There are two main kinds of arguments against abortion: Those based on the idea that we begin existing at conception and those based on the idea that personhood begins at conception.
One of the main objections to thinking that our existence begins at conception is the incredulous stare: How can that single cell be me?!
Here my recent geometrical observations about how I will be very small in almost every reference frames become relevant. Exactly the same argument establishes that in almost every reference frame, I start out really small. In almost every reference frame, I start out less than a nanometer in size (any non-zero size can be substituted here), and hence much smaller than a single cell.
Thus, it seems we are simply stuck with a counterintuitive result about what we are like at our beginning. Even if we don’t begin at conception, in almost all reference frames we begin as something much smaller than a single cell.
Can the geometrical observations show that personhood begins really small, too, and thereby undercut the incredulous stare at the idea that a single cell is a person?
Now, if we are essentially persons, given that by the previous argument we begin smaller than a cell, then indeed something smaller than a cell is a person.
So the remaining case to consider is views on which we are only accidentally persons, and we pre-exist our personhood. A typical view in this family will say that we are animals that come into existence at conception or implantation, and that about 1.5-2 years after our beginning, we come to have the property of personhood.
In the previous argument, I looked at the set K of all the spacetime locations of my body, and it followed that for almost every reference frame F, there was a time t in F and near my beginning such that the t-slice of me was really tiny. The obvious analog is to look at the set K* of all spacetime locations of my personal body—i.e., of my body at times at which I am a person—and repeat the argument. The problem with this move is that whether a spacetime location is within my body is intuitively independent of reference frame, but whether a spacetime location is within my personal body could more plausibly depend on the reference frame, if my 4D personal body is not all of my 4D body.
So at this point, I don’t have a version of my smallness argument against the view that to be a person I have to be big, when that view is coupled with the idea that I can exist without being a person.
What do you think motivates incredulous stare arguments? My sense is that they start to have their force when (a) the abstractness of the argument makes it seem somehow alienated from the reality it is supposed to be about, (b) the argument is difficult enough that we might not notice a mistake, and (c) we have a strong sense that the conclusion must be false—so strong that it seems more likely that the argument contains a mistake we aren’t able to spot.
ReplyDeleteIf someone presents you with an argument whose conclusion is that you don’t love your friends, and yet you have a strong sense that you do, in fact, love your friends, you might go hunting for a flaw in the argument. If you cannot find a flaw in the argument, you *might* accept the conclusion. But probably only if the steps in the argument seem pretty tightly connected to your relationship to your friends. For instance, if they have to do with the way you always seem to leave your phone behind when you expect them to call or the way you speak to them at dinner or what have you. But if, at some point in the argument, there is a detour into the properties of Riemannian manifolds, then you might simply respond to the argument with an incredulous stare objection.
(Obviously, detours into the properties of Riemannian manifolds might be less likely to alienate mathematicians than they would non-mathematicians. So use a different example for the detour if that’s you. Conditions (a) and (b) are related, since more abstract thinking tends to be more difficult precisely because it is further away from intuition.)
All this is to suggest: I’d bet that most people who make the incredulous stare argument against our coming into existence at conception will raise another incredulous stare objection to an argument that makes a detour into special relativity in order to show that I was generated at conception.
This conflates size with composition. Perhaps some space alien perceives me as a nanometer, it really don't care. That external perception of me could be a nanometer or a lightyear, it doesn't matter to me because everything scales with reference frame dilation.
ReplyDeleteA single cell is not a scaled down me.
" I start out really small. In almost every reference frame, I start out less than a nanometer in size (any non-zero size can be substituted here), and hence much smaller than a single cell."
"in almost all reference frames we begin as something much smaller than a single cell"
Irrelevant to personhood.
Alex
ReplyDelete"Even if we don’t begin at conception, in almost all reference frames we begin as something much smaller than a single cell."
If that is true, it does indeed work against the incredible stare objection of our coming into existence at conception. The problem is that it would also imply that we come into existence before our conception. Conception involves wto cells merging into one. But if we exist as something much smaller than a single cell, conception is irrelevant, we exist anyway.
How exactly do we exist? Perhaps as a small slice of a sperm cell or of an egg? But those are cells and are much bigger than we are, so they are not relevant either.
I guess we would end up saying that we exist as an immaterial form somehow.
But in that case, abortion does not harm this form in any way.
Well, as far as the geometry goes, we could begin as a small slice of the zygote endowed with form. Or we could begin as a small slice of an infant endowed with form.
ReplyDeleteThe geometric considerations don't decide between these options, but I think it is plausible that once an infant is on the scene, all of it is us, so the first option is more plausible than the second.
Alex
ReplyDeletebut if we begin as as a small slice of the zygote endowed with form, that would mean the zygote actually begins when a small slice of the sperm merges with a small slice of the ovum. Each would only have a small slice of the DNA, containing at best a few atoms but it would not be a DNA molecule. This idea of yours makes all chemistry and biology redundant. The form of the zygote is not endowed in any wayby the sperm or the ovum, because on the 'slice level' there is nothing to distinguish them from any other slice.