Potential rights and abortion

[tiepolo]

I am a proponent of the idea of potential rights. A five year old does not have the right to smoke or vote or to take a driving test, for example, but they have a right to do these things when they are older. The right is there in potential. I make a case against abortion based on the same principle. An unborn has all the rights of the adult said unborn would become if not interfered with. Potential rights would therefore seem to exist from the moment of conception. I came up with this idea independently, as far as I am aware, but a google reveals I'm not the first person to use the phrase and to express the concept in this context...

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/abortion/child/potential.shtml

 

I find some of arguments against potential rights smack of sophistry. Indeed a potential thing is not the same as a thing, but it would still be an injustice to tell a healthy five year old of normal intelligence that he will never be permitted to take a driving test. This would be a real enough violation of rights. So it surely follows that an action that robs a conceived human entity of all rights that are associated with life is a violation of rights that are at once existing and potential. A conceived embryo, moreover, is an actual being, not a potential being. It is an actual being that holds rights in potential, just as a child holds adult entitlements in potential. 

 

 

[Pepin]

A retort that comes to mind is that the potentiality can be applied to a non-embyo, as in a sperm and an egg. If two people choose not to conceive a child, and instead use birth control, does this not rob a potential embryo, IE: a potential adult human, of its rights?

 

If not, then what is the differentiation between an embryo and a separated sperm and egg?

[tiepolo]

Sperm on their own and eggs on their own will never develop into anything, whereas an embryo will. The potential right exists only from the point of fertilisation. Preventing fertilisation is not depriving anyone or anything of anything. Only an existing entity with an actual capacity to develop into something sentient has the potential right to progress to that stage. 

[dsayers]

Sperm on their own and eggs on their own will never develop into anything, whereas an embryo will.

 

An embryo will develop into something on its own? Why then are medical professionals (and the woman's body) waiting nine months to expel it?

 

Pepin's right; If you cite potentiality as if it's meaningful, you have to apply it universally.

[tiepolo]

An embryo will develop into something on its own? Why then are medical professionals (and the woman's body) waiting nine months to expel it?

 

Pepin's right; If you cite potentiality as if it's meaningful, you have to apply it universally.

Of course an embryo is reliant on sustenance from its mother, but a newborn is also dependant. So do you justify infanticide on that basis? 

[dsayers]

I wasn't making an argument. I was correcting your error.

[Pepin]

Sperm on their own and eggs on their own will never develop into anything, whereas an embryo will. The potential right exists only from the point of fertilisation. Preventing fertilisation is not depriving anyone or anything of anything. Only an existing entity with an actual capacity to develop into something sentient has the potential right to progress to that stage. 

 

But the differentiation you are making is in terms of potentiality, not of space and time. A sperm has the capacity to develop into an adult human if in the same space as an egg. An embryo has the capacity to develop into an adult human when in a womb. Is not the measurement of this theory whether you affect the capacity of an embryo or a sperm to develop?

 

To make this more clear, if someone is to get an abortion, you would claim that they are immoral because they removed the capacity of the fetus to develop into an adult human. The measurement is not that of murder, which requires preferences, but of removing capacity.

 

The objection I offer is that the dividing line, that the theory only applies upon conception, is an arbitrary one. In a technical sense, it is because the theory is a measurement of the capacity of a group of cells to develop into an adult human. Claiming that the concept of capacity only applies when a sperm and egg are in the same spacial location is to say that spacial location is not a measure of capacity prior to conception, but is after, doesn't really follow for me.

 

In the case of the pro-abortion argument, the measurement made is the comparison of the entity to that of a human. A sperm and an egg are cells, and therefore have the same ethical equivalent to any other cell. An embryo is more complex and more human like than a sperm, but is still far too much away. As a fetus goes through its development, it becomes more and more human like, and therefore the ethics of abortion become more and more grey. An abortion days before a baby was to be born can be considered murder as what is aborted is the equivalent to a baby, and the spacial location of being in or outside of the womb is irrelevant to the measurement, as the theory is only measuring likeness.

[tiepolo]

You will continue to live if permitted to occupy the same space and position in linear time without being killed by someone or something. You have the rest of your life in potential. If someone murders you, the wrong done is to strip you of this potential, they arrest your capacity to live on. If they smother you in your sleep then they deprive you of the potential right to wake up. The fact that you are not a conscious, sentient, moral being or a free agent capable of expressing preference, while in a state of sleep, doesn't lessen the crime, since the potential would exist for you to wake up and resume that state. Giving an embryo a right to be born is exactly the same in principle.

 

Also, the potential right to take a driving test doesn't become less and less grey as the child nears the legal age. The potential right is constant, up until the point where it becomes an active right. The potential right a newborn baby has to take a driving test is no different from the potential right a fifteen year old has to do so. 

 

The sperm or eggs that men and women carry around in their testicles and ovaries don't have any potential to develop into anything unless coitus and fertilisation has taken place, so it makes sense to see fertilisation as the beginning point of potential rights and potential humanity generally. A pot of yellow paint and a pot of blue paint have no potential, individually, to become green. They have no green quality to them. Only if and when they are mixed together can any greenness come about. 

[dsayers]

Murder is immoral because it is the exercising of ownership over that which is owned by somebody else. Namely their life, not their potential.

[tiepolo]

Your life is only your potential to continue living (this is the thing that is owned when one assert's one's right to live). When you murder someone you don't take the life they have already lived. Their life up to the moment of the murder is unaffected. 

[DanielB]

I am a proponent of the idea of potential rights. A five year old does not have the right to smoke or vote or to take a driving test, for example, but they have a right to do these things when they are older. The right is there in potential. I make a case against abortion based on the same principle. An unborn has all the rights of the adult said unborn would become if not interfered with. Potential rights would therefore seem to exist from the moment of conception.

I think the whole concept of rights is just another part of the morality debate, but let's start with natural rights. If you as a human being have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness/property, then children have these rights too. Anything we deny them (for whatever well intended reasons) forces us to say "well of course you have these rights too, we just say you're too young to exercise them right now." So we call them potential rights, but perhaps it would be more accurate to call them deferred rights? How morally questionable this is is demonstrated by the fact that we can drive at 16, 18 or even 21 years old depending on where you live. You can vote at 18 but buy a drink at 21. You get minimum wage for adults at 23 but can join the army at 17. You can be put to death at 14 (in the US) if you're unlucky.

 

So IMHO it's all BS. We either agree we have these rights or not. To deny them depending on age is to admit they can be arbitrarily given and taken away, and therefore they're not rights at all, they're privileges.