What makes a “human being,” and can science prove it?
I’m not talking about which organisms are members of the species Homo sapiens, but which entities should be treated like people for the purposes of ethical decisions. If you’re making an ethical claim, like “Innocent human beings should not be killed,” then what are you talking about? Who are the “human beings” in that claim? Can science tell you?
But let’s be more specific: Can science tell you whether an embryo is a “human being” for the purpose of ethics?
And let’s also remember what science can do: it’s a really good method for determining the characteristics of phenomena (e.g., when stem cells arise in embryogenesis), or testing explanatory possibilities (e.g., how stem cells work). Science can also be used to establish whether a given organism is a member of a particular species—for example, whether your canine is a wolf or a coyote. But science cannot tell you the ethical standard that ought to guide your interactions with your canine. That’s a matter of prevailing social standards, your personal level of empathy with the canine, and probably the level of anthropomorphism you perceive in the canine. Psychologists may determine, by a method that may be scientific, that when people in our society commit acts of “cruelty” (as defined for the purpose) against canines, it is an indication of how that person perceives the world and relates with other human beings. But that determination will only tell us about how a person gets along in our society, which means that any ethical conclusions are dependent on a pre-existing social context. Some societies may differ. So in that example, science cannot take us to a compelling universal conclusion that affects everyone, and should be used to condemn their conduct or create penalties for it, probably because there isn’t one.
Scientific methods can probably help us investigate whether measurable circumstances give rise to certain results that could be characterized as ethical. And scientific methods can help us obtain lots of information to inform our ethical assertions. But science cannot give us “right” and “wrong” because those are not scientific concepts, but social ones.
The other day I had the displeasure of engaging in a lengthy argument with someone who insisted, in a thoroughly unconvincing way, that science can tell you whether an embryo is a “human being” for the purpose of ethics. Not surprisingly, he concluded that an embryo is a human being for the purpose of ethics. (I say “not surprisingly” because it seems that most people who even bother to raise the possibility that an embryo is a “human being” are the people who have already decided that things like embryonic stem cell research are unethical, or at least ethically questionable.)
I’m not saying you can’t assert that an embryo is a human being for ethical purposes, and then conform your conduct to that assertion. Go right ahead. But that’s not a scientific assertion because the scientific method does not yield ethical propositions. So don’t go trying to put the imprimatur of “science” on your assertion so that you can come to the policy table and pretend there’s more heft in demand that everyone conform their conduct to your belief that an embryo is a human being for ethical purposes.
But what can science do here?
After the displeasurable argument mentioned above, I posed the question to someone who identifies as conservative, Christian, Republican, and pro-life. Interestingly, the response was immediate and emphatic: “What? Science doesn’t do that. Science can tell you that after so many days development is at this stage, and after so many days it’s at another stage, but it doesn’t tell you when you have a ‘human being’!” Which is exactly right.
Science can tell you about the stages of embryonic development. Science can yield explanations for how some of it happens. Science can tell you that you’re looking at human development rather than canine development. But science cannot tell you that, for the purposes of ethics, the little group of cells without a nervous system is a “human being.”
If science could do that, how would it get there? First, you would need a testable hypothesis. A hypothesis like “this object is a ‘human being’ for ethical purposes” would not do the trick because there’s no way to test that. You need something more specific, which would probably be the criteria that would always be used to establish “a ‘human being’ for ethical purposes.” Let’s call them criteria A, B, and C. With all those variables, you would probably need a series of carefully controlled experiments, so maybe we can imagine that there is just one criterion: A. So your hypothesis might be: “this object is a ‘human being’ for ethical purposes because A is one of its characteristics.”
The wag who argued with me the other day insisted that A could be something like genetic material. In other words, “this object is a ‘human being’ for ethical purposes because it has the same genetic material as a human being would have.” The facial circularity of that hypothesis should be immediately apparent, but the bigger problem is that a “human being” is generally recognized as requiring something substantially more than just its genetic material. For example, at the biological level, there are environmental effects on the genetic material, and at a higher level there is a sense of inclusion and participation in a social group.
But assuming the existence of some characteristic A that definitively identifies an entity as a “human being” for ethical purposes, then we are left to conclude that determining whether one is a “human being” for ethical purposes can only be established scientifically through some method akin to a DNA test. Take a sample, send it to the lab, get your results: “Congrats! You’re a human being entitled to inclusion in the ethical community.” But we all know that anybody who waited for those results would be an idiot. If you need a scientific test to tell you whether you’re a human being, then you’re obviously not paying attention. Why? Because the criteria are not susceptible to testing via the methods of the biological (or any other) sciences: You recognize human beings not for something that needs to be determined in a lab, but for other reasons.
Those reasons might be articulated and tested by a method that’s vaguely, but not truly, scientific—e.g., through something like a Turing test—but they could never be tested against an embryo because our sense of what makes a human being does not reach to that type of entity. Presented with a human embryo and a canine embryo, and left to determine in the ways that we ordinarily do whether one of them is a “human being,” we would find ourselves at a loss. “Scientific” testing—which would almost certainly destroy both embryos, if I understand the available procedures correctly—would tell us which biological species each embryo hails from. But by then, I suspect, there would be nothing left to treat ethically like a human being.
The simpler and more obvious approach is to recognize that whether an entity is a “human being” for the purpose of defining ethical behavior in relation to that entity is a question that must be answered by non-scientific methods. Science can help us determine lots of information about the characteristics of the entity we’re talking about, but it cannot bring us all the way to our goal, which is to answer the question, “Should this entity be treated like a ‘human being’ for the purpose of my ethical decisions?” For that, you need a different method, other than science.
Science neither compels us to treat embryos like human beings for ethical purposes nor prevents us from doing so. But it can inform our decisions. There is no intellectually honest way to come to the policy-making table and demand, for example, that science compels us to treat embryos with the same ethics we use for human beings and to bar embryonic stem cell research. You can make the same ethical assertion and policy demand, but you cannot try to piggyback on the sense that science is an unquestionable authority, that your position has been “proven,” or can be “proved” by the scientific method.
Are blacks human beings? http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5116
Would anybody except a complete fool ask that question in seriousness?
“Believe it or not, there was a time when the Supreme Court’s answer to this question was no, not if they were slaves.”
If you’re thinking of the Dred Scott case, then you should read it again. More carefully.
And what’s your point, anyway?
The link posted with the question “Are blacks human?” seemed to address your question (and make clear how silly of a question that is), but this (short) blog post popped up in my Google Reader just after I responded above and actually addresses your question quite well: http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2009/03/escr-can-we-kill-this.html
Basically it says that an embryo is living, human, and an individual (each of those claims is fairly obviously true). The real question is when does a human gain value. At which stage of development does a human become valuable.
“Here’s the problem. If humans are valuable because of some transcendent quality, then human value is intrinsic. It exists regardless of any physical or functional changes size, location, abilities, etc. Conversely, if any physical or functional change affects human value, then that value can only be extrinsic, dependent on external factors. Human value becomes conditional. The danger is, when value is functionally defined, there is no basis for inalienable human rights. Whatever can be functionally defined, can be functionally defined away.”
That’s really a different argument.
The question addressed in my post is simply how you find a “human being” for the purpose of ethics. You can’t get there by science, as discussed above. (See also this recent post at Pharyngula.)
But you (or the people you’re linking to) are asking this (and also mixing it up with the first question): Once we have a “human being,” how do we determine the content of our ethical relationship with that being?
Mixing those questions clouds the issue.
But you (or the people you’re linking to) also reveal a lot in the nature of the arguments you’re making. Implied in the argument that we need some objective grounding for the definition of “human being” and for the content of our ethical relations with other human beings is the unspoken assertion that without objective grounding for those things, we have no reason to be ethical.
That argument is really just the souped up version of the old saw, “If there is no God, then anything is permissible.” But what both old and new versions of the argument ignore is the basic reality of day-to-day living, which smacks each and every one of us in the face, almost every minute of every day. You can address that reality by asking yourself a simple question: What would the world be like if people had no ethical codes whatsoever?
It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a moment that human society would be impossible without some set of behavioral norms. That leads us into the question of which entities fall into that circle of necessary ethics? That’s the question this post is about: when do you have a “human being” for the purposes of ethical relations? The content of our ethical rules does have some freedom, but there are a few obvious floors. For example, allowing human beings to kill each other as they please is not going to work out very well. The question of how to regulate that problem through ethical rules differs throughout human societies.
But while there is clearly a need for ethics that arises from objective reality, it would be misleading to say that there is “intrinsic human value” giving rise to those ethics. Instead, there is simply the problem that each of us wants to succeed as an organism and as a person, but we need each other to do that. That the result is a set of ethical rules to meet those selfish ends says nothing about the “intrinsic value” of human beings, but everything about our fundamental need for each other.
You can raise the objection that people should be treated as ends rather than means, and doesn’t this contradict that, and etc., but what you’re doing is raising an ethical rule to justify ethical rules. That won’t get you anywhere. What you really want to do, and what I think my explanation in the previous two paragraphs sketches out to some extent, is figure out how to jump from a pre-ethics perspective (i.e., from a perspective where you’re not talking about the content of the ethics, but the conditions that would give rise to an ethical scheme) to a post-ethics perspectives (i.e., to a perspective where you know, and we have agreed, that ethics exist, with whatever content, and that they should govern our conduct). But the people-as-ends vs. people-as-means argument is probably just an ethical rule that arose because it smooths the way for other helpful ethical rules, which foster cooperation and benefit everyone who “buys in,” or agrees to be bound by that scheme.
I think you should watch this video of a short talk by Daniel Dennett because it relates to the kind of argument I’m making versus the kind of argument you’re making.