David B. Hershenov

Our contention is that all of the major arguments for abortion are also arguments for permitting infanticide. One cannot distinguish the fetus from the infant in terms of a morally significant intrinsic property, nor are they morally discernible in terms of standing in different relationships to others. The logic of our position is that if such arguments justify abortion, then they also justify infanticide. If we are right that infanticide is not justified, then such arguments will fail to justify abortion. We respond to those philosophers who accept infanticide by putting forth a novel account of how the mindless can be wronged which serves to distinguish morally significant potential from morally irrelevant potential. This allows our account to avoid the standard objection that many entities possess a potential for personhood which we are intuitively under no obligation to further or protect.

E.J. Lowe is one of the few philosophers who defend both the existence of spatially coincident entities and the Principle of Weak Extensionality that no two objects which have proper parts have exactly the same proper parts at the same time. Lowe maintains that when spatially coincident things like the statue and the lump of bronze are in a constitution relation, the constituted entity (the statue) has parts that the constituting entity (the lump) doesn’t, hence the compatibility with Weak Extensionality. My contention is that his argument for why the statue has parts the lump of bronze lacks can also be used to show that the lump of bronze has parts the statue doesn’t. This will mean that there is no basis for saying the statue and the lump are in a constitution relation. I argue for accepting a modified account of constitution and abandoning the Principle of Weak Extensionality.

My contention is that considering a person to be co-located with an organism, or one of its\nspatial or temporal parts, gives rise to a host of problems as a result of there then being too many\nthinkers. These problems, which Olson has emphasized, can be mitigated (somewhat) by a\nNoonan-style pronoun revisionism. But doing so will have very unwelcome consequences for\nbioethics as autonomy, informed consent, advance directives and substituted judgment will be\nimpossible for the human animal. I count it as a point in favor of Olson’s answer to the\nmetaphysical question “What are we?” that it avoids such ethical quandaries. But his animalism -\nwith its Parfit-inspired claim that it is not identity that matters in survival but the continuation of\nour psychology even if someone else is its subject - appears to be at odds with our self-conception\nand practical concerns. And if the only argument for this thesis is the fission scenario, then the\nthesis is further undermined as Parfit’s account of fission runs afoul of Wiggins’s Only a and b\nrule. What I will very tentatively suggest is that we explore two (incompatible) accounts of\nanimalism which deny that being identical to a future being is only of derivative importance to us.

The majority of philosophers believe that the existence of spatially coincident entities is not only a coherent idea but that there are millions of such entities. What such philosophers do not countenance are spatially coincident entities of the same kind. We will call this ‘Locke's Thesis’ since the denial goes back to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It is there that Locke wrote, ‘For we never finding, nor conceiving it possible that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude that, whatever exists anywhere at any time, excludes all of the same kind, and is there itself alone.’ It is not clear to me that the believer in spatially coincident entities can draw the ‘ontological line’ where Locke does. Many of the reasons that lead Locke and others to maintain that there exist spatially coincident entities of different kinds would also suggest that there are spatially coincident entities of the same kind. To illustrate this claim, a scenario of spatially coincident roads will be presented.

The typical Four-Dimensionalist metaphysics will posit the existence of many entities with thinking temporal parts. To determine which of these entities are persons, Hud Hudson relies upon an exclusion principle that withholds the label “person” from objects possessing any parts that don’t contribute to thought. Thus the human animal can’t be identified with the human person because it initially consists of mindless embryonic temporal parts. Since even normal adult human animals have parts such as hair and nails that don’t appear to contribute to the production of thought, Hudson argues that the person is to be found “beneath the skin” of the animal. This chapter contests this claim of the non-identity of the human person and human animal while still operating with Hudson’s assumptions that we persist in virtue of temporal parts, that composition is unrestricted, and that there cannot be any persons embedded within larger persons.

Brain transplants and the dicephalus (an organism just like us except that it has two cerebrums) are thought to support the position that we are essentially thinking creatures, not living organisms. I try to offset the first of these intuitions by responding to thought experiments Peter Unger devised to show that identity is what matters. I then try to motivate an interpretation of the alleged conjoined twins as really just one person cut off from himself by relying upon what I take will be the reader's disagreement with Locke's conjecture that a dreaming Socrates and an awake Socrates are two distinct people.

Hylomorphism offers a third way between animalist approaches to personal identity, which maintain that psychology is irrelevant to our persistence, andneo-Lockean accounts, which deny that humans are animals. This paper provides a Thomistic account that explains the intuitive responses to thought experiments involving brain transplants and the transformation of organic bodies into inorganic ones. This account does not have to follow the animalist in abandoning the claim that it is our identity which matters in survival, or countenance the puzzles of spatially coincident entities that plague the neo-Lockean. The key is to understand the human being as only contingently an animal. This approach to our animality is one that Catholics have additional reason to hold given certain views about purgatory, our uniqueness as free and rational creatures, and our having once existed as zygotes.

Two thought experiments are provided which elicit whatappear to be opposing judgments about the demands of morality.One Unger-inspired thought experiment suggests that a personmust give up four decades of earnings just to save a singlelife. The other evokes the contrary intuition that onedoesn't have to labor forty years without compensation inorder to prevent the death of an individual. However,considerations of consistency do not demand that weabandon one of our intuitive responses. This is becausethere is a morally significant difference between thetwo burdens that the people suffer in the respectivethought experiments. The difference is a result of humanpsychology being such that it is easier to bear theaftermath of an event that renders one's earlier effortsfutile than it is to suffer identical efforts goingunrewarded in the future. A conclusion that can bedrawn from this temporal asymmetry is that while moralityis not quite as demanding as Unger and many consequentialistsmaintain, it is much more demanding than many of their opponents realize.

Most people think it is wrong to take organs from the dead if the potential donors had previously expressed a wish not to donate. Yet people respond differently to a thought experiment that seems analogous in terms of moral relevance to taking organs without consent. We argue that our reaction to the thought experiment is most representative of our deepest moral convictions. We realize not everyone will be convinced by the conclusions we draw from our thought experiment. Therefore, we point out that the state ignores consent in performing mandatory autopsies in some cases. If readers are willing to give up the permissibility of mandatory autopsies, we then offer some metaphysical arguments against posthumous harm. Drawing upon claims about bodies ceasing to exist at death and Epicurean-inspired arguments against posthumous interests, we make a case for an organ conscription policy which respects fundamental liberal principles of autonomy, bodily integrity, and property.

There remains a need to properly analyze the metaphysical assumptions underlying two organ procurement policies: presumed consent and organ sales. Our contention is that if one correctly understands the metaphysics of both the human body and material property, then it will turn out that while organ sales are illiberal, presumed consent is not. What we mean by illiberal includes violating rights of bodily integrity, property, or autonomy, as well as arguing for or against a policy in a manner that runs afoul of Rawlsian public reason

Catholic opponents of abortion and embryonic stem cell research usually base their position on a hylomorphic account of ensoulment at fertilization. They maintain that we each started out as one-cell ensouled organisms. Critics of this position argue that it is plagued by a number of intractable problems due to fission (twinning) and fusion. We're unconvinced that such objections to early ensoulment provide any reason to doubt the coherence of the hylomorphic account. However, we do maintain that a defense of ensoulment at fertilization must deny that we're essentially organisms.