That post was partially triggered by the bombardment of intellectually dishonest or outright false pro-abortion campaign ads I’ve had to endure lately from Maryland and Virginia Democratic candidates. (Did you know that the Republicans will enact a national abortion ban?) In one, a GOP candidate is mocked for saying that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe was legally correct. “Huh?” says a woman or actress whom I guarantee didn’t read the opinion (or Roe) and who couldn’t explain the legal arguments if a gun was pointed at her head. Almost all legal scholars and lawyer admit that Roe v. Wade was incompetent; their major argument for not reversing it is “It’s too late: stare decisus!” Let’s ask that “Huh” lady to define stare decisus.
As he/she/it often does, one of Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s posts, this time an argument for abortion, prompted a sterling response. Here is Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Is This the Level of Critical Thinking Devoted To Pro-Abortion Advocacy?”.….
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The topic of “nature” is an important one to discuss, because ethics follows nature. Classically, we can ask what something is, and what about that thing makes it what it is. The whole notion of taxonomy relies on defining “what” something is. When we examine things, we notice two main categories of details. One category is essentials, and the other category is accidentals. It is essential to the nature of water to be composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, and it is essential to the nature of water to be a solid at some temperature, a liquid at another temperature, and a gas at a third temperature. It is accidental to water to be wet, because ice and super-heated steam are not wet, and it is an accident of water to be white, because snow is white but steam is transparent. Another way to put that is water can lose wetness and still be water, but if water loses its hydrogen atoms, it is no longer water.
There is such a thing as human nature. We can discuss and reason and argue about what details of human existence are essential and which are accidental, but I think we can agree that at some point if enough details are removed, what remains is no longer human. If we take the evolution of species (which Catholics are allowed to believe in), while we notice a gradation of speciation, we nevertheless notice that distinct species have disparate traits that are essential to being that species. Certainly it seems that a very distinct and essential detail of being human is being a rational creature. What Sarah B. brought up about rational kinds notices that a rational nature, while necessary, is not sufficient to identify as human, as there could be rational alien races in the universe, and the Catholic belief in purely spiritual beings that we call angels and demons postulates rational natures that are not human. In a similar way, there are shared details among primates, but there are different details about humans that distinguish them from other primates.
You ask, why bring “kinds” into the discussion at all? I find this an odd question, because the very question of trying to determine what the unborn are means we are trying to classify them, and we need to reference “kinds” to make such a classification. In order to distinguish between kinds, we have to then identify what is essential to a kind. When we speak of rational kinds, we are identifying a group of beings that share rationality as essential to their nature. In a similar fashion, we associate into one group those beings that possess mammary glands and call them mammals. This is an essential property of being a mammal. If there is a member of a mammalian species that lacks mammary glands, we know that that individual is suffering a disorder. Keep in mind, the very idea of nature is necessary to identify disorder. It is impossible to state that there is a disorder if there is no actual order for that being. In a similar vein, if an animal whose nature does not have rationality as an essential feature somehow receives rationality, we would call that super-natural, because it is a feature above the nature of that animal. That does not make that animal a person, because the rationality is not an essential feature and could be removed without changing the essential qualities of that animal.
Now, if we look closer at what we mean by a rational kind, we also notice that what we are speaking of is the capacity for exercising rationality. We know that humans do not always exercise rationality. We sleep. We occasionally act entirely on impulse or muscle memory. We can enter states in which brain activity is at a minimum. The extent to which, or the frequency of which, we exercise our rationality cannot be the essential quality of personhood, because then one would be in constant flux between being a person and not being a person. The essential quality must therefore be the possibility of rationality by nature. A sperm or an egg does not possess that possibility, but a single-celled union of the two does, because that single cell possesses in entirety the nature which by right contains the capacity for rationality.
One other detail I’ll address is when you mention “Things may have properties or behaviors, but we choose what we want their purposes to be…” I want to clarify that there is a distinction between what something is and what it is purpose is. An existentialist worldview is fully capable of agreeing with the concept of nature, because nature is what you described as properties and behaviors. The purpose of an object is another subject. Classically, the discussion of natures is ontology, whereas the discussion of purpose of teleology. They aren’t the same thing. We can discuss the nature of a chair, knowing full well that a purposeless, undirected, accidental universe has no concept of chair-ness (because it has no concepts at all), because there are still essential qualities for being a chair, even if a chair is purely a human invention. The impartial, unfeeling universe cannot care if we want to sit down, and nor if we take wood and metal and rendered horse hooves and say the result has the purpose of holding us up while we sit. That doesn’t change that the nature of what we have created is a chair. It is a deeper discussion we can have as to whether the purpose of being sat upon is an essential detail of a chair (or in other words, we can ask whether a teleological detail can be a necessary detail).
What do you think? Frankly, I love delving into the philosophical aspects of nature and purpose, so I hope I’m not flooding you with details here. And, knowing I’m terrible at making timely responses, nevertheless I’ll offer to try to answer any questions or challenges you have here. (I still owe you a number of responses from our previous discussions, but I have to admit that working overtime while trying to manage four daughters and still pay attention to my wife does eat into my spare time…)
Ethics Alarms 
Thanks for the COTD, Jack! I’ve been trying to formulate something like this for months, and EC gave me the needed inspiration to put this together (though I think I rambled too much and could have been crisper). And, as I said, I still owe him years’ worth of replies…
Talk about an elevated discussion. Only here on EA.
I completely agree, Chris. Numerous comments on this site are so beautifully nuanced that they need to be read slowly – or more than once – to grasp the richness.
Ryan, I think yours was a tour de force. Well done!!
“Numerous comments on this site are so beautifully nuanced that they need to be read slowly – or more than once – to grasp the richness.”
I have a gosh dang EA folder, brimming with what you reference; matter-a-fact, you’re represented.
PWS
Fair point: We do want to make classifications and generalizations. I guess the real issue is that I object to the way your philosophy approaches classification.
The taxonomy you use makes a lot of assumptions that rationalist taxonomy doesn’t. In particular, we don’t use assume that a category must have “essentials”. The rationality community has a whole sequence of articles pointing out that many categories are clusters of different members, which might not have any essential traits that all of them share. This happens a great deal when people talk/argue about cultural demographics like nerds, punks, and fandoms, as well as ethnic group membership.
I should also clarify that existentialism isn’t just about lack of inherent purpose. The premise is “existence precedes essence.” That is to say, we must observe the literal reality of something, because that overrules whatever we imagine its “true nature” to be. Names and labels like “chair” are tools for our convenience, just as chairs are. Each label we use is a prediction. If I identify an object is a chair, I probably mean “I predict that this matter was artificially optimized for human sitting.” We can test the prediction by examining the object or by asking someone if they know the object’s history.
Drawing an example from nature, the category of reptiles is a clade. If it were a proper category, it would include all the species with a common ancestor. Instead, it excludes descendants of other reptiles, like birds, while including more distant relatives like crocodilians. We deliberately exclude birds from the “reptile” category because they’re different enough that we have different ways of dealing with them, while crocodilians are similar enough to other reptiles that we lump them in. Likewise, “vegetable” is a culinary term, not a botanical term. It describes how we use parts of plants, not what they’re made of.
One example the rationalist community has used is that Jewish lore from Biblical times used a single concept to refer to both whales and fish. At the time, whales and fish had the same significance in human culture regardless of their different biology: they’re both vertebrates that live in the ocean. As far as it mattered for human interactions, whales were just really big fish that were impractical to catch. (By contrast, I assume that humans that hunted whales noticed that whales breathe air.)
Again, I assert that categories are semantic tools that people create to more easily interact with the world. The world has recurring patterns that can be described using generalizations, but the generalizations aren’t fundamental laws. If that were the case, how would evolution work? If every living thing must be a member of one or more categories with defined essential traits, then how would a population gradually change its average genotype and phenotype over time? Is there a way to be “sort of” a member of two categories as accidental traits gradually become essential, or are there infinitely many categories along the evolutionary path between wolf and dachshund? For that matter, how do these categories work with non-purebred dogs?
But if a species of mammals evolves that lacks mammary glands, is it still a mammal, or do we need to call it something else? When monotremes were discovered by European academics, did the “essential nature” of mammals change to remove the requirement that they give live birth?
You use “disorder” to describe a member of a group missing an essential feature from the group. Disorder is as disorder does, though. Something can be unusual, but does the existence of a disorder call upon us to do anything in particular about it? And why do you think disorders happen, if all events are part of the machinations of an enigmatic and supposedly benign entity?
Alright, that’s a very different definition of “person” from the one I use. Suspending the use of “person” for now, what are our ethical obligations toward a rational animal? I’m concerned that your philosophy may have an unwarranted assumption that the “animal” part matters more than the “rational” part. Why would reasoning capacity not be the most important thing that affects how we interact with an entity?
The word “nature” is doing a lot of work there. None of the nerves that support rational thought are present, unlike the example of sleep. Saying that a zygote has the nature of having the capacity for rationality is ethically unsound to me, since it gives ethical weight to properties which are not manifested. To me, it’s the same sort of reasoning as saying, “This person’s parents were criminals, so the person’s nature is to have the capacity for evil. We must ostracize them accordingly.” I think the assumptions you make about about the existence of determined categories for things may interfere with the application of constructive principles like ethics.