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Do Potential People Have Moral Rights?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Mary Anne Warren
Mary Anne Warren*
Affiliation:
California State College, Sonoma, and San Francisco State University
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Extract

By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 275 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1977

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References

1 Tooley, Michael “Abortion and Infanticide,” in The Rights, and Wrongs of Abortion, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974), p. 75.Google Scholar

2 See my “On the Moral and legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist, 57 (1973), pp. 43–62, for a defense of this view.

3 Hare, R. M. “Abortion and the Golden Rule,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 4 (1975), p. 212.Google ScholarPubMed All further page references not otherwise identified are to this article.

4 Hare objects to the use of the term ‘moral right’ on the grounds that no philosopher has yet produced “a theory of rights which links the concept firmly to those of ‘right', ‘wrong', and ‘ought'—concepts whose logic is even now a little better understood” (p. 213). I see no especial, difficulty, however, in analysing talk about rights, or translating it into talk about right and wrong and what we ought to do. As a rough first approximation it might be suggested that someone has a prima facie right to something if and only if other things being equal it would be wrong for anyone else to deprive that person of that thing. Insofar as one cannot sensibly say that someone has been deprived, of something unless that thing is something which the person wants or has reason to want, it is clear the rights and desires are closely connected, though the nature of the connection is difficult to state precisely. (See Tooley, pp. 60–4, for an exploration of this connection.)

5 Tooley uses the kitten example to present another intuitive argument against the potentiality principle. He argues that the “possibility of transforming kittens into persons will not make it any more wrong to kill newborn kittens than it is now” p. 76, and that therefore potential personhood does not entail a right to life.

6 Berkeley, George “Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.” The Works of, George Berkeley, Vol. II, edited by Jessop, T. E. (Thomas Nelson and Sons, London, 1964), p. 200.Google Scholar

7 Wade, Francis C. “Potentiality in the Abortion Discussion,” The Review of Metaphysics, 39 (1975), p. 255.Google Scholar

8 Ibid, p. 245. (Wade is here using’ agent’ to mean anything which causes a change in itself or in something else, not necessarily a conscious, agent.)

9 Engelhardt, H. Tristram “The Ontology of Abortion,” Ethics, 84, (1974), p. 220.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

10 Peter Singer, “Animal Liberation,” The New York Review of Books, April1974; reprinted in Moral Problems, edited by Rachels, James (Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 163-77.Google Scholar