Thank you, Aditya Pandey, for an important and enduring question.
We have here two distinct but intimately related questions. The first question really concerns whether we know when life begins, while the second pits life against body autonomy. Both require a substantial answer to the question of what constitutes life. I will therefore briefly explore this overarching question, before providing tentative answers to the two questions directly.
What is life? In short, we don’t know. The concept of life is a notoriously difficult one to pin down, even within the very scientific disciplines that purport to study it. This would not be such a difficulty for our present purposes if we had a suitable concept ready for deployment in ordinary… life. But I do not think this is the case. I will not try to convince you of this here; simply try doing a little armchair philosophy of your own. Investigate your own phenomenology, try to discern what your concept of life consists in. Alternatively, come up with some definitions and see how the counterexamples roll in. If you think you have something good, leave it in a comment below and be prepared to be counterexampled to oblivion.
This about spells the end for any conclusive answer to the first question regarding when life begins. In order to make this kind of subtle distinction, on the very boundary of life and non-life, the concept we use had better be clear, distinct, and uncontroversial enough that our determination has some clout in an argument for or against abortion. It is not. However, I do believe that this observation can be deployed as a partial, albeit pessimistic explanation for the divisive nature of the debate surrounding abortion. If the concept of life is not well defined, if we all end up with subtly distinct conceptions of life, this can result in quite strongly held views on abortion. If two people disagree about whether one and the same embryo is alive, everything else being equal – for instance, they both believe life ought to be preserved and prioritised over body autonomy – they will nonetheless disagree. Further, I think this disagreement is irresolvable given the lack of clarity around the concept of life.
Perhaps we disagree about whether life ought to be prioritised over body autonomy. Luckily, when approaching this question, I think we can get by with our vague ordinary concept of life. We just need to think of an agreed-upon form of life – an adult, for instance – to probe our intuitions on the topic. Judith Thomson does just this, inviting us to consider whether we would have the right to remove a full-grown man who had been grafted to us for nine months in order to save his life. She concludes that we do, indicating that there are limits on the right to life that are superseded by the right to body autonomy. Again, I will not retrace the many debates surrounding this topic. Instead, I invite the reader to consider whether this applies to the case of abortion, perhaps due to an exceptional kind of life or non-life that we attribute to an unborn human.
What do you think? What makes something alive? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: The fetus in the womb, a sketch by Leonardo Da Vinci (c. 1511)
I did a BA in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick, an MPhil in Philosophy at Warwick and am about to start a PhD in Philosophy at… Warwick. My primary research interests are the philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind and the ontology of concepts (basically I want to know what concepts are). Immanuel Kant is the source of much inspiration for me. My views on cognition are overtly Kantian and I’m pretty sure he solved the whole idealism thing with transcendental idealism, the only sensible position one can take.