Capability and Potentiality

The philosophical debates over abortion and the rights of animals are beset by a common question: what characteristic(s), if any, can be listed and described to correctly pick out members of our moral community? In the abortion debates, the worry is that all the arguments that demonstrate the permissibility of abortion also establish the permissibility of infanticide. And since infanticide is pretty roundly condemned, that’s a problem. Similarly, many have argued that no account of what constitutes humanity will include marginal cases like infants or the cognitively disabled but exclude more sophisticated animals.

I am not sure what precisely this argument proves. The idea that we should reject a category or a concept because it has a fuzzy extension doesn’t look right. I mean, the concept dogs has a fuzzy extension and that doesn’t mean there no such things as dogs. Still, given the possible consequences of the categorization (you know, justifiable termination, eating…etc), we are probably under a pretty strong obligation to categorize accurately.

And one of the distinctions that I think might be worthwhile exploring is that of capability v. potential. Potential is something that is often employed by pro-lifers to explain why we should include early term fetuses in our moral community (they are potential people). I take potential to be defined something like this: if natural processes are continued, then the immature being will develop into a certain kind of end-state. So a fetus has the potential to become a full person because it will so develop if certain natural processes are continued. An acorn is a potential oak tree and so on and so forth.

I do not think much of this pro-life move. First, it does not differentiate between a sperm and an ovum on the one hand and a fertilized zygote on the other. Second, the right to life does not protect potential people, it protects actual people. To see that this is so, imagine that space aliens have seized you and wish to make clones of your body (100 of them) in a process that is totally reliable and based on alien “natural physiology.” Would you be justified in escaping capture, rejecting inconvenience, or defending your life to avoid the cloning procedure? I think it is obvious that you would be, so there must not be any right to life for potential beings. (Warren, 1979 I think)

But consider capability. Capability is not the same as potential. I play hockey, and my slapshot can probably hit the 80 mph mark on a good day. Am I potentially an 80 mph slapshooter? No. Do I have the capability? Yes I do. The fact that I do not exercise that capability right now, a lot, or even frequently does not mean that I do not have it. In fact, I could never exercise the capability and still have it, though no one (including myself) would know that I did: “Wow, an ability I never knew I had.”

I want to differentiate between actual capability and physical capability. Actual capability is what I described above: an activity or action I could perform right now with no additional training or experience; provided the context was right. Physical capability I will try to define as a capability that could be acquired without any additional physical development or fundamental change in my neural abilities.

As an example, one might consider the difference in saying “Pat has the capability to walk,” compared to “Pat has the capability to do differential equations.” In the former sentence, it describes something that I could do it right now. In the latter sentence, it describes something that I could not do right now (I have forgotten) but that I could do if you gave me an hour to review a math textbook. In one sense, I do not possess the capability to do calculus. But in another sense, I certainly am capable of acquiring that ability without too much difficulty or change in the basic makeup of my body and intellect. I am physically capable, but I lack the experiential wherewithal to transfer that physical capability into actual capability.

So, what does this distinction have to do with abortion or animal rights? Well, suppose we define personhood in terms of physical capability instead of actual capability. It is actual capability that gets us into trouble when it comes to children and the cognitively disabled. It is my intuition (though this is an empirical matter) that children/fetuses attain the physical capability for rationality broadly conceived far earlier than they achieve actual capability. It just so happens that they are so young that they lack the experiential wherewithal to generally behave that way. This might mean that fetuses become people in this sense fairly late in the pregnancy, which would fit with our intuitions that there is no important difference between a late term fetus and a newborn when it comes to abortion (except, perhaps, for the fact that fetus is physically dependent on the mother and the newborn is, but I am unsure that this is an important difference).

We shouldn’t necessarily conclude from the fact that young infants don’t engage in minimally rational behavior because they are physically incapable of it anymore than we should conclude from my current lack of actual capability to do calculus that I don’t have the physical capability to do calculus. What this might do is provide a plausible line between fetuses that are permissibly aborted and people that may not that doesn’t so offend our intuitions about infanticide. And it is has a clear advantage over viability, which moves the line of permissibility with scientific advances. 

  Of course, the real question is whether a newborn infant is physically capable of minimally rational behavior even though it isn’t actually capable of it. What little I have studied of infant psychology is thought-provoking, but hardly conclusive. This is already too long. I’ll stop.

UPDATE: More here.

 

Comments

[Caligula]

A Tiberius, like Caligula, should look to
the Roman Law----The Paterfamilias had the
power of life and death over his children.
Them Romans was, like, RATIONAL!

[zwichenzug]

I'm still fuzzy from my lingering cold so I'm not going to try to think through the capability stuff right now. The two arguments you cite against potential, though, are familiar territory and both are pretty weak.

Take the first, that potential doesn't differentiate between sperm, ovum, and zygote (acually, leaving it at zygote may be problematic since pro-lifers are better able to draw a line a little bit later, but whatever). You're asserting here that no line can be drawn, but the pro-lifers who seriously offer the potentiality argument always give arguments on this point. You can't just gloss over those. The obvious argument, that once the sperm and ovum have joined you've got a particular thing, a zygote, which wasn't there before, seems pretty strong to me.

But, anyway, I suspect that the cavalier dismissal of the pro-life arguments on this point has mostly to do with a strong faith in the second argument, the one that Feinberg called "the logical point about potential." That argument has a lot of traction in the literature but, not to put too fine a point on it, it's absolutely worthless. The problem is that it misconstrues the argument from potential. That argument is not, in its strongest form, is NOT this:

(1) x has property p and has a right to r in virtue of p
(2) y has the potential to acquire property p.
(3) The difference between having a property and having the potential to to acquire a property doesn't mark a significant difference between cases.
Hence (4) y has a right to r in virtue of its potential to acquire p.

THAT argument, specifically the third premise, is the target of Feinberg's point. However, the potentiality argument need not rely on a general principle like the one articulated in 3. In fact, what the argument from potentiality ought to seek to do is establish a much more specific claim, namely, that if x is the sort of thing which has recognizably human properties and y is the sort of thing which has the potential to develop such properties, then x and y are the same sort of thing.

The difference is one of ontological priority. The weak argument which Feinberg targets treats the recognizably human properties as prior and says that humanity accrues (in the paradigm case) to just those things which exhibit those properties. The move to potential is, in such a case, suspect. The stronger argument I've sketched says that the kind, human being, is prior and that a feature of that kind is that things of that kind either exhibit recognizably human properties or have the potential to do so.

[exemplar of benevolence]

Please apply your potentiality/capability standard to animal rights. Do animals only have rights if they have potential or are capable of being like human beings? So chimps, nasty murdering, oversexed apes, will have more rights because they are genetically closer to humans and use tools, than squirrel which is very good at being a school but Jane Goodall doesn't give a shit about it? (Well, unless you're a flying squirel with a moose friend.)

[The Good Son]

We use a separate litmus test for animal rights. Its called the cutie pie test...the cuter the animal the more rights it has, and the more protection it should recieve... [emphasis] GOD [/emphasis] tehehe