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Why Potentiality Still Matters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jim Stone
Jim Stone*
Affiliation:
University of New Orleans, Lakefront, New Orleans, LA70108, USA
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Extract

Philosophy is a difficult mode of expression, and anyone who uses the word ‘potentiality’ invites misunderstanding. It is no surprise, then, that John Fisher ascribes to me a doomed position I do not hold. According to him I argue:

1. X is a creature of a certain sort.

2. Creatures of this sort have right R.

3. Therefore, X has a right R.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 281 - 293
Copyright
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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References

1 Fisher, ‘Why Potentiality Does Not Matter,’ The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994), 263

2 Stone, Jim ‘Why Potentiality Matters,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1987) 815-30.Google Scholar See section III, 824-9.

3 Self-awareness is a member of a collection of intrinsic goods essentially involving consciousness, which adult human animals enjoy. Others include language use, social interactions, and moral stature. Pleasure is another conscious good. These are not valuable because they are desired; they are desired because they are valuable.

4 The sentence ‘The infant has an interest in continued life’ might be taken to mean that the infant has an active psychological interest in continued life, like her later interest in astronomy. However, the fact that X has an active psychological interest in having A does not entail that having A is in his interest; for example, the fact that X has an active interest in trying crack does not entail that it is in his interest to do so. The construction ‘ It is in X’s interest to have A’ is what entails that having A benefits X. As ’S has an interest in continued life’ can be read the first way, there is a tempting fallacy of equivocation: as it is obviously false that an infant has an (active psychological) interest in continued life, it follows immediately that continued life is not in her interest. Hence painless death is no harm. Also, the equivocation leads swiftly to the conclusion that without active psychological interests there can be no benefits or harms. Conversation with philosophers who deny that infants have a right to life leads me to fear that they commit it.

5 Fisher writes: ‘Stone implies that appeal to a special developmental obligation is the only plausible way to ground our concern to infants. However, an “actualist” can account for a right of babies not to be painlessly killed by appeal to the properties and capacities that even a young infant already has’ (263, n. 5). That is it. How I wish that Fisher had gone on to say what those properties are, or hinted at how this actualist account might go! Of course, my account is actualist: the right of a baby not to be killed painlessly is grounded entirely in properties she already has. For she already has the property that it is in her interest to go on living — that is an actual property, not a potential one — and this, in turn, is grounded in a property her genetic code already has, namely, that it determines a developmental path leading to self-awareness, social interactions, the possibility of moral stature for her if she follows it to the end. The infant already has the property of having a genetic code that does this. Fisher must have in mind an actualist account other than mine. The actualist/potentialist distinction is badly drawn. Further, I deny that we have a ‘special developmental obligation’ to infants: it is just that we owe it to them to look out for their interests.

6 Fisher ascribes to me the view that ‘in the case of identical twins, an organism with an interest only comes into existence after the division of the original cell mass into two viable embryos’ (000), another position I did not express and would, in fact, deny. There is, as yet, no reason to believe that the division of the original cell mass is genetically determined. As the original multi-celled human animal has a biological nature the actualization of which involves a great conscious good for him, he has an interest in continued life and is owed our care and protection. Indeed, a consequence of my view may be that, if we can, we owe it to him to prevent his twinning.

7 Fisher’s discussion of ‘The Notion of Normal Development’ would have been still more interesting if he had discussed this account of normal development (see Fisher, section V). For example, he asks: ‘And what of freezing an embryo and completing the developmental process centuries later? Surely this, too, would not be normal, yet it would seem to preserve identity as much as more ordinary paths’ (000). Note that this would be normal development on my account.

8 I reject the literal use of ‘goal state’ as teleological; ‘outcome’ is better. The adult stage is not construed as a final cause or goal, for the sake of which the organism develops.

9 Of course, I am not maintaining that his genetic code will produce all of these goods if he is raised by wolves. A reasonable amount of human intercourse appropriate to raising children is required if he is to learn a language, etc. The child needs appropriate care if he is to actualize his biological nature. I agree with Fisher that a certain genetic code ‘does not by itself necessitate having certain adult characteristics,’ and I am surprised that he takes me to think that ‘the embryo has sufficient causal power to make the developmental process necessarily produce a certain sort of creature’ (000). My claim ‘What the fetus is finally, is something that makes itself self-aware’ hardly entails that the fetus can manage this without adequate nutrition, say. My point was that, given care and protection, the fetus will make himself self-aware on account of his genetic code.

10 Fisher states both 1 and 2 on 267-8.

11 Fisher notes that an artificial womb could be a safer place to grow. I agree: it has been observed that the most dangerous place to be in North America is in a womb.

12 See Fisher, 271, n. 19.

13 Perhaps Fisher’s concern is that there is no principled way to distinguish the ‘complete expression’ of the human genome from cases of ‘interference.’ Why is the unusual path the fetus might take after ‘causal shocks’ not just a novel mode of genetic expression? The answer, surely, is that the match between the genome and the path that counts as its complete expression is the result of evolutionary selection; the human genome evolved because it guides the animal along that path (which in turn evolved partly because it leads to conscious goods). The biological function of the genome is to guide the animal along the path that leads to our adult stage, because the human genome evolved because it guides the animal along that path. The genome’s complete expression requires that it fulfill its biological function.

14 Raven and Johnson, Biology, 3rd ed. (St. Louis, MO: Mosby Year-Book 1992), 301. This book examines how genes work from the perspective of molecular biology (or ‘molecular genetics’).

15 Moore, Keith L. The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia, P A: W.B. Saunders 1982), 76Google Scholar

16 Baskin, Yvonne The Gene Doctors: Medical Genetics at the Frontier (New York: Morrow 1984) 190-1Google Scholar, in Fisher, 270; my stress.

17 I take this to involve the claim that the physical chemical context provided by the mother’s uterus somehow plays a role in guiding fetal development. Otherwise it does not support Fisher’s thesis that an artificial womb might allow infants to grow bigger brains. My own view is that the mother’s uterus supports but does not guide fetal development. See Fisher’s n. 19.

18 A good source of information concerning embryological development is Gilbert, Scott F. Developmental Biology, 3rd ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates 1991)Google Scholar. Note that if A determines B, and Band A interact to determine C, then A determines c.

19 The phrase in quotations is from Minkoff, Eli C. Evolutionary Biology (New York: Addison-Wesket 1984), 128.Google Scholar

20 See Stone, 819. Fisher maintains that my position invites ‘the “Placenta objection”: on the grounds that “one cannot be two,” mustn’t we reject the identity of the fetus with that of the embryo before it separates into the embryo proper (fetus) and the extraembryonic membranes?’ (268, n. 12) The fetus and the extraembryonic membranes are not duplicate substances, however, so the principle ‘no substance can survive replication into duplicate substances’ does not apply. If I fission into twin offshoots I cease to exist. But if I grow a large tumor that weighs as much as the rest of me, I survive.

21 Fisher writes: ‘As Singer and Dawson point out, latest estimates put the probability of birth for the embryo before implantation (within fourteen days of fertilization) at 25 to 30 percent. Hence normal development for the early embryo would lead to an aborted embryo’ (277). As more than six in ten spontaneous abortions appear to result from genetic abnormalities, the probability that a genetically normal embryo will not abort spontaneously is far better than average. See Keith L. Moore, 49. (Of course, Fisher is using ‘normal’ here in a very different way from my use.) Singer and Dawson argue that the potentiality of the embryo in vitro cannot afford it a special moral status. I believe the account of potentiality I am defending here (which they had no opportunity to consider) is untouched by their objections. See Peter Singer and Karen Dawson, ‘IVF Technology and the Argument from Potential,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 (1988) 87-104.

22 The New Orleans Times-Picayune (October 15, 1993), 1. The gene is apparently inactive or functional in other cells.

23 Suppose we could, by altering the genes of a few cells in the brain of a genetically normal infant, give her superhuman powers. Would this confirm Fisher’s concern that very different outcomes are part of her biological nature? Further, could an interest in superhuman powers be grounded in the strong potentiality of the pre-alteration infant? As the alteration is limited to a few cells, the infant survives, for her original genetic code remains the primary determinant of the developmental path she takes. It follows that significantly different developmental outcomes are compatible with her survival. However, we have accepted this result already: a multiplicity of survival-compatible outcomes does not entail a multiplicity of outcomes compatible with the complete expression of her genetic code. In fact, only one developmental path is determined by the complete expression of the infant’s pre-alteration genetic code, and it does not lead to superhuman powers. So the unusual path she ultimately takes is not as much a part of her original biological nature as is that path. Therefore, her pre-alteration nature does not determine superhuman powers as part of her welfare.

24 My thanks to Ed Johnson and Judith Crane for comments, and to biologists Brit Bromberg and Jerry Howard for many helpful discussions. I am grateful to Professor Fisher for providing me this opportunity to clarify my views.