“Human Non-Person"

Terri Schiavo, bioethics, and our future

My debate about Terri Schiavo’s case with Florida bioethicist Bill Allen on Court TV Online eventually got down to the nitty-gritty:



Wesley Smith: Bill, do you think Terri is a person?

Bill Allen: No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don't think complete absence of awareness does.

If you want to know how it became acceptable to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with profound cognitive disabilities, this exchange brings you to the nub of the Schiavo case — the “first principle,” if you will. Bluntly stated, most bioethicists do not believe that membership in the human species accords any of us intrinsic moral worth. Rather, what matters is whether “a being” or “an organism,” or even a machine, is a “person,” a status achieved by having sufficient cognitive capacities. Those who don’t measure up are denigrated as “non-persons.”

~snip

And killing isn’t the half of it. Some of the same bioethicists who have been telling us how right and moral it is to dehydrate Terri Schiavo have also urged that people like Terri — that is, human non-persons — be harvested or otherwise used as mere instrumentalities. Bioethicist big-wig Tom Beauchamp of Georgetown University has suggested that “because many humans lack properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they…might be aggressively used as human research subjects or sources of organs.”

more: http://www.nationalreview.com/smithw/smith200503290755.asp

— Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. He is the author most recently of >Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World..

on the sabbath and that there is an impending baby shortage. The FDA has taken a stance that fried babies are not part of a healthy diet, but occasionally munching on a young 'un at a family picnic or holiday special event probably won't lead to weight gain.

--sui really hates it when "some" people use the phrase "some" referring to a hoary unknown group of black box people whose opinions just happen to count more than "most" people.

If you read the entire article, there are names and citations from "Lancet".

snip from article:

Allen’s perspective is in fact relatively conservative within the mainstream bioethics movement. He is apparently willing to accept that “minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood” — although he doesn’t say that awareness is determinative. Most of his colleagues are not so reticent. To them, it isn’t sentience per se that matters but rather demonstrable rationality. Thus Peter Singer of Princeton argues that unless an organism is self-aware over time, the entity in question is a non-person. The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, has defined a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence.” Other bioethicists argue that the basic threshold of personhood should include the capacity to experience desire. James Hughes, who is more explicitly radical than many bioethicists (or perhaps, just more candid), has gone so far as to assert that people like Terri are “sentient property.”

1. I think the article was fear baiting
2. I agree that organs should be harvested when there is no hope of recovery
3. I do not agree that personhood or "ownership" comes to play - just your wishes as spelled out legally in a living will / MPOA AND your driver's license donor status, and that already exists today.
4. I disagree that we can't move into an ethically difficult biomedical situation for fear of the worst possible scenario happening every time.

And more - I don't believe that the state has any say in involuntarily harvesting organs, or ever will.

So aside from all of that I don't personally believe that the state has a role in defining sentience in a temporal sense. The point of LW/MPOA is that you may not be sentient at the time your wishes are executed.

If the presence of awareness and cognition (i.e., 'personality') at some level is not the pre-requisite for being considered a 'person', then what is? Merely having human-type genetics?

We think nothing of disposing of non-humans even tho those non-humans have more claim to being persons than poor Ms Shiavo currently does.

People with cognitive impairments have fought for a long time to be considered full humans. The concern of the disability community is that certain cognitive abilities are considered prerequisites for being persons. Some of which, at some points in my life, I've lacked. Many of us are wary of the idea of setting up cognitive criteria for personhood because we've already seen that idea abused and would not want to use it against someone else.

And there's a difference between killing non-humans for meat and killing someone based on an assessment of their personhood. Carnivores and omnivores, including humans, kill each other, including humans, for meat on a regular basis. The basis on which they do this has nothing to do with which animals, including humans, are considered "persons", and which are not.

On the other hand, people who kill non-humans for other reasons have a problem. As do people who kill humans for other reasons. The idea of gratuitously killing humans for the same reason and prejudice that some people gratuitously kill animals seems like a step backwards, not a step forwards.

You're attributing to me a position I don't hold. I don't for an instant not consider a functioning cognitively impaired person fully human. I also consider cats and dogs and other cognitively-able mammals to be 'persons' albeit non-human, whence my vegetarianism.

But when an individual's cognitive ability is and will forevermore remain on a par with a fish or snake, but without the instinctual repertoire that lets those creatures live their lives, then what reasoning should motivate us to consider them 'persons'?

And I consider humans with what's considered the brain equivalent of such persons. My definition of personhood doesn't rest on specific cognitive abilities, but rather on the presence of life. Which is not a religious stance on my part, and I get tired of people assuming that disability rights stances are the same as religious ones. It's also one reason I'm not a vegetarian (I have been in the past, then decided that my reasons were in themselves an artifact of deeper prejudice than the ones I was attempting to fight by being a vegetarian).

Have you ever heard Harriet McBryde Johnson's article on her conversations and debates with Peter Singer? It might be instructive.

Evidently you disagree with something but what? And why?

I'm not questioning your right to disagree with him, I'm just puzzled by your response, which seems very dismissive.

That I didn't say anything about your intelligence directly, and reading an estimate of someone else's intelligence into my writing is likely to come up skewed no matter how you do it. Part of my disability specifically involves understanding what other people know and don't know, so I'm likely to say more or less than they're used to hearing, and they're likely to then think I'm overestimating or underestimating their intelligence. If I'd thought you were stupid, I would've said it outright, I don't play implication games or use hidden messages.

Was it this, "It's also one reason I'm not a vegetarian (I have been in the past, then decided that my reasons were in themselves an artifact of deeper prejudice than the ones I was attempting to fight by being a vegetarian)."


OR this, "Have you ever heard Harriet McBryde Johnson's article on her conversations and debates with Peter Singer? It might be instructive."

???

I didn't sense a failure to respect your intelligence at all. Banazir has always been respectful in every post of his I've read on this board.

I am a bit confused about the first quote re the change in vegetarianism. Although off topic, would you expand on that, please, Banazir?

thanks

I became a vegetarian, despite some niggling doubts about it making any sense, because (among other reasons, which there were several of) I had bought the idea that the reason humans eat other animals is that we consider them subhuman, and therefore eating other animals was disrespectful to the personhood of other animals.

A few things gradually became clear to me. One was that when I became dirt poor, I couldn't afford to eat a vegetarian diet without encountering malnutrition, and became aware of the classism of a lot of people who repeatedly chastised me for getting the food I got (not just meat, but the fact that I wasn't shopping at those high-priced health food stores they were shopping at). And a lot of people around the world can't afford to be vegetarians. My health improved drastically after starting to eat meat again, too.

Another was that humans can eat both animals and plants, and other animals eat animals (including sometimes humans) or plants or both as their preferences dictate. To say that I was respecting other animals by not doing what they do struck me as wrong, and I also view plants as worthy of respect. (No, I'm not making this up.) And people have to eat. A lot of vegetarianism seemed to me to be a way of divorcing humans from the realities of the animal world in general, as well as showing a very human-centered preference for respecting the life forms that most resembled humans over the ones that didn't. (Those were the doubts that had niggled in my head all along, but I'd been guilt-tripped into believing these doubts were meaningless.)

I decided past that point that I would respect animals and plants, and not harm them when harm was unnecessary, but that eating other animals was no more disrespectful than an animal that eats humans is disrespectful by eating us. And that vegetarianism is for most people (not all) a luxury.

Even if it is from National Review.

The notion that “because many humans lack properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they…might be aggressively used as human research subjects or sources of organs” should always stir up concerns. The immediate question that should arise is "who gets to determine personhood?" Entire categories of humans have been denied status as persons historically, while at least one non-life forms (corporations) do have status as persons.

I think we all should, as a species. Churches definitely should not. The wealthy definitely should not.

And corporations should be the first to be stripped of their ill-gotten status!

the personhood, and therefore the FATE, of everyone else? Including inconvenient minorities like the disabled?

And why do you rule out the church as having a voice in saying what a person is? Or the wealthy, for that matter. The church is made up of persons, all of whom are part of society, ad the wealthy are also persons, and part of society.

The personhood of corporations is ludicrous, of course, one of the greatest scams ever played.

You're surprising me, Mairead, with your comments here. I wish you'd explain more of what your opinions are. As a favor for a fellow Kuchie? ;-)

Because who can have a greater right to decide than we, ourselves?

Some church hierarchy? Which church, and why should they be privileged?

The wealthy elites, whose sole measure of worth is money and power?

merely because of it's source. I forget how I ended up there.

All along, I've felt the definition of personhood to be central to this situation. I was badgered about this. Someone even stated since I couldn't come up with an "objective test" of personhood, the issue was ridiculous. Probably the same person(s) who have called me a RW religious nutcase. (I'm agnostic, at best, by the way.)

"Entire categories of humans have been denied status as persons historically"----how true: native americans, women, blacks...disabled.