Abortion
Jan 09, 2011没有什么比堕胎更能引起争议了。对一些人来说,它带来了毁灭生命的高昂道德代价,而对另一些人来说,我……
Inmy last blogI discussed how some opponents of abortion misappropriate my work on dehumanization to support their position. They claim that abortion advocates dehumanize the unborn, and that abortion is analogous to genocidal murder. I explained why this argument doesn’t work.
My theory of dehumanization—as described, for instance, in my most recent bookOn Inhumanity—is that dehumanizing others boils down to conceiving of them as subhuman creatures in human form. But even the most ardent supporters of a women’s right to choose do not conceive of the unborn as vicious monsters or filthy vermin. So, my account of dehumanization can’t do the work that some right-to-lifers want it to do.
But my approach to dehumanization isn’t the only game in town. There are other conceptions of dehumanization that seem to serve the anti-abortion cause much better. How about understanding dehumanization as the denial that some human beings are really human. On this view, there’s no requirement that we conceive of dehumanized others as monsters or beasts—only that we see them as something other than human beings. This is, I believe, more or less what people mean when they say that abortion is predicated on dehumanizing the unborn.
Advocates of this argument often go on to say that conceiving of the unborn as non-human flies in the face of what science tells us. To be human, they say, is to be a member of a certain biological species—Homo sapiens—and that embryos are, as a matter of scientific fact, members of that species. It follows that aborting a fetus is snuffing out the life of a human being, and therefore morally aberrant.
At this point, philosophical defenders of the right to choose often step up to say that biological species membership is a red herring. They say that the fact that human embryos belong to our species isn’t relevant to the ethics of abortion. What really matters is that embryos are notpersons, and because they are not persons, it’s morally permissible to abort them.
I think that this response is deeply problematic. It’s not clear (to me, anyway) what personhood is supposed to amount to, how we can clearly distinguish persons from non-persons, and why personhood (whatever it is) is so morally significant. Traditional criteria for personhood, such as rationality and autonomy, exclude many members of our own species from this coveted status. And if killing embryos is acceptable on the grounds that embryos aren’t persons, doesn’t this license infanticide, the killing of mentally disabled people, and other atrocities?
尽管这些考虑因素很重要,但我不想在它们上面停留太久。我想探讨一个更深层次的异议。我想说的是,生命权和她的哲学对手都犯了一个错误。They both incorrectly assume that being human is equivalent to being a member of the speciesHomo sapiens.
“Human” is not a term used by biological taxonomists, and it does not name any set of biological properties.Homo erectusandHomo sapiensare genuine biological categories. Biological anthropologists can examine a fossil jawbone and determine that it belongs toHomo erectus. But there’s no amount of evidence that would allow them to figure out whetherHomo erectus是人类。Ask yourself how scientists could test the proposition that all and onlyHomo sapiensare human? What tests could they perform? There’s no conceivable test, because human is not a scientific category—it’s a social one.
What exactly is it to think of another being as human? A good starting point for answering this question is the fact that people generally take their own humanity for granted. “We” are human, but “they” may not. We see this in some autoethnonyms (names that ethnic groups use to designate themselves). Although by no means universal, it’s common enough for ethnic groups to refer to themselves as “the human beings,” or “the real human beings.” As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed, tribal names are often “not formal designations, but merely equivalents of the pronoun ‘we.’”
I think that Levi-Strauss was spot on, and that his claim applies across the board. In practice, to be regarded as human is to be regarded as one of “us”—as belonging to “our kind.”
Seen from this perspective, humanness isn’t a property that some individuals possess and others lack. Instead, it’s a consequence of an act of inclusion. Humannessseemsto be equivalent to membership in the speciesHomo sapiens那只是因为我们坚信这样一种观点:让一个人成为我们同类成员的,是他们在生物物种中的成员身份。But even a nodding acquaintance with the history of colonialism, genocide, and oppression shows just how malleable the category of the human really is, and shows that we are perfectly capable of denying the humanity of others without denying that they belong to the samebiologicaltaxon as ourselves. Humanness and species membership have often come apart.
这一分析表明,尽管生命权倡导者和他们的许多哲学反对者都声称,人类胚胎的人类地位是有争议的(为了防止有人反对,“人类胚胎”一词并不意味着这些胚胎是人类,就像把你的左脚称为“人类的脚”并不意味着你的脚是人类一样)。
人类胚胎是否是人类的问题不能通过诉诸科学证据来解决。没有任何生物学事实可以解决胚胎是否是人类的问题,或者它们在什么妊娠阶段成为人类。关于堕胎的争论是道德和政治的——关于哪些人应该被纳入我们的同类,哪些人不应该。我将在关于堕胎的这个系列的第三部分,也是最后一部分,探讨其中一些道德和政治方面的问题。
Photo byMaria OswaltonUnsplash
没有什么比堕胎更能引起争议了。对一些人来说,它带来了毁灭生命的高昂道德代价,而对另一些人来说,我……
Most countries allow their citizens to smoke cigarettes, get intoxicated, and eat unhealthy food – despite the harms that such behavior...
According to the Declaration of Independence, the basic human rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are God-given.
联合国预测,2050年左右,人类人口增长将超过90亿。我们知道人口过剩的后果…
People tend to treat other people who differ from them, even in seemingly small and insignificant ways, as less than fully human.
According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, there are more people living with mental illness in prisons than in psychiatric hospitals across the country.
Do we have a right to healthcare, and to good high quality healthcare, in any precise and defensible sense?
Is the human mind a relatively inflexible program bequeathed to us by evolution, and culture just a veneer that gives age-old urges a respectable cover?
Human rights—like freedom from discrimination and slavery— are fundamental rights and freedoms that every person enjoys simply because they're human.
没有什么比堕胎更能引起争议了。对一些人来说,它带来了毁灭生命的高昂道德代价,而对另一些人来说,我……
Most countries allow their citizens to smoke cigarettes, get intoxicated, and eat unhealthy food – despite the harms that such behavior...
According to the Declaration of Independence, the basic human rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are God-given.
联合国预测,2050年左右,人类人口增长将超过90亿。我们知道人口过剩的后果…
People tend to treat other people who differ from them, even in seemingly small and insignificant ways, as less than fully human.
According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, there are more people living with mental illness in prisons than in psychiatric hospitals across the country.
Do we have a right to healthcare, and to good high quality healthcare, in any precise and defensible sense?
Is the human mind a relatively inflexible program bequeathed to us by evolution, and culture just a veneer that gives age-old urges a respectable cover?
Human rights—like freedom from discrimination and slavery— are fundamental rights and freedoms that every person enjoys simply because they're human.
Comments(2)
AMEESH
Thursday, December 3, 2020 -- 8:58 AM
Mother Teresa once held thatMother Teresa once held that rights are not the privileges conferred by the state rather they are every human beings entitlement by virtue of his or her humanity.
Even Sir Dworkin in his book ' TAKING RIGHTS SERIOUSLY ' asserted that rights are trumps and thus they cannot be traded off for any other purpose.
For detailed analysis , visit my website : philosophicalnow500.blogspot.com
rabidtarsier
Friday, December 18, 2020 -- 11:48 AM
There are basically twoThere are basically two options here:
1. Mother Teresa and others like her are wrong, hence why human rights change depending on where those humans are in space and time.
2. Rights are transcendent and inherent to human beings but we have no way of knowing what they are or whether the ones we attribute to humans are even close to correct. And those inherent transcendent rights are basically meaningless.
The only part I agree with is that human rights are not conferred by the state. Legal rights are conferred by the state. Human rights are conferred by the society.