I think personhood depends on sentience (consciousness, etc.).
This challenge was addressed in a previous section, but, because it is such a common objection, we revisit it here. One difficulty in responding to this challenge is that “sentience” is poorly defined and even more poorly understood. Some people make fine philosophical distinctions among sentience, consciousness, self-awareness, and cognition, whereas others are more careless in using these terms.
Fortunately, we need not argue here over how to define these concepts. In whatever sense the pro-choicer means the word he chooses, it invariably has to do with some sort of mental activity. We can distinguish among three levels of “having” mental activity, and, for a dialectical defense of the pro-life position, the distinction among these three levels is more important than distinctions among different types of mental activity.
The first of these levels is to be mentally active. This means that one is actively exercising the mental process in question. The second is to possess an immediate capacity for the particular type of mental activity. This means that, though one may not currently be performing the mental process, one has all the necessary neurological structures in place to do so within a relatively short period of time. The third is to possess an ultimate capacity for a particular mental activity. To have this “ultimate” capacity is to be the sort of living being that can be mentally active, regardless of whether or not one is presently exercising that capacity (or even ever will).
All humans possess the ultimate capacity for rationality, sentience, or any type of fundamentally human mental activity from conception. If the pro-choicer has in mind such an ultimate capacity, a pro-lifer might be able to agree with his statement that personhood depends on mental activity3. However, since the pro-choicer probably does not think that zygotes are persons, he must not be speaking of an ultimate capacity. Rather, he must mean that personhood depends either on being sentient or on some sort of immediate capacity for sentience. Below I respond to these alternative viewpoints.
It is easy to see that intrinsic value cannot depend on being sentient.
If this were the case, sleeping (non-REM) individuals and people anesthetized for surgery would be non-persons. Therefore, if sentience is relevant to personhood, it must be the capacity for sentience that is the key criterion. One could say that sleeping or anesthetized people have the capacity for sentience, although of course, given the current biochemical state of their brains, it is impossible for either of them to experience sentience. The term “capacity,” therefore, must entail the condition that if their brains were in a different biochemical state they could be sentient. Is this situation so different from the case of an embryo, which is actively assembling its future seat of sentience? If you think there is a meaningful difference, it must be because the embryo is too far removed from sentience. A sleeping or anesthetized individual, by contrast, could become sentient at a moment’s notice. This is what is meant by an immediate capacity for sentience, which the sleeping person possesses but the embryo lacks.
The trouble is that some people suffer long-term comas from which they emerge after several months.1 These people are rendered biologically incapable of sentience and, from this non-sentient condition, require many months for their brains to re-assemble to a state in which sentience is once again possible. It is hard to see how this situation is meaningfully different from the case of a fetus, whose brain, over the course of several months, self-assembles into a sentient state. Most people would agree that individuals with reversible comas are persons, despite their lack of an “immediate” capacity for sentience. If so, any grounds for excluding fetuses become increasingly contrived and difficult to defend.
Finally, it should be noted that no sentience-related argument would place the beginning boundary for personhood at birth, so this is an inadequate criterion if the pro-choicer is trying to defend the status-quo legal definition of person. Depending on how sentience is defined, the boundary would be either before birth (in which case some abortions ought to be illegal) or after birth (in which case infanticide ought to be legal). This doesn’t necessarily render the pro-choicer’s position inconsistent, but make sure that he is aware of the ramifications of his arguments.2
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For example, if the pro-choicer insists that personhood begins with first brainwaves, make sure he thinks that abortion should be illegal after Week 6. If not, then either he disagrees with Premise 1 or else he doesn’t actually think that brainwaves mark the beginning of personhood. ↩
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We said before that pro-lifers think that personhood depends on being a human organism. But many pro-life philosophers define a person as a human organism precisely because all human organisms (and, among known material beings, only human organisms) have a “rational nature.” This is another way of saying that humans have the ultimate capacity for rationality. Some thinkers hold that this rational nature is in fact the source of the intrinsic value that accrues to persons. The definition of rationality was discussed briefly elsewhere, but our intention is not so much to defend this particular perspective within the broader pro-life camp but rather to point out that, if the mental activity in question is equated with rationality, many of the most prominent pro-life philosophers would heartily agree that personhood is closely dependent on mental activity. ↩