Phil 104 – Anderson
Supplementary notes on Finnis’s Paper
Abortion and Health Care Ethics
Finnis argues for the extreme conservative view that a person first exists at conception
and has the same moral status at that point as any fully mature human being. He
concludes from this that abortion is always morally impermissible because it involves the
direct killing of a person. (Note: Since our interest here is in how he defends his initial
claim about personhood, we only need to focus on pp 13-15 of his paper.)
Prior to defending his own position, Finnis argues against the ancient (but still widely
held) view that personhood begins at the time of initial ensoulment. This is the theory
that a person is not just a human body with a complex nervous system, rather, a person is
a composite of two fundamentally different kinds of being: a material human body
together with a non-material soul. The soul is thought to be the locus of all conscious
activity: thought, reason, emotion, feeling, memory, etc. The real person, on this theory,
is more closely identified with their soul than with their body and on many such accounts
the soul is also thought to be indestructible or immortal. Proponents of the ensoulment
theory have often disagreed on the point in human development when ensoulment first
occurs; traditionally the most favored view was at least several weeks after conception.
Finnis rejects the ensoulment theory altogether on the grounds that it is incompatible with
what is known to modern biology. This is a strange response. Ensoulment theory is
indeed highly controversial – most contemporary philosophers reject it - but not for
biological reasons, rather, it is difficult to defend on metaphysical grounds. It remains a
classic unsolved problem in the philosophy of mind.
For Finnis a zygote (what results from conception) or a fetus is a person because it has
the capacity to develop into the sort of conscious, rational, choice-making, self-aware
entity that everyone recognizes as a person. “Any entity which, remaining the same
individual, will develop into a paradigmatic instance of a substantial kind already is an
instance of that kind.” (15) One could reasonably disagree with this way of describing a
zygote or fetus. I might plant a six-inch oak seedling in my yard that, given favorable
conditions, will become a beautiful shade tree in twenty years. It would be very
misleading to say I already have a beautiful oak shade tree in my yard. It would be more
accurate to say the seedling has the capacity to become a beautiful shade tree. Finnis
wants to say a fetus already is a person, but a reasonable critic could say all he has shown
is that it is capable of becoming a person.
Some defenders of the conservative position (not including Finnis) grant that a fetus is
only potentially a person, but they argue it still should be recognized as having a right to
life based on the principle that all potential persons have rights to life. But once again, a
reasonable person could disagree. An eleven year-old is potentially an auto driver, but
that doesn’t mean he should be given a driver’s license at age eleven. In general, to be
potentially an X does not entitle one to the rights that go with actually being an X.
A third line of argument that could be teased out of Finnis’s language has to do with the
physical identity of a fetus with the mature adult it may eventually become. By physical
identity is meant the sameness of an enduring thing over its entire period of existence.
Just as a ninety year-old man is physically identical with the newborn he once was ninety
years ago, so is he identical with the zygote he once was ninety years and nine months
ago. The argument may then be made that if a being has basic moral rights at some point
in its existence (such as adulthood), then it must have those same rights at every other
point in its existence as the same physical entity. Physical identity implies moral identity.
But again a reasonable person could disagree with this thesis. The right to vote, for
example, is a basic moral right, but for obvious reasons we don’t grant a young child the
right to vote even though he is physically identical with the adult voter he later becomes.
More to the point, proponents of capital punishment think a person can lose their right to
life upon committing a heinous crime even though his physical identity remains
unchanged.