Two Views of the Moral Community: Exclusivism and Inclusivism

Warrens’ argument begins with a useful reformulation of what she sees as the primary question of the abortion debate. We can restate the question “who counts as a person?” in this way: “How are we to define the moral community, the set of beings with full and equal moral rights, such that we can decide whether a human fetus is a member of this community or not?”Footnote ⁴ According to Warren, only if we first determine the constituency of the moral community can we resolve the abortion debate. Even though I will find her analysis faulty, Warren does well to focus on the boundaries of the moral community and its membership as ethicists are too often imprecise or obscure about this issue.Footnote ⁵ Many requirements for the moral community have, of course, been proposed.Footnote ⁶ Historically, admission has been based on a wide range of criteria including class, race, nationality, religion, and biological sex. These restrictions, surely we agree, are untenable. One also finds criteria such as species membership, various forms of cognitive capacity or development, moral agency, language use, sentience, social or relational function, and/or psychological identity or continuity suggested.Footnote ⁷ Some proposals including such criteria have recently found increasing support.Footnote ⁸ I refer to such restrictions and their advocacy as “exclusivist.” I choose this term, since such criteria minimally exclude some living human beings. In this regard, I would agree with Tom Beauchamp and James Childress that each of these various theories provides a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for some level of moral status. As they note, however, each of these theories often makes “the mistake of isolating a singular property or type of property … as the sole or at least primary criterion of moral status. Each theory proposes using its preferred property for including certain individuals (those having the property) and excluding others (those lacking the property). Each theory thereby becomes too narrow to be a general theory of moral status unless it accepts some criteria” from other theories.Footnote ⁹ In addition, each of these theories struggles with what we might call the problem of “marginal cases” by excluding vulnerable populations such as infants, young children, the cognitively disabled, patients with advanced dementia, and/or research animals.

By way of contrast, an “inclusivist,” as I use the term, holds that any biological human being belongs to the moral community. So too does any person, if there is any, who is not a human being. This account of inclusivism raises, of course, two key questions: (1) who counts as a biological human being? and (2) who counts as a person? Question (1) is the easier to answer, since the concept of a human being is more precise than that of a person. Moreover, for our purposes we can make do with a partial answer. We can get by with a sufficient condition for being a human being; we do not need a full set of necessary and sufficient conditions. This lets us say that a fetus is a human being and bracket for now questions that “advances” like chimeras or artificial intelligence suggest.Footnote ¹⁰ An inclusivist answer, then, to (1) might be roughly this: any biological and genetic individual conceived by human beings counts as a biological human. Hence, human fetuses are human beings.Footnote ¹¹

But question (2) is much more difficult. My own view is that it is answerable only in a general and tentative way. I would say that a person is any normal adult human being or any individual sufficiently like one. Yet however hard it is to answer (2), the exclusivist has a serious duty to give a widely acceptable answer to just this question insofar as he or she maintains that only persons belong to the moral community. I say “widely acceptable” because society would be unwise to withdraw its protection from some human beings in virtue of a controversial theory that they do not have standing in the moral community. As Beauchamp and Childress convincingly argue, a morally appropriate response is not to strip what limited protections such individuals already possess but rather to offer special protection and care.Footnote ¹²

On the other hand, the need to answer question (2) is not so pressing given an inclusivist’s answer to question (1). After all, most controversial candidates for personhood, on this view, already belong to the moral community as biological humans.Footnote ¹³ There are, to be sure, other more or less commonly proposed candidates. For instance, we might ask about the status of “higher” animals such as dolphins or chimpanzees.Footnote ¹⁴ And what of artificial intelligence and extraterrestrials? Suppose we consider this list, working in reverse order. Extraterrestrials creatures may not exist, so their status is not immediately pressing. Whether AI systems or programs are persons is of greater concern. The question may someday become more urgent with advancing research.Footnote ¹⁵ But for now the problem yields to what I take to be a decisive consideration. Today’s examples of artificial intelligence are not persons. For they lack a central feature of persons we recognize, namely, being alive.

It is, however, already of great concern whether animals are persons. In this regard, I would agree with Warren that our treatment of animals is too often capricious and morally troubling.Footnote ¹⁶ If full standing in the moral community extends at least to some animals, we could not justify exploiting them as we do. The serious question this raises, the problem of animal rights, I cannot explore in any detail here.Footnote ¹⁷ But I do think that there is a cluster of morally relevant differences between animals and human persons. Because of these differences, including the capacity for objectivity, certitude, rational deliberation, moral agency, and the formation and use of abstract concepts, I doubt that animals are persons.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet this extends no carte blanche to our abuse or mistreatment of them. Much of this, especially factory farming or various forms of animal experimentation, can be opposed simply because animals are sentient.Footnote ¹⁹ The far stronger and somewhat counterintuitive claim that animals are persons need not be made at this time. Still even these few remarks about animals support a stronger inclusivism, though not one according personhood to animals. Thus a more thoroughgoing inclusivism could bring within the moral community some merely sentient beings, all human beings, and any nonhuman person.

This stronger inclusivism does not, however, suppose that each member of the moral community has full and equal moral rights.Footnote ²⁰ Nor does it suppose that each is by definition a person. Here my understanding of the moral community differs from Warren’s. I do not think, though she seems to, that full equality is a part of the very concept of a moral community.Footnote ²¹ But this does not mean that I think that only humans and (other) persons have any serious rights. Indeed, I think that there is a “second order” right that each member enjoys. This is the equal right of having whatever first order rights one does have taken seriously. So if an animal has a right not to be tortured except in the most extreme circumstances, then nothing less can justify its torture. And if humans have a right not to be killed except in the most extreme circumstances, then nothing less can justify the deed. Different members of the moral community may have different and variously restricted rights; but the rights of each must be taken equally seriously.

So far I have given no real argument for either an exclusivist or an inclusivist view of the moral community. But I find that an inclusivist view has a strong intuitive appeal, and not just for me. Indeed, I am inclined to accept the strong inclusivism I have just sketched, unless I find some persuasive objections against it. The best argument for such an inclusivism, I think we shall see, is that the exclusivist alternatives lead to disturbing and unacceptable moral consequences. But we shall also see that Warren does not share my inclination. Nor does she admit that certain consequences of her view are unacceptable. Most importantly, she denies that biological humans as such, what she calls “genetic humans,” are members of the moral community. She insists rather that it is, or should be, self-evident that all and only persons are members. Hence, we must distinguish between genetic humans and human beings in the moral sense, that is, human persons. Thus, she faults the inclusivist John Noonan for assuming that the fetus, admittedly a genetic human, is morally human.Footnote ²² This assumption, she says, is only too common an error of both friends and foes of abortion.

But Warren’s criticism itself merits scrutiny. Must we have an argument to show that fetuses are members of the moral community? Not, of course, if all (biological) humans are members of it, as inclusivists hold. But Warren contests just this claim. She proposes, instead, that we significantly limit membership in the moral community, arguing that there are good reasons for defining the moral community and personhood in a way that excludes the fetus. Any proposal about the constituency of the moral community must, of course, avoid being arbitrary and ad hoc.Footnote ²³ One could not exclude fetuses simply because one favors abortion. It is precisely the morality of abortion that is in question. Nor, obviously, can one advance so controversial a proposal with stipulative definitions. And it is surely not a definitional truth, unless one uses a stipulative definition, that a fetus is not a member of the moral community. We ought not to say, on the other hand, that one should or even could be wholly neutral in defining the moral community. The concept is, at the very least, partly a normative one.Footnote ²⁴ For example, a definition that excluded most adults would be implausible and entirely miss the mark.

If, then, she is to support her proposal with good reasons, Warren needs independent and nonarbitrary grounds for her construal of the moral community. As we will see, however, it is not clear that her account of its constituency has such a basis. The moral community, she says, includes “all and only people, rather than all and only human beings.”Footnote ²⁵ This is supposedly self-evident, or “perfectly obvious,” at least upon reflection.Footnote ²⁶ Yet her claim is surely arguable, and she gives little warrant for it.Footnote ²⁷ As Beauchamp and Childress note, the notion of person is so ambiguous that they attempt to avoid it as much as possible: “some people maintain that what it means to be a person is simply to have some biological properties; others maintain that personhood is delineated not biologically, but in terms of certain cognitive capacities, moral capacities, or both. What counts as a person seems to expand or contract as theorists construct their theories so that precisely the entities for which they advocate will be judged to be persons and other entities will not.”Footnote ²⁸ Suppose, for a moment, that we did agree on who counts as a person. Why should we limit the moral community to persons? Why suppose that only they have rights? It is surely not absurd to think that animals, infants, young children, and comatose patients are not persons and yet have rights.Footnote ²⁹ Warren’s claim is hardly self-evident then. Were it so, I doubt that inclusivism would even occur to us, much less have the appeal it does. So until Warren produces a justification for her exclusivism, her proposal is simply one of many. It has no unique credentials, and, as I will argue, its consequences are suspect.

Some Criteria for Personhood: Consequences and Objections

But quite apart from this significant gap in her argument, there are serious problems both with Warren’s analysis of personhood and how she uses it. While she declines to give a full account of personhood, she thinks that even a rough analysis shows that the fetus is not a person. If she is right, nothing yet follows, I have argued, about the rights of a fetus. But that question aside, how does Warren construct “a rough and approximate list” of the most basic criteria of personhood?Footnote ³⁰ She does so by inviting us on a trip to outer space. But since morality does not vary with distance, we need a code of ethics for astronauts. Our code will require us to treat any creatures we meet with due respect. Here the plot thickens; for how are we to do so unless we know whether they are persons?

In this regard, I am skeptical of Warren’s modus operandi. First of all, thought experiments that rely on what we would do in outer space—or in other unusual contexts—often presage an explanation of the obscure by the more obscure. And, secondly, given her scenario and an encounter with an extraterrestrial, I doubt whether we would check for putative person criteria anyway. Such a studied response is implausible. Rather than working through a problematic set of criteria, I think we would simply see what the creature did and how it acted and consider how we felt about it. In the meantime, I think we might give it the benefit of the doubt. There is nothing “philosophical” in this approach, but moral practices antedate artificial decision procedures.Footnote ³¹ If we forget this, we may lose sight of the core moral sensibilities in light of which we test a moral theory. But perhaps Warren’s approach has some merit, so we will try her plan. Her basic criteria for personhood are:

1. 1) consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain;

2. 2) reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems);

3. 3) self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control);

4. 4) the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics;

5. 5) the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both.Footnote ³²

In this regard, Warren is not wholly sanguine about her criteria. As she herself notes, there are many problems in making them suitably precise and in determining the behavioral criteria for their fulfillment. Still we might suppose that we astronauts know well enough what (1–5) require. Moreover, she urges us to be flexible. A living organism need not meet all five criteria to be a person. Perhaps (1) and (2) alone are sufficient. Quite probably meeting (1–3) will do. And perhaps no one criterion is necessary for personhood, though (1) and (2) and (3) are “necessary condition” candidates. But our liberality has its limits. This much is clear: neither an extraterrestrial nor a human being who meets none of (1–5) is a person. Anyone who disagrees, Warren claims, fails to understand the concept of personhood.

If there is any real dispute about her criteria, Warren thinks, the abortion debate is doomed insofar as the conceptual frameworks of the disputants would be irreconcilable. But she has no fear of this, because “the concept of a person is one which is nearly universal.”Footnote ³³ Here she overlooks, seemingly, a wealth of anthropological data that suggests that there is a family of person concepts rather than any one universal concept.Footnote ³⁴ For example, in some cultures many persons have been thought to “belong” to one biological human.Footnote ³⁵ In other cultures, many humans or members of a family unit, were seen as a single person.Footnote ³⁶ Perhaps, though, her talk of “racial self-awareness” in (5) reflects the historical and cultural dependency of the concept(s) of person.

Now given her criteria for personhood, Warren draws two complex and important conclusions. First, some genetic humans, for example, some of the intellectually disabled, and the irreversibly unconscious, are not persons. But since they are only “genetic humans,” their genetic humanity is insufficient to establish personhood. And since personhood (she thinks) is required for being a member of the moral community, it follows that such individuals, for example, do not have full moral rights.Footnote ³⁷ I noted earlier that Warren’s exclusivism has suspect and troubling consequences. That is, the exclusivist seems to maintain that some X that we do take to have rights does not. In the case at hand, if one holds that all intellectually disabled human beings (those whom Warren calls “defective human beings”) have some rights,Footnote ³⁸ for example, the right not to be killed, one already has a strong case against Warren’s exclusivism. For she seems committed to the view that the rights of some disabled human beings, for example, not to be killed, are not equal to your rights or mine. In addition, given Warren’s criteria for personhood (complex problem solving, a sense of self-identity, engaging in sophisticated communication), this would clearly put the arrival of personhood after birth which would justify not only abortion but also infanticide. Indeed, it might even allow for the justified killing of children up to the age of 3–5 years or so.Footnote ³⁹ If these consequences are repugnant, we should conclude that the exclusivist has gone wrong.

Warren’s second conclusion is that fetuses are not persons and, for like reasons, do not have full moral rights. As we have seen, both of her conclusions rely on the dubious, though supposedly self-evident, claim that only persons have such rights. Both also suppose that some human beings fail to satisfy Warren’s criteria. While the irreversibly unconscious do fail to meet them, infants, young children, some intellectually disabled individuals and fetuses might not. Surely many such disabled individuals meet (1) and (3) and (5). This leaves open the question of their personhood, even given these criteria. Warren does, at least, go through the motions of applying her checklist to the fetus, a courtesy not given to the intellectually disabled.Footnote ⁴⁰ But evidently the result is too obvious to merit much discussion. Significantly, she acknowledges that a well-developed fetus feels and responds to pain, has quite an active brain, and even some “rudimentary” consciousness. But since the consciousness is rudimentary and since criteria (2–5) are not met, she concludes that the fetus is not a person.

This seems hasty for a number of reasons. There is reason to suspect that even on her criteria some fetuses may be persons. Such a finding, of course, would undermine her entire case. Let us begin with her first requirement. Consciousness is undoubtedly a difficult concept.Footnote ⁴¹ But if an organism that feels pain is conscious, many fetuses are conscious. In fact, contemporary fetology suggests that there are good behavioral grounds for saying that the fetus has both painful and pleasurable sensations at an early stage.Footnote ⁴² But with this only “rudimentary” consciousness, as Warren terms it, the fetus supposedly does not meet (1).

At least two objections to her claim ought to be made here. The first is that (1) seems to become more demanding when she comes to apply it. Is “the capacity to feel pain” not so important after all? This capacity is, we recall, what (1) originally emphasized. The second objection is that if we are more or less persons, in effect, as our consciousness is more or less developed and acute, then a doctrine of equal rights will be hard to uphold. As one’s consciousness is more or less acute, it seems, one’s rights might also wax and wane.Footnote ⁴³ And yet as we have seen, Warren builds a doctrine of equal rights into her view of the moral community. Perhaps, however, she does not suppose that one is more fully a person as one more fully satisfies (1) or (1–5), even though what she says is consistent with this view. If so, what we must still press for is a substantial change or a recognizable turning point in development (or senescence) after which one is a “full-fledged” person (or is no longer one).Footnote ⁴⁴

Perhaps not surprisingly, Warren does not offer us one. Two likely reasons for this are that it is difficult to establish precisely when such a change occurs and secondly that such an approach entails a form of Cartesian body-self dualism that is difficult to defend both empirically and metaphysically.Footnote ⁴⁵ But if there is doubt about whether the fetus meets (1), Warren seems sure that it fails to meet (3). Again, I am not persuaded by Warren’s case. There is, as she notes, difficulty in determining what behavior is “self-motivated.” Still, as many mothers know, the fetus at some stages moves about on its own as it “tries” to find a comfortable position. Such activity might well be seen as self-motivating, although perhaps a case might also be made that it sometimes results from “direct external control” or internal “genetic control” and so fails to meet (3). Even so, one would want to distinguish between fetal movements prompted, say, by a physician’s prodding and the great majority of fetal movements that are not. And one would want to distinguish between localized reflex movements like swallowing, squinting, and tongue retraction and more generalized movement that is spontaneous at least in the sense that it is independent of external stimulation. Sometimes a fetus just does move on its own. So it is arguable that the fetus does satisfy criteria (1) and (3). True, the fetus does not meet (2) or (4); and it is doubtful that it meets (5), although I do not know how one could prove that a well-developed fetus cannot distinguish between itself and its environment.

But Warren allows that meeting only (1) and (2) may well be sufficient for personhood. So might not meeting (1) and (3) also be sufficient? If not, why not? It seems that the fetus could be seen as a marginal case, at least, but this is wholly unrecognized by Warren. Of course, there is no clear consensus that a fetus is a person.Footnote ⁴⁶ In some important respects, a fetus is unlike an adult; this dissimilarity is morally significant. In particular, its lack of development precludes its having autonomy or moral obligations.Footnote ⁴⁷ What I want to argue, however, is that given Warren’s criteria it is not clear that a fetus is not a person. Moreover, a fetus is genetically just like an adult human being. Both share a single developmental continuum. Both are human beings.Footnote ⁴⁸ In virtue of this similarity, whether one speaks of a fetus as a “mere” human being or as a “potential person,” it is not implausible to suppose that it has rights. So far, by way of summary, I have argued (1) that being a person is not so obviously central to having full moral rights as Warren assumes, (2) that her exclusivism has dubious moral consequences independent of the abortion issue, and (3) that it is not clear that a fetus is not a person, even on Warren’s own criteria.

The Limits of Warren’s Criteria

I would like now to argue that (4) her criteria for personhood are themselves suspect. In particular, I will offer three examples to show why they are suspect, why they are perhaps both too weak and too strong. It is not inconceivable, although it is very unlikely, that some plants manifest a kind of “knowing” and “feeling.” There is even a certain amount of serious experimentation going on to test such a hypothesis.Footnote ⁴⁹ And it is possible, though even more unlikely, that some plant thinks after a fashion, perhaps about itself or its victim (it might be carnivorous) or the weather. We would be astonished, of course, to find such a plant, but it is at least theoretically possible. But I suggest that even if we found such a plant, we need not on moral grounds at any rate, treat it in a privileged way. Much less need we acknowledge it as a person, though on Warren’s criteria we should consider doing so. After all, it might well meet criteria (1) and (2). Still, whatever amazing things we learn about plants, they are simply too foreign from us to have any significant place in our moral practices and sensibilities.

In addition, we can imagine that some forms of artificial intelligence such as Hal from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey might meet, say, (1) and (2) and (4). They might meet (1) only in a qualified way, since they could not be said to feel pain, unless perhaps we adopted a purely behavioral account of pain for them. But their capacity for communication and sophisticated pattern “recognition” (such as chess playing or lip reading) might make up for this. Would such a form of AI be a person? On Warren’s view it may well be. But we can well imagine our judging it to be too foreign from us. Our response might be something along the lines of: “It is just following a script!”Footnote ⁵⁰ “It’s not even alive!” “Why, it looks just like a camera lens!” Indeed, I doubt that we would count it as a person. Moreover, it seems implausible to speak of a computer’s having a right to life, even metaphorically. We would be unwise to destroy so useful a tool although in some circumstances it may be necessary in self-defense. But to recognize this is not to count it as a bearer of rights.

Each of these first two thought experiments suggests that Warren’s criteria may be too weak. But a third example suggests that they might also be too strong. Suppose someone suffers a major stroke and loses consciousness. Even after regaining consciousness, he might be unable to reason for a long period of time. His therapy might involve something like a re-education in skills first learned in early childhood. In particular, he would lack a “developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems.” So (2) would not be met. (Even the fetus has the capacity to reason and communicate. Perhaps this is why Warren requires a “developed” capacity.) But if this person fails to meet (2) for some time after gaining consciousness, surely he fails to meet (2) while unconscious. Moreover, while unconscious (and for some time after) he could hardly communicate with the skill which (4) requires. After all, his ability to reason has been affected. We cannot even say that he has any self-awareness. Hence neither does he meet (5). But now would our patient, while unconscious and even for some time afterwards, be a nonperson? I think we would say that he remains a person nonetheless. Yet Warren says that if an organism meets none of her criteria, and our unconscious person seems not to, he is not a person. Hence, he is not a member of the moral community. And yet nearly everyone would agree that our patient remains very much a member of the moral community. Indeed, we often give special care and protection to those approaching his condition. We feel a special obligation to the vulnerable and the defenseless, though for a time they have no obligations to us.Footnote ⁵¹ So it seems that Warren’s criteria may be both too weak and too strong.

Now an important reply to, or qualification of, the conclusion I draw from this case might well be made here. One could say that the reason we treat our patient as we do is simple enough. He has the potential to meet, in the future, criteria (1–5). We need only await his recovery. So the criteria are not too strong, if we give potentiality its due. There is some merit to this reply, though I think it gives only a partial explanation of our behavior. An appeal to potentiality is not, of course, the only way to explain our attitude toward our patient. One might argue that once personhood is ascribed it remains until death. Too much turns on personhood to let uncertain medical standards affect it. This suggestion, too, has merit, although one’s definition of death might in turn invoke uncertain or disputed standards.Footnote ⁵² But it is not the position Warren seems to take. For she considers at least some of the irreversibly unconscious to be “alive,” even though she denies they are persons.Footnote ⁵³

Potential Persons and Their Rights

Clearly one intriguing feature of the appeal to potentiality, if it is legitimate, is that the fetus stands to benefit by it. Potentiality, indeed, plays a large role in many discussions of moral status in general and abortion in particular.Footnote ⁵⁴ Warren introduces it, as we might expect, in conjunction with her account of personhood. For even if the fetus is not an actual person, the question arises whether anything of moral consequence follows from its being a “potential person.” Warren’s “lead in” question, before turning explicitly to the role of potentiality, is this: how much like an adult human being, our paradigm person, must a human being be in order to have a right to life? Fetuses and infants and children, qua human beings, are somewhat like human adults. But how much like adults must they be to have full moral rights?

Warren’s answer is forthright. As an organism becomes more like a person, the case for its having a right to life and other rights gets stronger. But nothing, she insists, in the development of a fetus makes it significantly more like a person than it is at its earliest stage. We are left to wonder, too, whether anything in the early development of a postnatal infant contributes to its personhood.Footnote ⁵⁵ In this regard, Warren offers us no reason to think so. Indeed, she thinks that even a fetus of 8 months is not nearly as much like a person as is an average fish—a gold fish should do. And, for that matter, a newborn guppy is as much like a person as an 8 month fetus. The gold fish, after all, comes closer to meeting criteria (1–5) than does the fetus. The guppy does just as well as the fetus. It is only as one comes closer to meeting these criteria, too, that one becomes more like a person.

It follows that even if we grant some moral standing to the developed fetus, it would never have rights greater than a guppy’s, should a guppy have rights. On this account, then, the rights of the unborn could never come before a woman’s right to abort. Warren’s conclusions are certainly provocative. But they come with a warning to keep our emotions in check. We are told that “mere emotional responses cannot take the place of moral reasoning.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This is certainly true; yet neither can the emotions be ignored in moral discernment and assessment. Morality without emotion is not a human morality.Footnote ⁵⁷ Still, we need not lay great stress on the emotions to show Warren’s position suspect. A fish is, indeed, more like a person than is a rock. But a fish is not very much at all like an adult human being. Moreover, it is the adult human being that is our paradigm person. An 8 month fetus, on the other hand, is far more like an adult human being than even the wiliest Brook Trout.

Of course Warren might reply that a fetus is not as much like a human person in the relevant respects as a Brook Trout is. Again, I am skeptical about Warren’s approach. For it is not yet shown that her five criteria are the relevant respects. As I have argued, they seem both too weak and too strong. Moreover, we have seen that fetuses may meet criteria (1) and (3). In this regard, I doubt that fish do any better. Indeed, fetal consciousness might be much more like an adult’s than is that of a fish. Still, so long as we focus on the actual development of the fetus rather than its potential, and so long as persons alone are allowed full moral rights, the moral status of the unborn is tenuous. But there are two important questions before us.

The first, which leads into the second, is how much like an adult must a fetus be to have rights. Warren’s answer is that a fetus must be much more like an adult than it is. The second question is how does the fact that a fetus is a potential person bear on its having rights. How does Warren answer this second question? First of all, she admits the obvious: the fetus is a potential person. Indeed, she makes a second important admission. If an entity is a potential person, there seems to be a strong prima facie case for not destroying it. Are we to conclude, then, that the fetus has after all a right to life?

According to Warren, the answer is no. For even the case for not destroying a potential person, which hardly ascribes it rights, is only a prima facie one. We must realize, first, that a concern for potential persons may well be just a function of our concern about natural resources. But any concern for our “potential persons resources” surely bears rethinking. For today we have an extraordinary and growing amount of these “resources.” Here I would argue there is something wrong with Warren’s easy transition from potential persons to natural resources. The potential persons in question are actual human beings. Ordinarily, we distinguish between the human population of a country and its natural resources. Even if the humans in question are not persons, it is odd that they should be treated as mere things or objects; they are neither pine trees nor oil fields. Surely it is better to treat potential persons as among those for whom natural resources have purely instrumental value. Indeed it is better even to look upon future generations—merely possible persons—as using a share of the earth’s resources rather than constituting a part of them.

Even Warren herself is uneasy with this view of potential persons as natural resources. She allows that there may be more than a prudential question at stake in how we treat potential persons and admits that qua potential person the fetus may have some right to life. Yet she insists that a woman’s right to abort always outweighs any such right.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, she makes a much stronger general claim: “the rights of any actual person invariably outweigh those of any potential person, whenever the two conflict.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Apparently her argument for this general claim is to establish the more specific claim; no independent argument is given for the latter. Yet her argument for the general claim is, we shall see, unpersuasive. Warren soberly concedes that her general claim is not obvious. But if it is true, she thinks, abortion on request is always justifiable. And if we doubt the general claim, a new journey to outer space will reassure us.

The Rights of Actual and Potential Persons

On this trip one of our crew falls into the hands of some alien evil geniuses. These aliens envisage a grim future for our poor friend. (Perhaps he does not meet their criteria for personhood?) His body is to be broken down into its component cells. These cells, in turn, will be used to make millions of adult human persons. Each new human will share our colleague’s genetic code and his personal traits. This evil scheme can be realized in seconds, and “success” is almost certain. But what is this scenario leading to? The dilemma posed, purportedly suggestive of the abortion issue, is this: can our fellow astronaut escape in good conscience? If he does millions of potential persons will have no chance at life. What about their “right to life”? Warren (correctly) assures us that he can blamelessly escape. But is not it now equally obvious that a woman can abort even if this deprives one potential person, the fetus, of life? The astronaut, to extend the analogy, could escape in good conscience even if his life were not at stake but only a day of his freedom. He could legitimately escape even if he were captured through his own carelessness. By a parity of reasoning, a woman may legitimately secure an abortion for convenience, not just to protect her life. She may do so even if she is pregnant due to her own carelessness. Escape and abortion are alike, for the astronaut and the pregnant woman, respectively, are legitimate because the rights of an actual person are greater than those of one or a million potential persons.

One might wonder, of course, why Warren bothers with the fiction of the “rights” of potential persons in the first place. Rights ordinarily have correlative duties. But I cannot imagine how persons, who alone have obligations, would ever, on her view, have an obligation corresponding to the “right” of a potential person. But more importantly has a second voyage to outer space established Warren’s general claim that the rights of an actual person always outweigh those of a potential person? Here I would argue the answer is clearly no; for there are crucial differences between the escape of the astronaut and obtaining an abortion which preclude treating the two cases alike. First, the astronaut’s rights are being maliciously violated. So only rape provides, in this respect, a comparable pregnancy case. His captors have no claim on him; nor would his carelessness give them one. Because he has been taken by force and his life is at stake, he surely has a right to self-defense. Indeed, even if he kills some evil scientists in the course of his escape, he is morally blameless.

Secondly, the astronaut, unlike one who secures an abortion, does not kill any potential person. None of his cells is a potential person—or a human being. Any idea that in escaping he is killing potential persons or, more accurately, keeping them from being actualized supposes that his cells are already potential persons. But this supposition is implausible. And we must distinguish between (1) preventing existing potential persons from becoming persons and (2) preventing it from coming about that possible future potential persons become persons. Abortion minimally involves (1) and escaping involves only (2). But showing that (2) is legitimate has no bearing on (1). Perhaps a short way to put this is that the problem of abortion is fundamentally different than the problem of future generations.Footnote ⁶⁰

If Warren thinks that it makes sense in the astronaut case to talk of potential persons, she must hold a very unusual view of potentiality. Perhaps she thinks that any X that can be developed into a Y is already a potential Y. Since each cell of the astronaut can be developed into a person, each cell X is already potential person Y. At least two things make such a view suspect. First, as often happens with science fiction thought experiments, a plausible causal story never gets told. If we understood how X becomes Y, how a cell becomes a person (typically and naturally), we might think of X as a potential Y even now while it is simply X. But again we might not. Much depends on our concept of X.Footnote ⁶¹ But we do not know at all how cell X becomes person Y. We are just assured that there is a causal story to account for it. Perhaps this might be true. But until we have it in detail, we need not think of X as a potential Y. X is still, at most, just a possible Y. For all we know, cell X is no more potential person Y than a brick is a potential house.

Secondly, X seems not to be a potential Y in a morally relevant sense unless the morally relevant description of X is “a potential Y.” But the morally relevant description of a cell X is, in our story, “a part of the explorer’s body.” Basic biology, on the other hand, tells us that we cannot rightly describe a fetus as “a part of its mother’s body.”Footnote ⁶² Were this so, it would be false that no major part of the human body is regenerated. In addition, the fetus possesses its own distinct biological sex, bodily organs, genetic profile, blood type, and bone structure.Footnote ⁶³ But as Warren herself recognizes, a fetus can be described as “a potential person” or “an actual human being.” It may be that with the proper manipulation nearly any X is a possible, if not potential Y. But for now any X is already an actual X. An actual genetic human being that is also right now a potential person does not seem morally comparable to what is here and now a cell and a part of an astronaut’s body.

Warren’s argument, then, with its doubtful doctrine of potentiality, does not show that the rights of an actual person always outweigh the rights of a potential person. In the end, the astronaut example fails to do the job she thinks it does. Because it is not really comparable to an abortion case, it sheds little light on the topic. But her case for abortion on request hangs on this argument by analogy. So both the doctrine that the rights of actual persons always prevail and her broader case for the moral and legal right to abortion remains suspect.