As the relative quiescence of the blog in recent weeks will attest, there has been a great deal going on that has kept me from posting, and I am truly sorry for the interruption of our ongoing discussion of EMBRYO. To Chapter 3, Dualism.
We need a little primer with some of the language that undergirds this chapter, specifically a discussion of essence and accidents. Before proceeding, I must confess that while I studied philosophy as a second major in college, that’s sand lot baseball and this is the major leagues. I invite Dr. Tollefsen to correct me if I fail in any way to present the philosophy accurately. This is his baby (no pun intended) from here.
Accidents- This is not the colloquial understanding of a mishap, but rather a description of an objects discernable characteristics: height, weight, shape, color, texture, material composition etc.
Essence- Perhaps a spice combination used by celebrity chef Emeril, but in philosophy a statement encompassing the very idea of what an object is, the very concept of the thing.
For example, we all know a chair when we see one, yet there are untold numbers of different types/models/styles of chair; everything from a simple wooden kitchen set chair, to a formal dining room chair, to an upholstered recliner. All are very different in material composition, texture, color, style, etc. Yet, they all share one essence: chairness.
This is an important exercise in metaphysics as we turn our attention from chairs to humans and human development: The essential “Gerard” relative to the accidental “Gerard” (who has added a few ‘accidental’ pounds since he got married 171/2 years ago).
Now, the authors take us into some rather challenging thought regarding the essential ‘me’ vs. the accidental ‘me’, which leads to a discussion of the philosophical error that is dualism. As regarding human beings, a common perception is that the essential ‘me’ is the mind/soul while the accidental ‘me’ is the body in which the soul resides and from which it is liberated at death. The authors quite correctly refute this understanding, not only in light of the resurrection of the body, but in asserting that “we are also essentially bodily, organic beings, part of the physical world, with biological lives essential, not accidental, to our existence.
The error of dualism plays itself in the area of embryo ethics. The organism need not exhibit all of its potentialities all the time to be the essential organism, the kind of thing that it is. To suggest that the kind of thing something is depends on some function yet to be performed, some accidental feature yet to be developed, is a grave error.
The authors go on to describe several types of dualism: mind-body, soul-body, Lockean, brain-body, and Constitutionalism. Under constitutionalism, the organic body/animal precedes the person’s existence, and in many cases, outlives the person. So here the human person is constituted by, but not identical to the human animal. Moral dualism will be further explored in chapter 5. In brief, it suggests that humans may come into existence at fertilization, but do not become worthy of moral respect (become persons) until some later stage of development.
The authors then go on to present some compelling argumentation against dualism, which we will pick up this Thursday in a second post on this chapter. I’m uncertain as to how people have understood the material in chapter 3, so I’ll draw the line here and see where the discussion takes us.
It’s good to be back.
Coming Home 
Thanks, Gerry.
Let me put this somewhat abstruse discussion into a bit of context. The question we are trying to ask in this chapter is basically this: what are you (readers of this blog) and I (guy writing just now) essentially?
What do we mean by “essentially” here? Well, there are some things that we are that we could stop being, but we would still exist. Gerry (and I, for that matter) could drop a few pounds and we would still continue to exist. If I stopped being a teacher, I would still exist, and so on. So we are only these things “accidentally.” But whatever it is that we are, such that, if we stopped being *that* we would cease to exist, that is what we are “essentially”.
Why is that important? The big reason is this: in the embryo research and abortion debates, on one side, and the euthanasia debates on the other (especially where, e.g., persistent vegetative state patients are concerned), then it is important to know when you and I began, and when we will cease to be, respectively. If *you* were not around at the embryo or fetus stage, then embryo destruction and abortion just would not have been the same kind of moral problem as they would be if they would have taken *your* life. If a patient no longer exists when her body is in a pvs, then depriving her of food and water is, again, not such a big moral problem.
And some views strongly imply that your and I were *not* around as embryos and fetuses: if you and I are essentially brains or minds, or souls, for example. And if, for you and I to exist, we need to be thinking things at that very time, then we will not exist in a pvs either.
In Embryo, RPG and I argue, to put it briefly, that you and I are human beings, living bodily organisms of the species Homo sapiens. That means that you and I came into existence when the particular human being that we are did; and, as the evidence we present in Chapter Two show, that is at conception, except in the case of identical twins, at least one of whom comes into existence a bit later when the embryo divides.
So if someone had destroyed the embryo from which the later you developed, that person would have destroyed *you*. And, as we argue later in the book, to do that would have been morally wrong.
Cheers,
CT
Thanks for the context Chris, and the tight summation. That’s why I’m grateful to have you aboard on the discussions!
CT this is something I’m well versed in and IMO arguing the important mereological relationship between body parts and the body still doesn’t by itself address collectively the brain swap or fission problems or how ontologically a thing without a current important ontological capacity should be considered that thing.
So Liberal philosophers will probably say that you haven’t presented anything really new to the debate.
Now if you attacked this from a systems perspective as I have done, combined with a few other points you would find a much stronger argument on the subjct.
Again it would be nice to at least chat with you about this.
Simon,
I look forward to your exchange with Dr. Tollefsen. May I make a request in the interim? For the sake of hapless laypersons in philosophy such as myself who don’t speak the Patois, can you define your terms as you go along?
Terms like brain swap and fission problems are not readily intelligible to me. When I hear brain swap, I think of what I feel most in need of most days. Fission for me is something that produces electricity and atomic explosions….
Thanks much in advance.
Simon,
I agree generally that something needs to be said about those thought experiments. Many of them attempt to convince us that we are not organisms but minds, on the grounds that we would go with our minds in the event that the brain and the rest of the organism became separated — e.g., if a whole brain transplant was possible, we think we would go with the brain.
[I’m not sure which fission cases you mean — embryo fission? If so, you might find my essay “Fission, Fusion, and the Simple View,” Christian Bioethics 12, 2006, pp. 255-263 helpful. I deal with other cases from the personal identity literature in “Experience Machines, Dreams, and What Matters,”The Journal of Value Inquiry 37, 2003, pp. 153-164.]
One thing to be said is that many of them are so removed from the realm of possibility that their evidential value is weak.
A second is that we provide positive arguments for the truth of our view that you and I are human animals, which themselves have some positive evidential weight.
A third is that some of the cases don’t seem to pose a real challenge: it is certainly possible to think that if my brain is removed, then even if the rest of the organism keeps on living, it lives as something other than a human being precisely because it now has *no* ontological capacity for rational thought.
But that description does not seem true to me either of the embryo, which is developing *itself* to the point of being able to think, and does not change its essential nature when it, e.g., develops a brain; or even of very seriously cognitively impaired human beings who for genetic or environmental reasons are prevented from developing, or maintaining, their ability for rational thought, such as anencephalic infants.
Finally, I don’t really think that developmental systems approach speak to the question of *what we are* — that approach has some bearing on when we begin, and on how we understand the nature of our coming to be, but those seem to me to be different questions (I could be missing something, though — please let me know). DST seems to me to be a view on the cusp of biology and philosophy of biology, but not a view about personal identity.
Best,
CT
[…] M. Nadal’s blog: Pro-Life Academy. In Dr. Nadal’s pro-life academy posts, he has been digging into embryology recently, going through the book EMBRYO: A Defense of Human […]
CT if you are still around sorry I didn’t receive the email notification that you replied so didn’t get a chance to give you a reply to your followup.
Gerard if you would be willing to help edit it I’ve been working on a quick article I’d like to have Dr. Tollefsen to comment on.
BTW CT any chance you could ask for a recording so we can listen in?
7 June 2010 || Cognitive Science and the Mereological Fallacy
LSE, LONDON :: The lecture will sketch the outline of one of the themes of “Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience” — namely the fallacy of ascribing to parts of an organism properties that can be attributed only to an animal as a whole and not to its parts. In particular, the incoherence of attributing to the brain properties that can intelligibly be ascribed only to the animal as a whole will be investigated. This provides the backdrop against which other conceptual confusions in cognitive neuroscience are exposed. Criticisms of “Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience” will be examined and refuted.
Speaker: Peter Hacker, University of Oxford
http://oxbionet.medsci.ox.ac.uk/lectures/7-june-2010-cognitive-science-and-the-mereological-fallacy