David B. Hershenov

The position that we are essentially thinking beings and not living entities is thought to commit its advocates to maintaining that the organism and person are distinct but spatially coincident entities. A problem for this position is that if the person can think, then it would seem that the organism can also since it shares a brain and every other atom with the person. Jeff McMahan and Ingmar Persson independently proposed that the problems presented by spatially coincident thinkers could be avoided by treating the person as a proper part of the organism. The organism would then only think in a derivative and unproblematic way as a result of having a thinking being as a part. However, their “solution” merely results in moving around the metaphysical bulge in the carpet. The problem of too many thinkers will reemerge. Instead of the spatial coincidence of the organism and person, there will be the problem of the spatial coincidence of the person and whatever bit of anatomy that constitutes or in some other way coincides with the person conceived as a small part of the organism.

I criticize two core assumptions held by most of my fellow pro-lifers. The first so-called “dogma” is the belief that it is a sufficient condition for the wrongness of abortion that there is an entity in the womb identical to the postnatal person leading a valuable life. The second dogma is that a necessary condition for the wrongness of abortion is that beings of our fundamental kind are present in the womb at the time of abortion. Both dogmas are false. There could be entities identical to postnatal persons who wouldn’t have been harmed or wronged if destroyed before they developed sophisticated minds associated with persons. There also could be mindless embryonic animals distinct from us persons who would have been greatly harmed and wronged if destroyed when it the womb.

Shoemaker maintains that when a functionalist theory of mind is combined with his belief about individuating properties and the well-known cerebrumtransplant thought experiment, the resulting position will be a version of the psychological approach to personal identity that can avoid The Problem of Too Many Thinkers. I maintain that the costs of his solution—that the human animal is incapable of thought—are too high. Shoemaker also has not provided an argumentagainst there existing a merely conscious being that is not essentially self-conscious but is spatially coincident with a person who is essentially self-conscious. Both the person and the merely sentient being will be transplanted when the cerebrum is. And another thought experiment will make it impossible for Shoemaker to identify the person and the merely conscious being.

One often hears Catholic and non-Catholic politicians and private citizens claim “I am personally opposed to abortion... ” but add that it is morally permissible for others to accept abortion. We consider a Rawlsian defense of this position based on the recognition that one’s opposition to abortion stems from acomprehensive doctrine which is incompatible with Public Reason. We examine a second defense of this position based upon respecting the autonomy of others and a third grounded in the harm to the unwilling mother overriding that to the aborted fetus. We look at a fourth and fifth defense based upon our epistemic ignorance regarding the burdens on others of unwanted pregnancies and the ontological and moral status of embryo. We find most versions of these defenses to be wanting and conclude that only if the proponents of the position are subjectivist about morals, which few are, can they offer a coherent defense.

Buford first criticizes my 2019 paper by relying upon a view about the permanence of death that no one should hold as it makes death due to extrinsic features. The second criticism involves a description of cerebrum transplants that I don’t accept. The continued existence of a transplanted cerebrum doesn’t show that the whole brain death criterion hasn’t been met as the brainstem-less person has gone out of existence and so no longer has a brain and thus trivially meets the whole brain criterion. Buford’s third criticism is that a criterion should be helpful, doctors can make use of it, and legislators can enshrine it in law. I admit that criterion for the death of the person won’t be useful when the person dies but animal remains. But the criterion of existence for the person will be met and one can infer from that the death criterion has been met.

We contend that both the defenders and critics of potentiality arguments in the abortion debate have failed to appreciate the morally relevant aspects of potential. Crucial for understanding the moral significance of potentiality is the fact that mindless organisms have interests but only in their healthy development. Unlike most kinds of organisms that develop minds, the operations of a healthy human mind are of a sophistication and range that bestows them with great value and enables their possessors to obtain unrivaled levels of well-being. Thus the frustration of those interests in healthy mental development is a great harm. Since the healthy development that is in the fetus’s interest can require all sorts of extrinsic interventions, the morally relevant potential isn’t limited to that which is intrinsic, active, normal or probable. And given those real or hypothesized non-human beings that are supposed to show the absurdity of protecting potential are not unhealthy if the mere possibility of their personhood isn’t actualized, then it follows that they don’t have any interests frustrated by that potential going untapped. So potentiality properly construed in terms of healthy development is not susceptible to reductio, unlike understandings of potentiality as metaphysical or physical possibility.

Extreme transhumanism involves prolonging our existence by sustaining our mental life without all of our body’s organic parts. Christians should be wary of these aims for metaphysical, moral, and theological reasons. The metaphysical qualms are based on our being human animals rather than distinct persons. So, extreme transhumanism will eliminate rather than enhance us because animals cannot become inorganic. Even if we are persons distinct from our animals, the moral worry is that extreme enhancements of persons will kill their human animals. Appeals to double effect in making such killings unintentional will fail as one cannot intend to so reconstruct a person without intending lethally to deconstruct the animal constituting the person. The theological concerns arise because inorganic enhancements of the person could produce the death of an animal composed of organic parts. The death of the animal would mean the overlapping person would also cease to instantiate life processes. This would initiate the onset of a divinely ordained intermediate state between death and resurrection.

Christian pro-lifers often respond to Thomson’s defense of abortion that the violinist is allowed to die while the embryo is killed. Boonin and McMahan counter that this distinction does not provide an objection to extraction abortions that disconnect embryos and allow them to die. I disagree. I first argue that letting die and killing are not to be distinguished by differences between acts and omissions, moral and immoral motives, intentional or unintentional deaths, and causing or not causing a pathology. I offer a taxonomy in which hysterotomies turn out to be killings. I then argue that if either the placenta is considered an organ of the embryo or the embryo is construed as a part of the pregnant woman, then abortion pills kill rather than allow death. So, assuming that killing people is morally worse than letting them die, extraction abortions can be condemned to the same degree as other abortions.

The Rational Substance View is a pro-life position which maintains that all humans are moral equals and have a right to life in virtue of their kind membership. Healthy embryos, newborns, children, adults, and as the cognitively impaired all essentially have a root or radical capacity for rationality, though it may not be developed or have its operations blocked. Their being substances with a rational nature is the basis of their moral status and what makes it wrong to kill them. I will argue that the view is committed to some bad biology, and suspect metaphysics, and is unable to escape all the reductios of potentiality. I will offer the Healthy Development View as an alternative to the Rational Substance View. It is a pro-life view that avoids the problematic biology and metaphysics and reductios of potentiality. It understands our rational development to be a contingent rather than an essential trait.

Dean Zimmerman argues for the existence of souls as they enable us to avoid certain vagueness-inspired, metaphysical puzzles that plague materialist accounts of the person. There are far too many overlapping material thinking candidates for being the referent of “I”. Zimmerman suggests that an emergent soul whose creation is overdetermined by overlapping material entities will avoid the unwelcome overpopulation of physical thinkers. I will argue that parallel problems plague Zimmerman’s emergent dualism, there are too many souls produced where we want just one.

A number of philosophers maintain that the destruction of an embryo in the first 2 weeks after fertilization is not morally problematic as it is metaphysically impossible for any human organism to then have existed. We contend that the typical adult human organism was once a zygote so there is no metaphysical shortcut to justify early abortion. We show that five arguments against human organisms ever having been zygotes fail. All of the arguments have to do with one variant or another of the zygote or early embryo dividing. They do not provide any reason to believe that since some adult organisms are not identical to zygotes due to earlier divisions, none could have been.

Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who refuse on grounds of conscience to participate in certain legal, expected, and standard practices have been accused of unprofessionally introducing their personal views into medicine. My first response is that they often are not engaging in conscientious objection because that involves invoking convictions external to those of the medical community. I contend that medicine, properly construed, is pathocentric, and so refusing to induce a pathology via abortion, contraception, euthanasia, etc., is actually being loyal to the internal morality of medicine. My second response is that even if such refusals are best considered conscientious objection, there is still no personal hijacking of medicine. Doctors refusing to induce pathologies need not refuse qua Christian, but can do so qua doctor. A pathocentric account of medicine provides a principled way of distinguishing conscientious objection from religious, idiosyncratic, and bigoted refusals. Patients’ refused pathology-inducing procedures are not medically harmed.

Is it coherent to be personally opposed to abortion but to accept others’ decisions to terminate their pregnancy? This might appear to be the case if one appeals to the different situations and attitudes of pregnant women. To the contrary, only those people whose personal opposition to abortion is restricted to situations in which the pregnancy and its consequences are not very burdensome can consistently hold their IPOB position and espouse an objective ethics. The vast majority of people claiming to be merely personally opposed cannot coherently sustain that position. To be logically coherent, the latter not only must be committed to condemning the abortions of others and have the moral standing to do so, but more importantly and controversially, must be committed to call for a legal ban on abortion rather than restrict themselves to being merely personally opposed to abortion.

Embryo rescue cases and minimal miscarriage prevention research have been interpreted as showing that even pro‐lifers are not really committed to the unborn having the same moral status as the born. I will suggest instead that judgments about embryo rescues are often distorted by triage considerations that reveal nothing about differences in moral status between those saved and those not. I will present metaphysical and ethical considerations – none assuming a difference in moral status – why preventing millions of miscarriages does not warrant the massive redistribution of research funds that would occur to prevent the deaths of equal numbers of humans already born.

Elselijn Kingma maintains that Christopher Boorse and other naturalists in the philosophy of medicine cannot deliver the value-free account of disease that they promise. Even if disease is understood as dysfunction and that notion can be applied in a value-free manner, values still manifest themselves in the justification for picking one particular operationalization of dysfunction over a number of competing alternatives. Disease determinations depend upon comparisons within a reference class vis-à-vis reaching organism goals. Boorse considers reference classes for a species to consist in the properties of age and sex and organism goals to comprise survival and reproduction. Kingma suggests that naturalists are influenced by value judgments and may rely upon implicit assumptions about disease in their choice of reference classes and goals to determine which conditions are diseased. I argue that she is wrong to claim that these choices cannot be defended without arguing in a circular manner or making certain arbitrary or value-driven judgments.

Animalism offers a more attractive account of the human person than the Embodied Mind Account. If people are not animals, but small proper parts of animals, then there is a threat of spatially coincident thinkers. This will likely have to be avoided at the cost of the sparsest of ontologies, one in which there are no larger entities that can become reduced to the size of the brain or cerebrum-size thinker. This will be a rather implausible ontology as such thinkers will not fit well into the natural world, meet traditional independence or unity criteria for being substances, nor provide a compositional principle with causal glue.

Eric Olson criticizes Lynne Baker’s constitution account of persons on the grounds that personhood couldn’t be ontologically significant as nothing new comes into existence with the acquisition of thought. He claims that for something coming to function as a thinker is no more ontologically significant than something coming to function as a locomotor when a motor is added to it. He levels two related charges that there’s no principled answer about when and where constitution takes place rather than an already existing object just acquiring new properties. I’ll argue that none of these objections are problems for understanding person to be a substantial kind.

Christopher Boorse is very skeptical of there being a pathocentric internal morality of medicine. Boorse argues that doctors have always engaged in activities other than healing, and so no internal morality of medicine can provide objections to euthanasia, contraception, sterilization, and other practices not aimed at fighting pathologies. Objections to these activities have to come from outside of medicine. I first argue that Boorse fails to appreciate that such widespread practices are compatible with medicine being essentially pathocentric. Then I contend that the pathocentric essence, properly understood, does not prohibit physicians from engaging in actions that are not aimed at combating pathologies, but rather supports an internal morality of medicine that allows medical providers to refuse without penalty to engage in practices that promote pathologies.

Psychological accounts of personal identity claim that the human person is not identical to the human animal. Advocates of such accounts maintain that the definition and criterion of death for a human person should differ from the definition and criterion of death for a human animal. My contention is instead that psychological accounts of personal identity should have human persons dying deaths that are defined biologically, just like the deaths of human animals. Moreover, if brain death is the correct criterion for the death of a human animal, then it is also the correct criterion for the death of a human person. What the nonidentity of persons and animals requires is only that they have distinct criteria for ceasing to exist.

The Christian conception of Hell as everlasting punishment for past sins is confronted with two charges of unfairness. The first is the inequity of an eternal punishment. The never‐ending punishment seems disproportionate to the finite sin (Kershnar, Lewis, Adams). A second and related problem is that the boundary between sins that send one for all eternity to Hell and those sins that are slightly less bad that are compatible with an eternity in Heaven is arbitrary and thus it is unfair that sinners so alike are treated differently (Sider). Hell, as traditionally conceived, is then claimed to be incompatible with God's traditional attributes such as his commitment to justice, omniscience and omnipotence. The unfairness can be avoided by appealing to God's foreknowledge and a debt/atonement theory of punishment. My view is analogous to refusing to parole the unrepentant. If a wrongdoer is eternally defiant, then he can never be released from Hell for his debt won't ever be paid if he isn't reformed and reconciled with the wronged. So it doesn't matter that his initial sin was a finite wrong not deserving of infinite punishment nor a sin no worse than that of the penitent in Heaven.

We argue that the secular cannot offer a materialist response to “The Problem of Too Many Thinkers” that makes autonomy possible. The materialist can accommodate what truths about respecting personal freedom and autonomy only by accepting a counterintuitive sparse ontology. Immaterial accounts of the person look good by comparison. However, those immaterialist theories that don’t posit a divinely created soul suffer from certain metaphysical puzzles avoided by those who do claim divine creation. A soul that requires divine creation strongly suggests that such immaterial beings were made for a purpose. Such purposeful creation makes theistic ethics seem far more plausible.

It is sometimes proposed that killing or harming abortion providers is the only logically consistent position available to opponents of abortion. Since lethal violence against morally responsible attackers is normally viewed as justified in order to defend innocent parties, pro-lifers should also think so in the case of the abortion doctor and so they should act to defend the unborn. In our paper, we defend the mainstream pro-life view against killing abortion doctors. We argue that the pro-life view can, in various ways, reject the assumption that defensive violence to save innocent individuals is always permissible. Now even if that assumption is accepted, we contend that defensive violence against abortion doctors still is not justified. Drawing on Frances Kamm’s work, we contend that there are structural similarities between abortion and letting someone die who needs your help to stay alive; and we argue that it is impermissible to kill those who kill in order to avoid giving life-saving aid.

The potential for healthy development is the key to determining the moral status of mindless and minimally minded organisms. It even provides the basis for a defense of speciesism. Mindless and minimally minded human beings have interests in the healthy development of sophisticated mental capacities, which explains why they are greatly harmed when death, disease, and other events frustrate those interests. Since the healthy development of members of non-human species doesn’t produce the same sophisticated mental capacities, mindless and minimally minded non-human beings lack the interests of mindless and minimally minded human beings. The absence of such interests in developing valuable mental capabilities means non-humans can’t be benefited and harmed to the same degree as human beings. This results in mindless and minimally minded non-humans having lower moral status than human beings. This doesn’t mean that any member of our species is more valuable than any other member of any other possible species. We instead claim that human beings with undeveloped or impaired minds have greater moral status than any member of any other known species that has manifested equivalent mental capacities.

Material property has traditionally been conceived of as separable from its owner and thus alienable in an exchange. So it seems that you could sell your watch or even your kidney because it can be removed from your wrist or abdomen and transferred to another. However, if we are each identical to a living human animal, self‐ownership is impossible for self‐separation is impossible. We thus cannot sell our parts if we don't own the whole that they compose. It would be incoherent to own all of your body's parts but not the whole body; and it would be arbitrary to own some but not all of your removable parts. These metaphysical obstacles to organ sales do not apply to the selling of the organs of the deceased. The human being goes out of existence at death and is not identical to the body's remains. Any objections to selling the organs of the deceased must instead be due to dignity rather than metaphysical or conceptual considerations. But the remains lack the intrinsic dignity of the human being, instead possessing, at best, relational dignity. Relational dignity would not provide sufficient reason to prohibit life‐saving sales.

Psychological Approaches to Personal Identity maintain that the persistence of some kind of mind is essential to our survival. The Biological Approach to Personal Identity considers the mind to be metaphysically no more important to one's identity than one's kidney. Our persistence conditions are those of an organism and an organism does not need to be conscious to survive. A case is made that the BAPI is the superior account because it avoids the metaphysical quandaries that the psychological approach gives rise to. Many of these problems result from the psychological approach's commitment to the organism and the person being spatially coincident but distinct entities. One major problem is that if the person can think, so can the physically identical organism, and thus there will be two thinking beings where we would like there to be only one. It is argued that the psychological accounts of Baker and Shoemaker, which stress that the organism constitutes the person, are unable to avoid the problem of too many minds. The BAPI is also contrasted with the Body Approach to Personal Identity. If an organism is essentially a living entity, then it ceases to exist at death. But if the body continues to exist as a corpse, then before death it would appear that the body and the organism were spatially coincident and thus problems similar to those plaguing the PAPI would arise for the BAPI. An explanation of how the BAPI avoids such metaphysical quandaries is offered towards the end of the thesis