In a previous essay, I discussed how everyone knows that chickens and eggs are different, even though eggs may develop into chickens. When we confuse the potential to become something with being that thing itself, this is called the “genetic fallacy.” Another example should clearly illustrate the workings of this fallacy.
As everyone knows, acorns are the fruit of oak trees. Even the scrub oak we have in the canyons around Colorado Springs produce acorns, though they’re small acorns, coming as they do from trees so small they really count as brush. An acorn will, under the right circumstances - given a nice patch of soil, sufficient water and sunlight, and if not disturbed by greedy squirrels or other rodents - grow into an oak tree. Now, a lot of them don’t grow up to be full-grown, because they compete for space and nutrients, or because droughts happen, or maybe because deer eat the little seedlings. And that illustrates one aspect of the genetic fallacy: one reason that the potential to develop into something is not the same as being that thing is that the development is not inevitable.
We can also talk about how we value things differently, even though one has the potential to turn into the other. If your neighbor has a stand of oak trees, 60 or 80 feet high, and with nice, thick foliage, that adds a lot of value to his lot. If you go over and cut one of those trees and take the wood home to your fireplace, you’re going to be guilty of theft or, at least, a civil tort. (In California, I recall hearing, there are triple damages for killing someone’s trees.) On the other hand, if you go walking down his sidewalk in the fall, when it’s strewn with acorns, you can step on those acorns and destroy them without fear of any negative consequences (unless you slip and fall): acorns are not valuable.
One way to put it is that an oak tree (or its owner) has a right against wanton destruction. And that means that other people have an obligation not to destroy the oak tree. Acorns have no rights, and people aren’t obliged to respect them. I suppose you might say that trees, like people, grow into their rights. And there’s nothing strange about asserting that a fetus doesn’t get all the rights of a living human being, just because it has the potential to turn into one. A living child doesn’t have all the rights of an adult human being, even though it, too, has the potential to become one.
This is the genetic fallacy at work. In the area of abortion, when someone asserts that a conceptus, an embryo, a fetus, is a “human being,” there is some equivocation going on. Certainly, a fertilized human egg may have the potential to develop into a human being. It is not, however, a human being at the moment of conception, and it doesn’t have the rights we expect a human being to have.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Glenn:
Sorry for the radio silence. Busy week at the office.
Yes an acorn is different from an oak tree and nobody disputes it. But they’re both just wood products, and chickens and eggs are simply poultry. They’re property. Buy, ‘em, sell ‘em, pass special laws protecting some forms of some of them based on their mitigation of evil greenhouse gases, whatever.
What they are not is human. But a human embryo and a convenience store clerk, whatever their other differences, are both individual human organisms. How can anyone argue that a fetus is not a human organism? Seems to me the point of argument is whether all undeniably human organisms should be considered human “beings”. I don’t see how we can avoid it. How is an organism not a being?
My week was pretty busy, too.
I don't want to get too far into semantics, Agim, but it seems that the meaning of "organism" is pretty important here. I looked in my Penguin Dictionary of Biology (Ninth edition, 1994, reprinted with minor revisions, 1995, 1996), figuring on finding a good scientific definition there. Interestingly enough, they didn't have an entry for "organism." That tells me that organism may not be a scientific term.
In the Webster's College Dictionary I found, at page 624, this definition:
"1: an individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of organs separate in function but mutually dependent: a living person, plant, or animal 2: a complex structure (as society) like a living organism in having many interdependent parts."
By that definition, an embryo, like an egg or an acorn, is not an organism. Compare this definition of "embryo" from Webster's College Dictionary, page 289:
"1: an animal in the early stages of development that are characterized by cleavage, the laying down of fundamental tissues, and the formation of primitive organs and organ systems - compare FETUS."
I think the basic point here is not whether we're talking about humans or chickens. Humans are, after all, animals, and their development follows the patterns of animal development. The point is that an embryonic human, like an embryonic chicken, dog, or rabbit, is not an organism, to use your terminology. That is, it is not possessed of complex organs and organ systems, but is in the process of developing "primitive organs and organ systems."
Now, the Webster's definition is vague at some points, but I think it's clear that an "organism" is capable of independent life, while an embryo is not. So, at some point, the embryo becomes a fetus, and the fetus becomes a human being. I don't yet know what that point is, but it isn't at the moment of conception.
The Penguin Dictionary of Biology, ninth edition. M. Thain and M. Hickman. 1994.
Embryo ... (Zool.) The structure produced from an egg (usually fertilized), by generations of mitotic divisions while still within the egg membranes, or otherwise inside the maternal body. Embryonic life is usually considered to be over when hatching from membranes occurs (or birth); in humans an embryo becomes a foetus when the first bone cells appear in cartilage (at about 7 weeks of gestation). Page 202.
Thus, a fetus is merely an embryo which has reached a certain stage of development.
I think it particularly significant that the authors identify the end of embryonic life as birth (or hatching. If human birth is analogous to hatching for birds, then one can fairly say that an embryo becomes a human being at birth. (Or, looking at the point about membranes, when the mother's water breaks.)
Post a Comment