Fellow Koch alum Sara Russo has posted a transcript of a speech she delivered at a conservative conference, entitled “The Science of Being Pro-Life.” She begins with the observation that many people are, rightly enough, not impressed with strictly religious arguments against abortion. Few people, after all, think that we should criminalize the failure to adhere to the tenets of any particular religion, even if it’s the majority’s religion. So Sara proposes to offer a strictly scientific anti-abortion argument. Following a discussion of personal identity and fetal development, she writes: “And you might say, well, this is philosophy, this is religion, but no, itâ??s not, thereâ??s no religion here.”

I hope the problem here is obvious: if the argument were really purely scientific, the appropriate response would be: “so what?” Science establishes the physical facts. But no conclusion about how we ought to act, or what behaviors we ought ot ban, follows just from those facts, absent some value premise. As it happens, though, Sara is wrong about the contents of her argument. There isn’t any religion there, but there is most certainly philosophy. And, as is often the case when the philosophical component of an argument is left in the background, unarticulated, it’s not very sound philosophy.

First, we have an argument from personal identity. The argument runs: you can remember being twenty, or fifteen, and that was “you.” Therefore, the baby and fetus stages of your existence were also “you” (and presumably deserving of the same moral respect). Let’s take that one sentence at a time. It is, of course, convenient for a number of reasons to refer to physically continuous organisms as the “same” person, especially when later stages have memories from the earlier stages — and it seems likely that the salient feature of continuity of memory is indeed what drives our intuition that these stages are parts of the “same person.” But even that continuity-of-memory based ascription of identity is, I think, just a façon de parler. What I mean is that, as Derek Parfit has put it, there is no “further fact” of personal identity: saying that Julian (age 15) and Julian (age 23) are the “same person” is just a sort of shorthand way of claiming that the two are related by certain ties of memory, personal disposition, and so forth. Personal identity is not a separate relation between the two, just a way of summarizing those other relations. But if that’s the case, what can possibly be the meaning of that dubious leap across the “therefore”? Sara grants that the ties of memory between our current selves and fetal selves don’t exist, so what precisely is one claiming when one says they are “the same”?

There are two possibilities. One is that, despite having used the continutity of memory as an intuition pump, Sara really intends a strictly physical criterion of identity. That is, by personal identity, she means only a kind of strictly material continuity. But if “identity” just means that material continuity — the sort I have with the gametes which formed me and the corpse I’ll become — it’s not clear why it’s morally important. The other possibility is that Sara means to claim that there is, contra Parfit, some “further fact” of identity. That reading seems consistent with her claims that despite many differences in body and mind, our person-stages across time have “this identity.” But what, precisely is “this identity?” If it is not one of those two kinds of relation, what does it consist in? We get no clue, and one begins to suspect she is, after all, talking about souls, despite her contention that she avoids relying on religious ideas.

The rest of the argument is actually logically independent, relying only upon the traits of the fetus itself. Here, I think she lapses into what I’ve called “biofetishism.” That is, she observes that the fetus looks like a baby, has human DNA, and generally meets other criteria for being a “human life.” The problem is that, in avoiding any explicit philosophy, Sara ends up trying to imbue “human life” in a strictly biological sense with the normative charge it has in moral discussion, without argument. But that’s just equivocation. When we talk about the value of “human life,” we mean, if we are saying anything coherent, the value of beings with certain kinds of morally weighty capacities typical of humans — not the value of just being an organism of a certain species. Why on earth would anyone think that this latter trait, in itself, had any value? Now, Sara hints that she recognizes this point when she emphasizes fetal brainwaves: she knows that minds, not genes, are what have ethical importance. Insofar as the existence of brainwaves is pretty good grounds for thinking that the fetus may have some sort of subjective experience, it is also a good reason for thinking it may have some degree of moral worth. But how much? Gerbils and cows have brainwaves, too. And, I think, gerbils and cows are deserving of some degree of moral consideration: I don’t eat them, since I can live perfectly well without doing so, and would condemn someone who tortured animals just for the hell of it. But in any serious conflict between the interests of gerbils and persons, the gerbil loses.

So, what should we believe about the inner life of the fetus, if it has one? It has not yet developed any capacity for abstract symbol manipulation. It almost certainly is not reflectively conscious of itself. The sum total of its experience, if it has any, is limited to the flow of amniotic fluid, and perhaps the feel of its own limbs. What would we say about a 30 year old human male, say, raised and fed intravenously in a sensory deprivation tank, who had these traits? Would it really be appropriate to call him a person? How seriously wrong would it be to kill this creature, if it were necessary to avoid some significant cost? Now, here I may lose a few readers, but I think if we strip away the purely visceral reaction to the idea of something that looks like an adult human person being killed, we see that the answer is that it wouldn’t. The mind destroyed is almost certainly less developed than an adult dog’s. Why, then, should we treat it differently? We should not, unless we think moral worth inheres, not in minds, but in the orderings of DNA base pairs. And that view seems more absurd than any religion.