Faith and Philosophy, Part 5: When Does Life Begin?

Episode Topic: When Does Life Begin?

When does a human person begin? Explore the profound intersection of philosophy and biology with Professor Jason T. Eberl. In this compelling lecture, Eberl critiques modern dualism and champions a Thomistic hylomorphic perspective, arguing for ensoulment at conception.

Featured Speakers:

• Jason T. Eberl, Saint Louis University

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Transcript

Speaker 0:06

All right. Good evening, everyone. We'll go ahead and get started. For those of you that I have not met, my name is Alexa Kovalevsky, and I am the president of our Graduate Maritain Fellows chapter. So we have both a graduate and an undergraduate chapter here at Notre Dame, and I work with our graduate students. Arjun is our president of the undergraduate chapter. If you have not joined the Maritain Fellows group, this is my plug to tell you to join the Maritain Fellows group. Very easy application link. You just fill out a simple form, tell us why you're interested, and then we have a lot of great opportunities for you as a fellow, both things like this, classroom things, reading groups, speaker dinners, the usual. So if you're not already a member, please join us today. I will also start off by introducing our speaker. He'll give his lecture, and we'll have time for questions at the end. So if you have questions, please keep them in mind. I'll walk around with the microphone at the end for those to ask questions. All right. Jason T. Eberl is the Hubert Mather Chair in Bioethics, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Bioethics at St. Louis University. His research interests include the philosophy of human nature and its application to issues at the margins of life, ethical issues related to end-of-life care, biotechnology and healthcare allocation, and the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas. His current research concerns human enhancement and transhumanism, conscience and public reason, and the determination of death. He's the author of Thomistic Principles and Bioethics, the Routledge Guidebook to Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, and The Nature of the Human Person: Metaphysics and Bioethics, as well as the editor of Contemporary Controversies in Catholic Bioethics and Emerging Issues in Catholic Bioethics. He currently serves on the executive committees of the International Association of Catholic Bioethics and the Conference on Medicine and Religion, as well as being the president of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors. Please welcome Professor Eberl.

Speaker 2 2:23

Great. Is the microphone projecting just fine? Okay, awesome. So thank you, Alexa, and thank you, to everyone who organized this event, who invited me to come up here, and, uh, thank you all for being here, tonight. So, uh, without further ado, let's just get right into it. so as Alexa mentioned, uh, I published a book with University of Notre Dame Press, uh, in twenty twenty, and a lot of my talk is going to be drawing on some material from this book with some relevant updates. partly because, it was, mentioned to me that this talk is kind of, not maybe directly in response to, but was kind of ins- uh, inspired by a, a talk that Professor Richard Swinburne, gave here, uh, in the fall. And I spent a lot of time in my book differentiating Thomistic hylomorphism from Swinburne's version of dualism, and then drawing out for both of them what the implications are, for the beginning of, uh, uh, of human life, the beginning of human personhood. And one thing that will become clear though, as we get into it, is that even among Thomists, there's not a single agreed upon position of when a human person begins. One might think there is, and that it's absolutely clear, but there's actually three different positions argued for by different scholars of Aquinas. and so I'll outline those different positions and then, you know, give you my, my argument for the position I think works. k- knowing that the Maritain, student fellows, you know, represent people studying, you know, all over Notre Dame, different backgrounds, different specialties. You're not all philosophers or theologians, but people who have an interest, again, in Catholic thought, in the thought of Aquinas. I didn't wanna presume anything, so I thought it'd be good to start off with just a little bit of a, of a primer on, you know, sort of the historical grounding of these theories, where Aquinas' own hylomorphic view is coming from, what hylomorphism is, uh, and then we'll kinda get into the particulars. So you've all seen this picture, right? Raphael, School of Athens. Almost every philosophy department website, I'm sure Notre Dame's I, I haven't checked Notre Dame's philosophy department's website, but you know, it's almost every philosophy department at Catholic, Christian, secular universities uses this, right? And you got this part in the middle with Plato and Aristotle, Plato pointing up to the sky. I like to think that he's like,"You know, we, we must lift our, lift our minds to the heavens." And Aristotle's kinda like,"Keep it real, dude." Right?"Keep it grounded." so Plato, Platonic dualism. you know, Plato's view was that human beings are identical to an immaterial soul, and the way Plato characterizes the soul is roughly equivalent to what we would today consider the mind, right? The human psyche. Even the Greek word that he uses, psyché, right? It's where we get our word, you know, psyche, psychology, psychiatry, and so on. And, and f- for Plato, each of our souls is eternal. They preexisted our bodies, and they'll live beyond our bodies. And, being embodied is actually an imprisonment, an entrapment of the soul. If you've ever read Pl- Plato's Meno, there's this famous scene where Socrates brings this young servant boy and through a series of, of questions where we get this idea of the Socratic method of questioning, he sort of draws out the servant boy's knowledge of, you know, complex theorems and mathematics and geometry and logic. And basically, the whole point is to say, look, he had this knowledge all along, right? He just forgot it'cause of the trauma of his soul becoming embodied. And so learning is this process of drawing out this, this knowledge that we have. And so death, again, is a freeing of the soul from the body, from all the vicissitudes of embodiment and our sensory life that, that prevent us from being able to, to fully access all the knowledge we're supposed to have. So that's Plato's dualism, and I spend time on this because Aquinas directly responds to Platonic dualism or at least a, a sort of Neoplatonism that had developed by, by his time. Then you have Aristotle. Now, Aristotle was Plato's student for over two decades. He learned a lot from Plato. He imports a lot of Plato's concepts, including the concept of, of, of the forms as these, you know, pure ideals and, and the soul as a particular type of form. But when it comes to the relation of form or specifically souls to matter, his view is again a bit more grounded than Plato's, and he develops this view that becomes known as hylomorphism. the Greek word hyle means, matter, and the Greek word morphos means change and is often used to refer to the, the idea of the form. So hylomorphism is this idea of reality comprising form-matter composites, right? Everything that exists is a material thing, but it's a material thing that has a particular shape, structure, set of functional properties, set of qualities to it, right? That's the form of the thing. And then the forms of living things for Aristotle is where he then imports Plato's term psuche to say that they have a special type of form because there's a sort of dynamism imparted into the matter of a living thing such that it takes in nutrition, grows, reproduces, right? So he calls them-- So he says the forms of living things are psuche, are souls. And then beyond merely living things are things that are not only living but also sentient, animals, right? So they also have psuche but a different type of psuche, what he calls the s- the sensory or the sensitive soul. And then finally, you have animals who have the ability to reason, and we'll unpack a little bit later what Aristotle means by, by reasoning, particularly how Aquinas understands it. And those are the rational animals that have a rational soul, and that's what human beings are, right? Now, one of the que- the question we'll be centering on tonight is, are all human beings rational animals? And even if all of us in this room are rational animals, when did we first come into existence as a rational animal? There's also separate questions which, I mean, we can go anywhere you want in the discussion period, but at least in my talk, I will not be getting into, which is, are there may be other rational animals out there? Chimps, dolphins. I watch a lot of Star Trek, so I, I think there's probably Vulcans and Klingons out there who would also be rational, or in the case of Vulcans, hyper-rational animals. but this is the key idea, that, again, when you ask Plato the question, what am I? What is Jason Ebrel? Plato's answer is,"I am a soul trapped in this body." If you ask Aristotle,"What am I, Jason Ebrel?""I am a rational animal. I am a form-matter composite. I am a substance made out of these two metaphysical parts, but I'm not identical to either one of those parts." Right?"I'm not the matter of my body, but I'm also not identical to my form or my soul either. I am the composite." Move from the classical to the medieval period. In the fifth century, we have Augustine. Again, not gonna spend a lot of time on Augustine's thought, but just to kind of connect the dots here, show the progression of thinking. Augustine pretty much is a Neoplatonist. philosophers and theologians in Augustine's time found a lot of affinity of Christian thought with the philosophy, be- you know, that comes to us through Plato. This is also a period of time that in the Latin Western world, while they knew about Aristotle and some of Aristotle's works were, were, were extant and around, after the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, most of Aristotle was lost to the Latin West. And it wasn't until you had, Arabic scholars get reintroduced after, the movement of Islam through northern, Africa and then into southern Spain that you have these kind of, the Islamic and Christian and Juda- and Jewish worlds all kind of colliding, sometimes peaceably, sometimes not, in southern Spain. And this reintroduced Aristotle to the Latin West,'cause there's all these Arabic manuscripts. and that's what led to Aquinas being exposed to Aristotle's thought. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. So Augustine, Neoplatonist, right? Plato's the big influence here. And Augustine doesn't have, like, a fully worked out- anthropology, but he does spend a lot of time talking about the nature of the soul. And although he does understand the soul to be embodied, he does think kinda like Plato, that our embodied condition, in a lot of ways, uh, negatively impacts our soul's ability to fully function, to fully, uh, access truth and beauty and live out the virtues. Augustine's also kind of a proto-Cartesian. Again, I'm not gonna spend really any time tonight talking about Descartes or what's called Cartesian dualism, except as we see it play out in Swinburne's view. but Augustine spends a lot of time, you know, from the Confessions onward, talking about sort of introspective self-knowledge and the soul's ability to know itself being what grounds the reality of the person. And again, this sounds... When, when you read it, certain passages, it's like, oh my God, this, this just sounds like, like Descartes. so Augustine pretty fairly can be called a dualist in that Platonic Cartesian vein. Another hugely influential figure that comes around the sixth century is Boethius. Boethius is the first Western scholar to introduce the term person, Latin, Latin persona, English person, as a philosophical term of art. the word had existed before as a, as a term in juris- in Roman jurisprudence, right? So to be a person was to have a certain type of legal and social standing in the Roman Empire, and actual- actually, the word person goes back to this Greek word prosopon, which referred to the masks that Greek actors would wear on stage, right? And we still talk sometimes today about sort of putting on a certain persona, right? You got your student persona, and then you got your Friday night persona, right? And then you got your football fan persona, right? So all these different masks that we put on is still a way we talk about persons today. And again, person is also still very much a, a legal term today, right? Corporations can be persons. even rivers and forests are in some jurisdictions being declared, as having the status of legal persons. But Boethius introduces this notion of person again as a, as a philosophical term primarily to help him resolve two puzzles. The first puzzle is the Trinity, three persons in one God. How do we figure that out? I mean, no one has. Maybe Professor Porter has. But other, but other than brilliant theologians, at least I haven't, right? and also equally puzzling thing to try to resolve metaphysically, the two natures of Christ. One person, one of the three persons of the Trinity, but with two natures, human and divine, right? So how do you figure out the, this logic? How do we figure out the, this math? Well, to help him, Boethius Defines the term person to refer to an individual substance of a rational nature. And we could spend a, the whole rest of the talk unpacking each one of these terms. I won't s- take the time to do that, but the key relevant f- factors here are that, one, to be a person is again, to be a thing that ex- that has some sort of independent existence, right? It exists on its own as a substance, as a things that bears properties, that is in some ways always in relation to other things. Person... Aristotle famously says that, that human beings are social or political animals, but is also an individual. Something that also has a certain degree of incommunicability between itself and others, right? I can't enter into your unique first-person perspective. I can't read your mind. If I were, then would your mind even be yours anymore? Would we share one mind, one consciousness? Again, I watch a lot of Star Trek, so if you think of the Borg and collective consciousness, or if you've watched Pluribus, won't give things away, but same idea. So a person, again, an individual substance, but lots of things are individual substances. What makes persons special is that they have a, a, a nature as a rational being. Now, this allows Boethius to say that God can exist as three distinct persons, yet one. Allows him to say that Christ exists as a person with two natures. It allows him also as a Christian to talk about angels and demons, the fallen angels, as purely intellectual, rational substances. And then there are us, the rational animals, right? All of us fit this definition of personhood. And Aquinas is the one who takes the Boethian definition, combines it with Aristotle's understanding, his hylomorphic understanding, and as a neo-Aristotelian, uh, but then, but in, in various ways going beyond Aristotle... Again, I had a slide on this. I deleted it for the sake of time, but we can talk about the ways in which Aquinas agrees with, but then also does not agree with Aristotle. Arist- Aquinas develops what we can call Thomistic hylomorphism. Right? A version of Aristotle's hylomorphism that, again, stands in dis- a distinction to Plato's dualism. So just to unpack this a little bit more, for Aquinas, human persons are metaphysical hybrids. We are not identified with our soul alone, but with the composite of soul and body, right? He says body and soul are not two actually existing substances, but from these two is made one actually existing substance, for a human being's body is not actually the same in the soul's presence and absence But the soul makes it exist actually. Again, there's a lot of metaphysical baggage in here that I don't have time to unpack, but again, uh, we can go back to some of these points, in the discussion period. So what does Aquinas say about Platonic dualism? Well, on Aquinas's understanding, and, and granted, Plato never used this analogy himself, at least I'm not aware of him using it, but Neoplatonus, living and writing in Aquinas's time, would often talk about the soul being like the sailor that pilots a ship, right? So the body's the ship, the sailor is the thing, right? So think of it this way, right? You're, you're driving, you're driving down Angela Drive, and, you know, someone says, you know,"There goes Alexa," right? Well, her, her windows are tinted. They're rolled up'cause it's hot... it, it's cold outside, and, you know, then no one sees actually Alexa, but they see the thing that she's driving and, and identifies that thing with her, right? That's how, you know, Plato understands our body, right? I'm not seeing any of you. I'm just seeing the vehicle you get around the world in, okay? And what Aquinas says is that this view destroys the unity of the human person as, again, this metaphysical hybrid. Rather, he says that a person's substantial form, her rational soul, is unified and possesses not only the rational powers, self-consciousness, intellect of thought, free will, but also the powers of sens- sentience and vegetative life. a competing view to Aquinas is that, again, don't have time to get into tonight, it comes from John Duns Scotus. Scotus's view is that we actually have a form of the body, and then we have the rational soul in addition to the form of the body. And Scotus, you know, tells us as a version of hylomorphism. He's, he's also eschewing Platonic dualism. But on Aquinas's view, that also disrupts the unity of the person, that my soul is both the thing by which I think, my mind, but is also the form of this body, endowing this piece of matter with all the qualities that it possesses as a living, sentient animal. So here's... I won't read through all these quotations for the sake of time, but basically, Aquinas's view is that even though the soul can exist beyond the death of the body, that doesn't mean that that's the natural way for the soul to be. Aquinas is... You know, he spends a lot of time talking about the interim state between death and bodily resurrection at the end of time, and he says this is an unnatural state for the soul, that the soul longs for reunion with its bo- with its body. And key point, if you need, you know, a short, pithy, tweetable, or X-able now, whatever, Statement of Aquinas's view, it comes from his commentary on First Corinthians,"My soul is not I." Anima mea non est ego. Period, end of story. He couldn't have said it more clear. yeah, so s- so now fast-forward, we get to Swinburne, okay? So Professor Swinburne, who is, again, this brilliant philosopher of religion. I'm... He's, you know, one of those people that if I'm gonna disagree with him, I'm very trepidatious to do so but I did devote a whole chapter of my book doing that. so in his, really his masterful piece on this, The Evolution of the Soul... He has this m- more recent book on, uh, on souls and bodies, but, while he refines his view a little bit in that book, at least for our purposes, it doesn't really advance... It's not like he really changed his mind on anything. Swinburne is a contemporary, what we would call, substance dualist insofar as he thinks that what you see in front of you are two substances compounded together. uh, Eric Olson, uh, terms Swinburne's and, and similar views compound dualism. So the idea is that instead of my soul and body sort of mixing together to form a single thing, they're sort of... You know, they interact, but b- but m- maintaining their separateness as existing things, the soul as the thinking part of me, and really with what I essentially am, and my body as, again, that very necessary but still, you know, vehicle by which I get around, and not even fully necessary,'cause Swinburne's whole argument is based on the contingency of this body. This body can go away, and yet I can remain. So my soul and body are linked together, but they are separate. So here's a relevant quotation,"The body is separable from the person, and the person can continue even if the body is destroyed. Just as I continue to exist wholly and completely if you cut off my hair, so the dualist holds, it is possible that I continue to exist if you destroy my body. The soul, by contrast, is the necessary core which must continue if I am to continue. It is the part of the person which is necessary for his continuing existence. The person is the soul together with whatever, if any, body is linked temporarily to it." Okay? I'm gonna skip over ac- Swinburne's whole argument for this because, A, I suspect he probably gave this to you if you were able to attend his lecture, but also, again, for the sake of time and to get to the beginning of personhood, beginning of life stuff. but here's what Swinburne concludes about the beginning of person... Again, I won't read the whole, the full quotation, but he basically says,"Look, if the soul..." And, and this is something that Swinburne and all the Thomists I'll be talking about tonight all agree upon, is that when we're talking about the soul-body relationship- It has to be the case that the body is suitably organized to either be linked to the soul or to be informed by the soul, right? None of these thinkers think that it's, that it's metaphysically possible for a soul to inform this, right? I'm not gonna get into all, all the AI stuff tonight unless, again, you want to bring that in conversation. But in other words, there's a form of this T-shirt, but this T-shirt cannot be informed by a rational soul nor have a rational soul linked to it. It's not proper matter for that, right? It only makes sense for the soul to be linked or to inform matter that allows the soul to exercise its proper functions, its proper capacities, again, for thought, sentience, life. So even if we're just restricting what the soul does to consciousness and thought, as Swinburne does, it's still the case you have to have a suitable body to facilitate the soul's ability to engage in conscious, rational thought and volition. And so it seems to make sense then that while Swinburne accepts that it's metaphysically possible that ensoulment could happen at, at fertilization, it makes more sense that we need to have a sufficient amount of neurological development in the fetus for the soul as the, you know, the sort of or- the, the metaphysical organ of our cognition to be able to exercise its cognitive functions. And you don't get that... I mean, brain formation is a long, extended process, and Swinburne throws up the n- the number twenty weeks. There are some who would push it later to twenty-eight weeks. Some would push it even earlier to about eleven weeks gestation. But we'll just g-go with twenty because that's what Swinburne says. That when the fetus at around twenty weeks gestation has enough neurological formation that we can say that the soul is present, actually engaging in, in at least, you know, rudimentary level cognitive activities, right? The fetus can sense pain and so on. That's when it makes the most sense on his view to say that the soul has become linked to the body. But again, this is not a hylomorphic view, although some hyl- Thomistic hylomorphists would agree with Swinburne on this point. We'll get to that in a minute. So before moving on, I'll just very quickly mention a couple critiques of Swinburne's approach to substance dualism. As again, as a sort of, you know, Neoplaton- form of Neoplatonic dualism, already we have Aquinas' critiques that I've already mentioned. In addition People like Dean Zimmerman, uh, my own mentor, Eleanor Stump, and her mentor, Norman Kretzmann, uh, have critiqued the logic of Swinburne's modal argument, which again, I had a slide for, but I didn't rehearse. Again, if I skip over something, y'all wanna go back to it during discussion, happy to do so. but basically, Zimmerman's whole point is that Swinburne's argument can actually prove the very opposite of the thesis he's trying to prove in terms of the, the logical possibility that I survived the death of my body, therefore I have to be an immaterial soul. It's also possible, logically possible, that I cannot survive the death of my body because I am just my mate- my material body. Like the modal logic can run both ways. Also, I really like this quotation from Alex Pruss. he says,"If Swinburne's right, if substance dualism is right, then my wife has never kissed me. She has only kissed my body. You cannot touch me. You can only touch my body. Rape seems more like a property crime. Making philosophical sense of the meaning of sexuality is a lost cause. Two persons having sexual intercourse is nothing but intercourse between the animals associated with each of the persons. Stealing one of my kidneys is a mere property crime and is not stealing a part of me." And then he just thinks these consequences are all ethically unacceptable, right? so let's see if Thomistic hylomorphism fares better than Swinburne's dualism, um, unless you like Swinburne's view and agree with him, at giving us, uh, you know, maybe a more philosophically defensible, argument for the beginning of personhood. Now the one thing, and again, this is something that Swinburne and all the Thomists I'm about to talk about would agree, but one other view that's out there, that you see particularly among secular philosophers and secular bioethicists, not that all secularists agree on this, is the r-- is what's, my... one of my other, mentors, uh, the late great, uh, Jesuit priest, Father John Cavanaugh referred to as performance theory. This is a view you see with people like Peter Singer, Helga Kuhse, uh, Maryann Warren, Michael Tooley, Bonnie Steinbock, and so on. The idea with performance theory is that a person only exists when you have a human animal body or any other, you know, it could be a different species, but when you have a body that instantiates, that actually performs the relevant capacities of being a person, right? I have to actually be able to be self-aware, to think conceptually, to express my will in more than just some sort of instinctual drive. And honestly, in normal human development That doesn't really happen until up to two and a half years after birth. Singer and others kind of push it to what they consider to be the most reasonably conservative position. I'm using conservative with a small C here. conservative position of maybe about two to three months post-birth when the infant could pass like the mirror test. And what this allows them then to argue is, as Tooley titles his book, Abortion and Infanticide, is to say that if abortion is morally permissible because it's not the killing of a person, and he argues that it is, infanticide in the first two or three months post-birth would also be morally permissible. So that's a view that, again, Swinburne and all the Thomists I'm about to talk about would agree in rejecting. Part of the basis that people like myself, again, my mentor, Father Cavanaugh, Chris Kaser, Norman Ford, Pat Lee, the difference between the performance theories, theories view and our view, which Cavanaugh refers to as an endowment theory of personhood, is to say, no, you don't have to be actually capable at this moment of being self-aware or thinking conceptually or, or, or, or, or willing volitionally. You just have to have the potential to do so. Now, I'll talk... I'll come back to the argument. I'll come back to this concept of potentiality in more detail, towards the end of my remarks. But the idea here is not to say that what we have in front of us, if we're talking about an embryo or a fetus or sp- or a sperm or an unfertilized ovum, is something that is potentially a person, right? Uh, a lot of what people who, who argue about abortion and, and, you know, this notion of personhood often talk about, well, an embryo or a fetus is potentially a person, and therefore it has a certain moral status. But then critics come in and say,"Yeah, but a sperm is potentially a person. An unfertilized ovum is potentially a person," right? this leads to, the famous, song, by the comedy troupe Monty Python, Every Sperm is Sacred, right? that is not how Thomists or Aristotelian Thomists think. I mean, all Thomists are Aristotelians, but it goes back to Aristotle, how Aristotelians, including Thomists, think about potentiality. Rather, what I and all these other thinkers hold is that whenever you have a rationally ensouled human organism, it is a person. It fits that Boethian definition But of course, it can't fully manifest yet all of its relevant powers and, and capacities. So it's a person with potential, right? You know, just as, you know, Nick sitting up there, who I was chatting with earlier, is a potential moral theology professor, right? He's not actually a moral theology professor, but he, he aspires to be, right? Well, that's that first sense of potentiality, right? You're not yet a moral theology professor. But as a student studying moral theology, are you, are you, at least we can say, an academic, a scholar with potential, right? With potential to become more than you currently are, right? That's more... That's closer, still not the same, but closer to the idea that Aristotelians and Thomas are, are thinking about here with this notion of potential. You have something that exists and is already the kind of thing that has this internal drive to develop itself into a more fully actualized form of itself, right? It is a person, and it's gonna be even more of a person as it continues to develop. we'll come back to this. Yet despite that general agreement, as I mentioned, there's still debate among Thomistic scholars about when do we have a rational animal? When do you have a body s-suitable for rational ensoulment? Like I said, that's kind of the, the principle that all the Thomists and Swinburne as well are kind of agreed upon, right? When do you have a body that is suitably organized for ensoulment? Now, famously or infamously, Aquinas actually spoke about this and put out a view that's known as the, the theory of delayed hominization. Basic idea is this. Remember earlier when I was talking about Aristotle's view, I talked about three types of souls, right? So there's the vegetative soul, right, the, the form of, of living organisms. There's the sensitive soul, um, which doesn't mean that someone listens to soft jazz, but s- you know, some, uh, a soul capable of sensation, right? So animals, right, have a sensitive soul. And then the rational or intellective soul, right, the form of, of rational animals. And Aquinas, who, mind you, whose biological understanding was no more advanced than Aristotle's, right? it's interesting. There is more time, right, about seventeen hundred years separated Aquinas and Aristotle, and only eight hundred years separates us from Aquinas, yet our understanding of, of basic science so far exceeds his. His was basically the same as Aristotle's, right? And on that view, they didn't understand anything about sperm, ova, DNA, right? They thought conception involved the, quote,"seminal fluid" acting on menstrual blood to form it into the embryo, right? That, that's, that was their sex ed back then. And because of that, what they witnessed in terms of that early conceptus, again, was something that was clearly alive, but didn't have a lot of form to it. It wasn't... it didn't appear really human at all, right? And mind you, they're not obs- They, you know, they didn't have the powers to observe like, you know, teeny-tiny embryos back then, right? They're, they're talking about fetuses, you know, who are maybe miscarried. Like, th-that's what they're able to observe back then, or by studying what's happening with, in animal reproduction. And so to Aristotle, and later to Aquinas, it just seems sort of clear that the first thing that gets created in this, in this generative process is a life form, but it's not yet a rational animal. It's not yet a human life form, hence the term delayed hominization. As that, as that life form develops, of course, it will grow into something that forms sense organs, right? That now start, is starting to look at least like an animal, if not like a human animal. And so that vegetative soul gets annihilated. You... There's a s- what's called a substantial change, and now you have an animal informed by the sensitive soul. Development continues, and now you get something with a broadly human appearance, which is now capable of supporting, through its powers of sensation, intellective, rational thought. Now you have another substantial change. Now you have the rational animal. That's Aquinas' historical view. to be clear, this doesn't mean that Aquinas thought that abortion was morally okay. he thought that abortion was still a morally serious wrong because you're interfering with developing human life, uh, from conception, or developing life, I should say, even though technically until en-ensoulment occurs, it was not homicide to abort an early-term fetus. So that's Aquinas' actual view. Like I said, the metaphysics is something that Thomists, you know, accept, but we reject today all the outdated biology. So what do we say today? Well, like I said, there are three basic positions on the table. The first comes from Bob Pasnau, who in his otherwise, you know, very careful, erudite treatment of Aquinas' Treatise on Human Nature, when it comes to this question, the beginning of personhood- Says that basically follows the same line Swinburne does, that in order to have a body suitably organized for rational ensoulment, it has to have the sufficiently organized neurological structures to say that this developing organism has what he calls a capacity in hand to perform such activities. By capacity in hand, what Pasnau means is that even if the fetus is not immediately exercising those capacities, all the s- the structures are there. I mean, yes, they gotta go through some more and more development to get further and further refined, but the basic structures of the cerebral cortex are present, again, around twenty-four to twenty-eight weeks gestation. Okay? And so that's when he concludes we have a suitably organized body for rational ensoulment. Norman Ford, in a book way back in 1988, pushes the line back further. Ford says, look, he differentiates between an embryo that is conceived and an embryo that is implanted in the uterus. So quick side on, on, on basic embryology. Apologies for if you already know this, but, you know, when conception occurs, it typically occurs as the egg, the ovum, is traveling down the fallopian tube during the w- the, the woman's f- uh, fertile period, and sperm fertilizes it, and now the zygote, the fertilized ovum, continues its journey down the fallopian tube as it starts dividing mitotically, forming what we call the blastocyst. And then around two weeks post-conception, depending, it's anywhere between really ten to sixteen days, hopefully that blastocyst will implant in the wall of the uterus. Now, in that intervening two-week period, one of the things that can happen is that blastocyst could divide into what we call identical twins, right? Once the blastocyst has implanted in the uterus, the possibility of further twinning stops, and where you get conjoined twins are where that process has kind of started as implantation was happening, and so it gets interrupted. Or fusion can also happen. You could have the twins split and then partially or wholly ref- refuse to each other. If you ever watched, uh, The Office, Dwight, Rainn Wilson's character, has a... There's a part where he talks about having a resorbed twin So he says,"I had the power of an adult man and a tiny fetus in me." so because all these things can happen, Ford argues, as an Aristotelian, he's actually a Catholic priest, he actually says In, in, before, until implantation, we can't really say we have that individual substance, right? So go back to that Boethian definition. I'm not going all the way back, but Paz now is really focusing on that rational nature aspect of that definition. When do you have that rational nature? Ford's focusing on the individual substance part, and he's saying you don't have the individual substance as long as twinning is possible, right? And then finally, you have the view defended by myself and my book, uh, Robbie George and Chris Tollefsen in their book on the embryo defend it, Maureen Condic, Melissa Moschella, who's here at Notre Dame, lots of people defend this view, which is that at conception, you have within the zygote, within the fertilized ovum, the intrinsic active potentiality for that embryo... for that zygote, then becomes an embryo, then becomes a fetus, to develop itself. Now, of course, we cannot forget, lest we forget, there's a whole nother person involved in this process, right? There's the, there's the person who's carrying this embryo and fetus, right? there's a very active debate, and in fact, I just, um, I've-- there's an issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy I just co-edited, on medical mereology. Not medical mariology. That's a whole different thing but medical mereology. Mereology is the philosophical study of part-whole relationships. And one of the big topics of debate right now is whether fetuses should be considered parts of the pregnant person that's carrying them or not. Were you, when you were a fetus, a part of your mother, or were you your own separate entity? That's a very active debate right now in bioethics. those in the Thomistic Aristotelian camp would defend the view that the embryo and the fetus are distinct, again, distinct individual substances. You were not part of your mother, right? You shared a body with your mother. You shared space. You shared a lot of physiological connections with your mother. But no, you were not s-simply a part of your mother, uh, when you were, structurally attached to her. and even though this early embryo could split into identical twins, there's nothing metaphysically incoherent in saying that one of the resulting twins is the same as that original one, that original conceptus, and that the other one sort of came into existence later on when that split happened, right? Again, we can dive into the metaphysics of twinning if you want to further in the discussion period. But the point being is, is, is George and Tollefsen and myself and others, you know, we have responses to Ford's argument, uh, from twinning. So- That's the argument. And as I said, it trades a lot, it leans very heavily on this notion of potentiality. So I'm just gonna conclude here, this is my last couple slides, on what we mean by this notion of potentiality. And the f- foundational difference we need to draw is between what we can call an active potentiality and a passive potentiality. A passive potentiality is the potential you have to be acted upon. you have the passive potentiality, to be a professor, right? So go back to my example of Nick wanting to be a moral theology professor. he could, but guess what? He has to apply for jobs. There has to be jobs available. He has to apply for them, and he has to get offered one, and then he has to accept it, right? A lot of things, including lots of things, I know, so scary, outside of Nick's control are necessary for him to actualize his potential to become a theology prof- moral theology professor. It's there, right? He has a potential that I don't have. I don't have any potential to be a moral theology professor because A, I'm a philosopher, not theologian, right? Um, I'd have to go back to school and kinda start from scratch, right? but again, it's still in that realm of passive potentiality. But active potentiality is something that, again, is present within the being itself. It's part of its internal developmental drive. So again, you know, a zygote, right, a fertilized ovum certainly is not self-aware, not thinking rationally, not willing anything, not engaging in social relationships with others. But it has within itself everything it needs to develop itself. Now, big, huge qualification on that, as I mentioned, lest, lest we forget, there is a whole another person involved here, and that person's providing a lot to allow that zygote, later embryo and fetus, to develop its potential, right? Without the uterus, and again, there's a whole debate now about ectogenesis and artificial wombs and so on, but whether we're talking about the natural womb that a, a human mother provides or the artificial womb that we may soon have available for human beings, you still need something. You need an external supportive environment for that embryo, later fetus, to be able to actualize its potential. It's not just doing it completely on its own, but it is an internal drive it has to develop itself. So couple, you know, representative quotations here. first of all, how are embryos and fetuses distinguished from sperm and eggs? Aquinas says,"Things are always in potentiality to actuality when they can be reduced to actuality by their proper active principle." With nothing external hindering them. However, seed, by which he means, you know, in his case, semen and menstrual blood, or we'd say sperm and ovum, is not yet such, for it must be by many changes that an animal comes from it. But when by its proper active principle, namely something actually existing, it can already become such, it is then already in potentiality. Then from Aristotle, when we are dealing with definite and ordered products of nature, we must not say that each is of a certain quality because it becomes so, rather that they become so and so because they are so and so. For the process of becoming attends upon being, as for the sake of being, not vice versa. Human embryos become fully actualized human persons because they are already human persons, right? Again, this quotation is not referring to that subject matter, but based on this, that's how I and others argue that you have this relevant potential as part of, uh, embryos and fetuses. And then finally, I won't read this whole quotation, you can read it yourselves, but I'm just gonna close on why does all this morally matter? An important takeaway whenever I give lectures like this, and I drill this in my students all the time, is metaphysics informs, but doesn't dictate the ethics, right? You could accept everything that I just said, and I, I welcome those who don't accept it. Um, but you could accept everything that I just said and agree with Thomas, like myself, who say that rational ensoulment happens at conception, and that embryos and fetuses are therefore human... You know, fit the Boethian definition of personhood, they are human persons, and say,"Yeah, but didn't Judith Jarvis Thomson tell us that even if fetuses are persons," this is a very famous defense of abortion from nineteen seventy-three,"that even if fetuses and embryos are persons, that no one has the right to use another's body, and that therefore a woman has a right to terminate a pregnancy?" Sure. I mean, I'm not gonna get into, you know, Thomson's argument unless you all wanna go there, but the point is, is that's an argument that has to be taken into account, right? It may, it may be a good argument, it may be a bad argument. But in other words, just because we may have it metaphysically established by rational argumentation when personhood begins, there's still a whole another set of arguments we have to have about ethically, morally, how we ought to treat these entities. But I do close with this slide from Jim Stone on, again, why potentiality morally matters. That the basic upshot being when you do have beings that have this internal drive to develop themselves, to manifest their relevant potentialities of self-consciousness, rational thought, volition, social relationships, that is good For us to assist that, right? In, in Thomistic Aristotelianism, being and goodness are commensurate with each other. So as we assist beings to fully actualize their potentials, we are increasing their flourishing, we are increasing their goodness. And whether it's a strict moral duty or it's simply a good thing to do, at the very least, we ought not to interfere directly with that unfolding developmental process, right? and that's the way at l- least that Stone and others like myself would ground the moral impermissibility of abortion. Uh, so it's not just the metaphysics. You have to add on some of that, uh, ethical argument as well. So with that, I will end, and I really thank you for y- your patience and your attention. I know it's kind of a long detailed lecture. Lots of things we can go back to. but yeah, I think we got about twenty minutes or so for some discussion, so thank you all very much. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 50:08

All right, I'll run down with the mic. Hold on.

Speaker 3 50:14

thank you so much. This was really, really interesting. I was hoping you could say a little bit more about, on, on your view of when ensoulment happens, what the right kind of matter needs to be.

Speaker 50:24

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3 50:24

Cause it seems like all the parties in the dispute agree, you know, a, a rational soul can't come to inform a bit of a chunk of plastic, for instance. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4 50:32

Uh,

Speaker 3 50:32

and so it seems like, the, the sperm and the egg have to themselves be the right kind of matter to receive a rational soul.

Speaker 4 50:40

Yep.

Speaker 3 50:40

but then there's sort of a question of like what, what do you have to be like in and of yourself in order to be the right kind of matter- Mm-hmm for a rational soul, especially since there can be embryos with, say, significant chromosomal deficiencies. Yeah. Right? So the matter could be very different, and we still think a, a human organism comes to be. So it, it seems like there could be serious deficiencies in like the sperm and egg, and yet still it would be sufficient. So I was just interested- Yeah in what you thought sufficiency takes.

Speaker 2 51:05

Yeah. No, thanks. Great question. So, first thing I'll say is, for the most part, it does, you know, for me, come to the genetic identity and also all the extra nuclear material that's in the zygote, you know, for that zygote to be able to develop itself. some p- some people who are not trained in, in Aristotelianism or Thomistic metaphysics have sometimes liked to say that,"Oh, the form or the soul is the DNA." No, not really. It may be th- DNA, though, can be the way by which that form is expressing its organizing powers and, and grounding that intrinsic act of potentiality. so the DNA is largely what grounds it. But again, I just wanna be clear, I'm not saying that form or soul is the DNA, right? however, as you pointed out- There can be genetic-based, conditions, abnormalities where you can end up with an embryo or fetus who may never develop, right, the powers of self-consciousness, rational thought, autonomous volition. By the way, I think all the-- those things come in a package. So if you have one, you have all of them. It's not like,"Oh, I'm self-conscious, but I'm not rational," right? Or,"I'm rational, but I have no free will." No, it's they all kind of come together in a package. Anyways, two things. One, in most and potentially all cases where this happens, these conditions are, A, do not lead to a complete absence of these qualities. Right? They may be diminished in various ways, right? Down syndrome, for example, again manifests in a whole spectrum of ways. But in the most, you know, significant cases of cognitive disability, there's often at least a minimal level of self-awareness and capacity for some degree of rational thought and, and, and volition. It just may not be to the same level as you sitting there, right? So it's there, right? The, the, the potential and even the actualization is there. And then even in cases where it may be completely absent, in a lot of those cases, the cause is something external to the embryo or fetus as it was developing. So the most severe form of this would be anencephaly. Anencephaly is a condition where the cerebrum does not form. The neural tube doesn't close early in gestation. You don't get-- You get the lower parts of the brain. So an anencephalic infant can... They're, they're, they breathe on their own, their heart's beating, but there's no possibility of any degree of thought, of consciousness. We don't fully understand all the causes of anencephaly. We know that one c-contributing factor is a lack of folic acid, in, in the maternal diet that causes the neural tube not to fully close. Well, that's an environmental condition. Doesn't say anything about whether that intrinsic potential is there. Now, some Thomists, a lot of them actually, would argue that rational ensoulment, being a person, a human person at least, goes hand in hand with being a genetically human being. I actually disagree with that. Like I said, the genes are kind of the important grounding factor here. But, and I wanna be clear, we have no evidence that these types of entities actually exist, but I think it's at least theoretically possible that you could have an anencephalic fetus or infant, once they're born, that the cause is genetic, that the cause was there ab initio, from the very beginning. The-- Again, they're otherwise human But because, you know, you could bathe them in folic acid, there's no possibility they could ever develop a brain capable of supporting self-conscious, rational thought and volition. I would argue that that's a genetically human being, and I'm sure, you know, we ought to treat it with some degree of more respect as a result, but it's not a rational animal'cause that intrinsic act of potentiality was never present. But like I said, I don't know if that's, if such an entity even ever exists in reality. But at least my view would op- would, would have that phi- that philosophical possibility being open. But yeah, when we're talking about persons with various cognitive deficiencies and so on, there's, to me, there's no grounding for saying that they l- they lack a soul. Oh, yes.

Speaker 4 55:42

so my question is, do you think that ethically...

Speaker 6 55:48

Do, do you think that ethically, if you define, uh, human life as ability or presence of rationality, would it make sense that, to say that, okay, a person who's more rational has more value to their life connected than, like, a person who's less rational? If you say that, like, okay, there's exists some cutoff point where, uh, from that cutoff point, everybody's rational, everybody's, like, equally, uh, like, let's say, let's say it's, like, the mirror test, right?

Speaker 4 56:14

Uh-huh.

Speaker 6 56:14

Imagine, like, I come up, two weeks later I come up with some test that, like, says the person is rational, two days earlier before the mirror test, and it includes some, like, other animals, right? Would that, like... Imagine it, it's a dog that's been included in rationality then. Ooh. Would then allo- would that then allow for, equal sentence for a person who puts down a dog versus a person who kills a person? I feel like there's a lot of, uh, moral ambiguity that's, is being started with, uh, the definition as, like, a range of rationality.

Speaker 2 56:44

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So again, and I only brought the mirror test to, to demonstrate how a performance theorist might draw the line at, again, kind of the most morally conservative position of being, like, like you said, two and a half, three months post-birth. Which again, no Thomist is, you know, accepting that criteria. Because again, for all of us, it's, the, the question is not what can this being do, human being, canine being, feline being. It is what kind of being are they, right? And how we know what kind of being they are is typically by observing what they do actually do and then understanding as we learn more and more about science what genetic and other conditions are, need to be present for them to have that, again, intrinsic act of potential to develop those capacities, those functions. The moral value, to go back to Stone's, quotation that I ended with, tracks with being the kind of being that has these potentials. It doesn't track with any degree of how you actualize them, right? So in terms of basic human rights, basic rights of persons, everyone has them equally if you are this kind of being, if you are a rational animal. And if, for example, this is an example that Michael Tooley brings up, what if we invented a drug someday where we could inject a k- a, a kitten, and nine months later that kitten becomes self-conscious? Well, I would say, well, the moment you've injected that kitten, you've endowed it with that intrinsic act of potential. And if we were to kill the kitten then, and I'm against killing kittens in general, I, I foster through a no-kill shelter. But while I'm against killing kittens in general, I don't think killing a kitten is killing a person until you've injected it, right? Tooley doesn't think you're killing a person until that, that kitten has reached that nine months of development and can actually now think I thoughts. But I think once you've injected it with this magic serum, that kitten is now on its own internal developmental track to develop it. It is now a kind of being that, again, Aristotle calls rational animal. To me, it doesn't matter that it's biologically feline or biologically canine, or biologically Homo sapiens, right? What matters is, does it have within it structurally, genetically what's necessary for it to develop? So again, going back to, like, human beings who have severe cognitive deficiencies and so on, again, they have the same basic rights all of us do. Now, of course, the way we all manifest our cognitive and other abilities can then lead to whether certain other rights get conferred, right? you don't have a right to vote until you reach a certain level of, of maturity, right? That even a lot of voters lack. But you know, point being is that, you know, we, you know, there are all sorts of other rights and, and, and so on that we enjoy as mature human beings that we don't have when we're immature human beings. But of course, when it comes to the basic rights, like the right to life and so on, as long as you've reached that baseline, it doesn't matter from there how well you exercise your potential. Your value, your fundamental dignity, it's a word I h- really haven't used tonight, but that's how I would put it, your fundamental dignity is already present there. Does that... Okay.

Speaker 4 1:00:14

Thank you.

Speaker 2 1:00:14

Yeah. Professor Porter. Now I'm really gonna start sweating.

Speaker 7 1:00:21

No, don't, don't be silly. Uh, yeah, thank you so much, Professor Abrul, for a really stimulating and, and, uh, I, I think a really comprehensive talk. You know, you, you really helped us to cover the ground. So So I'm a Thomist of the first persuasion. Mm-hmm. Uh, I think Aquinas basically got it right the first time. Mm-hmm. A-and, and here's why. So when you talk about Thomistic hylomorphism, you're commit... Wait a minute. There we go. Yeah,

Speaker 4 1:00:50

yeah.

Speaker 7 1:00:50

Yeah. Okay. So when you talk, when, when, when Aquinas defends hylomorphism, uh, uh, Aristotelian and then Thomistic hylomorphism, he's defending a claim according to which the soul is the form of the actually existing body.

Speaker 4 1:01:03

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 7 1:01:04

Uh, even it, a-and, and that's why you have the requirement that the body as it actually exists has a certain kind of structural potential for rational functioning. It doesn't have to do any rational functioning.

Speaker 4 1:01:15

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 7 1:01:16

It just has to be the body capable of it. Because with Aristotle, he's going to say the soul is the first act of a living organism. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then you compare that to a view according to which what's essential is to have, uh, and I'm not sure I'm gonna get the phrasing right, but, but it, your, your view, intrinsic potential.

Speaker 4 1:01:35

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 7 1:01:36

So I guess the counter question to that would be, okay, but then what is this, what, what is the soul doing in this case?

Speaker 4 1:01:42

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 7 1:01:42

You have a soul which is expressed through rational functioning in forming a body, say a zygote or an early conceptus, which does not have even the rudimentary structural forms necessary to carry out rational functioning.

Speaker 4 1:01:55

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 7 1:01:56

It seems that any answer you give to that is going to flip you back into dualism.

Speaker 4 1:02:00

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 7 1:02:00

because if you say,"Okay, well, what the soul is doing is it's directing the whole process of life," well, you say, uh, then I'm, I'm g- I'm gonna come back and say,"Okay, so the soul is e- is exercising efficient causality on its body."

Speaker 2 1:02:12

Mm.

Speaker 7 1:02:13

And that means, uh, in, on, in Aquinas's terms, and I think in j- in any metaphysical terms, the, it cannot be then identical as one substance with the body.

Speaker 2 1:02:22

Right.

Speaker 7 1:02:23

So that, that's my primary worry, that if you go to your view, you're going to go, be led back to the dualism that we all want to get away from.

Speaker 2 1:02:31

Yep.

Speaker 7 1:02:32

Parenthetical question, when you say that the zygote has everything within it to develop intrinsically into the human person, I'm wondering if you're meaning here to deny the doctrine of the, of the infusion of the soul by God.

Speaker 2 1:02:44

Oh, yeah. Uh, so great set of que-

Speaker 7 1:02:46

Yeah, I thought I'd throw that in for fun.

Speaker 2 1:02:48

Yeah. Well, so I'll, I'll start with the last one first, not because any of these questions are easy, but I think I'll just, I can quickly discharge the f- the latter one with, with, Is at least no, I'm not, I'm not denying that. y- as you, uh, as you well know, and others in this room probably are aware, there, there is an internal debate among contemporary Thomists about whether Aquinas's arguments still hold up philosophically that it is necessary for God to directly create each individual rational soul in each human body at, in whatever time. Aquinas is very clear that that is the case, and he has g- you know, arguments for that. there are some Uh, Thomists who f- who buy into, something I was almost gonna talk about tonight, but clearly didn't have time to, uh, what's called emergent dualism, the idea that the soul emerges out of the body as it organizes itself. and that includes the soul as a, uh, you know, as a thinking, rational, capacities. so clearly that's not Aquinas's view. and like I said, there's a debate. I'm kind of agnostic on that. For, for the record, at least in everything I've published so far, I, I have affirmed Aquinas's view, and I... And it's not the question of, you know, what causes the soul to in- inform the body. It's again, under what metaphysical criteria would God infuse? I was actually in a Facebook debate with someone on a Thomism discussion group recently who was trying to argue, that AIs could never be rationally ensouled. Yeah. And, and again, I'm not-- I don't have an... I'm agnostic about the AI question too. But the point, I, I just made the point that there's no reason that God couldn't, that an... if an AI were, you know, suitably, if, you know, here the matter we're talking about is code, not physical matter, but it's code. If the code were suitably organized to instantiate self-consciousness and rational thought, then, you know, God, in, in the way that God ordered the universe, there's no reason for God not to infuse a rational soul. Aquinas himself had to deal with this question when, it was put to him, why... how can God infuse rational souls into children produced through sin, like fornication or rape or adultery? And he's like, basically, anytime you have suitably organized matter, God's gonna cooperate with that natural process. Even if the process started through a sinful act, God's not cooperating with the sin, God is cooperating with, with the process. Anyways, so that was the first part. the... So one thing I'll just make clear, I think that all of these three Thomistic views that I've outlined are all, you know, philosophically defensible. I think they're all metaphysically coherent within Aquinas's metaphysics. the thing I would say is, again, where it comes down to is, first of all, what we mean by potentiality, right? That's the primary difference between, like, myself and Pasnau, right? Pasnau limits it to having this capacity in hand, and I, and I've, and I think I'm following Aristotle on this, have a more expansive notion of potentiality that allows to be present earlier in embryonic development. So that's just a point where we're just at loggerheads, right? But this challenge that Professor Porter puts that, that a view like mine would entail this k- more kind of dualism, yeah, I, I, I do need to respond to that, and I think my, my response would be something l- like this. It would be Well, first of all, what one thing we'll, we would agree on is the soul c- is, can never, not in any way be considered as the efficient cause of the body, right? The soul is the formal cause. And again, we typically understand the formal cause to be present when something exists, typically in its completed actualized form. You know, part of the problem here, and, and I know Professor Ford is not making this error, but a lot of people get very confused because unfortunately, Aristotle, and Aquinas as well, uses as their illustrative examples a lot of everyday things that we're familiar with, and a lot of them are artifacts, things like houses, right? Well, of course, a house doesn't exist when it's only half built, right? You can only have a house when it's... the structure is fully present that you can actually live in it and be sheltered from the rain and the weather and so on and lake-effect snow. right? That's when you have a house. But a house, unlike a, an organism, is not something that develops, right, and has, again, these internal drives of development. So, so, again, we all are agreeing that the soul has to be understood again as the formal cause of the body. That means it can only be present when the body is suitably organized, and that suitable organization is... What makes the body suitably organized is it can instantiate at le- you know, at the level of a capacity or potentially, uh, whatever term we wanna use, for the soul to exercise its powers. Now, here's the thing I haven't said yet. What are the soul's powers? Well, again, Aquinas believes in the unicity of substantial form, right? There's only one soul informing this body right now. I don't have a vegetative soul and a sensitive soul and a rational soul, right? And so in that, in that delayed hominization picture, Aquinas says the... what happens is that the embryo and the fetus and so on has to go through stages where you, you have one type of substance, a merely living, and then that substance is destroyed, right? We don't see it as a destruction because it's not like something dies in the traditional sense, but that living thing has to cease to exist, and then a new thing comes to exist, the animal. Then at later point, that animal ceases to exist, and now you have the rational ensouled animal. So a question comes up, what is driving all that change? What is keeping... Why, why is that merely living embryo developed to its own destruction, and then that sentient animal continue to develop to its own destruction, right? Aquinas' answer is it's nothing intrinsic to the embryo fetus. It is the formative, what he calls the virtus formativa, this formative power transmitted through the male semen That is still present, even still present as you're sitting here today, that this formative power inherited through your father, this is also how Aquinas grounds original sin, but that's a whole theological debate I'm not equipped to, to address. But the idea is like, what's the same? What's transmitted? What links you most directly to your generative parents? Through your father, it is this formative power by- which drives your development even when you did not yet exist. So my counter-challenge to, to Professor Porter and Pro- Professor Pasnau, and, and to be honest, it's been, it's been a long time since I've looked at Bob's actual argument, which is, to be honest, quite short, it's not fully developed, is what's replacing that virtus formativa? Unless we're still believing in that, and maybe we do. Maybe metaphysically we have to say that, that that's a thing that exists. If not, then we need some other explanation for what is driving that developmental process. And if the answer is not the virtus formativa, then it seems a likely candidate is the genetic program of the embryo, which again, is there at conception. And that then brings us back to, well, isn't that grounding now the embryo's intrinsic potentiality to develop itself? So to me, that's-- that'd be my argumentative pushback, respectfully on, on why I think my view still fits within the realm of formal causality.'cause yeah, we, we have to explain the development. That's-- I think that's the explanandum, right?

Speaker 4 1:10:54

Maybe time for one more question. Yeah.

Speaker 5 1:11:05

I'll just speak really loud- Yeah save you a couple of steps. But, um, I can remember reading a, a passage in Maximus the Confessor- Mm who was dealing with some theory of delayed hominization. I don't know how it got to him, what transmission was, but, he just throws it out immediately and says:"How can it be that a man would beget a plant?" so I'm just wondering in Aquinas's view w-with these, with this idea of substantial change happening with the vegetative, soul, the sentient soul, and the rational soul all in, prenatal development. Would that also be called a, a special change from, from one type of organism to another or, or how, how would you respond to Maximus' kind of, start, assertion or I guess, marvel at, at the idea, how can a man beget a plant?

Speaker 2 1:12:01

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean- Again, I, I-- th-there's an aspect of Maximus' view that is even echoed in, in the way the church often speaks about it.'Cause a-again, to be clear, the Catholic Church has no definitive position on when a human person first comes into existence. Pr-Professor Porter's view, my view, Ford's view, all are in line with what the, the church says. You, you can be a, a philosopher, theologian who holds any of these positions. thanks to the Council of Vienna, you have to, you have to be a hylomorphist but in terms of responding to this question. Nevertheless, in arguing for the sort of reasonability of ensoulment at conception and at the very least using the precautionary principle, treating embryos as if with the dignity of persons, even if we can't fully demonstrate rationally that they're not. One of the things that, that is said in Donum Vitae, a nineteen eighty-seven document about this, is that, yes, how could something produced through the process of human generation not itself be human? Now again, that trades a lot on the, on the sort of locus of moral status being the human biological, you know, organism. Which again, I think all living human organisms are rational animals, therefore are rational ensouled persons. But one issue with, with that way of, of, of approaching it is it runs up against this charge from Peter Singer, who I m-for the most part disagree with, but I do take seriously his charge of speciesism, the idea of privileging being a member of the biological species Homo sapiens as if that alone is enough to ground our moral status, right? because again, I watch a lot of Star Trek, so I'm open to the idea of there being non-human species out there that fit the criteria of being rational animals. So one thing to say to Maximus is to say, is to say,"No, there is the possibility of, of the process of human generation through some sort of accident resulting in something that isn't metaphysically, morally speaking, human." But again, as I said, I don't know if that ever happens, and I think the church is right in its wisdom to say that regardless of what we think the product of conception is, we should treat all products of human conception with the dignity of persons, right? in terms of what Aquinas would say to that is he would probably say, well, Maximus is being a bit cheeky, to use the British term, in saying that, that man begets a plant. Because no, the, the human member, even on Aquinas's view, even on Pat's, now Professor Porter's view, that's reductive to call it a plant, right? That's like calling someone in an irreversible coma a vegetable, right? No. They're still human. It's just a question of whether being genetically human, being biologically human, is enough to be metaphysically, ontologically, and souled rational animal. So that would be a kind of more serious response to Maximus.

Speaker 1:15:24

Let's thank Professor Eberl for his talk.