Finessing the Truth

At his Human Exceptionalism blog at NR, Wesley Smith is bothered by newly proposed legislation in South Carolina that would declare newly conceived human beings to be persons under the law. Of it he says:

Well-intentioned legislation has been filed in South Carolina to try and establish "personhood" as beginning at fertilization. I don’t prefer that approach. I think what matters is humanhood. If an organism is human, certain rights attach, regardless of "personhood" – a philosophical concept being changed in bioethical and ideological circles as requiring self-awareness or other such capacities. In other words, personhood is subjective, whereas humanhood is more objective.

Except that they aren't. In traditional Catholic thought, there is no distinction between 'human being' and 'person.' Furthermore, those "bioethical and ideological circles" deny personhood to certain obviously human entities because they also deny that entity's "humanhood." They are remarkably deft (in their own minds) at finessing either concept at a moment's notice, and at their convenience.


Certain Catholic writers such Andrew Greil and William May agree with Smith as to what those circles are up to regarding the concept of 'person.' Says Greil:

It is essential to understand the concept of personhood as an ontological concept, and not a functional concept...The notion of person, is therefore a word about man's being. Man is a person because of who he is, because of his being what he is, not because of what he is capable of doing or becoming, because of what functions, mental, psychological, biological, etc. he is capable of performing...Insidiously, when many moderns use the word "person," they have a functional concept in mind...Such a functional conception of personhood is convenient when you want to dispose of men, women, or children under color of morality.

Likewise, William May:

Many contemporary authors prominent in bioethical circles distinguish sharply between being a human being and being a human person. These authors claim that for an entity to be regarded as a person, it must have developed at least incipiently exercisable cognitive capacities or abilities. Perhaps the most prominent advocates of this anthropology, however differently each articulates it in specifying the requisite abilities, are Peter Singer and Michael Tooley...

In appealing to Scripture and Catholic (and largely Christian, as far as I know) tradition on the correct understanding of 'person,' May says:

The human body reveals a human person...In this understanding of the human person no distinction is made between a human being and a human person. All human beings are persons. Being a human being, therefore, has crucial moral significance inasmuch as a person surpasses in value the entire material universe and is never to be considered as a mere means or object of use but is rather the kind of entity to whom the only adequate response is love.

Since this understanding is true, it is not clear to me why Smith doesn't want to make the argument, especially since, as I have pointed out, the concept of "humanhood" will prove equally malleable. Those creatures to whom the circles grant full humanhood will also find themselves the beneficiaries of personhood.

Well, it turns out that he doesn't want to argue it because this quibble over personhood and humanhood is not his real concern. As he says, "That point aside," what really bothers him is that the South Carolina legislation - "at least as the Establishment Clause is currently interpreted" - amounts to an establishment of religion. But it's not a matter merely of the Clause being interpreted in a certain way. It is also the case that Smith shares this interpretation. He admits it toward the end. He believes it because the legislation relies for its definition of 'person' on the Declaration's acknowledgement that "all persons are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," and that South Carolina's "General Assembly acknowledges personhood is God-given, as all men are created in the image of God."

To which Smith responds that "...to declare that a law is explicitly based on a religious belief, e.g., that 'personhood is God-given' and that 'all men are created in the image of God,' is unquestionably to turn the law into the establishment of religion..." To which I say, "No it does not." There is no requirement in the law that any man sign up for a particular religion, attend a particular church, or believe a particular thing, upon which the penalty for failure to comply with any one of these shall end in a curtailment of his civil rights. It simply isn't there. The legislation amounts to a commandment in the form of a prohibition: "Thou shalt not kill the baby. The human baby, body and soul, who is in fact a person."

What these legislators know that Smith doesn't, or doesn't wish to acknowledge, is that the country's origins are indeed Christian; that a rather varied but mostly Protestant form of it was the cultural womb of our constitutional birth. There is nothing "unconstitutional" about this constitutional republic acknowledging where it came from, and thereby preferring one religious foundation to all others.

These legislators also know that to engage their enemies in purely secluar debate is a thankless and never-ending task, that this diabolical twisting of the meaning of "person" or "human being" can take any number of nightmarish forms, each worse than the last, and that in the end is nothing more than a direct assault on the God who made us and the morality derived from our admitting this simple fact. And so they've decided to throw God back into the mix, to meet the juggernaut head-on. It might be possible to arrive at a truly human moral anthropology by directly and honestly observing the nature of things. But I'm sceptical. It's worked so well so far, don't you think?

If Smith thinks that the higher courts, or the people themselves voting in referendum, won't strike down this legislation even if its precepts are rendered in purely secular terms, then we're living in different countries. But Smith is probably right that the legislation as written won't work. Something similar recently failed to pass muster even in Mississippi. It won't fail because it's not true, or because it's unconstitutional. It will fail because so many Christians (and believers of other sorts) have had their vision corrupted by the allure of that functionalist heresy mentioned above. They want to reserve the right to kill the baby on occasion. We never know when a terrible circumstance might arise in which we'll find it necessary to call the baby something other than what it is. But neither do I see how we'll repair this by denying the truth: that we come from God, that He has revealed Himself to us, and that we must return to Him. And which I'd thought we were commanded to proclaim in season and out. Apart from this, what will irrevocably bind us to each other, and for how long will the non-functional innocents among us remain safe from attack?

We've already crossed that Rubicon, haven't we?

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Comments:

5 Responses to Finessing the Truth

Zippy says:
March 2, 2013 at 4:57 pm (Edit)
Et tu, Wesley?

William Luse says:
March 2, 2013 at 9:13 pm (Edit)
I’m not sure it’s so much an et tu, as in a betrayal, as that he’s simply steeped in the modern, liberal understanding of “establishment”, which concept I consider pure crap.

Lydia says:
March 10, 2013 at 2:19 am (Edit)
Smith is a liberal by his own statement. He’s always said that. One might call him a liberal who, on some issues, has been mugged by reality. His training is as a lawyer, and so most of his declarations about constitutionality will, more’s the pity, be those of a lawyer taught to believe (wrongly) that what the SCOTUS says the Constitution means is what the Constitution means. He has said as much in a comments thread a few years ago. At times one sees a tension in his writings and he will criticize SCOTUS rulings, but for the most part, when there is a large body of precedent, he’ll use a word like “unconstitutional” as unconscious shorthand for “unconstitutional according to the existing and controlling body of precedent.” Typical lawyer behavior. It isn’t the way I think and talk, but then, on matters of con law, I’m a radical. Smith isn’t.

On the personhood issue I think he’s worried unnecessarily that the authors of the amendment are conceding something or “getting in over their heads” or something, but I don’t think he’s betraying anything. When he says that there should only be humanhood, I take him to be saying pretty much the same thing that you are saying when you declare that personhood and humanhood should always come together. He’s worried about the term “personhood” because so much mischief has been done with it by the wrong people, so he fears that the legislature was somehow playing into their hands.

William Luse says:
March 10, 2013 at 9:43 am (Edit)
That’s interesting info in your 1st paragraph. Some of it sounds vaguely familiar, as though you may have mentioned it at least in passing in prior correspondence, but that he’s “a liberal by his own statement. He’s always said that,” I did not know. Or at least don’t recall. ‘Twould be interesting to know where he stands on issues other than the life issues. But that’s a curiosity he probably won’t be willing to satisfy.

He’s worried about the term “personhood” because so much mischief has been done with it by the wrong people..

Well, he’s right, of course. I just think his arguments might benefit from recognizing that mischief is done to that word only because it’s a legal sock puppet (I remember that phrase you taught me) for a faulty understanding of humanhood, and that separating the two is a basic philosophical error. If I recall, it was Justice Blackmun’s agonized inability to define when human life begins that led to a whole class of people being declared nonpersons.

Lydia says:
March 10, 2013 at 1:18 pm (Edit)
It occurred to me much later last night that, *as* a lawyer, Smith should recognize the importance of personhood as a legal concept. The fourteenth amendment and all of that. Obviously what this law is attempting to do is to extend protections accorded in law to persons to the unborn. “Personhood” was an important legal term long before the bioethicists got hold of it.

I also thought up (lying awake trying to get over Daylight Savings Time) a rather amusing little comedy riff on law school graduates being rendered incapable of criticizing the Supreme Court, but I’ll have to save that for another time, as I’m simultaneously trying to wake up and get to church.