The claim that undergirded slavery--and really Jim Crow--wasn't simply that blacks lacked "personhood" it was that they either weren't human, were sub-human, or were a lower order of human. This wasn't simply an ethical debate--whole reams of bad science sprung up to back up this notion. Eventually, better science prevailed. I'm arguing that that's a lot more cut and dry than abortion, and that religion was a constant on both sides, and basically dominant among those who defended slaveholding. Science, which rose above the level of alchemy, on the other hand, was not.
I don't think this works, for a number of reasons. Mr Coates is intermingling a scientific definition of humanity with the social definition--what I called "personhood". They happen to be contiguous in America right now, but that's by no means a universal cultural constant. Our Victorian ancestors were perfectly capable of recognizing that Africans met the basic scientific requirements to be counted in the human being--whites and blacks could interbreed and produce viable offspring. That's one of the reasons that I'd dispute that either slavery or Jim Crow were overthrown by science--it would be nice if this were so (I think), but the debate wasn't fundamentally scientific. It was a debate over what entities are included in the social definition of "person".
Every society has its own definition of what makes a person. Personhood, broadly defined, is what grants you the basic complement of rights to which everyone is entitled. That definition is usually based on genetic affinity, but what degree of genetic affinity varies greatly. Ta-Nehisi is using a fairly modern definition, "every adult whose genes class them as homo sapiens". We think that anyone who meets that criteria is entitled to a broad array of negative rights--you can't rob tourists just because they're German.
But that's hardly a universal constant. Western society has been expanding its definition of personhood for centuries--an ancient Roman wouldn't understand the notion that everyone who happened to find himself inside Roman territory should be entitled to the rights of a Roman citizen. Indeed, most non-Christian societies would have been puzzled at the notion that infants were people with a right not to be killed even if their family found them inconvenient. Nor would Tamerlane easily comprehend the notion that the citizens of the cities he sacked had a basic human right not to be raped and/or dismembered. For that matter, I doubt the African slavers who captured and sold most of the people who were sent to America as slaves thought that they were doing anything wrong; my understanding is that they were taking captives from other tribes and nations, who probably fell outside their mental definition of what constituted a person.
As an aside, we do need to credit religion for much of this. The Church has certainly committed its share of religious atrocities, but it was also, as I understand it, the main force eliminating practices like infanticide, "honor guards" and even human sacrifice in Western Europe. It was also where the anti-slavery movement started--the 16th century Catholic Church spoke out against it, and William Wilberforce, the father of the British abolitionist movement, was inspired by religious passion. The Congregationalist church in New England and the Quakers in Pennsylvania were the backbone of the abolitionist movement in early 19th century America. It's not relevant that churches in the south supported slavery. Support for slavery would have existed without the church. Opposition to it wouldn't have, without the churches that preached their conscience and gave the movement a ready-made base for organization. Or such is my understanding of the history.
Back to personhood. In at least one place we've contracted that definition. We used to think fetuses were persons, but over the last forty or fifty years, we've decided that they aren't. That's not because the science has changed; the relevant facts were all known in 1960. Rather, various cultural changes have made fetal personhood much harder to sustain socially than it was fifty years ago, so we rescinded it.
I think that in both cases we've got it right, and moreover I don't think that even most pro-lifers actually believe in the full personhood of the fetus, because if they did they'd be for capital punishment for women who have abortions, and against exceptions for rape and incest.
But this is an uncomfortable parallel for pro-choicers, because it makes obvious the fact that we have, in the past, expanded our social definition of personhood--and that a lot of people, many of whom were undoubtedly otherwise pretty good joes, embraced an excessively narrow, evil definition of who was entitled to be called a person. It is possible, though I don't think particularly likely, that 100 years from now our grandchildren will wonder how we could have been such selfish, inhuman monsters as to deny basic human rights to creatures who were obviously human.
That's why, while I'm pretty settled on my opinions of black personhood, I'm less sanguine about my notions of fetal (non) personhood, and frankly puzzled by the pro-choicers who not only believe that their definition is right, but that it has been arrived at by some super-scientific process that could only be disputed by a woman-hating religious nut who has blinded himself to the obvious rational answer. There are two obvious bright lines: conception (or implantation), and birth. Pro-lifers have chosen the former (though as I said above, they don't really fully believe this). A few hard-core pro-choicers are willing to hew to the latter--to say that eight months after conception, outside the womb it's a baby with full personhood, but inside the womb it's a thing with no right to exist save at the sufference of the mother. But most pro-choicers do not. The label "pro-choice" tolerates a very wide degree of disagreement about when personhood begins, from the end of the first trimester all the way to birth. If it's so obvious that pro-lifers must be willfully blind, how come we can't agree?
This seems almost like an argument for ignoring the notion of "personhood." It's not like it's a notion with clear parameteres ("can recognize itself in a mirror and..."), which we can then use to settle moral questions. I mean it could be specfied in some way and people try to do so - but never with very satisfactory results in my view. Why shouldn't we just be intereted in whetehr it's a human being or not? That's a boundary that doesn't shift with social pressures.
Because fetuses are indisputably human, but not everyone wants to give them full human rights. Once again, you're admixing the scientific and social definitions of "human being".
This is plain incoherent.
Whole reams of bad science sprung up to say that blacks were definitely evolutionarily inferior, yes. (As mentioned in delightful textbooks like the one at the center of the Scopes trial.) at the same time, white people didn't support enslaving mentally challenged whites in the same way as black people. (Even when, as in Buck v. Bell, fashionable scientific opinion supported sterilizing them-- another piece of "bad science" that was unfortunately dominant and opposed by the Catholic Church.)
I suspect, perhaps with little basis, that some of your patience for people with a different point of view on this issue is your vegetarianism. Personally, I don't understand how some people can be convinced that "meat is murder" and not have at least some openness to the idea of fetal personhood.
Exceptions for rape and incest can be tolerated with some consistency based on a "you don't have a moral obligation to save a life that you have no responsibility, but you do if you have a substantial responsibility." I believe that, to be consistent, pro-lifers would have to disapprove of women who were raped having abortions, in the same way that one might disapprove of someone who refused to help another in need.
We used to think fetuses were persons, but over the last forty or fifty years, we've decided that they aren't.
Pardon? We who, when? Fetuses have never legally been treated as persons (that is, for matters, e.g., of inheritance, a stillbirth or miscarriage has never been treated as a child who was alive and then died.) I don't know what past milieu you're appealing to in which fetuses were broadly understood to be persons. (Note: I'm not claiming that no one ever had this belief, I'm reacting to your apparent claim that the belief that fetuses are persons was a broadly understood norm at some time in the past.)
If all you mean is that abortion used to be prohibited by law in the US, that doesn't imply that supporters of that prohibition necessarily regarded fetuses as persons.
"It's not relevant that churches in the south supported slavery. Support for slavery would have existed without the church. Opposition to it wouldn't have, without the churches that preached their conscience and gave the movement a ready-made base for organization. Or such is my understanding of the history."
You're understanding of history is, to put it kindly, wrong.
It is deeply relevant that southern churches supported slavery. The church was a primary social institution in the South as it was in the North. The planter aristocracy thought of itself as Christian and pious and had a deep need to see slavery and white supremacy in religious terms so that they could own slaves without being being seen (or regard themselves) as hypocrites. That need continued after slavery into the middle of the last century and religious reasons were constantly cited after the Civil War for the imposition of white supremacy and segregation.
Blacks were viewed as your fellow blogger says. There were serious theological debates in the South over whether or not the slaves should be converted to Christianity because they may or may not have had souls. If there is no soul, religion is irrelevant.
God's curse on Ham, one of Noah's sons, was cited as justification for the permanent subordination of blacks. It was part of God's plan for mankind. I encountered these arguments as a college student debating race and racism in the late 60's.
And while the movement for abolition was lead by the church in the North, anti-slavery sentiment was held by people, including some of the founders who were at best deists, because it was viewed as being inconsistent with the notion of individual liberty.
There were also powerful economic forces contending over the issue of slavery. One of the root causes of the Civil War after all lay in the issue of whether or not new states would be slave or free. There was much more going on in that debate besides different religious philosophies. The question at base was whether land in the new states would be "free ground," homesteaded by freeholders, not owned by the planter oligarchs.
Your knowledge of the slavery's history and the debates that marked it's history from the Colonial period forward seems dangerously thin. Since what you're really arguing here is abortion, you might consider another approach.
Why shouldn't we just be intereted in whetehr it's a human being or not?
Because fetuses are indisputably human, but not everyone wants to give them full human rights.
No, it's because 'human being' is a synonym for person, so the same confusing analysis applies. If I have a stroke as I'm typing this, and they haul me off to the hospital where I drop dead, and they remove my kidneys for transplant and bury the rest of me, my kidneys are alive, and human, and genetically unique. But they aren't human beings -- it would be very odd to think of my kidneys as having rights.
Whether a fetus is either a person or a human being or something else is a definitional question, not something that you can settle scientifically by saying that it's alive and made up of genetically human cells.
My uncle practiced criminal law before Roe v. Wade. Basically if you were middle class, or wealthier, you went to Sweeden or Mexico for an abortion. Only the poor were denied a safe abortion, and then had to make a choice: Have the child which they could not afford, or have an illegal abortion, which had a terrifying degree of complications, including death (my uncle refers to them as "butchers").
So while both sides may talk about the "morality" of whether a fetus is a person, it misses the main point.
Those who are wealthy enough to afford to raise a child, will ALWAYS have the choice of an abortion. And those who have very little choices to begin with, will have even a greater burden thrust upon them.
The real abortion debate is really about poor women having a choice...wealthy women will always have a choice.
It's tough to separate religion with morals when talking about history because for so much of history religion served as the primary acknowledged source of morality. Unlike today, centuries ago, it would have been very difficult to find someone who believed strongly in morals but was completely a-religious. Thus anyone who felt morally compelled to oppose slavery (ie against the societal norm) was mostly likely also a person of strong religious beliefs, and justified their beliefs in a religous context. There were exceptions which mostly resided among the intellectual elites (deists and the like).
Would the abolitionist movement have survived without the church? Certainly certain churches played an important role in abolition, and most likely most abolitionists would find religious jusitification for their moral arguments. But to a large degree that is simply because religion was so entrenched in the concept of morality in that day. As a hypothetical it fails simply because its impossible to even imagine any setting of that time period 'without religion'.
Great post. Thanks
I was having the same discussion with myself last night about 11:00 pm Central. Had to get up and read a book after the third time through. Spooky
"... Opposition to it wouldn't have, without the churches that preached their conscience and gave the movement a ready-made base for organization. Or such is my understanding of the history."
This is wrong. Few working men want to compete with slave labor. There was substantial opposition to slavery that had nothing to do with religion or sympathy for blacks.
Daviddo, I don't want to be insulting, but the 10th grade history gloss of the abolition movement is grossly oversimplified, and also, doesn't refute anything I've said. You're wildly confused about cause and effect. My point is that the northern church played a causal role in the abolition movement. There is no reasonable reading of history that attributes a similar causal role to the southern church. Indeed, the cause runs the other way--there was considerable selection pressure on southern churches, with churches that spoke out against slavery (there were some) seeing their membership transfer to more amenable congregations.
Think of it this way: if religious people had not been driven by their faith to come out against slavery, the abolitionist movement would have, at best, come into being much later and much weaker than it did. Had the the southern churches said nothing about slavery, would slavery have collapsed? It's unlikely to have had any effect. I am well aware that the southern church provided revolting justifications for slavery, but it's very hard to read the relevant history and conclude that these did much to strengthen an institution that had very strong self-interest behind it, as well as the universal human tendency towards xenophobia. If you hadn't been debating ridiculous religious texts, you would have been debating equally ridiculous eugenic claims, or cultural arguments. People have a powerful way of finding reasons to believe what they want to.
I think part of the issue here is that the very question of when the binary event of personhood occurs automatically polarizes the debate. This is not a required assumption.
For example traditional Jewish theology gives great value to a fetus, but distinguishes it from a full person until the first breath (actually it's 8+ days after birth since full morning ritual isn't done unless a child lives for a certain period of time). In general, abortion is discouraged and a fetus is theologically treated as more than just a clump of cells, but there is never an ethical question of life of mother vs. fetus and even the penalty for causing a miscarriage against the will of the mother is less than the penalty for killing a person.
From a scientific or theological position, why does there have to be a specific, intrauterine point where a fetus achieves personhood?
It's not relevant that churches in the south supported slavery. Support for slavery would have existed without the church. Opposition to it wouldn't have,
This is demonstrably false. Just a couple of examples: Slavery was abolished in France in 1791 (before Britain and the US) by the atheistic leaders of the French Revolution. Only after they had overthrown the deeply Catholic French monarchy I might add. In the US, some of the earliest people to agitate against slavery were either Atheists or Deists (who were nevertheless not memebers of any organized religion) including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson (even though he owned slaves) and John Quincy Adams. Also, closer to the actual abolition of slavery in the US , you have Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison and Robert Ingersoll. Garrison in particular was nearly indispensable to the movement. Even Abraham Lincoln was, and is, considered at the very least a religious freethinker in the spirit of Jefferson. One thing we know for sure was that he wasn't involved in organized religion or affiliated with any church. In addition to Wilberforce in England, a man who was clearly a committed Christian, there were very important contributions to the abolition movement from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, both atheists.
Each of theses people made substantive and, in some cases, indispensable contributions to the abolitionist movement. And they certainly didn't do so out of any religious motivation
If I have a stroke as I'm typing this, and they haul me off to the hospital where I drop dead, and they remove my kidneys for transplant and bury the rest of me, my kidneys are alive, and human, and genetically unique. But they aren't human beings -- it would be very odd to think of my kidneys as having rights.
But if you had a stroke and were hooked up to life support, it wouldn't be odd for someone else to make the decision to halt the life support and let you die. You'd still be human, but we have created a process for allowing another person to make the decision to end your life.
Abortion strikes me as being very similar to my analogy. The fetus is clearly a human life (it's human and it's alive, what else could it be?), but it's hooked up very intimately to a life support system. We have chosen to allow the person providing the life support the right to terminate that life support.
It strikes me that the only reason that some pro-choice people so vehemently deny the human life being terminated is because they don't want to deal with the underlying reality of so they place the fetus in in some nonsensical category ("Abortion should be safe, legal and rare" - if the fetus has no moral value, why should abortion be rare?) to avoid the truth of what they advocate.
And I'm mildly pro-choice, although I think there should be more restrictions than what is currently allowed.
I was going to say what LizardBreath said.
Indeed, the lack of property and inheritance rights in pro-lifer's campaigning leads me to believe that they don't actually think in terms of "personhood" in the sense that you (or I) understand it.
Megan, will you marry me?
But not really.
In other words, I tend to agree with you a lot.
Crediting the church for incubating anti-slavery movements is like crediting George Bush for lack of terrorist attacks on American soil since 9-11. Correlation is not causation, and we can't turn back history and see what would have happened without religion. I suspect that churches were the "town halls" of the day in many regions, and as such were the launching pads for many types of social movements. In the absence of churches there would have been other venues.
Megan says;
"Because fetuses are indisputably human, but not everyone wants to give them full human rights."
At the end of the day, I think the only way this issue will be resolved to the satisfaction of most people from both sides of the aisle is if this definition of “personhood” migrates from a cultural one to a scientific one. As you point out, cultural definitions are inherently subjective and can change over time. An objective definition of what a human being is, or in your words, what a person is, would be a preferable way to approach the matter.
I am a pro-life individual and you are right about one thing; I would not support capital punishment for someone that obtained an abortion, particularly in the early stages of pregnancy. That is because, while I completely recognize that the fetus is a human fetus from the moment of conception, I am less certain when it becomes a human being.
What then is my opinion of when a person becomes a human being? That has to do with human consciousness, and the biological necessity of developing a nervous system to support human consciousness. I am not quite sure when that happens, but it has most certainly happened at the point of viability. And it most certainly has not happened at the moment of conception.
I think a human fetus deserves protection from the moment of conception, hence my pro-life stance. But until it becomes human, I am not sure that it has full human rights. And by that I mean rights that are superior to parental rights (both parents) and maybe even the right of sovereignty over one's own body. I am not sure what this means legislatively in a post Roe-v-Wade world though. I think this should be thrown back to the states and have 50 different state legislators experiment with the matter.
BBC News reported yesterday that, according to German researchers, magpies pass the mirror test for self-recognition. This means that magpies (along with apes, dolphins, and elephants) have a strong claim to be recognized as persons, or at least "near-persons".
Gary E. Varner has posted on-line a beta version of his new book, Persons, Near-Persons, and the Merely Sentient, for anyone interested in exploring the scientific and philosophical arguments about personhood.
“Every society has its own definition of what makes a person. Personhood, broadly defined, is what grants you the basic complement of rights to which everyone is entitled. That definition is usually based on genetic affinity, but what degree of genetic affinity varies greatly”
Individual rights and personhood share an obvious relationship for if a “person” is not a “person” then they have no individual rights. However for the sake of clarity I think the terms of the debate could be better defined because “personhood” as a concept raises too many questions. Do we make a distinction between different types of personhood? For example is there a difference between the personhoodness (for lack of a better term) of a child in his/her minority versus the same child in his/her majority? Do we make exceptions for the mentally handicapped or the insane? When a person commits a crime does that rob them of their “personhood?” Do we make a distinction between the “personhood” of citizens and non-citizens? In short –to my mind– the concept of “personhood” requires too many definitions, and qualifications to properly have a debate about “personhood” and either abortion or slavery.
Respectfully, in principle, I agree with your broad generalization. In practice I think the debate would be better framed by using a broad biological definition of “humanity” and asking at what points in time and under what circumstances a human being should be given full individual rights under either law or custom.
In your first post on this subject you argue: "the main effect of faith is to spur people to embrace causes that are personally and socially inconvenient," and suggest that the pro-life cause is one such inconvenient cause.
I would disagree. Christian support for pro-life is also support for Christian family structures and a Christian way of life. That's the payoff and it is a powerful payoff. Millions have led fruitful lives following these rules and millions more will in future years; Richard Dawkins be damned.
I would also support this position by showing how narrowly the "sanctity of life" argument is applied. There is no widespread protest against the killing of innocent women and children in Iraq, for one example. In fact, the US military refuses to track these statistics. Sanctity of life be damned. Since the sanctity of life argument is not universally applied, it seems clear that where it is applied is to support Christian families, beliefs and culture.
I would further contend that if the Christian religion was a matriarchal religion rather than a patriarchal religion the arguments about abortion would be quite different than the ones we now hear.
So getting back to the argument about personhood and fetuses: You know what you would do if you were raped and pregnant from the rape; personhood be damned.
Does "honor guards" really mean what you think it means?
Any definition I've seen (ceremonial escort) doesn't make it obvious that this would be high on the list to eliminate, so I'm guessing this is some kind of horrifying ritual that does not show up high on Google's priorities?
There is one big, big problem with the notion that "conception" is a "bright line". The interesting occurrence at that point is the creation of a unique human genetic makeup. Sounds good, right?
But this goes to a fundamental misunderstanding that people have about biology. While it's true that most biology is complex, even "messy", this is not true of DNA. The key point about DNA is that it's an entirely digital storage medium. That's not too odd if you think about it, since it's designed for massive duplication.
So, this unique genetic makeup that exists at conception is basically a series of numbers, which could (in principle, and increasingly in practice) be read into a computer, stored on a thumb drive, even sent over the Internet. It's not really even that much data. It's hard to see a sequence of numbers as a person.
At some point, especially where higher level brain development is concerned, the structure beings to interact with reality and diverge from the deterministic predictions of its genetic code. That's what we think of as a person. Not some sequence of numbers.
There is no widespread protest against the killing of innocent women and children in Iraq, for one example.
I notice that you wrote "women and children", not "people".From which it is tempting to infer that killing innocent men is regarded as more acceptable than killing innocent women. Probably many people think that, which suggests that just because they call two entities "persons", does not mean that they care about them equally.
Few working men want to compete with slave labor.
It does not really make any difference. The money an employer saves on paying the slave, he loses on paying his owner to rent or buy him.
African slaves were imported because a) European immigrants rapidly died off from malaria or yellow fever b) Free Africans were not available. The fun comes when you start thinking about whether it is a wise idea to free all those unhappy Africans who have no reason to feel loyal to the powers that be. The powers that were generally thought not.
Tim, it's a sequence of numbers, but the numbers are an equation, the equation is in a computer, and the computer is on and humming away.
That complicates things.
Re: I would further contend that if the Christian religion was a matriarchal religion rather than a patriarchal religion the arguments about abortion would be quite different than the ones we now hear.
The Roman Catholic Church venerates Mary second only to Jesus, yet it is more rigidly anti-abortion than several non-Marian churches I can think of. Patriarchy has nothing to do with it. Japanese religion has a goddess, Amaterasu, at the head of its pantheon-- yet Japanese society has been notoriously patriarchal from the get-go. And where do you stick god-less Buddhism on the patriarchy scale? Traditional Asian Buddhism is as thoroughly pro-Life as traditional Christianity (and is quite puritanical on sex matters too), even if Buddhist pro-Life protests are a lot nicer than Christian protests since Buddhists place a premium of maintaining a irenic, passion-free attitude.
Re: African slaves were imported because a) European immigrants rapidly died off from malaria or yellow fever
Not really true. The problem initially was that large numbers of Europeans had already died off from the Black Death and there were not enough people in Europe willing or needing to emigrate to build civilization from the Stone Age up in the New World. Hence the need for a foreign source of labor. Native Americans were dying like flies from Old World diseases, and Asian nations were too powerful to expropriate their populations. Hence: Africa, already a source of slave labor for centuries.
What bothers me about the pro-choice side of discussions is not that they disagree with me about when the fetus is a Person. It's that the baseline position seems to be, "A women has a right to do what she wants with her body, so don't talk to me about the fetus' personhood. First trimester, second trimester, third... some of our sisters may choose to be concerned later on in the pregnancy, but that's their own personal decision. At no point may our society say, there are two people involved here. It always remains a woman's Right of Privacy. Back off!"
Since we all know that the fetus is pretty much a viable human being long before it is born, how can that be anything but profoundly immoral? Shouldn't even decent pro-choice people be in favor of treating late-term abortion as basically the equivalent of murder?