Mighty Oaks from Tiny Acorns Grow

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.