Start with this:
Dignity is an essential property of anything that has it.
Necessarily, something has dignity if and only if it is a person.
Therefore, personhood is an essential property of anything that has it.
Now, suppose the standard philosophical pro-choice view that
- Personhood consists in developed sophisticated cognitive faculties of the sort that fetuses and newborns lack but typical toddlers have.
Consider a newborn, Alice. By (4) Alice is not a person, but if she grows up into a typical toddler, that toddler will be a person. By (3), however, we cannot say that Alice will have become that person, since personhood is an essential property, and one cannot gain essential properties—either you necessarily have them or you necessarily lack them.
Call the toddler person “Alicia”. Then Alice is a different individual from Alicia.
So, what happens to Alice once we get to Alicia? Either Alice perishes or where Alicia is, there is Alice co-located with her.
Let’s suppose first the co-location option. We then have two conscious beings, Alice and Alicia, feeling the same things with the same brain, one (Alice) older than the other. We have standard and well-known problems with this absurd position (e.g., how does Alicia know that she is a person rather than just being an ex-fetus?).
But the option that Alice perishes when Alicia comes on the scene is also very strange. For even though Alice is not a person, it is obviously appropriate that Alice’s parents love for and care for her deeply. But if they love for and care for her deeply, they will have significant moral reason to prevent her from perishing. Therefore, they will have significant moral reason to give Alice drugs to arrest her intellectual development at a pre-personhood stage, to ensure that Alice does not perish. But this is a truly abhorrent conclusion!
Thus, we get absurdities from (3) and (4). This means that the pro-choice thinker who accepts (4) will have to reject (3). And they generally do so. This in turn requires them to reject (1) or (2). If they reject (2) but keep (1), then Alice the newborn must have dignity, since otherwise we have to say that Alice is a different entity from the later dignified Alicia, and both the theory that Alice perishes and the theory that Alice doesn’t perish is unacceptable. But if Alice the newborn has dignity, then the pro-choice argument from the lack of developed sophisticated cognitive abilities fails, because Alice the newborn lacks these abilities and so dignity comes apart from these abilities. But if dignity comes apart from these abilities, then the pro-choice argument based on personhood and these cognitive abilities is irrelevant. For it dignity is sufficient to ground a right to life, even absent personhood.
So, I think the pro-choice thinker who focuses on cognitive abilities will in the end need to deny that dignity is an essential property. I suspect most do deny that dignity is an essential property.
But I think the essentiality of dignity is pretty plausible. Dignity doesn’t seem to be something that can come and go. It seems no more alienable than the inalienable rights it grounds. It’s not an achievement, but is at the foundation of what we are.
You mention in the paper that dignity is the property of a person that makes it wrong to kill them when they are innocent.
ReplyDeleteHow does dignity accomplish this? Is dignity the same as value?
I don't know how dignity accomplishes this.
ReplyDeleteBut dignity is not the same as value. I think it's quite consistent (though I am not sure it's true) to think that all the giraffes on earth taken together have no less _value_ that one human, in the sense that if given a choice between saving all the giraffes and saving one human, it's reasonable to save the giraffes, but nonetheless it is wrong to kill one innocent human to save two humans, while it is not wrong to kill all the giraffes to save two comparable species of nonpersons. Dignity gives one deontological standing.
I think human dignity comes from the form or nature that God endowes us with (==we are created in his image), which includes (among other things) the ends to know God, to merit and to grow in His Grace _in our earthly life as well_.
ReplyDeleteIf this is true, then the permanent ending of someone's life takes away the ability to fulfill these ends.
This is contrary to the love of that person (at least in ordinary cases), since the fulfillments of these ends is _the_ good that all humans are meant to achieve.
In the case of innocent persons this is entirely unjustified, so it is always wrong.
This ability is also taken away when the person killed is not innocent, so if human dignity really includes these things, then this would show that all intentional killing is a violation of human dignity, even the death penalty (or killing in a just war?). But in this case there are justifying reasons for the DP or the war, so it would not be always wrong, indeed it would sometimes be just.
(Since we can't be consequantialists, this of course means that it is not the violation in itself that is sinful, only unjust violation, which might sound weird. But if one remembers that the fulfillment of some of these ends can be very much restricted or obstructed by other legitimate punishments, eg. imprisonment as well, which are of course not sinful, it becomes more understandable. These violations would still be things that are bad, even when they are neccesary. Eg. that in a just war soldiers are killed and their dignity is violated is a bad thing, even if it fully moral and necessary.))
This might explain how dignity accomplishes 'this'.
It also gives an (imo) nice grounding for why,
even tho the DP is sometimes just, it is nevertheless always contrary to the Gospel which calls us to exercise mercy over justice when possible. (And possible here would mean cases where society can be protected without the DP.) Since it would be always better for the criminal to repent, merit and grow in God's grace (so fulfill these ends) than to be killed, even if they deserve death.
So I think it also explains the teaching of JPII and Francis on the death penalty, especially some more controversial statements from Dignitas Infinita for example.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20240402_dignitas-infinita_en.html#_ftn40
(If someone is a corruptionist, then in the case of intentional killing the entity that posesses dignity stops existing with death. This might be an additional reason why one would hold that killing always violates dignity, even when it is permissible, since by ending the thing that has X I'm also ending X.
I don't know about non-intentional killing. There it seems that the _act itself_ doesn't violate anything.)
So overall: having dignity <==> being a substance of this nature that specifies some of these end,
and innocently being killed means unjustly depriving someone of the possibility of fulfilling these ends.
The problem this account faces is that it's also wrong to kill someone who, as we already know, cannot fulfill these ends, like a fetus or a newborn who will die in a couple weeks.
But I think we can say that the substance already has a determined deontological status by virtue of having that _nature_, and this is what matters.
This might not make any sense but I've already typed it out.