The value of a human life (and why abortion, economics, pulling the plug and triage)

[Autumnlicious]

In matter of a developing fetus, during the early to mid stages of growth there is insufficient brain mass, folding and electrical activity to sustain the potential for that individual to grow into a functioning adult. This area of philosophy, if you are curious, is often called the potentiality argument. Often it is used to argue against abortion, however I am using it to show that a developing fetus during much of its development is fundamentally a nonperson. If it were to be removed or birthed during those times and it's body was kept functionally alive, it would never develop into a thinking individual. No exceptions. That is due to the complexity of biology involved.

Syn, your concept of potentiality seem to center around the potentiality of a child/fetus only after it is separated from its mother. What is the basis for this? Wouldn't it be more logical or flow more naturally to argue potentiality from the perspective of what is potentially possible if the fetus is left in its normal place (i.e., in the mother's womb if it is fetus/pre-born baby, or in the parent's care after birth)? In fact, you go on to say:

"To establish the clear illegality of destroying an infant without consent as another, one must recall that an infant has the clear potential, assuming all bodily needs are met, to develop into a thinking individual. "

If "assuming all bodily needs are met" is part of the analysis of potentiality, then it seem to me this would seem to support the idea that potentiality should be assessed from the perspective of what is potentially possible if the fetus is left in its normal place, not after separation from its mother.

I am uncertain where the disconnect is. I define a set up that if the lump of flesh inside of a woman were to be removed and magically kept simply alive, then if it were to develop thought, much like an infant, than it is an infant. The thing the is different between an infant and a simple fetus is the capability, when all physical needs are taken care of, to develop a mind close to, equal, or greter than it's forebears.

This situation is set up to define when a fetus becomes an infant. Quite possibly one can empirically determine in vitro the transition from fetus to infant. However, in vivo, the mother is constantly putting in resource, hormones and providing the environment to continue growth of the fetus, where by then making the potential of a human being concrete.

If we were to stop those instructions, the commands to build and the fetus were to still have the potential for thought (brain activity is a loose measure of such, but not one I'd appreciate as the capability once "out of the womb", implying a functional individual, to develop a mind is still undefined except through observation and time). In a sense, as the infant approaches completeness, the rate of which it takes resource approaches zero (as a direct vampiric or parasitical resource drain on the mothers body) - what we want to know is, how early is early?.

The way biology grows in stages, in leaps and bounds, makes it quite possible that there exists a point where the fetus could recover (assuming ALL bodily needs are taken care of ideally)(read italicized) being removed from the womb and develop into a capable individual. We want to preserve that.

What I mean ideally is, were we to have technology to provide all life support for a fetus but none of the external commands that the mother provides to cause development, there would be a slight gradient of time where a fetus becomes an infant. In this motion, we are testing for self-hosting (It's a CS term, but quite useful in my opinion), testing the current growth of the mind to see if it can grow into an individual.

This system of thought thoroughly discards emotion in favor of potential, where potential to develop into/further as a thinking being and the potential to live to the maximum age. This is due to the tied nature of aging (time) and the development of thought, or as we physicists say:

d(developingThought)
-----------------
d(time)

Wherever the rate is highest implies the highest value, the lowest, the lowest value. Therefore the most valuable are the developed beings with the best cognitive development. But consider this - this is an equivalency statement for only one (1) individual. An infant is less valuable than a child, a child less than a teen, a teen less than an adult, with an adult more valuable than the elderly.

As an aside, I never knew that physics dealt with issues such as potentiality of human life such that physicists would be known to say d(developing thought)/d(time).

Anyway, are the "d"s here refering to changes? It seems so. And if that is the case, I fail to see how you reach the conclusion that "An infant is less valuable than a child, a child less than a teen, a teen less than an adult, with an adult more valuable than the elderly". It seems pretty evident to me that children do a lot more developing (even in mind) per unit of time than adults do and that such development/time decreases as time goes on (the older one gets the less development there is per unit of time). Of course this is a generalization and individuals may vary on this depending on how ambitious they are in developing as they age, but I think it is valid generally. If so, then it would seem that a child would be more valuable than a teen, a teen more valuable then an adult. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Please note, my arguments above should not be taken in any way that I agree that potentiality should be the basis for making life/death decisions for individuals (including preborn ones) or making judgements of the value of individuals.

Ah, but the maturity of the adults in case of their completeness, of their growth as an individual is at the maximum. Soon after adulthood, the degeneration and age of the body and mind begin slowly dominating in a growing rate - hence what is the 'person' is slowly being whittled away by dementia et al.

While children and infants are valuable, the prior is more valuable over the latter as the child has lived longer and has had more time to develop into a thinking individual. To sum it up bluntly, he [the child] has already shown he has gotten this far (lived that long and developed that long), so we already know the potential up to that point in present time has been attained. The infant, however, is still a crap shoot - it has simply not endured the ravages of time long enough to now to show that it will live even that long.

It's a matter of knowing that we all die one day, that we have a steady decline in abilities after adulthood, that those younger than adults grow in spurts and endure the growth of their minds also in brief periods before plateauing slightly. Here is a chart to explain:



I never stated that this is a catch all or absolute system. In fact, the more one knows about the intellectual development of a single human, that shifts the axis of value to the left or right. For example, a supreme genius child would shift and change the very graph by warping the value during those early years to be of greater value, ideally making it symmetrical (of the right side).