a right to kill an innocent pre-natal human being? (The 'innocent' is of course redundant but helps underscore the obvious for the inattentive.)

The point is more easily digested if you think of a third trimester fetus. (By the way, contrary to what some conservative zealots think, 'fetus' is not a question-begging or derogatory term. In fact, its emotional neutrality recommends it.) 

The natal -prenatal difference is not a difference that makes a moral difference. Or do you think that a difference in spatial location makes a moral difference?  There is a difference between killing me in my house and killing me outside my house, but that difference in spatial location does not a moral difference make.

You will tell me that there is a temporal difference between the pre-natal and the natal. True. The difference may be a day, a week, a month, a trimester. These temporal differences do not make a moral difference either: they do not justify a difference in treatment.  Compare the temporal difference between the neonate and the two-year-old. That is not a difference that translates into a difference in rights or a difference in the moral gravity of maltreatment.

I invite you to think of the other differences and reflect on whether they make a moral difference. For example, the neonate breathes on its own whereas it did not while in the mother. Is that a difference that makes a moral difference? If it does, then is the right to life of an adult on a ventilator in any way impaired by his having to use such a device to breathe?

You say a woman has a right to do anything she wants with her own body? I'll grant you that if you grant me that the healthy human individual developing within her is not her body. It is not her body nor a part of her body in any sense of 'part' that could justify her doing anything she wants with it.  For those who cannot think without a pictorial aid:

So yes, women have reproductive rights. But it cannot be assumed that the right to an abortion is automatically one of them, or even that there is a right to an abortion. There is a grave moral issue here that Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and others of their ilk do not want you to see. But it is not going to go away and you need to address it as honestly as you can.

Does a woman have a right to do whatever she wants with her own body?

If I grant you that, will you grant me that the fetus growing within her is not her own body, but a separate body, a separate biological individual, a separate life?

Related: The Woman's Body Argument

Should a Pro-Lifer Advocate the Killing of Abortionists?

Mike Valle on his Facebook page raises the title question in these terms: "If you believe that abortion is truly murder, then wouldn't it be incumbent on you to kill an abortion doctor? After all, wouldn't you kill a serial killer in the act? " One way to construe the question is as follows. Is it logically consistent for a pro-lifer to hold both of the following:

a) Abortion is morally wrong.

b) Killing abortionists is morally wrong. 

To focus the issue, let's consider only cases of third-trimester abortion in which both fetus and mother are healthy and normal, the pregnancy did not result from rape or incest, and the mother's carrying the child to term will not endanger the mother's life.  To sharpen the issue even more, suppose the fetus is likely to be born within a week.  

To my mind, abortion in a case like this is a grave moral evil for reasons I supply elsewhere, for example here. If you agree with me on this, is it "incumbent on you," i.e., morally necessary for you, to at least try to kill any late-term abortionists you are in a position to kill?  Or is it morally justifiable to hold both (a) and (b)?

Answer A. Yes, one can hold both (a) and (b) because all intentional killing of humans is wrong, regardless of who the humans are, what they have done and what they have left undone.  This pacifist answer is no good because it rules out killing in self-defense, just war, capital punishment, and suicide, and surely at least one of these is morally justifiable.  Surely some intentional killing of human beings is morally justifiable.

Answer B. Yes, because abortion is legal and we have a moral obligation to uphold the rule of law by obeying particular laws and by not taking the law into our own hands. This is a much better answer.  The rule of law is a precious thing because civil order is a precious thing. Laws enacted and enforced by proper procedures have a prima facie claim on our respect. To tolerate mass lawbreaking is to invite social chaos. We should work within the system to have the abortion laws changed.

Answer B is better than Answer A although it is not quite satisfactory. I myself am not about to kill abortion providers, nor do I advocate that anyone else do so.  In explanation I would invoke something like Answer B.

But if I am not willing to kill abortion providers, do I really believe that abortion is a grave moral evil?  Yes, I really believe it. My belief is demonstrated by such actions as voting and arguing against abortion over many, many entries that have cost me a lot of time and effort without making me a cent.   Note that if a person lacks the full courage of his convictions, in the sense that he is not willing to sacrifice his life or liberty for them, it does not follow that he lacks convictions.  Most of us are moral mediocrities and I am no exception. The fact that my efforts to save the unborn are paltry and insignificant does not show that I do not really believe that abortion is wrong. 

Let Roe Go

Megan McArdle:

I am myself uneasily pro-choice. Moreover, just a few days ago, I argued that the increasingly bitter judicial wars tearing apart today’s politics can only be ended with more judicial deference to legislatures and to precedent. It stands to reason that I would be dismayed by the politically electrifying prospect that Roe might be overruled entirely. But I wouldn’t be dismayed. I’d be glad to see Roe go, as quickly as possible.

[. . .]

Somewhat paradoxically, the way to make abortion less contentious is to throw the matter back to the states so that people can argue about it. Debating the difficult decisions regarding gestational age and circumstances would force people to confront the hard questions that abortion entails, which tends to have a moderating effect on extreme opinions.

Returning the matter to the states would give most people a law they can live with, defusing the rage that permeates politics and has more than once culminated in acts of terrorism against doctors who perform abortions.

Secular Arguments Against Abortion

A question rarely asked is the one I raise in this post:  

Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises?

Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1) Infanticide is morally wrong.
2) There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infancticide.
Therefore
3) (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument.  

Now suppose someone demands to know why one should accept the first premise.  Present this argument:

4) Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong.
5) Infanticide is the killing of innocent human beings.
Therefore
1) Infanticide is morally wrong.

This second argument, like the first, invokes no specifically religious premise.  Admittedly, the general prohibition of homicide -- general in the sense that it admits of exceptions -- comes from the Ten Commandments which is part of our Judeo-Christian heritage.  But if you take that as showing that (4) is religious, then the generally accepted views that theft and lying are morally wrong would have to be adjudged religious as well.

But I don't want to digress onto the topic of the sources of our secular moral convictions, convictions that are then codified in the positive law.  My main point is that one can oppose abortion on secular grounds. A second point is that the two arguments I gave are very powerful.  If you are not convinced by them, you need to ask yourself why.

Some will reply by saying that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body.  This is the Woman's Body Argument:

6) The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
7) A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
8) A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (6) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (7) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (7) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (7) is acceptable, but (6) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

I am making two points about the Woman's Body Argument.  The first is that  my rejection of it does not rely on any religious premises.  The second is that the argument is unsound. 

Standing on solid, secular ground one has good reason to oppose abortion as immoral in the second and third trimesters (with some exceptions, e.g., threat to the life of the mother).  Now not everything immoral should be illegal.  But in this case the objective immorality of abortion entails that it ought to be illegal for the same reason that the objective immorality of the wanton killing of innocent adults requires that it be  illegal.

A Common Abortion Mistake

It is often said that  a human fetus is a potential human life.  Not so!  A human fetus is an actual human life. 

Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother.  It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And  let's be clear that a potential X is not an X.  A potential oak tree is not an oak tree.  A potential neonate is not a neonate.  A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker.  But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn.  And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.

The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities.  So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition.  You need to find a morally relevant difference -- not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference -- between the fetus and any born human individual.

No Voice for Men in Abortion Debate? Do Arguments Have Testicles?

Michael in Russia writes,

Got a question for you. I am a pro-abortion man (or even more generally a pro-death man since I support capital punishment too). You strongly oppose the former. I'm not going to repeat all familiar pros and cons. Rather, I've got one peculiar premise which I have never met in discussion of the issue and which I take to be the first step in dealing with it—namely, I hold that we, men, should have no voice at all in this business. Since no man has ever known what it is (like to be a bat) to conceive, to bear, and to give birth, and it appears that no one is going to, I maintain that this issue must be decided on strictly by women whatever the outcome. It's utterly undemocratic, but I'm not a fan of egalitarian democracy. So, what do you think of this: no voice for men in abortion debate, that's strictly women's business?

Thank you for reading, Michael, and thank you for writing.

It warms my heart to hear that you are pro-death - - when it comes to capital punishment.  You are probably aware of my arguments for the latter's moral justifiability in some cases and in some venues. (In a place where the justice system is unfair, I would be inclined to support a moratorium on the death penalty.)  I also maintain, pace the late, great Nat Hentoff, that it is logically consistent to be for capital punishment and against abortion. 

My view in one clean sentence: Abortion is morally prohibited in most cases while capital punishment is morally required in some cases.

Now on to your question: Ought men have a say in the abortion debate?  Here is my short answer:

Arguments don't have testicles!

But that bumper sticker wants unpacking. 

An argument for or against abortion is good or bad regardless of the sex of the person giving the argument.  And similarly  for race. One doesn't have to be black to have a well-founded opinion about the causes and effects of black-on-black crime.  The point holds in general in all objective subject areas. For purposes of logical appraisal, arguments can and must be detached from their producers and consumers.

Here is an argument. "Infanticide is morally wrong; there is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion; therefore, abortion is morally wrong." The soundness/unsoundness of the argument cannot pivot on the sex of the producers or consumers of the argument.

Suppose someone argues that repeat-offending rapists should be be chemically or in some other way castrated by the state. Would the fact that men and men alone would bear the burden of the punishment be any reason to maintain that women have no right to a say in the matter? No.

It is also clear that one can be a competent gynecologist without being a woman, and a competent specialist in male urology without being a man.  Only a fool would discount the advice of a female urologist on the treatment of erectile dysfunction on the ground that the good doctor is incapable of having an erection. 

"You don't know what it's like, doc, you don't have a penis!" 

What's it like to be a pregnant woman? 

In objective matters like these, the 'what it's like' made famous by Thomas Nagel is not relevant.  One needn't know what it's like to have morning sickness to be able to prescribe an effective palliative.  I know what it is like to be a man 'from the inside,' but my literal (spatial) insides can be better known by certain women.

What's more, we white men can have a sort of knowledge by analogy of what women and cats and blacks feel. For example, men and women both urinate and defecate, and typically a certain pleasure accompanies these activities. I know by analogy what it is like for a woman to micturate and feel relief and a modicum of pleasure even though my modus micturiendi  is somewhat different.

Defecation triggers orgasm in some women. I have never experienced that, but I can imagine it. Similarly with menstrual cramps, morning sickness, and other miseries of pregnancy.  I am a sympathetic and sensitive guy as everyone knows. To be honest, I am a bit womanish in this regard, and I don't intend 'womanish' as a term of derogation.

I don't know what it is like to be a bat, and I will grant that bat qualia are beyond our ken even analogically; but I have some sense of what it is like to be a cat inasmuch  as cats manifestly feel analogs of such human emotions as fear, surprise, annoyance, etc.

I have no idea, however, what my cat Max Black feels when he retromingently takes a leak.

Do I know what it is like to be black? Well, I know what it is like to disrespected. So I know what it is like to feel the hurt and the rage of a black motorist who is stopped by a cop merely for 'driving while black.'  

But do I know what it is like to be a slave?  About as well as contemporary blacks do in the West none of whom are or have ever been slaves.

"But you have never faced the prejudice blacks experience." Not that particular prejudice, but plenty of other kinds.

At this point tribalism enters the discussion.  The more we tribalize, the more we shrink the space of objectivity, reason, and argument.  The more we tribalize, the more we reduce ourselves to mere tokens of racial, ethnic, and other types. The more we do that, the more we miss the person, the free agent, the rational being. 

There are blacks who would say to me, "You have no idea what it is like to be black!" I say, "Bullshit! You have incarcerated yourself in your tribal identity."  Same with women who feel (that's exactly the right word) that abortion is a women's issue exclusively. Well, it is not. It is an objective issue that affects both males and females. Stop feeling and start thinking.

That should be obvious. Among those aborted are males and females. So abortion cannot be solely a concern of women.

So let us set our tribalism aside and approach the question as rational beings on the plane of reason and argument where no testicles are to be found.

California and Abortion

The first is becoming as morally repugnant as the second. Here:

California has long promoted abortion on demand, and even forces taxpayers to pay for elective abortions through its state Medicaid program. But one of their latest efforts is really beyond the pale. Abortion advocates in the state recently became alarmed that the burgeoning number of pro-life Pregnancy Care Centers (they now outnumber abortion facilities nationally 5 to 1) neither offer abortions to their clients, nor refer women for them. To do so would be antithetical to their mission. But in response, groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood convinced California to pass AB 775, which requires pregnancy centers to post signs on the walls of their waiting rooms (or by other means) informing clients that California offers “immediate free or low-cost access” to abortion, along with the phone number of the county social services office. In other words, this requirement would force pro-life doctors, nurses, and staff to advertise for free abortions, plain and simple.

More proof that leftists are morally obtuse.

The Left's Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm

Among the leftists who profess deep concern over the effect on children of the President's salty talk are  leftists who endorse the killing of disabled unborn children.  I call that misplaced moral enthusiasm. Which is worse: mocking a disabled reporter as Trump is alleged to have done, or the late-term abortion of the disabled unborn?  

The hypocrisy is unbearable. Leftists who have worked tirelessly to normalize crudity and wanton self-expression well beyond the bounds of social responsibility now have the chutzpah to complain that POTUS is crude, obnoxious, and lacking in gravitas?

Leftists are moral idiots.

And you are still a Democrat?

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Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence.  Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail.  Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media -- combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right?  Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer.  But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot. 

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo. 

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony.

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves. 

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The Sad State of Public Discourse in an Age of Ideology

The inability to follow an argument and respond reasonably and civilly to what an author actually maintains is a mark of the present miserable state of public discourse. Even prominent conservative commentators display this inability. A recent example is the Never-Trumper and NRO contributor David French's febrile flailing at Tully Borland.  Professor Borland ignited a firestorm of controversy when he presented an argument why Alabamans ought to vote for Roy Moore. Chad McIntosh, in a fine defense of Borland, accurately restates Borland's main argument:

Comparing Moore to opponent Doug Jones, Borland argues that a Moore victory would be the lesser of the two evils in a binary election in which these are the only two viable options. Why? Well, even if Moore is guilty of sexual assault and seeking sexual relationships with girls as young as 14 some 40 years ago, as accused, that is very unlikely to have policy ramifications today, whereas Jones supports a policy of unrestricted abortion today.

Don’t be misled here: Jones supports killing a fetus up to the moment of crowning, the moment a baby exits his mother during birth. That isn’t your typical pro-choice position. That’s almost as extreme as they come. So, as Borland sees it, “either Jones knows exactly what he’s doing in supporting killing babies in utero but doesn’t care, in which case he’s a moral monster, or his moral compass is in such need of calibration that one should never trust his judgment in moral matters.” Borland therefore concludes that one is morally justified in voting for Moore, whose win would result in lesser evil.

This is a very strong argument. You will not appreciate its strength, however, unless you appreciate the grave moral evil of unrestricted abortion, abortion at any stage  of fetal development, for any reason.  Unless you are morally obtuse you will understand that the intentional killing of innocent human beings is morally wrong and that the pre- and almost-natal human beings in question are human individuals in their own right, not globs of tissue or parts of their mothers.

McIntosh again:

The closest French comes to a substantive response to Borland is in the following:

"Of course we’re always choosing between imperfect men, but there are profound differences between conventional politicians and a man who tried to rape a teenager when he was a D.A. Believe it or not, the American political ranks are chock-full of politicians who possess better character than Moore, whose pasts are far less checkered. I don’t even have to get to the difficult process of line-drawing to have confidence in declaring that Christians should not vote to put a credibly-accused child abuser in the Senate."

But this is misdirection. That the American political ranks are chock-full of politicians who possess better character than Moore is beside the point, since they aren’t running against Moore. It’s Jones running against Moore, so that is the only comparison that matters.

That's right. It's Jones against Moore, and exactly one of these two will be elected. Not both and not neither. 

It is also important to note that while character matters, policies, programs, and ideas matter even more. People of the 'Never X' mentality seem not to understand this.  French apparently thinks two terms of Hillary and all her damage to conservatism would be a fair price to pay for keeping Trump out of the White House with all the good he has already done in less than one year in office.

But suppose you are not convinced by the Borland-McIntosh argument.  Then you should at least have the decency to admit that it is a reasonable argument. But that is not what French does. He heaps abuse on Borland. See McIntosh piece for documentation.

Why Alabamans Should Vote for Roy Moore

Tully Borland makes the case in The Federalist.  

In so doing he has provoked a crap storm of controversy. See here and here. The quality of the Twitter jabs of an army of thoughtless twits justifies my talk of a crap storm.

It is depressing to realize how few people today are able calmly to follow an argument and evaluate it as opposed to heaping abuse upon its producer.

(I have noted the same thing in popular opposition to the work of David Benatar.)

Politics is almost always about choosing between the better and the worse.  Both Moore and his opponent, Doug Jones, are flawed character-wise. But character is only one consideration. Equally if not more important are the policies the candidates support.  Now Jones is for unrestricted abortion which, as Professor Borland points out, is tantamount to infanticide. Unrestricted abortion is a grave moral evil. So if you refuse to vote for Moore because of his (alleged) sins of 40 years ago, then you indirectly lend support to a pro-abortion candidate.  I should think that the gravity of the evil of future abortions far outweighs one man's (alleged) evil sexual excesses of 40 years ago.

According to David French, "There’s no defensible argument for choosing the 'lesser of two evils' in Alabama."  But I just gave one!

As Borland points out, if one had a policy of voting only for the morally perfect, one would have to abstain from politics entirely.

..........................

UPDATE (12/1). The controversy continues.  I won't link to any of it due to its low quality.  Much of its rests on the assumption that an argument is good if and only if it leads to a conclusion that the consumer of the argument antecedently accepts.  Otherwise it is bad and one is free to mock and malign the producer of the argument.

Trump Nixes Outrageous Obamacare Birth Control Mandate

Here.

Prominent Catholics such as Robert P. George and George Weigel who refused to vote for Trump made a massive error in judgment. I was right to lay into them in Catholics Must Support Trump.

Are 'Progressives' Now Entirely Devoid of Moral Sense?

From an article by A. N. Wilson:

Not believing in abortion, like not believing in gay marriage, is now, unquestionably, a thought crime. It was hardly surprising that the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg recently said he did not believe in abortion, because he is a man of conviction as well as a Roman Catholic, and this is the teaching of his Church. Yet his view was treated with incredulity and disdain by everyone from trolls and women's groups to the higher echelons of the political Establishment.

Catholics need to to realize that it is utterly foolish to invoke the teachings of their church in justification of their beliefs when countering leftists.  If that is what the Tory MP did, then he needs to wise up.  In the eyes of a leftist, he may as well have 'defended' his opposition to abortion on the ground that his mum/mommy taught him that it is very bad.

Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative, although few seem to understand this. Yet another reason why you need my blog.

I argue it out here.

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FULL DISCLOSURE:  I am not now, and never have been, a Southerner, a redneck, a plantation owner, slave holder, apologist for slavery, Civil War re-enactor on the Confederate (or Union) side, racist, or white supremacist.

I condemn slavery as a grave moral evil. I also condemn abortion as a grave moral evil. 

Holding that all lives matter, I hold that black lives matter, including unborn black lives.

Abortion: The Actual Future Principle, An Objection, and a Sophistical Reply

Elizabeth Harman puts forth the following 'principle':

The Actual Future Principle: An early fetus that will become a person has some moral status. An early fetus that will die while it is still an early fetus has no moral status. ("Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion," Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 28, no. 4 (Autumn 1999), 310-324, 311. http://www.princeton.edu)/~eharman/creationethics.pdf)

What Harmon is saying is that the actual future of an early fetus determines its moral status. This implies that there are two different kinds of early fetuses. There are those that die while they are early fetuses. At no time during their existence do they instantiate the intrinsic properties that confer moral status. Thus the members of the first kind do not have moral status.  The members of the other kind will in the future have the full moral status of persons for they will come to instantiate the intrinsic properties that confer moral status.  Harman thinks that if an early fetus will one day possess the full moral status of a person then that is a "good reason" (her words) to think that it has that status when it is an early fetus.

The idea, then, is that an early fetus that does not, while it is an early fetus, have the properties that confer moral status nevertheless possesses moral status while it is an early fetus if it comes to have those properties later on in its development.

Harman is thus denying a widespread if not universal assumption, namely, that 

A. For any two early fetuses at the same stage of development and in the same health, either both have the same moral status or neither does. (311)

Questioning assumptions is something philosophers do and so she cannot be faulted for that. But not all assumptions are reasonably denied. This is one of them.  Her fancy footwork does nothing to detract from the evident truth of (A).

When I first encountered Harman's argument in the muddled form of a video in which she is interviewed (see below) by an actor and another professor the following objection occurred to me:

Harman is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on something contingent: how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus  but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor. 

Harman's argument issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no actual future. If it has no actual future, then it has no moral status by Harman's principles. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified. 

A reader points out, however, that Harman anticipated something like my objection in the above-cited paper:

"Third objection: "According to the Actual Future Principle, you just can't lose! If you abort, then it turns out that the fetus you aborted was that kind of thing it's okay to abort. If you don't abort, then it turns out that the fetus was the kind of thing it's not okay to abort." (320)

My objection, however, asserts only the first of Harman's conditionals. My objection has the form of a reductio ad absurdum: if you accept Harman's principles then you are committed to an absurdity; you are committed to saying that you can morally justify your abortion just by having one. But this is absurd in the sense of incoherent. One cannot justify an action just by performing it.

Harman responds by saying that here view is "very liberal." No doubt. "Therefore, according to the Actual Future Principle, no moral justification is required for an early abortion." (320)  But now she is contradicting herself: moral justification is required if the early fetus has an actual future.  It cannot be true both that no moral justification is required for an early abortion and that moral justification is required if the fetus has an actual future.

But there is no point in wasting any more time on this sophistry.

One gets the impression that many of the producers of these bad pro-abortion arguments want to have sex whenever they want, with whomever they want, with no consequences. Should a human life arise as a result of their sexual activities, they want to be able to dispose of it easily for their own convenience. One gets the impression that concupiscence is what drives these 'arguments,' suborning the otherwise truth-directed intellect, and seducing it into self-serving sophistry.

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I was a little unfair to Elizabeth Harman the day before yesterday.  I said she has "presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public." As knuckleheaded as her argument is, there is one that is worse. 

Elizabeth Harman's Abortion Argument

A curious new abortion argument by Princeton's Elizabeth Harman is making the rounds. (A tip of the hat to Malcolm Pollack for bringing it to my attention.) It is not clear just what Harman's argument is, but it looks to be something along the following lines:

1) "Among early fetuses there are two very different kinds of beings . . . ."

2) One kind of early fetus has "moral status."

3) The other kind of early fetus does not have "moral status."

4) The fetuses possessing moral status have it in virtue of their futures, in virtue of the fact that they are the beginning stages of future persons.

5) The fetuses lacking moral status lack it in virtue of their not having futures, in virtue of their not being the beginning stages of future persons. 

Therefore

6) If a fetus is prevented from having a future, either by miscarriage or abortion, then the fetus does not have moral status at the time of its miscarriage or abortion. "That's something that doesn't have a future as a person and it doesn't have moral status." (From 5)

7) If a fetus lacks moral status, then aborting it is not morally impermissible.

Therefore

8) " . . . there is nothing morally bad about early abortion."

Some will say that this argument is so bad that it is 'beneath refutation.'  When a philosopher uses this phrase what he means is that an argument so tagged is so obviously defective as not to be worth refuting. There is also the concomitant suggestion that one who refutes that which is 'beneath refutation' is a foolish fellow, and perhaps even a (slightly) morally dubious character when the subject matter is moral inasmuch as he undermines the healthy conviction that certain ideas are so morally abhorrent that they shouldn't be discussed publicly at all lest the naive and uncritical be led astray.

But to quote my sparring partner London Ed, in a moment when the muse had him in her grip: "In philosophy there is a ‘quodlibet’ principle that you are absolutely free to discuss anything you like."  That's right. The Quodlibet Principle is one of the defining rules of the philosophical 'game.' There is nothing, nothing at all, that may not be hauled before the bench of reason, there to be rudely interrogated. (And that, paradoxically, includes the Quodlibet Principle!)

I hereby invoke that noble and indeed Socratic principle in justification of my attention to Harman's argument.

What's wrong with it?  She is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus  but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor. 

This issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no future. If it has no future, then it has no moral status. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified. 

Is it ever morally right and reasonable to question or impugn motives or character in a debate?

I have just demolished Harman's argument. She has given no good reasons for her thesis. Quite the contrary. She has presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public. But what really interests me is the bolded question.  And I mean it in general. It is not about Harman except per accidens.

Is it ever morally right and reasonable in a debate to question motives and character? I didn't get a straight answer from London Ed in an earlier discussion.  So I press him again. 

We agree, of course, that arguments stand and fall on their own merits in sublime independence of their producers and consumers. I have hammered on this theme dozens of times in these pages. One may not substitute motive imputation and character analysis for argument evaluation. 

But once I have refuted an argument or series of arguments, am I not perfectly morally justified in calling into the question the motives and character of the producers of those arguments?  I say yes.  

I have a theory about what really drives the innumerable bad pro-abortion/pro-choice arguments abroad in this decadent culture, but I leave that theory for later. Here I pose the bolded question quite generally and apart from the abortion question.

Do you now see my point, Ed? And what do you say? 

Harmon's argument is here. 

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More Proof that 'Liberals' are Morally Retarded

1) JPod on Kathy Griffin. It is not just Griffin who is at fault here, but every 'liberal' who contributes to an environment in which the sorry Griffin can get away with her vile stunt, at least initially.  The nadir of cultural decline is still a ways off yet, however: CNN fired the sick comedienne.

2) Did you know that a pre-natal human being is a tough little object hard to dismember? Here:

In the new video, which is a compilation of excerpts from video filmed at the trade shows, abortionist Dr. Susan Robinson of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte is heard saying, “The fetus is a tough little object and, taking it apart, I mean taking it apart on day one is very difficult.”

Dr. Lisa Harris, medical director of Planned Parenthood Michigan, is also heard saying, “Let’s just give them all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing, let’s just give them all that.”

Director of abortion services for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast Dr. Ann Schutt-Aine states in the video, “If I’m doing a procedure, and I’m seeing that I’m in fear that it’s about to come to the umbilicus [navel], I might ask for a second set of forceps to hold the body at the cervix and pull off a leg or two, so it’s not PBA [partial-birth abortion].”

One irony here is that feminists protest, legitimately, against 'objectification.' But if the girl is young enough, then she is a "tough little object" the objectification of which can legally take the form of literal dismemberment.

If you voted for Hillary, you are complicit in this and also in the further moral outrage of using tax dollars to fund it.

What if you voted for neither Hillary not Trump?  I'll leave that for you to think about. 

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The Collapse of the Catholic Universities

Yet another example, one so egregious that I pinch myself to see if I am awake:

Stéphane Mercier, a lecturer in philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven (UCL) in Belgium initially was suspended from teaching, pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings, because there was opposition in a class from a feminist group to his philosophical argument to the effect that abortion is the killing of an innocent unborn human life, which is an “intrinsically evil,” always unacceptable, regardless of the circumstances. The response from both the UCL administration and the Belgium Bishops Conference to his philosophical argument, which was put forth in a document entitled “The Philosophy Supporting Life: Against a so-called Right to Choose an Abortion", has been confusing.

UPDATE 2/24:

A reader sends this:

A student at the institution informs me this is the passage that led to the lecturer's sacking. It was a First Year Philosophy course:

"[...] reminds me of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania in George Orwell's 1984. Voluntary interruption of pregnancy is a euphemism that hides a message, namely the truth, which is that abortion is the murder of an innocent person. It is a murder particularly abject, because the victim has no defense against it. if murdering an  innocent person capable of self-defense weren't repulsive enough, taking the life of someone who doesn't have the power to defend himself is even more vile. Today, we hear people who believe abortion is immoral, but don't think about making it illegal, a disturbingly absurd way of reasoning. [...] Imagine that the same person declares rape immoral, but thinks it shouldn't be made illegal in order to protect the freedoms of an individual (except for the victim...). that's absurd, right? So, if abortion is murder, as it is said to be by some, doesn't that make it worse than rape? Rape is immoral, and fortunately illegal as well. Shouldn't abortion, which is even more immoral, be illegal too?"

BV's comment: Imagine getting sacked at any university, let alone a supposedly Catholic university with the word 'Catholic' in its name, for giving this argument!

Leftist termites are undermining the great institutions of the West, and the authorities in charge of these institutions have either abdicated, or are termites themselves.  The edifices of higher culture are in dire need of fumigation. Figuratively speaking, of course . . . .

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Here:

President Trump on Monday reignited the war over abortion by signing an executive order blocking foreign aid or federal funding for international nongovernmental organizations that provide or "promote" abortions.

You conservative pro-life Never Trumpers are starting to look mighty stupid 'long about now, don't you think?  You refused to support the one guy who could defeat Hillary and promote the policies that you claim to support. 

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Nat Hentoff, Defender of Human Life (1925-2017)

I have been a fan of Nat Hentoff ever since I first read him in the pages of Down Beat magazine way back in the '60s. He died at 91 on January 7th. My tribute to him is a repost from 4 June 2012:

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff  is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term.  He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead.  So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do?  They attack him.  His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them.  Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal -- not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

Related posts:

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment.  I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

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'The Punishment Must Fit the Crime' and Lex Talionis

What ISIS Really Wants

Nat Hentoff  is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term.  He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead.  So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do?  They attack him.  His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them.  Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal -- not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

Related posts:

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment.  I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?

After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man.  Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct:

The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to hold traditional beliefs about marriage that were suddenly deemed backward and unacceptable (at least since 2012, when President Obama stopped pretending to share them). What else do you think drove all those religious voters to support a dissolute heathen?

Ironically, a pragmatic, Jacksonian populist worldling such as Donald J. Trump will probably do more for religion and religious liberty in the long run than a pious leftist such as Jimmy Carter.  

Mr. Carter famously confessed the lust in his heart in an interview in -- wait for it -- Playboy magazine.  We should all do likewise, though in private, not in Playboy. While it is presumptuous to attempt to peer into another's soul, I would bet that Mr. Trump is not much bothered by the lust in his heart, and I don't expect to hear any public confessions from his direction.

But what profiteth it to confess one's lust when one supports the destructive Dems, the abortion party, a party the members of which are so morally obtuse that they cannot even see the issue of the morality of abortion, dismissing it as a health issue or an issue of women's reproductive rights?  

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Truth Decay

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SCOTUS and Benedict

 

A Pro-Life Feminist Who Voted for Trump

Thereby helping to block the butchery Hillary would have exacerbated.  I hope you 'conservatives' who refused to vote for Trump will come to your senses at some point.

A Morally Justifiable Case of Late-Term Abortion

Abortion Numbers

Here is a page displaying various abortion counters.

You appreciate the grave moral evil of slavery, but not that of the vast majority of abortions?

Even stranger is the fact that some who are much more vociferous opponents of abortion than me will not vote for Donald Trump a week from today.  

Related: A Possible Way to 'Get Through' to Liberals on Abortion

Addendum

As for slavery, many college students think America invented it!

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Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

DePaul University Bans "Unborn Lives Matter"

Here:

Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., the president of DePaul University, prevented a College Republicans poster bearing the phrase “Unborn Lives Matter” from being displayed on campus. According to Holtschneider’s open letter to the DePaul community, the poster constituted “bigotry . . . under the cover of free speech” that “provokes the Black Lives Matter movement.”

This Holtschneider (Woodcutter) must have sawdust for brains.  Where is the 'bigotry' in standing up for the rights of the unborn? How can a Catholic cleric who is the president of a Catholic university grovel in such sickening and supine fashion before the forces of political correctness?  

Black Lives Matter is an anti-law enforcement movement built primarily on well-known lies about the Trayvon Martin case and the Michael Brown case.  

Holtschneider is an all-too-common case of administrative cowardice and abdication of authority.  No sane person ought to be concerned about 'hurting the feelings' of the thugs of BLM by stating the obvious:  ALL lives matter, and therefore,

 

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Conservative Marquette Poly Sci Prof Suspended for Blogging

What Does Abortion Have to Do with Religion?

What follows is a re-post, slightly redacted, from 3 November 2012.  Occasioned by the Biden-Ryan Veep debate in 2012, it is equally applicable to the 2016 Kaine-Pence Veep debate, except that in 2016 only Kaine is (nominally) Catholic.

.......................

The abortion question is almost always raised in the context of religion.  The Vice-Presidential debate provides a good recent example.  The moderator  introduced the topic with these words: “We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I  would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your  own personal views on abortion.”  Why didn't the moderator just ask the candidates to state their positions on abortion?   Why did she bring up religion?  And why the phrase "personal views"?  Are views on foreign policy and the economy also personal views?  Below the surface lies the suggestion that opposition to abortion can only rest on antecedent religious commitments of a personal nature that have no place in the public square. 

A question that never gets asked, however, is the one I raise in this post:  What does the abortion issue have to do with religion?  But I need to make the question more precise.  Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infancticide.
Therefore
3. (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument. 

And as a matter of fact there are pro-life atheists. Nat Hentoff is one. In The Infanticide Candidate for President, he takes Barack Obama to task:

But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme  Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban  Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama -- in the Illinois Senate -- also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

Return to the above argument.  Suppose someone demands to know why one should accept the first premise.  Present this argument:

4. Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong.
5. Infanticide is the killing of innocent human beings.
Therefore
1. Infanticide is morally wrong.

This second argument, like the first, invokes no specifically religious premise.  Admittedly, the general prohibition of homicide -- general in the sense that it admits of exceptions -- comes from the Ten Commandments which isd part of our Judeo-Christian heritage.  But if you take that as showing that (4) is religious, then the generally accepted views that theft and lying are morally wrong would have to be adjudged religious as well.

But I don't want to digress onto the topic of the sources of our secular moral convictions, convictions that are then codified in the positive law.  My main point is that one can oppose abortion on secular grounds. A second point is that the two arguments I gave are very powerful.  If you are not convinced by them, you need to ask yourself why.

Some will reply by saying that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body.  This is the Woman's Body Argument:

6. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
7. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
8. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (6) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (7) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (7) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (7) is acceptable, but (6) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

I wrote "perhaps (7) is acceptable" because it is arguable that (7) is not acceptable. For a woman's body is an improper part of her body; hence if a woman has a right to do anything she wishes with her body, then she has a right to kill her body by blowing it up, say. One who has good reason to reject suicide, however, has good reason to reject (7) even when 'part' is construed narrowly. And even if we substitute 'proper part' for 'part' in the original argument, it is still not the case that a woman has a right to do whatever she wishes with any proper narrow part of her body. Arguably, she has no right to cut out her own heart, since that would lead to her death.

I am making two points about the Woman's Body Argument.  The first is that  my rejection of it does not rely on any religious premises.  The second is that the argument is unsound. 

Standing on solid, secular ground one has good reason to oppose abortion as immoral in the second and third trimesters (with some exceptions, e.g., threat to the life of the mother).  Now not everything immoral should be illegal.  But in this case the objective immorality of abortion entails that it ought to be illegal for the same reason that the objective immorality of the wanton killing of innocent adults requires that it be  illegal.

Of course it follows that you should not vote for the abortion party, a.k.a. the Dems.  And if you are a Catholic who votes Democratic then you are as foolish and confused as the benighted Joe Biden and the the benighted Tim Kaine.

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A Vote for Hillary is a Vote for Tax-Payer Funded Abortion on Demand

Including partial-birth abortion.

You say your conscience won't allow you to vote for a vulgarian who thinks, or used to think, that his celebrity entitles him to grab at the female anatomy?  But your conscience is not troubled by Hllary's support for abortion?  Then I humbly suggest that you are morally obtuse.

You tell me you won't vote for either Trump or Hillary?  Then you support Hillary by your inaction.  Is your conscience 'down' with that?

The Dems are the abortion party.  (Is that why so many 'Catholics' are Dems?)  Hadley Arkes, Pro-Lifers Settle for Dhimmitude:

The readers of this site have heard often of that bill passed by the House over a year ago to punish surgeons killing those babies who survive abortions. The vote was 248-177, and all votes in opposition came from the Democrats. That, not merely partial-birth abortion, is the issue on the table right now.

For the official position now of the Democrats is that the right to abortion is not confined to pregnancy. It entails nothing less than the right to kill a child born alive, who survives the abortion. That is the position that Hillary should be made to defend.

And yet even more so Tim Kaine. He professes to be an earnest Catholic, that he had reservations about “partial-birth” abortion. And so: will he vote now in the Senate to bring to the floor for a vote that bill that passed the House a year ago? Will he break now from the pro-choice orthodoxy of his party, his president, and his presidential candidate? [emphasis added]

 

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Arguments Don't Have Testicles

Prepared lines come in handy in many of life's situations.  They are useful for getting points across in a memorable way and they  make for effective on-the-spot rebuttals. 

A mind well-stocked with prepared lines is a mind less likely to suffer l'esprit d'escalier. 

Suppose a feminist argues that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion.  Without a moment's hesitation, retort: Arguments don't have testicles! 

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Bright Flash at Moment of Conception

From The Telegraph (4/26):

Human life begins in bright flash of light as a sperm meets an egg, scientists have shown for the first time, after capturing the astonishing ‘fireworks’ on film.

An explosion of tiny sparks erupts from the egg at the exact moment of conception.

Make of this what you will.  But be careful!  Use your intellect not just your will.

A Possible Way to 'Get Through' to Liberals on Abortion

Suppose I want to convince you of something.  I must use premises that you accept.  For if I argue from premises that you do not accept, you will reject my argument no matter how rigorous and cogent my reasoning.

So how can we get through to those liberals who are willing to listen?  Not by invoking any Bible-based or theological premises.  And not by deploying the sorts of non-theological but intellectually demanding arguments found in my Abortion category.  The demands are simply too great for most people in this dumbed-down age.

Liberals support inclusivity and non-discrimination.   Although contemporary liberals abuse these notions, as I have documented time and again, the notions possess a sound core and can be deployed sensibly.  To take one example, there is simply no defensible basis for  discrimination against women and blacks when it comes to voting.  The reforms in this area were liberal reforms, and liberals can be proud of them.   A sound conservatism, by the way, takes on board the genuine achievements of old-time liberals. 

Another admirable feature of liberals is that they speak for the poor, the weak, the voiceless.  That this is often twisted into the knee-jerk defense of every  underdog just in virtue of his being an underdog, as if weakness confers moral superiority, is no argument against the admirableness of the feature when  reasonably deployed.

So say this to the decent liberals:  If you prize inclusivity, then include unborn human beings.  If you oppose discrimination, why discriminate against them?  If you speak for the poor, the weak, and the voiceless, why do you not speak for them?

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The Potentiality Argument Against Abortion and Feinberg's Logical Point About Potentiality

I claim that the standard objections to the Potentiality Argument (PA) are very weak and can be answered. This is especially so with respect to Joel Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality," which alone I will discuss in this post. This often-made objection is extremely weak and should persuade no rational person. But first a guideline for the discussion.

The issue is solely whether Feinberg's objection is probative, that and nothing else. Thus one may not introduce any consideration or demand extraneous to this one issue. One may not demand of me a proof of the Potentiality Principle (PP), to be set forth in a moment. I have an argument for PP, but that is not the issue currently under discussion. Again the issue is solely whether Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" refutes the PA. Progress is out of the question unless we 'focus like a laser' on the precise issue under consideration.

Of course, the removal of all extant objections to an argument does not amount to a positive demonstration of the argument's soundness. But at the risk of being tedious, the issue before us is solely whether Feinberg's objection is a good one.

The PA in a simplified form can be set forth as follows, where the major premise is the PP:

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
2. The fetus is a potential person.
-----
3. The fetus has a right to life.

What Feinberg calls the "logical point about potentiality" and finds unanswerable is "the charge that merely potential possession of any set of qualifications for a moral status does not logically ensure actual possession of that status." (Matters of Life and Death, ed. Regan, p. 193) Feinberg provides an example he borrows from Stanley Benn: A potential president of the United States is not on that account Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.

It seems to me that Feinberg's objection, far from being unanswerable, is easily answered. Let me begin by conceding something that is perfectly self-evident, namely, that inferences of the following form are invalid:

4. X is a potential possessor of qualifications for a certain moral or legal status S
ergo
5. X is an actual possessor of qualifications for status S.

This is a glaring non sequitur as all must admit. If x potentially possesses some qualifications, then x does not actually possess them. So of course one cannot infer actual possession from potential possession. A five-year-old's potential possession of the qualifications for voting does not entail his actually having the right to vote.

But what does this painfully obvious point have to do with PP? It has nothing to do with it. For what the proponent of PP is saying is that potential personhood is an actual qualification for the right to life. He is not saying that the fetus' potential possession of the qualifications for being a rights-possessor makes it an actual rights-possessor. He is saying that the actual possession of potential personhood makes the fetus a rights-possessor. The right to life, in other words, is grounded in the very potentiality to become a person.

What Feinberg and Co. do is commit a blatant ignoratio elenchi against the proponents of PA. They take the proponent of the PA to be endorsing an invalid inference, the (4)-(5) inference, when he is doing nothing of the kind. They fail to appreciate that the potentialist's claim is that potential personhood is an actual (and sufficient) qualification for the right to life.

Of course, one can ask why potential personhood should be such a qualification, but that is a further question, one logically separate from the question of the soundness of Feinberg's objection.

I have just decisively refuted Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" objection. What defenders of it must do now, without changing the subject or introducing any extraneous consideration, is to tell me whether they accept my refutation of Feinberg. If they do not, then there is no point in discussing this topic further with them. If they do, then we can proceed to examine other objections to PA, and the positive considerations in favor of PA.

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Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

I suspect that Vlastimil V's (neo-scholastic) understanding of potentiality is similar to the one provided by Matthew Lu in Potentiality Rightly Understood:

The substance view of persons holds that every human being either has the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood or does actually manifest them. For the adherent of the substance view of persons, "potential" does not essentially refer to some possible future state of affairs. Rather, in this conception of what I will call developmental potential, to say that an organism has the potential to manifest some property means that that property belongs essentially to the kind of thing that it is (i.e., is among the essential properties it has by nature). Whether or not a specific individual actualizes the potentialities of its nature is contingent; but those potentialities necessarily belong to its nature in virtue of its membership in a specific natural kind.

I don't understand this.  Let the property be rationality.  Let organism o belong to the natural kind human being.  We assume that man is by nature a rational animal. A human fetus is of course a human being.  Suppose the fetus is anencephalic.  It too is a human being -- it is not lupine or bovine or a member of any other animal species.  But it is a defective human being, one whose defect is so serious that it, that very individual, will never manifest rationality.  So how can every human being have "the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood"?  That is my question.  Now consider the following answers/views.

A1: The anencephalic human fetus does not have the potentiality to manifest rationality.  This is because it lacks "the largest part of the brain consisting mainly of the cerebral hemispheres, including the neocortex, which is responsible for cognition." (Wikipedia)

A2:  The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because it is a member of a species or natural kind the normal (non-defective) members of which do have the potentiality in question.

A3:  The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because the natural kind itself has the potentiality to manifest rationality.

I think (A2) is the most charitable reading of the above quoted paragraph considered in the context of Lu's entire paper. Accordingly, a particular anencephalic fetus has the potentiality to manifest rationality because other genetically human members of the same species do have the potentiality in question.  This makes no sense to me.  But perhaps I am being obtuse, in which case a charitable soul may wish to help me understand.  To be perfectly honest, I really would like it to be the case that EVERY  "human being either has the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood or does actually manifest them."  I would like that to be the case because then I would not  have to supplement my Potentiality Argument against abortion with other principles as I have done in other entries.

What's my problem?  Let's start with an analogy. It is narrowly logically possible and broadly logically possible that I run a four-minute mile.  It is also nomologically possible that I run a four-minute mile. For all the latter means is that the laws of nature pertaining to human anatomy and physiology do not rule out a human being's running a four-minute mile.  Since they do not rule out a human being's running that fast, they don't rule out my running that fast.

But note that the laws of human physiology abstract entirely from the particularities and peculiarities of me qua individual animal.  They abstract from my particular O₂ uptake, the ratio of 'fast twitch' to 'slow twitch' muscle fibers in my legs, and so on.  And to be totally clear: it is the concrete flesh-and-blood individual that runs, 'Boston Billy' Rodgers, for example, that very guy, not his form, not his matter, not his nature, not any accident or property or universal or subjective concept or objective concept that pertains to him. 

Now consider the question: do I, BV, have the potential to run a four-minute mile? No.  Why not?  Because of a number of deficiencies, insufficiencies, limitations and whatnot pertaining to the particular critter that I am.  The fact that other runners have  the potential in question is totally irrelevant.  What do their individual potentialities have to do with me?  The question, again, is whether I, BV, have/has the potentiality in question.  It is also totally irrelevant that the laws of human physiology do not rule out my running a four-minute mile.  Again, this is because said laws abstract from the particularities and peculiarities of the concrete individual.  Surely it would be a very  serious blunder to suppose that the nomological possibility of my running a four-minute mile  entails the potentiality of my doing any such thing. That would be a two-fold blunder: (i) potentiality is not possibility, and (ii) potentiality is always the potentiality of some concrete individual or other.

Similarly, the anencephalic individual does not have the potentiality to manifest rationality.  The fact that normal human fetuses do have this potentiality is totally irrelevant.  What do their individual potentialities have to do with the potentialities or lacks thereof of the anencephalic individual?  It is also totally irrelevant that man is by nature a rational animal, that the capacity to reason is 'inscribed' (as a Continental philosopher might say) in his very essence.  For the question is precisely whether or not this very anencephalic individual has the potentiality to manifest rationality.  My answer, as you may have surmised, is No. 

I think I can diagnose the neo-Scholastic error, if error it is.  (I hope it is not an error, for then the Potentiality Argument is strengthened and simplified.)  Take a look at (A3):

A3. The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because the natural kind itself has the potentiality to manifest rationality.

This, I submit, is a complete non-starter.  Whatever a natural kind is, it itself does not have the potential to be rational.  It can no more be rational than humanity in general can run.  (I once entered a 10 K event called 'The Human Race.' I did not compete against humanity in general, but against certain particular human critters.)

So it can't be the universal nature humanity that has the potential to be rational.  What about the individual or individualized nature, the human nature of Socrates, of Plato, et al.?  Could a particular individualized nature be that which has the potential to manifest rationality?  No again.  For it is but an ontological constituent of  a concrete man such as Socrates.  It is baby Socrates that has the potential to manifest rationality and excel in dialetic, not one of his ontological constituents.  Socrates is more than his individual human nature; there is also the dude's matter (materia signata) to take into consideration.  Our man is a hylomorphic compound, and it is this compound in which the potentiality to display rationality is grounded.

My diagnosis of neo-Scholastic error, then, is that neo-Scholastics, being Aristotelians, tend to conflate a primary substance such as Socrates with his individual(ized) nature. Since human nature in general includes the potential to be rational, it is natural to think that every individual(ized) human nature, whether normal or defective, has the potential to be rational.  But surely it is not the individual(ized) human nature that has the potential to be rational, but the ontological whole of which the individual(ized) human nature is a proper part.  In the case of the anencephalic fetus, this ontological whole includes defective matter that cannot support the development of rationality.  Only if one confuses the individual(ized) human nature of the anencephalic individual with the concrete anencephalic individual could one suppose that it too has the potential to manifest rationality.

The fact that Lu's paragraph above is ambiguous as between (A2) and (A3) further supports my contention that there is a confusion here.

My view, then, is (A1).  Abortion is a grave moral evil.  The Potentiality Argument, however, does not suffice as an argument against every instance of it.  This is not to say that the aborting of the anencephalic is morally acceptable.  It rather suggests that the PA requires some form of supplementation.

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Does the Potentiality Argument Prove Too Much?

Here is a simple version of the Potentiality Argument (PA):

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
2. The human fetus is a potential person.
-----
3. The human fetus has a right to life.

Does PA 'prove too much'? It does if the proponent of PA has no principled way of preventing PA from transmogrifying into something like:

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
4. Everything is a potential person.
-----
5. Everything has a right to life.

Probative Overkill I

One kind of probative overkill objection is easily sent packing, namely, the sort of objection that is based on the confusion of potentiality with the mere logical possibility of transformation. It is thinkable without contradiction that a pumpkin seed become a rabbit. Indeed it is thinkable without contradiction, and thus narrowly logically possible, that anything become anything. But of course a potentiality is something quite specific and has nothing to do with an empty logical possibility of transformation. After all, we know that (planted) pumpkin seeds do not become rabbits; they become pumpkins. Rabbits give birth to rabbits, not kangaroos or pumpkins. Nature is orderly.

If there are potentialities in nature, they are directed at specific outcomes. There are two points here.  The first is that potentialities are directed; the second is that their directedness is to specific outcomes.  They are like dispositions in this regard. Solubility is the disposition to dissolve, not the disposition to shatter or explode. Potentiality is interestingly analogous to intentionality.  Necessarily, thoughts take objects.  Necessarily, potentialities have outcomes.  In both cases we can speak of directedness -- of thoughts to their objects and of potentialities and dispositions to their outcomes or realizations.  In both cases the object/outcome enters into the individuation of the thought/potentiality.  And in both cases the object/manifestation need not exist. 

A potentiality can go unrealized without ceasing to be directed at an outcome.  This is analogous to the situation in which one thinks of something but the thing does not exist.  To say that a potentiality can go unrealized is not to say that the potentiality is not itself something real, indeed something actual.  It is real analogously as a thought is real even when its object does not exist.

Anyone with an elementary grip on the notion of potentiality can see that the first kind of overkill objection fails.  For it is based on a failure to see that (4) is false.  If a thing has a potentiality, that is not a 'blank check' to become anything at all.

Probative Overkill II

According to a less crude objection, there is no principled way to ascribe potential personhood to a zygote without also ascribing it to spermatazoa, unfertilized ova, and pairs of sperm cells and egg cells. 

Let's consider first the pair (S, O). Let S be one of my sperm cells and O an unfertilized egg cell of a nun in India. This pair exists because its members exist. But this pair is not a potential person. The very idea is incoherent. If a pair is a set or a set-theoretical construct, then it is an abstract object; but surely no abstract object has the potentiality to become a concrete individual person. But whether or not pairs are abstract objects, the notion that the pair in question is a potential person is absurd on the face of it. For a sperm cell out of all contact with an egg cell simply cannot develop into a person.

Now consider a sperm cell S. Given that there are potentialities in nature, S has the active potentiality to fertilize an egg. But as noted, potentialities are directed to specific outcomes and not others.  The potentiality to fertilize an egg is not the potentiality to become a person. Surely, a sperm cell that has not fertilized an ovum does not have the potentiality to become a person.

Similarly with a an egg cell.  It has the passive potentiality to be fertilized by a sperm cell.  But this potentiality is not the potentiality to become a person. 

It follows that the Potentiality Argument is not an argument against contraception.  Contraception prevents sperm cells from 'hooking up' with egg cells, either by killing the former or by blocking their access to the ova they lust after.  Thus a spermicidal jelly does not destroy potential persons.

It is worth noting that it would be the Fallacy of Division to argue that since the zygote is a potential person, each of its constituents is as well.

The Potentiality 'in Principle' Response to Probative Overkill II

"The egg cell does not have the 'ready' potential to develop into a person, but it has the 'in principle' potential because something can be done to it to give it the 'ready' potential, namely, it can be fertilized by a sperm cell.  And the same goes for the sperm cell:  it does not, by itself, have the 'ready' potential to develop into a person, but it has the 'in principle' potential because something can be done to it to give it the 'ready' potential, namely, it can be brought into contact with an egg cell."

"Therefore, your 'probative overkill' objection fails.  If a zygote is a potential person, then so are sperm cells and unfertilized eggs.  Since this is an absurd consequence, the Potentiality Argument proves too much and fails for this reason."

"The situation is really no different from that of the anencephalic fetus.  It lacks the 'ready' potential to develop normally on its own into a person whose faculties are normal.  But it has the 'in principle' potential for such development because something could be done to the fetus to get it to develop a normal brain."

"There is also the case of the comatose individual who will not emerge from his coma on his own, but can be made to emerge from it by special medical interventions.  This individual lacks the 'ready' potentiality to emerge from the coma state, but possess an 'in principle' potentiality to do so."

"In sum, we need to distinguish between 'ready' and 'in principle' potentiality to account for cases like that of the comatose individual just mentioned.  But then  the distinction applies to sperm and egg cells prior to their union.  Since anything with either kind of potentiality to develop into a person has a right to life, sperm and egg cells have this right as well.  Herein lies the reductio ad absurdum of the Potentiality Argument."

Rejoinder to the Potentiality 'In Principle' Response

The above response eviscerates the concept of potentiality, stripping it of its usefulness.  'In principle' potentiality is intolerably latitudinarian.  The idea is this:

X has the 'in principle' potentiality to develop into an F =_df there is something that could be done to x to enable it to develop into an F.

But then a fetus born dead has the potentiality to develop into a normal human person because God or some other agent with superhuman powers could resuscitate it.  That's possible!  Or it is possible that in the future babies born without brains can be given brains, or certain pre-natal genetic interventions could be performed that would cause the fetus to develop a normal brain.

Cats cannot at present fly.  But they would like to, the better to catch birds.  So they have the 'in principle' potentiality to develop into airborne critters because they could be fitted out with wings. 

I think this approach shows a failure to grasp the notion of potentiality.  A potentiality is an intrinsic, actual, not merely possible, 'principle' in a thing that directs it toward a certain outcome.  It is 'built-in.'  It cannot be reduced to a possibility -- even a nomological possibility -- that the thing be modified ab extra in various ways.

So I reject 'in principle' potentialities and with them the 'probative overkill' objection to the Potentiality Argument which requires them. At the same time I issue a challenge to the partisans of 'in principle' potentialities:  How do you rebut the probative overkill objection?

Or do you 'bite the bullet' and accept that human sperm and egg cells by themselves are potential persons?

Related articles

What is Potentiality? An Exploration

Another Example of the Moral Depravity of the Left: Planned Parenthood

Michelle Malkin's The Wine-Sipping Butchers of Planned Parenthood ends brilliantly:

What kind of country do we live in where law-abiding businesses are fined, threatened and demonized for refusing to bake gay wedding cakes, but barbaric baby butchers are hailed by feminists, Hollywood and a president who asked God to "bless" them?

God help us.

In Obama's Amerika, the state, among whose legitimate functions are the protection of life, liberty, and property, sanctions and profits from the taking of the lives of the unborn while violating the liberty of those who refuse, as a matter of conscience, to be complicit in ceremonies to which they have moral objections.

Abortion and Infanticide: What's the Difference?

This is a re-post with minor edits of an entry from March 1, 2012.  I agree with it still.  (Surprise!)  I would like Vlastimil V., who is currently exercised by topics in this neighborhood, to tell me how much of it he agrees with, and what he disagrees with and why.

____________________

If you agree that infanticide is morally wrong, should you not also agree that late-term abortion is also morally wrong?  Consider this argument:

Infanticide is morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion
Therefore
Late-term abortion is morally wrong.

To cast it in a slogan:  Late-term abortion is pre-natal infanticide!

But of course the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety:

Late-term abortion is not morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion
Therefore
Infanticide is not morally wrong.

To make a slogan of it: Infanticide is post-natal abortion!

Since the arguments and slogans  'cancel each other out,' the question arises whether we can move beyond a stand-off.  The pro-lifer finds it evident that infanticide is morally wrong, violating as it does the infant's right to life, and extends that right to the late-term fetus, while the type of pro-choicer I will be discussing in this post finds it evident that late-term abortion is morally acceptable and extends that moral acceptability to infanticide.

My response to the problem makes appeal to two principles, the Potentiality Principle, and the Modified Species Principle.  After I lay them out I will ask  whether they help us avoid a stalemate.

The idea behind the Potentiality Principle (PP) is that potential descriptive personhood confers a right to life. In other words, the idea is that potential descriptive personhood entails normative personhood.  For present purposes we may define a person in the descriptive sense of the term, a descriptive person,  as anything that is sentient, rational, self-aware, and purposive.   A person in the normative sense of the term, a normative person, we may define as a rights-possessor.  We assume that actual descriptive persons are normative persons and thus have rights, including a right to life, a right not to be killed. Presumably we all accept the following Rights Principle:

RP: All descriptive persons have a right to life.

What PP does is simply extend the right to life to potential persons. Thus,

PP. All potential descriptive persons have a right to life.

I have undertaken the defense of PP in other posts and I won't repeat myself here.  PP allows us to mount a very powerful argument, the Potentiality Argument (PA), against the moral acceptability of abortion. Given PP, and the fact that human fetuses are potential persons, it follows that they have a right to life. From the right to life follows the right not to be killed, except perhaps in some extreme circumstances.

It may be that the right to life has multiple sources. Perhaps it has a dual source: in PP but also in the Species Principle (SP) according to which whatever is genetically human has the right to life just in virtue of being genetically human. Equivalently, what SP says is that every member of the species homo sapiens, qua member, has the right to life of any member, and therefore every member falls within the purview of the prohibition against homicide.

The intuition behind SP  is that killing innocent human beings is just plain wrong whether or not they are actual persons in the descriptive sense of the term.  Now late-term human fetuses are of course human beings, indeed human individuals (not just clumps of cells or bits of human genetic material).  And of course they are innocent human beings.    it follows that they have a right to life.

Subscription to SP entails that a severely damaged infant, a Down's Syndrome baby, for example,  would have a right to life just in virtue of being genetically human regardless of its potential for development, or rather its lack of  potential.  Some will object that SP is involved in species chauvinism or 'speciesism,' the arbitrary and therefore illicit privileging of the species one happens to belong to over other species. The objection might proceed along the following lines. "It is easy to conceive of an extraterrestrial possessing all of the capacities (for self-awareness, moral choice, rationality, etc.) that we regard in ourselves as constituting descriptive personhood. Surely we would not want to exclude them from the prohibition against killing the innocent just because they are not made of human genetic material." To deal with this objection, a Modified Species Principle could be adopted:

MSP: Every member of an intelligent species, just insofar as it is a member of that species, has a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

The two principles (PP and MSP) working in tandem would seem to explain most of our moral intuitions in this matter. And now it occurs to me that PP and MSP can be wedded in one comprehensive principle, which we can call the Species Potentiality Principle:

SPP: Every member of any biological species whose normal members are actual or potential descriptive persons, just insofar as it is a member of that species, possesses a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

Does the above help us move beyond a stand-off?  Not at all.  No committed pro-choicer will accept the principles I have articulated above. And of course I won't accept his rejection of them.  For they are eminently rationally defensible and free of any formal or informal logical fallacy.  And of course no empirical facts speak against them.  Here as elsewhere, reason and argument can only take one so far.  They are wonderfully useful in achieving clarity about what one's position is and the reasons one has for occupying it.  But no argument will convince anyone who doesn't accept one's premises.

Here as elsewhere reason is powerless to decide the question even when informed by all relevant empirical facts.  As I have maintained many times, there are few if any rationally compelling arguments for any substantive thesis in areas of deep controversy, this being one of them.

In the end it comes down to basic moral intuitions.  Some people have moral sense and some people don't.  I say: Can't you just SEE (i.e., morally intuit) that killing an innocent human being is morally wrong?  And can't you just SEE that the location of that indivisual, its size, and its state of developement are morally irrelevant?  If you say 'no,' then I call you morally obtuse or morally  blind.   I throw you in with the color-blind and the tone-deaf.   And then I go on to call into question your motives for holding your morally outrageous view.  I might say: "The real reason (i.e., the psychologically salient motive) for your support of abortion and infanticide is your desire to have unrestrained sexual intercourse without accepting any responsibility for the consequences of your actions.  At the root of it all is your refusal to practice self-restraint, and your selfish desire to do whatever you please."  But even in the cases where such a psychological explanation is  true it will do nothing to convince the opponent. 

Here is something to think about.  Would the abortion/infanticide question be such a hot-button issue if  it weren't for our innate concupiscence kept constantly aflame by a sex-saturated society? (Pardon the mixed metaphors.)  Could it be that concupiscence unrestrained clouds our moral vision and makes us unable to discern moral truths? 

This post was 'inspired' by After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live? (A tip of the hat to the noble Maverickians who brought it to my attention.)

The title leaves something to be desired as regards felicity of expression.   'Afterbirth' is either the process whereby the placenta is expelled from the uterus after the neonate has exited, or else the placenta itself.  May I suggest 'post-natal'?  And to call infanticide after-birth or post-natal abortion is an egregious misuse of language inasmuch as abortion in this context is the termination of a pregnancy by killing of the fetus.  Infanticide is not the termination of  a pregnancy.  One cannot terminate a process that has come to fruition.   

Related articles

What is Potentiality? An Exploration

What is Potentiality? An Exploration

Our Czech friend Vlastimil V. writes,

I believe it is precisely the potentiality -- or the in principle capacity -- of logical thinking, free decisions, or higher emotions that makes killing human embryos morally problematic, seemingly unlike the killing of non-human embryos. This seems to me a promising hypothesis, to say the least. But I need help with settling several issues.

And then V. peppers me with a bunch of tough questions.  I'll address just the first in this entry:

 

What is potentiality or in principle capacity in general? How does it differ from (metaphysical) possibility?

 

This is indeed the logically first question.  Potentiality is widely misunderstood even by many philosophers.  No wonder they do not appreciate the Potentiality Argument.  Here the focus is not on the Potentiality Argument against abortion, but on the concept of potentiality it requires.  My task is merely to unpack it, not evaluate it.  We may begin by treading the via negativa.

 

1.  A potentiality is not the same as a possibility.  It is obviously not the same as an actualized possibility, but it is also not the same as an unactualized possibility. Potentialities are strange items and their ontological status is puzzling.  Don't assume you know what they are, and don't assume that you can learn what they are from the uses of 'potential' and cognates in English.

 

Take the fragility of a piece of glass.  Its fragility is its potentiality (passive potency, disposition, liability) to shatter in certain circumstances.  Consider two panes of thin glass side by side in a window. The two panes are of the same type of glass, and neither has been specially treated. A small rock is thrown at one, call it pane A, and it shatters under the moderate impact. The other pane, call it B, receives no such impact. We know that A is fragile from the fact that it shattered. ("Potency is known through act," an Aristotelian might say.) We don't have quite the same assurance that B is fragile, but we have good reason to think that it is since it is made of the same kind of glass as A.

Suppose that B never in its existence is shattered or in any way pitted or cracked or broken. Then its fragility, its disposition-to-shatter (break, crack, etc.) is never manifested. We can express that by saying that the manifestation of the disposition remains an unactualized possibility. That is, the shattering of pane B remains, for the whole of B's existence, a merely possible state of affairs, a mere possibility.

But that is not to say that the disposition is a mere possibility, let alone that it is unreal. The disposition is as actual as the thing that has it.  A disposition is distinct from  its manifestation. The disposition is actual whether its manifestation is actual, as in the case of pane A, or merely possible, as in the case of pane B.

So we make a distinction between the (de re) possibility of B's shattering and B's disposition to shatter.  The first is the possibility of the manifestation of the second.  The first may never become actual while the second is as actual as B.  What's more, the possibility of B's shattering is (in some sense needing explanation) grounded in B's disposition to shatter.

The point extends to potentialities: it is an elementary confusion to think of unrealized or unmanifested or unactualized potentialities as unactualized possibilia or mere possibilities. For example, a human embryo has the potentiality to develop, in the normal course of events, into a neonate. This potentiality is something actual in the embryo. It is not a mere or unactualized possibility of the embryo. What is a mere possibility is the realization of the potentiality. Just as we must not confuse a disposition with its manifestation, we must not confuse a potentiality with its realization.

One difference to note is that between a passive potentiality and an active potentiality.  The pane's potentiality to shatter is passive whereas the embryo's potentiality to develop into a neonate is active.  As for terminology, I don't see any non-verbal difference between a potentiality-to-X and a disposition-to-X. (I could be wrong.)  Some people are irascible.  They are disposed to become angry under slight external provocation.  Is that a passive potentiality or an active potentiality?  Put that question on the 'back burner.'

2.  Another difference between a possibility and a potentiality is that, while every actual F is a possible F, no actual F is a potential F.  Therefore, a possible F is not the same as a potential F.  For example, an actual cat is a possible cat, but no actual cat is a potential cat.  A towel that is actually saturated with water is possibly saturated with water; but no towel that is actually saturated with water is potentially saturated with water.  If a man is actually drunk, then he is possibly drunk; but an actually drunk man is not a potentially drunk man.  Potentiality excludes actuality; possibility does not.  But can't a man who is actually drunk at one time be potentially drunk at another?  Of course, but that is not the point.

Necessarily, if x is actually F at time t, then x is possibly F at t.  But, necessarily, if x is actually F at t, then:

a. It is not the case that x is potentially F at t

and

b. X is not potentially F at t.

Furthermore, an actual truth is a possible truth, but it makes  no sense to say that an actual truth is a potential truth.  A truth is a true proposition; propositions are abstract objects; abstract objects are not subjects of real, as opposed to Cambridge, change.  So it makes  no sense to speak of potential truths.

The actual world is a possible world; but what could it mean to say that the actual world is a potential world?

If God necessarily exists, then God actually exists, in which case God possibly exists.  But it makes no sense to say that God potentially exists.  In terms of possible worlds:  If God exists in every world, then he exists in the actual world and in some possible worlds.  But 'God exists in some potential worlds' makes no sense.

It makes sense to say that it is possible that there exist an individual distinct from every actual individual.  But it makes no sense to say that there is the potentiality to exist of some individual distinct from every actual individual. 

3.  So, to answer Vlastimil's question, potentiality is not to be confused with possibility.  And it doesn't matter whether we are talking about narrowly logical possibility, broadly logical possibility, nomological  possibility, institutional possibility, or any other sort of  (real as opposed to epistemic/doxastic) possibility.  Nevertheless, the two are connected.  If it is possible that a boy grow a beard, then presumably that possibility is grounded in a potentiality inherent in the boy.  The point, once again, is that this potentiality is not itself something merely potential, but something actual or existent, though not yet actualized.

I am now seated.  I might now have been standing.  The first is an actual state of affairs, the second is a merely possible state of affairs.  How are we to understand the mere possibility of my standing now?  Pace the shade of David Lewis, it would be 'crazy' to say that there is a possible world in which a counterpart of me is standing now.  But it seems quite sane to say that the possibility of my standing now, when in actual fact I am seated, is grounded in the power (potentiality) I have to stand up.

A mere possibility is not nothing.  So it has some sort of ontological status.  A status can be secured for mere possibilities  if mere possibilities are grounded in really existent powers in agents. 

('Potential' Puzzle.  I have the power to do X iff it is possible that I do X.  But do I have the power because it is possible, or is it possible because I have the power?  Presumably the latter.  But my power is limited.  What constrains my power it not what is antecedently possible?  Throw this on the 'back burner' too, Euthyphro!)

As I understand the Aristotelian position, real possibilities involving natural items are parasitic upon causal powers and causal liabilities ingredient in these items.  That, by the way, implies constituent ontology, does it not?  Score another point for constituent ontology.

The Aristotelian position also implies a certain anti-empiricism, does it not?  A rubber band that is never stretched never empirically manifests its elasticity; yet it possesses the dispositional property of elasticity whether or not the property is ever manifested empirically.   So dispositions and potencies  are in a clear sense occult (hidden) entities, and they are occult in a way the occult blood in your stool sample is not occult.  For the latter, while not visible to gross inspection is yet empirically detectable in the blood lab.

4. Go back to the two panes of glass.  One we know is fragile: it broke under moderate impact.  How do we know that the other is fragile?  I submit that the concept of potentiality underlying the Potentiality Argument is governed by the following Potentiality Universality Principle:

PUP: Necessarily, if a normal F has the potentiality to become a G, then every normal F has the potentiality to become a G.

To revert to the hackneyed example, if an acorn is a potential oak tree, then every normal acorn is a potential oak tree, and this is so as a matter of natural necessity. It cannot be the case that some normal acorns have, while others do not have, the potentiality to become oak trees. Potentialities are inherent in the things that have them. They are not a matter of ascription. We don't ascribe potentialities; things have them regardless of our mental and linguistic performances. And these very performances themselves realize potentialities. So if the potentialities of the ascribing mind were themselves ascribed, who or what would do the ascribing? I cannot ascribe potentialities to myself if the ascribing is itself the realization of my potentiality to ascribe.

Similarly with passive potentialities. To say of a sugar cube that it is water-soluble is to say that, were it placed in water, it would dissolve. Now if this is true of one normal sugar cube, it is true of all normal sugar cubes. Suppose you have 100 sugar cubes, all alike. There would be no reason to say that some of them are water-soluble and some are not. If one is, all are. If one is not, none are.

5. Note that the water-solubility of sugar cubes cannot be identified with the truth of the subjunctive conditional 'If a sugar cube were placed in water then it would dissolve.'  It needs to be identified with the truth maker of that conditional, namely, the passive potency to dissolve inherent in the sugar cube.

6. Potentiality as here understood brings with it further Aristotelian baggage.  

Pointing to a lump of raw ground beef, someone might say, "This is a potential hamburger." Or, pointing to a hunk of bronze, "This is a potential statue." Someone who says such things is not misusing the English language, but he is not using 'potential' in the strong specific way that potentialists -- proponents of the Potentiality Principle in the Potentiality Argument-- are using the word. What is the difference? What is the difference between the two examples just given, and "This acorn is a potential oak tree," and "This embryo is a potential person?"

The difference is explainable in terms of the difference between identity and constitution. A lump of raw meat cannot come to be a hamburger; at most it can come to constitute one. The same goes for the hunk of bronze: it cannot come to be a statue; at most it can come to constitute one. Note also that an external agent is required to shape and cook the meat and to hammer the bronze. An acorn and an embryo, on the other hand, can come to be an oak tree and a person, respectively, and indeed by their own internal agency. Potentiality in the strong sense here in play is therefore governed by the following Potentiality Identity Principle:

PIP: Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and there is a y such that y realizes, whether partially or fully, x's potentiality to be an F, then x = y.

Note that PIP does not imply that there is a y that realizes x's potential. Potentialities, after all, may go unrealized similarly as dispositions may go unmanifested. A seed's potential will go unrealized if the seed is destroyed, or if the seed is not planted, or if it is improperly planted, or if it is properly planted but left unwatered, etc. What PIP states is that if anything does realize x's potentiality to be an F, then that thing is transtemporally numerically identical to x. So if there is an oak tree that realizes acorn A's potentiality to be an oak tree, then A is identical over time to that oak tree. This implies that when the acorn becomes an oak tree, it still exists, but is an oak tree rather than an acorn. The idea is that numerically one and the same individual passes through a series of developmental stages. In the case of a human being these would include zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult.

Not so with the hunk of bronze. It is not identical to the statue that is made out of it. Statue and hunk of bronze cannot be identical since they differ in their persistence conditions. The hunk of bronze can, while the statue cannot, survive being melted down and recast in some other form.

Consider the Pauline verse at 1 Corinthians 13:11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." This implies that numerically one and the same man, Paul of Tarsus, was first a child and later became an adult: it is not as if there was a numerically different entity, Paul-the-child, who passed out of existence when Paul-the-adult came into existence.

So not only is potentiality (in the strong Aristotelian sense here in play) governed by PIP, it is also governed by what I will call the Potentiality Endurantism Principle:

PEP. Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and there is a y such that y realizes, whether partially or fully, x's potentiality to be an F, then x (= y) is wholly present at every time at which x (= y) exists.

PEP rules out a temporal parts ontology according to which a spatiotemporal particular persists in virtue of having different temporal parts at different times.

Let me throw another principle into the mix, one that is implicit above and governs active potencies.  I'll call it the Potentiality Agency Principle:

PAP. Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and x's potential is to any extent realized, then the realization of x's potential is driven, not by any agency external to x, but by x's own internal agency, with the proviso that the circumambient conditions are favorable.

The notion of (strong) potentiality that figures in the Potentiality Principle and the Potentiality Argument is governed by PUP, PIP, PEP, and PAP at the very least.

7.  When Barack Obama was a community organizer was he 'potentially' president of the U. S.?  It was surely possible that he become POTUS: logically, nomologically, and institutionally: there is nothing in the Constitution that ruled out his becoming president.  And there is nothing incorrect in saying, in ordinary English, that the young Obama was 'potentially' POTUS.  But does it make sense to say that, ingredient in the young Obama, there was a potentiality that was actualized when he became POTUS if we are using 'potentiality' in the Aristotelian sense?

I don't think so.  It looks to be a violation of PUP above.  Let 'F' stand for U. S. citizen. Does every U.S. citizen have the potential to become a presidential candidate? Obviously not: it is is simply false that every normal U. S. citizen develops in the normal course of events into a presidential candidate. A potentiality is a naturally inherent nisus -- and as natural not a matter of laws or other conventions -- which is the same in all members of the class in question. But the opportunity to become president has nothing natural about it: it is an artifact of our contingent laws and political arrangements. People like Obama do not become presidential contenders in the way acorns become oak trees.