John Kerry, Mr. Consistent?

No, I'm not really trying to be funny. Of course, I'm not really talking about consistency of one's position over time, but rather philosophical consistency. In what? On the issue of abortion. If we can believe what George Will writes, then John Kerry has a position on this issue of greater consistency than the average pro-choicer in the Democratic (or Republican, for that matter) party.

In this column, Will writes to Kerry, "The easily distressed abortion rights groups were distressed when you said that your faith teaches you what elementary biology teaches everyone: life begins at conception. But you say personhood does not." I've heard Kerry say that life begins at conception before. I haven't found a place where Kerry discusses personhood, but I haven't looked all that hard, and I don't really have any reason to doubt Will. Assuming this is Kerry's position, then, as I said, he's achieved a degree of consistency that many pro-choicers lack.

In philosophy, where the discourse has nuance that it lacks in politics, for many years different theorists have made this distinction between personhood and human life. They do usually because they recognize the obvious truth that if human life begins anywhere, it's most likely at conception. While Catholic theologians have held at various times that life begins at quickening, when the baby first moves in the womb, and others have held that life begins when the embryonic cells begin to differentiate, neither is a particularly attractive position. I'm not saying that no one argues this direction, just that many recognize that a distinct organism, with a complete human genetic code, and a natural life trajectory heading towards human adulthood, is really all you need for human life. Few will argue that human life begins at birth.

The personhood distinction comes in because these philosophers, for one reason or another, don't believe that human life is a sufficient condition for moral value. That is, they think that the simple fact that something is a human life qualifies it for full moral consideration, the kind that we would give to a normal human adult. This kind of moral consideration, of course, includes believing that it's not OK to end the life of this person except perhaps under very special circumstances (self-defense against an attack, as punishment for a capital crime, etc.).

The implication is obvious. It's not being a human life that makes it wrong to kill you, it's being a person. And so, it's not morally wrong to kill a fetus, because you're not killing a person. This is why I'm arguing that John Kerry is being consistent. He's establishing a criterion of moral consideration, personhood, and then sticking with it. As I've mentioned, many other pro-choicers have lacked this, dare we say, nuance in their position. Many have simply tried to say that human life doesn't begin at conception, which stretches credulity a bit.

Of course, there are serious problems with what Kerry's position, despite his admirable identification of a criterion. The main problem is that personhood, when you start cashing it out, looks like a quality that many things lack, that we firmly believe have full human moral worth. That's why Will, an incisive thinker, follows the quote about with a series of questions. "Fine," he writes, "When does it [personhood begin]? What are its defining attributes? Does, say, an elderly person with dementia have it, and hence a right to life?" Elderly dementia patients is just one of the problem cases. Persons in persistent vegetative states are another. Closer to the original issue, infants are yet another fringe case that it is not clear personhood covers. Thus we have philosophers Peter Singer and Michael Tooley arguing that small infants do not have full moral status, and Singer arguing that parents ought to be able to decide whether or not they want to keep or kill their newborn children. (I do not know if Singer and Tooley still hold these positions, but they certainly did at one point, and argued for them on the basis that infants lack qualities critical to personhood). Personhood is a nebulous concept. Sentience (the ability to feel pleasure or pain) might be one requirement, but many think that more is needed, such as higher order reasoning skills, and this is where the above examples start to drop off the moral status map.

One can hold that personhood is the criterion for moral status and that, whatever the qualifications for it are, newborn babies have them. But if this is Mr. Kerry's position (and I would bet that it is, I sincerely doubt he follows Singer & Tooley), then he is unfortunately exposed to a deep inconsistency. This is because it seems clear that whatever the morally relevant properties are that newborns possess, be it sentience or a certain level of brain function, or these combined with a human genetic code, it is certainly the case that a 9 month old fetus has them as well. Kerry, however, was one of the few members of the Senate to vote against the partial birth abortion act, which would protect these 9 month old children from what is, on this position, the moral equivalent of infanticide. Since its highly likely that Mr. Kerry thinks infanticide is illegal, he ought to think that partial birth abortion should be illegal. I haven't yet seen the argument that a viable 9 month fetus lacks moral status simply because of its physical position inside the womb, though I'm sure it's out there somewhere. But this argument is a laugher. The failure to traverse the 6 inches of the birth canal, or to be released by a surgeon's scalpel in a C-section, is hardly the kind of property that could cause something to lack moral status.

Mr. Kerry and his strategists are certainly clever. By saying on TV that he believes life begins at conception, he's trying to remove a roadblock for socially conservative voters, and he may do so for some. But it turns out that if we dig a little deeper, the apparent consistency of his abortion position turns out to be a morally confused fiction.