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The Other F-Word

October 22nd, 2010

by John Finnis

In an article adapted from his debate last week with Peter Singer and Maggie Little on the moral status of the “fetus,” Professor Finnis explains that outside of medical contexts use of the word “fetus” is offensive, dehumanizing, prejudicial, and manipulative. It obscures our perception of moral reality. Moral status is not a matter of choice or grant or convention, but of recognition, of someone who matters, and matters as an equal, whether we like it or not.

The last time I had the opportunity of discoursing with Peter Singer was in May 1998 in the Philosophy Society at Oxford, right behind the College where we were colleagues for a while in the 1970s. The topic in 1998 was “Brain Death,” and we had a fair measure of agreement that the contemporary tests and criteria for brain death are an unsatisfactory guide to determining when death has occurred. But we disagreed about some things. One was the ethical question whether it’s sometimes right to choose to kill living human beings, as Peter thinks, and I deny, because I believe that everyone equally has the right not to be deliberately killed precisely as a means to someone else’s well-being. Another was that Peter wanted (and I’m sure still wants) to treat the question whether someone is dead as an “ethical question”—or in this afternoon’s jargon, a question of the moral status of anencephalic babies, people in persistent vegetative states (PVS), and so forth. I consider that it is a question of fact—of understanding, if you like philosophically and biologically, what it is for an organism of a certain substantial kind to have ceased to be an organism of that substantial kind (which is essentially what happens at that organism’s death).

The last time I had the opportunity of discoursing on today’s topic was at the American Political Science Association, in 2000, in a debate with the Rawlsian political philosopher Jeffrey Reiman. Reiman is a liberal, but he too, like Peter Singer, doesn’t believe in human equality. Peter must speak for himself, but in his publications around 2000 he agrees, I think, with Reiman that birth has little or no real moral significance. Reiman’s position is clear enough: the baby has no more rights, is no more entitled to respect, in the minutes or hours or days, or weeks, after birth than in the minutes or hours or days, or weeks, before birth. So far he and Peter agree. But then they split; for Reiman the child doesn’t acquire the equal moral status of having rights of its own for several years, when it has started to “consciously care about the continuation of its life”—whereas for Peter the moral status of equality and right to life is to be affirmed (I’m not sure why) a month after birth. (In the debate following this presentation, Singer made clear that his “one month” proposal dates back to 1984 and was intended just as a pragmatic legislative line, and that his basic and present view approximates to Reiman’s.)

So, on Reiman’s view (and I suppose Peter’s), if there is to be a law against infanticide from birth, it certainly doesn’t rest on the moral rights, or moral status, of the young infant—it has none—but only on the feelings and dispositions of adults. And Reiman is keen to add this: since the unborn child, like the born child for quite a while, has no right to life, the mother’s right to an abortion is not a right simply to be relieved of the presence of what is growing in her body, but a right to ensure that it is killed, whether or not it was delivered or expelled alive.

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