1. Why Potentiality Does Not Matter: A Reply to Stone
2. Why Potentiality Matters
3. Self-awareness is a member of a collection of intrinsic goods essentially involving consciousness, which adult human animals enjoy. Others include language use, social interactions, and moral stature. Pleasure is another conscious good. These are not valuable because they are desired; they are desired because they are valuable.
4. The sentence ‘The infant has an interest in continued life’ might be taken to mean that the infant has an active psychological interest in continued life, like her later interest in astronomy. However, the fact that X has an active psychological interest in having A does not entail that having A is in his interest; for example, the fact that X has an active interest in trying crack does not entail that it is in his interest to do so. The construction ‘It is in X's interest to have A’ is what entails that having A benefits X. As ‘S has an interest in continued life’ can be read the first way, there is a tempting fallacy of equivocation: as it is obviously false that an infant has an (active psychological) interest in continued life, it follows immediately that continued life is not in her interest. Hence painless death is no harm. Also, the equivocation leads swiftly to the conclusion that without active psychological interests there can be no benefits or harms. Conversation with philosophers who deny that infants have a right to life leads me to fear that they commit it.
5. Fisher. writes: ‘Stone implies that appeal to a special developmental obligation is the only plausible way to ground our concern to infants. However, an “actualist” can account for a right of babies not to be painlessly killed by appeal to the properties and capacities that even a young infant already has’ (263, n. 5). That is it. How I wish that Fisher had gone on to say what those properties are, or hinted at how this actualist account might go! Of course,myaccount is actualist: the right of a baby not to be killed painlessly is grounded entirely in properties shealreadyhas. For she already has the property that it is in her interest to go on living— that is an actual property, not a potential one— and this, in turn, is grounded in a property her genetic code already has, namely, that it determines a developmental path leading to self-awareness, social interactions, the possibility of moral stature for her if she follows it to the end. The infant already has the property of having a genetic code that does this. Fisher must have in mind an actualist accountotherthan mine. The actualist/potentialist distinction is badly drawn. Further, I deny that we have a ‘special developmental obligation’ to infants: it is just that we owe it to them to look out for their interests.