Prosblogion's Mike Almeida argues that "[b]eing a person does not itself confer greater moral standing than being a non-person." I've been writing a fair amount in comments at Mike's post about this, but I thought it worth talking about here. I'm going to simplify and generalize his argument a bit:*
1. On any standard list of morally relevant properties, a fetus F is clearly a nonperson.
2. On any standard list of morally relevant properties, a normal adult human being H is clearly a person.
3. Given the exclusive options of saving the life of fetus F or saving the life of H, a disinterested observer O is morally permitted to save F.
4. If persons had greater moral standing than nonpersons, it would not be permissible for O to save F rather than H.
5. :. Being a person does not itself confer greater moral standing than being a nonperson.
Surprisingly, Mike adds that the same argument holds with newborns instead of fetuses, "[since they] are also paradigmatic non-persons."
Now, this subsidiary claim that newborns are "paradigmatic nonpersons" is itself remarkably dubious: Newborns are sentient human beings who, at the very least, have tasted of the multi-modal sensory world, been cradled in their mother's arms, taken their first breath, etc. Perhaps this is not enough to render them "persons" in the fullest-blooded sense of the word. Nonetheless, a newborn is surely much more of a person than a blastocyst is. There's an awful lot of conceptual room between paradigmatic personhood and paradigmatic nonpersonhood.
Furthermore, to whatever extent that a human being has not yet become a person -- has had no contact with another human, has not felt the outside world, has not heard the sounds of language, encountered its mother's smiling face, etc. -- the notion that it is "morally permitted" to save that human being while leaving a far more developed human person to die becomes that much less convincing. Why should it be permissible to rescue a socially inert, phenomenally hyper-underdeveloped human being and leave another one who is far more embedded in the human Lebenswelt to die? Because it's cute?
If my points above are sound, they give us reason to reject Mike's general argument at his third premise -- that it is "morally permitted" to prefer the lives of nonpersons to those of persons. But the invalidity of that premise can be more concretely shown by looking at the following case:
A building is on fire. Inside, a ten-week old fetus F and a ten-year old child C are trapped. You know nothing else about them individually, except that C is sleeping, and won't suffer if she should die in the fire. You can save one and only one of them. Which do you save?
I take it that no one (or practically no one) would think it was more desirable in this case to save B. If that's right, it's at the very least good prima facie evidence that we place a higher moral value on persons than we do on nonperson, and that it is morally impermissible to prefer the life of a nonperson to that of a person.
__________________
* Mike's original argument appeals to the moral choices of F's mother M.
But this generates issues of partiality that Mike subsequently has to
abstract away. I nip this in the bud by substituting the "disinterested observer O."
