Two comments about Aristotle:

1. The key point required to respond to Aaron’s odd solicitude for forlorn reproductive cells has been touched on but maybe not sufficiently emphasized by James. A living thing has a nature. This nature is an internal source of motion and development leading the thing internally to the attainment of its fullness of being (Physics.2.1). The possession of a full complement of genetic materials is one of the material requirements for a living thing to have the nature of the kind of being it is to become. Sperm and ova do not have this nature. They exist in abundance to beat the odds against conception and successful birth, just as some egg-layers have to lay thousands to get a few survivors. But they do not have the inner principle of development into the full human being that requires only the right external conditions to enable it to go forward with the humanity it already has as a self-fulfilling potential. (This also suffices as a response to Empedocles, though I suspect he was being facetious again.)

2. On political and “humane” abortions in Aristotle, I think this is a point at which the subsequent tradition makes it harder to see Aristotle’s point. Thomism, resting on the foundation of a sole rational creator, is inclined to think we can end up with a harmonious system of understanding. For Aristotle, there are tensions in the nature of things that he generally articulates up to the point where they can’t be resolved by mere reason and then leaves them there. One of these tensions is between the natural ends of the human being (and also the household) and the ends of political life. The two orders of ends are in some ways harmonious and in some ways in tension in their priorities. The city needs a vast preponderance of fit citizens (and in this regard it is a matter of justice to destroy all unfit infants rather than institute some kind of inevitably unfair quota). But Aristotle recognizes that this is ethically problematic, particularly if it deadens our sensitivity to the goodness of life as such. So best to perform the politically necessary terminations at a point at which the feeling that we are performing a life-despising evil is less palpable. Aristotle is not Kant; he sees that we must devote a lot of care to promoting and safeguarding the right modulation of emotion if we want to promote virtue.

In this regard, the “manipulative” rhetoric of James and the opponents of abortion is sound. Use the ultrasounds that Aristotle didn’t have to make clear that those emotional responses ought to be elicited by the child much earlier than one would otherwise think. Then you may be able to convince some by sound arguments that this extends all the way back to the moment the being first has its internally-directing human nature.

Let us suppose the hard case of rape, and that the embryo is a child of said rape, and that the mother does not want the embryo at all.

Let us suppose the hard case of shipwreck. If someone is shipwrecked onto my property, am I allowed to regard that as trespass? Am I allowed, in defense of my property, to shoot the poor helpless waterlogged victim, or abandon her to die of exposure, or order him off the beach and back into the teeth of the hurricane to die? Does the shipwreck victim become my property in any way, or does the shipwreck victim remain a person with rights? If I live on a deserted island, am I allowed to deprive the shipwreck victim of food, water, and medical care because I want her gone? Or am I obliged to keep the person alive if I possibly can?

The embryo is not to blame for anything that has happened to the mother or family, and the embryo does not have any choice about coming into existence. You cannot claim that it’s a case of breaking and entering, and thus you can scarcely claim the right to justifiable homicide.

Tomorrow, while I sit among my fellow faculty celebrating the graduates of Villanova, President Obama will be making his slow march to the stage in South Bend to announce — no doubt among many “inspiring” apercu and admonitions — that abortion is something “about which we can disagree and still respect each other” or some such.

To which I reply, without any intention of entertaining his appearance of “moderation,” “Tell that to my son, or, rather, to the millions who were once as he is now, and who have been killed without so much as a death certificate.” To the extent we are complicit in his self-congratulation and in the murderous order he oversees, we will all, I hope, someday be held accountable.

Admittedly, this discussion is becoming more speculative than deductive, but regardless, I think a reasonable reading of the quoted passage might include something like this: Aristotle could simply demarcate the initial acquisition of sense and life as the initiation of citizenship, couldn’t he? For one might think that it would be less disruptive to the polis for the state to kill a non-citizen than it might be for the state to kill one of its own, hence the attempt to draw the line at “sense and life.”

It seems like this question may also hinge on some discussion of the Aristotelian account of vice—namely, cruelty. Perhaps Aristotle encourages abortion prior to “sense and life” because sense and life mark the initiation of a certain kind of virtue-object. So, for instance, charity toward a rock (one wonders whether such an act is possible) or a dog is a less virtuous act than charity toward another person. “Sense and life” may simply mark the point at which Aristotle believes that the human being becomes a higher object of our virtues and vices. Thus, if the child is to be killed, the more virtuous action is that which is performed on the senseless and (in some sense, apparently) lifeless child. This raises a number of interesting questions, not the least of which is what Aristotle means by the word “sense,” or the degree to which he would take objects of virtuous actions to extend along species lines.

Like I said, though, this conversation has become pretty speculative, but perhaps not too much so. And anyhow, I’m grateful for the free Medieval education I’ve received over the last few days.

I expected this to come up sooner rather than later; The Politics has sat open to 1335b for three days.

My questioning of your arguments was over matters of causality, potency, and act — as in foundational principles of classical Aristotelianism and of the whole tradition that sprang from his thought and continues to provide the most vital philosophic thought up to the present day. Because of the existence of that tradition, I do not hestitate to distinguish between its principles and the particular claims Aristotle may have made. But, let me see if I can address just two points in your last comment.

I’m not sure “intrinsic value” is a helpful term here; if I used it above (and I don’t recall having done so), it was only in response to your use of the word “value.” I would generally look askance upon any argument that used the word in anything more than a heuristic sense. Aristotle would not speak of intrinsic value, any more than I would, and for a reason very similar to why neither of us would speak of “rights.” All things exist for some good; all things are functional things and by their existence aim at some good. All things may be hierarchized (valued?) as they stand in relation to their particular good and as that particular good stands in relation to the Good itself (woah, says the strict Aristotelian, unsure if I haven’t just made him a Platonist in spite of his best efforts).

Aristotle understood the human person as a part of the prior whole that is the state. There’s an ambiguity in his understanding of the state, however, that someone more qualified than me would have to clarify, because if man exists for the good that is the state, the state also exists for the good life for man and men. We have here, at the very least (and again, let me match your modesty regarding Aristotle with my own!), an incipient conception that the human person is not reducible to an instrumental good of the state, because he is internal to that good.

Nonetheless, one may refuse this reading of Aristotle and say, “No, indeed, the person is just the part, the state the whole.” Granted. Our tradition gives us much more fully developed, more profound accounts of the good than Aristotle had. Because of Christianity, the notion came into the world that the final cause of human life was not bounded by the horizon of this world, but rather was located in the Kingdom of Heaven. Consequently, each individual person has a dignity that he did not have before; while he may be reducible to a “part,” he is a part of the Kingdom of Heaven rather than of Athens. One of my many objections to “rights discourse,” incidentally, is that it tries to give us an understanding of man in immanent and secular terms that only makes sense if his destiny lies in the transcendent and the divine.

If one does not believe in a heavenly kingdom, then one might as well readjust one’s vision to the kingdom of this world. In that case, Aristotle would be right to recommend the exposure of children just as you would be right to suggest (as you do in “b)” of your first comment at the head of this happy thread of comments and conversation)that abortion might be a practical and permissible means of population control. However, you would also have to confess that the so-called “right to choose” an abortion was a poor policy for that end. Rather, the state must control, measure and coerce mothers to abort their children as needed. For the mother is no less a part of the whole of the state than is her child. That’s one of the curious misfortunes about the abortion debate. One can justly decry abortion as murder, and one can, from a statist and early Aristotelian position, justify abortion as state policy. The only position that is incoherent is the one now in place, where one person is said to have a sacred (right) sovereignty while another person is not; such is the incoherence of liberalism as a secularized form of Christianity.

Finally, let us turn to Aristotle’s words: “As to the exposure and rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live, but that on the ground of an excess in the number of children, if the established customs of the state forbid this (for in our state population has a limit), no child is to be exposed, but when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun . . .”

Why, Aristotle? Why “before sense and life have begun”? My reading, in light of the ambiguities in Aristotle noted above, is that he is uncomfortable with abortion because he already senses that it may be murder. He senses that the destiny of the human person is not reducible to being an instrumental good of the state, but does not know what the highest good might otherwise be. And so he hedges, as our society has hedged: “If we kill him early enough, maybe he won’t be alive, or at least he won’t feel pain.” But Aristotle’s basic teleological understanding of things was already at work, and tells us, “this is an inconsistency in his argument.” He knows it is a child being killed, and, for our sake rather than the child’s, he hopes to have the deed done before the child is old enough to make a fuss and remind us of our deed. He could, perhaps, hedge here because he did not know for sure, lacking modern embryology and the instruments that advanced it, precisely when life does begin. But we know better; we don’t have “faith” better, we know better.

But that said, I’m happy to admit that my Aristotelian acquaintance is broader than it is deep here. So before I press further, it’d be prudent for me to ask whether you think I’ve misread Aristotle, at least insofar as your argument relies upon his work.

The “my” in “my body” actually does not designate possession or ownership, it merely signals identity, distinguishing mine from yours, or this from that. One can try to found an ethic of ownership on this grammatical phrase, as did, it seems, John Locke. One would just be wrong to do so, grammatically and theoretically, since none of us owns ourselves.

Ugly though the universe often appears (and it looks more deformed to me than ever thanks to a few of the comments here), part of its ugliness comes from the fragility of things being pure gift or given. We do not own ourselves, and our experience confirms just how rarely we are in possession of ourselves; more often than not, we experience — if we are attentive — being cast upon the sheer gratuity of things, of being dependent and still more dependent, of always being only a few inches from non-existence were it not for our possession by another.

SoMG’s comment is helpful rhetorically, of course, because most persons only give their reluctant support to pro-abortionists and their laws out of an insecurity and uncertainty about when life begins — an uncertainty that is itself the product of obfuscation, scare-tactics, and ideology rather than, say, basic biological science. Many such persons would be immediately revolted by this “admittedly extreme” position, as well they should be. Forced with either becoming murderers, cooperating in such intrinsic evil, or recognizing the humanity of unborn children, most would elect the latter. They would probably also recommend SoMG seek some kind of help, or at least a loving friend beyond the irresponsible precincts of the internet.

Right-to-lifers have one right answer: fetuses are live human persons, fully entitled to the rights that other persons enjoy.

But you have the wrong question. What matters is not WHAT the fetus is, but WHERE it is.

Call me an extremist, but I claim absolute control over what and who lives inside my body, and when, and how long. If something or someone is inside my body, then I’m entitled to kill it, no matter what or who it is. If all the people in the world–innocent and guilty, unborn and already-born, great and small, high and low, rich and poor, smart and stupid–were assembled somewhere inside my body, then I’d be entitled to holocaust ‘em, any time, for any reason or for no reason. That’s part of the meaning of the word “my” in the phrase “my body”.

Sure, abortion is homicide. But abortion on demand is JUSTIFIABLE homicide.

I’ll address each of your points in sequence:

The basis of your argument lies in expanding the conception of teleology beyond the course or function of an individual creature to the total order of which the creature is a part. A sperm is not a human being, and so to speak of it as somehow protected as if it were one because it is an initially constitutive property of one, would require a conception of the end (a person who has lived a full life, or, to put it a better way, a person living a good life) that transcends the boundary of the species. And, if one wishes to argue teleologically in a manner that transcends that boundary, I am not sure how one could stop with just the sperm and the egg. I am also not sure why one would want to make that argument, since it goes against all reason and experience, which tells us the sperm is a distinct kind of being from the being of a human. That was the sole moral of my “dust” example. I continue to think your line of reasoning is not simply trying to press me to admit an absurdity, but is itself absurd. You are as aware as anybody of the differentiation between individual things. You are aware, for example, that a son is not his father or his mother, even though he derives materially from them. The sperm and the egg are the material cause that makes that derivation possible. Neither of them constitutes the person conceived upon their union.

Second point. Please do not interpret me as suggesting that the telos of a being is reducible to its DNA. I would similarly advise you not to reduce the unity of a human life to a perpetuated pattern of DNA. That kind of materialism is very comfortable in modernity, but is also a damning weakness of modernity. I don’t think anything I’ve said necessitates that; when I use species, nature, and essence I am not being eccentric but relying on the Scholastic acceptation of those words, which is the only vocabulary that seems adequate to the reality at which all these questions is driving.

Now I don’t quite know what to make of “less valuable” in your second point. In particular circumstances, a child may indeed be less valuable than an adult (as a soldier, for instance), and it is not the total equality of all persons that I have any interest in defending. I am simply trying to make clear that there is an evident line between a thing called an egg and a human being, and that this line indicates these are two different kinds or species of things and thus two things with different natures rather than two moments in the continuous development or life of one thing.

Third point, picking up from the second. This seems a mixed, inadequate reading of Aristotle. Let’s grant it has an element of truth, as we can see by analogy in considering the following: Aristotle takes for granted that a good man must own property and be relieved from the necessities of life. His philosophy does not try to get us to foreswear our awareness that, while property may be constitutive of a good man, it is not an attribute of the man himself. Unlike John Locke (not incidentally), one could not reasonably make the argument that, asked to point out a good man, Aristotle would direct his digit at the man’s house, loom, or slaves. My point here is that you are trying to absorb too much into the concept of a telos at this moment, even as you are materialistically reductive in trying to reduce it to DNA above, and, moreover, even as you are insincerely radical in inadvertently suggesting that, logically, a telos should encompass all things.

It does not matter that the sole end of an egg is to contribute to the material cause of a human being; the question is whether it is a human being and it cannot be a human being precisely because we know for certain that when an egg contributes to the making of a human being the egg simultaneously ceases to exist as itself as it becomes another (something else). To make the same argument for different stages life as you do is disturbingly reductive (in a fashion, of course, at home in certain modern and postmodern accounts of the discontinuity of the self). It is also patently inaccurate; in addition to the continuity of DNA and that of memory and consciousness, there is the objective continuity of the person as a whole that is continuously confirmed by those in his community who call him something like “Tim,” and who can mark the moment of his conception and that of his death and say, “that’s our Tim, all right!”

Aquinas and Aristotle both are the sources for my account (given several comments above, and in response to your first objections) that a being is constituted by both its final cause (telos) and by its present nature that determines it to that cause rather than another (its formal cause), and its being determined thus as an individual of a species (its material cause). It is clear that the sperm shares, and shares only partially in the material causality of the human person, not its form or telos. And so I would suggest that you are trying to understand things only in terms of final causes, as was, for that matter, Jake (insofar as it could be said he was understanding anything rather than bloviating).

Now, whether the sperm or the egg have a particular dignity due to them because they contribute to the creation of human life is one question. But my entire argument against your position hinges solely on my showing that they are not in themselves human life. The same argument that shows them not to be human life shows also that even at its earliest stages of development, to be pointedly redundant, a human life is a human life.

If you wish to argue that human life is not somehow sacred or that the inequalities of various human beings should somehow be reflected in law or justice (as do Utilitarians), that is another question. But I have taken for granted these things, and have seen the burden of your questioning to lie only in establishing what exactly constitutes a human being.

Now, I can see your argument as to the instrumental value of spermatozoa and ova, but I don’t think that we’ve decided the question as to whether the value spermatozoa and ova is simply instrumental. I guess what I’m missing here is that I don’t see that simply “having a different DNA” than the final product means that a constituent part of the product is less valuable than the final product, itself. After all, the conceptus ends when it grows to a blastocyst; the fetus ends when it becomes an infant; the child ends when it becomes an adult. The only unity between these parts is that they have the same (human) DNA, my question is: Why is this specific DNA valuable in the first place?

As I read Aristotle, he would defend (protect/care for) the previous series of stages not on biological grounds, per se, but on the grounds that those are the necessary stages in the human being fulfilling its rational function. But if that’s the case, that the series doesn’t begin at conception but at the first stage necessary in the human achieving its rational function, then isn’t it the case that human development begins with the formation of ova and spermatozoa?

The acorn/oak tree analogy is extremely common in this debates. It has been around at least since Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote her famous article “A Defense of Abortion” in the early seventies and it may have been in circulation before that. So it won’t surprise you that the following response is also common:

Let’s say the phrase “oak tree” is ambiguous because it could be used either as a biological classification or in a more restrictive way, so it refers only to members of the oak family that have reached a certain point in their development. Either way the analogy doesn’t work. If “oak tree” is being used in the first way then acorns *are* oak trees. If “oak tree” is being used in the second way (so that we don’t speak of something as being an oak tree until it has grown to the point where it’s trunk has a certain thickness, it’s ready to start producing leaves, or whatever) then it’s true that an acorn won’t count as an oak tree in that sense, but the analogy no longer does what it was intended to do. Using oak tree in this sense to say that an acorn isn’t yet an oak tree is just like saying a human fetus is not yet a human adult.

Aaron, while it’s true to say that a human being won’t come into existence unless a sperm fertilizes an egg, it doesn’t follow that either the sperm or the egg is a human being. It doesn’t even mean that either of them has the potential to become a human being. When a sperm and an ovum come together a new organism which is neither the sperm nor the ovum is created. That organism is a human being, whereas human sperm and eggs are produced by human beings, but they are not themselves human beings. Abortion may be a complex and controversial issue – I don’t deny it – but these are mundane facts about sexual reproduction.

A sperm or an egg really is a different species from the human being who comes into being when these two things become one. It is not a “sperm at a different stage of development,” it is literally a different kind of being with a different telos.

As for acorns, if you wish to insist that an acorn is essentially the arborial equivalent of an unborn child, I can go with you to some extent (though I have stated above the problems with this claim). However, that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Human beings do not consider even a fully grown tree to be as high a good as a very small child. One doesn’t have to be a Christian to reason that far, though one cannot be either an irrationalist, fideist, materialist, or a nihilist.

To say that the telos of sperm and egg alike is to become a human being is to say that their function is to exist for something other than themselves. They are instrumental goods whose “goodness” is entirely understood in terms of their serving a purpose in which they will no longer exist. So too, you could push the point, might we say that dust has as its highest end its use as the material cause of the human person; its telos may well be providing the constitutive material property of human life, and therefore it too has as its end the ceasing-to-be-itself.

But, granting this point, I think my argument would clearly tell us at least three things.

First, that the telos of a human embryo is not to become something else — something other than itself, a different nature, a different essence — but merely to become *more actually* what it already nonetheless actually is.

Second, that the good of human life lies not in its being part of the wide process known as “fertility” but in its being a specifically human life; it is the kind of being that is fertile, rather than fertility itself, that we take into consideration when defining murder.

Third, we can quickly discern a clear hierarchy of goods at least partially measurable by taking into consideration things that are good in themselves, and things that are merely instrumental, and therefore can be understood as goods only insofar as they cease to be themselves in making possible the good for something else. Anyone who sees human life as valuable (after the fashion that most, but not all, westerners do) has some understanding of that life as itself a good; the Christian understanding of the end of human life to be the love and virtual unity with God is no exception here, since it confers the human person as an end in itself that finds its continuous fulfillment in unity with God. If the human self were obliterated in that unity, then we might think of the individual as a mere instrumental good (as, evidently, some religious traditions do), but that is another day’s work.

The life of the human individual therefore is a superior good, because a good-in-itself, relative to any instrumental good. There are other more obviously mixed goods — things that have a certain goodness in themselves even as they are also clearly instrumental goods — the chief example of which would be other species of animals. These are harder to rank, hence the unfortunate and degrading prevalence of “animal rights” groups in our present culture. One must have a particular understanding of the human person as the highest good in nature, as a true good-in-itself, in order to treat other animals as distinct from and inferior to human beings. But even lacking that power of distinction and ordering so essential to human wisdom — as so many environmentalists seem to be — one can still see that a sperm or an egg can only be understood as an instrumental good and therefore is evidently inferior to, and distinct in essence from, the nature and telos that is created the moment these two things unite.

So far as I can tell, to argue otherwise would necessitate your also arguing that all dirt must be saved in custom molds in anticipation of its coming to use in the creation of human beings. There is a reductio ad absurdum that could derive from this conversation, but it cannot be derived from my argument.