Infanticide and the Recognition of Personhood

Earlier this year, a paper, “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?”, by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, making a case for the legitimacy of infanticide—which, no doubt to soften the blow, the authors called “after-birth abortion”—under certain conditions. In essence, the argument the authors made was that as (in their view and a widely held public view) abortion is morally legitimate, and as there is no reason to see a moral difference between a fetus and a very young infant, certain forms of infanticide should be permitted for utilitarian reasons such as, for example, to avoid social, psychological and economic costs associated with severe disability.

The article created a minor furore. Some of the responses were extremely unpleasant, as the editors of the Journal noted at the time. However, the attempt by the editors to minimise the controversy by protesting that the argument is not entirely new is somewhat disingenuous. While arguments for infanticide have been previously made by authors such as Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and John Harris, the fact is that the position Giubilini and Minerva advocate, whether or not they are the first to do so, is what only a short time ago was seen as the bottom of the “slippery slope”. That is, they are advocating a practice which until very recently was regarded as so obviously wicked that even its being a logically possible implication of a position was an argument against that position.

The basis for this slippery-slope argument was the same as the reason many have reacted to their proposal: the perception that infanticide is immoral. There is something, it seems, about the idea of infanticide which makes many (though clearly not all) people recoil. This perception is worth pausing over. The authors may, ultimately, be correct that the moral legitimacy of infanticide is the implication of currently accepted views of abortion. But this does not necessarily make the reaction of outrage unreasonable: it could equally be the case that the reaction of outrage is well-founded, and that there is something important in this perception, something that, if the authors’ contention about the moral equivalency of the fetus and the very young infant is correct, should lead us to call into question the moral assumptions underpinning our acceptance of abortion.

At the heart of the authors’ argument is a contention about the idea of personhood. The argument made in favour of the position that infanticide is legitimate rests upon the idea that a fetus, like a very young child, is not a person, but only a “potential person”, and as such, does not command the same moral respect that persons do. I suggest that the idea of “potential persons” both conflicts with some of our most basic intuitions about personal identity, and implies an understanding of personhood that, if it were true, would in fact remove any moral obligation to respect persons at all. 

The most important question at stake in this discussion is the relationship between personhood and capacities such as rationality and self-reflection. Giubilini and Minerva are explicit about their position: “We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her” (my emphasis). That is, to be a person is to be capable of what we might call reflective self-awareness. A very young infant, therefore, is not a person but only a potential person, because he or she is not yet capable of this kind of reflective self-awareness.

It is possible, of course, to recognise the significance of capacities such as self-awareness, without giving them this kind of determinative position in our understanding of personhood. An older view of personhood would not have denied that things like rationality were distinctive expressions of personhood, by which persons could be recognised. However, it would have rejected the idea that these capacities were essential to personhood. For according to this view, personhood is a reality that exists logically and temporally prior to these capacities, such that while their presence might disclose personhood, their absence can by no means disprove it.

The idea of potential persons, however, requires an understanding of personhood in which these capacities are necessary not only for the identification of personhood, but for its existence. Because, in the view of the authors, it is only when these capacities are actually present that there is in fact a person (not just that we can know that there is a person, but that personhood exists). So a very young infant is not an actual person but only a potential person because he or she is not presently in the condition of being able to value his or her own life in a self-aware way. Personhood, that is, is constituted by the presence of capacities of rationality, sentience and reflection.

There are immediate questions to be asked of the new position. Most significant is the question of the grounds on which the authors link the moral significance attached to persons with these particular capacities. Why do these capacities command the moral respect attached to the idea of personhood? Why are these things to be regarded as uniquely morally important? Why not other characteristics, such as, say, bodily form or emotional facility? It also raises tricky questions about our knowledge of these capacities. How do we identify something like “reflection” or “rationality”? How much evidence do we need? How much capacity for reflective self-awareness is enough? At what point can we be confident this capacity is no longer present?

Various answers (more or less satisfactory) can perhaps be given to these questions, although it is hard to see how they can avoid the charge of arbitrariness. However, the position also appears to have other troubling implications. If personhood is not just disclosed by but constituted by capacities such as rational reflection, this could be seen to imply that personhood ceases to exist in various other circumstances—even non-permanent circumstances. It might be seen to imply that I cease to be a person when I am unconscious, perhaps even when I am asleep or under anaesthesia. It might mean that a man or a woman in a coma or experiencing a psychotic episode was no longer a person, because he or she is not capable of reflective self-awareness.

At this point it may be objected that this is not what is meant by “capable of” when we say a person is someone capable of self-awareness. We may respond, however, by asking what view of capacity other than “present ability” is meant; because it is a very short step from the idea that a man who is asleep or in a coma is “capable of” reflective self-awareness to the idea that a baby, or even a fetus, is “capable of” reflective self-awareness: if the man in the coma were to wake he would possess self-awareness; if the fetus were to grow a little older, she would possess self-awareness. This is not just a neat conceptual trick. It is a very real question about what the concept of capability means apart from a sense of possibility or potentiality. Unless we are prepared to accept that the idea of capability carries with it ideas of potentiality, we must acknowledge that the view that personhood is constituted by capacities makes it difficult to acknowledge the personhood of those in the kinds of situations mentioned above.

There are those who are willing to embrace views such as these, such as the philosopher Derek Parfit, who argues that the person who awakes from sleep is another person than the one who fell asleep. Most, however, would baulk at such a thought; and for good reason. Such an idea is extremely counter-intuitive. We instinctively think of persons not as the product of their capacities, but as the “someone” who exercises these capacities, and who therefore continues to exist even if they are not being exercised. But this means that the ascription of personhood cannot be restricted to the time period during which these capacities can be exercised. Because if a person is the “someone” who exercises capacities, they are that someone before they ever exercise them, and they remain that someone after they cease to be able to exercise them. As the German philosopher Robert Spaemann puts it (in his book Persons: The Difference Between “Someone” and “Something”): 

The person does not begin its existence after the human being, nor does it end its existence before the human being. It takes quite a time before a human being starts to say “I”. But what does he or she mean by “I”? Not “an I”, but simply the selfsame human being who says “I”. So we say, “I was born on such and such a date”, though the being that was conceived or born on that date did not say “I” at the time. That is no reason for saying, “On such and such a date there was born some thing from which I later developed.” I was this creature that was born. Personality [personhood] is not the result of development, but its framework. Since persons are not totally accounted for by their present condition, they can understand their own development as that of a unified “self” over time. This unified self is the “person”.

The implication of Giubilini and Minerva’s position, by contrast, is that it is indeed true that a someone emerges out of a something, and returns to a something after a certain point. The disjunction between this notion and our usual assumptions about personal identity should be acknowledged as a serious problem for this position.

Perhaps this will not be seen as sufficient reason to dismiss Giubilini and Minerva’s argument. However, there is a further significant difficulty for this position: it ultimately annuls the significance of personhood as a moral category.

The moral demand to respect persons arises from the sense of absoluteness that attaches to personhood: the sense that this is a fundamental, bedrock reality that must be respected and cannot be tampered with. Personhood, that is, creates an unconditional demand. That this being whom I encounter is a person is the primary, definitive fact about him or her, shaping all my engagements with him or her of necessity. This absoluteness is completely nullified, however, if personhood is understood to be a product of capacities, because in that case it ceases to be a fundamental, unnegotiable reality to which I can only respond. Instead it is a judgment I may or may not confer. We have to, as Giubilini and Minerva put it, “determine when a subject starts or ceases to be a ‘person’”. Personhood is now the conclusion, rather than the starting point, of a process of moral reasoning. This means that the category “person” can no longer generate an absolute demand for respect. The best it can muster is a moral argument based on the value of capacities of reason and so forth—because it is no longer personhood that is worthy of respect in and of itself, but certain capabilities. This is why this view is subjected to the kinds of questions we mentioned above, about the grounds for ascribing moral value to these capacities. If you become “someone” from “something”, then the moral significance of “someone-ness” (personhood) is annulled. This is the deep consequence hidden within the idea of potential persons.

The older view noted above did not face this difficulty. When personhood is something that is always already true of a human life, a ground of respect rather than a respectable achievement, then it is not the conclusion to a process of reasoning, but the starting point. Of course, understanding personhood in this way does have challenging implications, particularly for our culture’s general acceptance of abortion. In our acceptance of abortion, we have as a culture already rejected the idea that personhood is something that is always already given, only to be welcomed and respected. Yet we have not faced up to the moral implications of this rejection. On what grounds do we distinguish the personhood of the thirty-weeks-gestation fetus from that of the ten-weeks-gestation fetus, and, indeed, as the authors point out, from the two-hour-old baby? And what does this distinction ultimately entail for the moral significance of the category of personhood?

Perhaps, then, Giubilini and Minerva are correct in their argument that their position is simply the logical implication of currently accepted views about abortion. What they have not seen, however, is what these views entail. What is at stake in the way we treat the unborn and very young infants is in fact our capacity to respect personhood at all. Personhood used to be a way of drawing attention to and highlighting the moral significance of all human beings. In Giubilini and Minerva’s conception, however, it has become a way of delimiting a particular subset of human beings. Yet when personhood is used in this way, it can only cease to support the moral significance attached to it. Personhood is only worthy of respect if it is a fundamental, unnegotiable truth about a particular being, justifying a particular way of treating and responding to him or her—that is, if all human beings are always already persons.

If we abandon the idea of personhood as something that is always already there to be recognised and responded to, in favour of a conception where personhood is achieved and so needs to be determined in advance before we can respond, an inexorable logic will lead to the denial of the right to life of some of the disabled, for example, or the ailing elderly. This is in fact the obvious implication of the idea that infants are not persons, but only potential persons—a point which is perhaps unwittingly brought out into the open by Giubilini and Minerva’s off-hand mention of determining “when a subject starts or ceases to be a ‘person’” (my emphasis). To have begun thinking about whether a living “someone” might have become a “something” is to have begun looking for reasons to dispense with our obligations to care.

In conclusion, let us return to the issue with which we began: the perception that infanticide is wrong. Why is it that infanticide makes people recoil? The view of Giubilini and Minerva has to explain this reaction away as a moral error. The older view of personhood, by contrast, has no trouble accounting for this reaction, just as it has no trouble understanding the way parents treat their growing baby as a person. Because for the older view, which took its cue from the idea that human beings exist first and foremost before God and in His image, personhood is something that is simply there to be reckoned with, not something that emerges over time or develops along with certain capacities. And personhood is something which, rather than being about the actualisation of potential, is always a ground of possibility. Which is why it can often be precisely the sense of potentiality in a newborn, or indeed a fetus, which demands our absolute respect.

Personhood is not the kind of thing that can be determined or inferred, only recognised. This is why it is something that a human face makes abundantly clear. But recognition does not determine the presence of the person: indeed, the ability to recognise something implies that there is already something there to be recognised. Perhaps it can seem somewhat odd to think of a blastocyst as a person. (Though it is not therefore a mistake.) It is not at all odd, however, to see a newborn baby as a person. And so, rather than hastily explaining away our revulsion at the idea of infanticide, we should let ourselves trust its moral importance, and be led by it to a revision of our attitudes towards the personhood of the unborn as well.

With the question of infanticide we are brought face to face with two profoundly different moral visions: one, championed by modern bioethics, in which human life has to be justified (“Why Should the Baby Live?” was the paper’s harrowing subtitle), and another, the fruit of the Bible’s description of the world, in which human life carries its own justification. We are currently poised unstably between these alternatives. We would do well to count the cost—on both sides—before we commit.

Andrew Errington is an Anglican minister and a member of the Social Issues Executive of the Diocese of Sydney.