[Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay]
Over at Astral Codex Ten, the great Scott Alexander is doing a defence of eugenic embryo selection in IVF (I’m being descriptive, not pejorative: making the case for eugenics is one of Scott’s big things). People raised various objections to his post, and one set of these objections were the standard pro-life ones. If embryos have rights, if they’re ‘persons’, then embryo selection involves killing whichever people are deemed unfit. This seems like the bad, Nazi kind of eugenics that proponents of Nice Eugenics like Scott don’t want.
Scott’s response to this objection was the familiar one:
I think a default position would be that if you believe humans are more valuable than cows, and cows more valuable than bugs – presumably because humans are more conscious/intelligent/complex/thoughtful/have more hopes and dreams/experience more emotions – then in that case embryos, which have less of a brain and nervous system even than bugs, should be less valuable still.
He thinks that this is really what underlies the general aversion to murder, and that attempts to get around this are so much cope.
We can always eventually come up with some gerrymandered criterion that rules in all the things you want to rule in and rules out all the things you want to rule out. But will it be satisfying? Will we, on reflection, think “yes, this is what I mean when I say I’m against murder; the true reason that murder is bad is because it affects things beginning with the letter E”?
When I think about why murder is bad, I think of human beings being conscious, able to feel pain, able to have preferences, having hopes and dreams – things like that. So I would rather just skip this entire process of figuring out exactly how self-assembling counts as really self-assembling, and note that embryos have none of those things.
One way to think about this is that “the reason murder is bad is because it deprives people of future consciousness, and the only people who have interests in future consciousness are the presently conscious”. That interest will then get stronger if you have the sophisticated person-type consciousness, so it will be worse to kill you.
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Someone raised a problem with this which will be pretty familiar to Minimise readers: what about someone who’s deeply asleep? (We usually talk about people in temporary comas, but same principle). A sleeping hermit “currently has no consciousness, hopes, dreams, etc.” and as a very hermit-y hermit he doesn’t have anyone who would be made sad by his death. So why does he have rights now? If it’s “because he’ll have consciousness, hopes, dreams, etc. later” then that would seem to apply to embryos as much as to hermits.
Scott’s answer to this was that “the hermit’s past personhood gives him some sort of property rights to continue having his personhood respected, the same way I may still own an object when I’m not physically holding it, or an absentee landlord may own a house when he isn’t present.” Embryos don’t have past personhood, so they don’t have this right.
There seem to be to be two ways to read this thought of Scott’s, and they differ in their answer to the question “who has that property right in continuing to have his personhood respected?”
1. Beings only have rights and interest while they’re conscious: so right-holder is the awake hermit in the past
One way is to say that it’s not the sleeping hermit right now: it’s the wakeful hermit in the past. This seems to fit with Scott’s way of thinking. After all, the sleeping hermit right now isn’t a person, because he doesn’t have the consciousness, hopes, dreams and all that. He has “none of those things”, just like an embryo. But you can’t have an interest in having your personhood continue to be respected when you have no personhood to respect. So it seems like right thing for Scott to say would be that it’s the past hermit who has the interest in having his consciousness continue, after a gap where it isn’t present. He is a person right now, and will be a person again in the future as long as his body isn’t killed while it’s asleep, and so he has a right to make sure he gets to be that future person. So by killing the sleeping hermit you would, strictly speaking, be wronging not the guy in front of you, but his past conscious self: the once and future hermit.
Though Scott isn’t completely clear I think this is his way of thinking about things. He gives by way of illustration a sci-fi example in which you are given an ‘immortality surgery’ which involves you being split apart into all your body’s individual cells, which are then infused with nanotechnology and put back together. Scott thinks that stopping the surgery when you’re disassembled would be murder, even though “(w)hile you’re disassembled, you don’t have a brain, or a working mind, or any independent potential to self-assemble into a person. You just have a sort of residual claim to personhood that you lodged back when you were a fully-assembled human.” Presumably, while you’re disassembled you aren’t there (that is, you aren’t anywhere): there’s nowhere to point and say “there’s the guy who has the rights of a person”. So it’s the pre-surgery you that has the rights. If this is supposed to be similar to the case of the sleeping hermit, it seems clear that it’s the past hermit, not the present one, whose rights need to be respected.
This is in ways quite neat. It maintains the idea that we are at all times dealing with the rights and interests of conscious beings who have hopes, dreams etc. We don’t need to say that anyone non-conscious has rights. That would be silly, like saying that plants or chairs have rights. Right?
The problem with this is that it’s insane. Imagine standing beside the sleeping hermit and asking yourself the question “where is the guy who has the right not be killed here?” If this way of thinking things is right the answer is “nowhere”. There’s no guy with rights in the room with us now. I’m not sure if in Scott’s terms there’s any ‘guy’ present at all. There’s no-one who is conscious, no-one who’s got hopes, dreams, emotions. There was! But now there isn’t. The sleeping hermit is just like the guy who’s been disassembled into all his cells. He’ll return, but he’s not there now.
The problem is that he is there now! The hermit’s right there! There’s just one animal in the room: the human being that was awake earlier and is asleep now. If the sleeping hermit now is not the same entity as the awake hermit then, who or what exactly is he? The sleeping hermit is, after all, a being. Is a new being created every time the hermit falls asleep? Is there a “sleeping hermit” who alternates possession of the body with the waking hermit, Jekyll-and-Hyde style?
Most of us would be inclined to think that a view on which we disappear from existence every time we’re sufficiently deeply asleep is kind of a crazy view. But it is the natural consequence of this way of understanding the sleeping hermit. Scott sounds like he might be pretty OK with this:
I think lots of things about personhood are a convenient legal fiction. I don’t, right now, have a strong preference against dying (in the sense that my brain is currently focused on writing this essay, rather than on how much I don’t want to die). And I currently possess the money in my bank account, even though I am a slightly different person (in the sense of having slightly different opinions, being made of different matter, having brain cells in different positions, etc) from the person who earned that money. We need to abstract all of this weirdness into the idea of a single continuous person with moral rights in order to do anything at all, and I think this covers the sleeping hermit too.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think the idea that I continue to exist while asleep is a convenient legal fiction! It rather seems to me to be a straightforward fact, one that we would only be tempted to deny if we were in the grip of a kind of confusion: the kind of confusion that arises when you try to endorse an initially plausible-sounding claim like “only conscious beings have an interest in being conscious in the future”.
Incidentally, it’s this same kind of ‘convenient legal fiction’ that explains why Scott thinks newborn babies should be treated as though they have the rights of persons, despite the fact that they don’t have the sophisticated cognition that older humans do. We need ‘bright lines’ for legal purposes, and besides, “in most cases, killing a baby will make their parents, relatives, and tender-hearted onlookers extremely sad”. If you think that infanticide is actually as bad in itself as killing older humans, you might be tempted towards a view in which persons are more than just kludges of consciousness unified by convenient fictions. For example, one on which they are human organisms.
2. Non-conscious beings can have rights and interests if they were conscious in the past: the rights-holder is the sleeping hermit in the present
Now if this all seems dubious, another way to think about things – you might think it’s the more straightforward way – would be to say “the rights holder is the sleeping hermit, right now.” What gives him the right is that he – yes, the very same hermit – used to be conscious, used to have hopes, dreams, emotions, all that malarkey. He has an interest in being conscious again, even though he isn’t now.
This seems a lot less mad than the previous view. We can now safely say that the hermit is the same being as he was when he was awake. And we can say that he is the one with the right not to be killed. But we can still leave out embryos and fetuses because they, unlike the hermit, were never previously conscious.
But it also seems like exactly the kind of unprincipled gerrymandering that Scott complained about above. When you’re explaining why a being has an interest in being conscious you talk about what its future will be like, what it will actually experience in getting to be conscious in the future. It doesn’t seem like what you’ve experience in the past has a huge amount to do with it.
Imagine two identical twin babies. Both of them had a rare complication in utero which meant that, though their brains developed otherwise normally, neither ‘woke up’ or achieved any consciousness before birth. Both were born in a coma and transferred to the neonatal ICU where doctors attempted to give them every possible treatment. When the babies are a month old, one twin, let’s call him Earl, emerges from his coma for three days. He wakes up, looks around, cries. Unfortunately, he then lapses back into the coma. The other twin, Layton, doesn’t wake up at this time. Fortunately for both twins, the prognosis for them emerging from their coma is very good. Both of their brains are responding well to a new treatment, and they are expected to respond to wake up permanently somewhere around the two-month mark. Neither Earl nor Layton are expected to suffer any serious long-term consequences from their comas.
If we take this way of understanding Scott’s response to the sleeping hermit case, it seems as though Earl has an interest in future consciousness, whereas Layton doesn’t. But now we’re back into gerrymandering. The twins have similar futures to look forward to: why does the fact that one of them has already been awake make such a difference to whether or not they have an interest in actually getting to live out that future? It seems to me that it doesn’t.
We could say that Earl actually exists as a being because he’s been conscious, whereas Layton doesn’t really exist. But this seems to inherit all the absurdity of the first way of understanding things above. Layton does exist! He’s right there! The very same entity will be the one that’s conscious later, same as Earl.
But if there’s no reason to treat Earl and Layton differently, there doesn’t seem to be any significant reason to treat the sleeping hermit differently to an embryo. Sure, the hermit might have a stronger interest in future consciousness because of his past plans, dreams, hopes etc. Things that might happen in his future could count as fulfilment of these in a way that isn’t true of the embryo.
But he also might have a weaker interest in future consciousness than the embryo because he expects to have less of it than the embryo does (if he’s a middle aged hermit, he might only expect 40 years of future consciousness after waking up, whereas the embryo might expect to have 80 years). The main point is that once we allow that beings who aren’t conscious right now can have an interest in being conscious in the future, the fact that these beings were conscious in the past seems to just become one factor among others in assessing how strong that interest is: it seems no reason to deny them any such interest at all.
I’ve been talking a lot about interests here when Scott has been talking about rights. Maybe non-conscious beings, even ones that were never conscious before, can have interests, but they can’t have rights. Maybe! But that’s the kind of claim that would need some kind of argument, and Scott hasn’t given one.
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There’s a lot more to say about all this, of course. Above all, I’d want to add that the idea that the prohibition on killing people is exclusively grounded in their interest in future consciousness is deeply implausible. If it was, you’d expect the strength of the prohibition on killing people to vary with the amount and perhaps the quality of the future consciousness that killing them would deprive them of. But this would mean that killing very old people was a lot less bad than killing younger adults or children. All of this is just to say that the connection between “murder is bad” and “human beings being conscious, able to feel pain, able to have preferences, having hopes and dreams – things like that” is just a lot more complicated than Scott might want it to be: not just for pro-lifers, but for everyone. You can make this connection less complicated: but then you get an insanely complicated theory of personhood, where persons fade in and out of existence like pulsing Christmas lights; and an insanely complicated theory of rights, where past people’s interest in being future people means that we should treat them like people now even when they aren’t, and infanticide is only murder because of convenient legal fictions. Better to let go of the idea that only the conscious, or the previously conscious, can be equal persons with equal rights.
Ben
The Minimise Project 