...Versus a Four-Year Old Child

I want to thank everyone who commented on my query of when "life" begins. I received many erudite responses, all of which helped clarify the position in my eyes. I am sufficiently convinced to take as a provisional position that a fetus is endowed with moral personhood at the commencement of higher brain activity. This seems like a suitable brightline, and is intellectually coherent as it seems to actually correspond to a feature we feel importantly distinguishes humans from other creatures. This does raise interesting questions about the non-health-related abortion of a fetus whose higher-brain function has begun (I gather this happens around the 3rd trimester). I think some commenters were too glib in saying that even these abortions should be left entirely between a women and her doctor, but it's a tough issue. I also want to note a provocative argument made by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson (cited by Lindsay Beyerstein):

In a famous paper the pro-choice philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson assumes the full human rights of fetuses for the sake of argument and goes on to make a very strong argument for the permissibility of abortion. This is a radical view, even among pro-choicers. Normally we don't think that the right to bodily sovereignty entitles us to kill another person who is impinging intextricably upon your person but who is not directly threatening your life....[However,] Thompson doesn't say that the woman's right to control her own body simply overrides the fetus's right to life. Rather, she maintains that an innocent person's right to life doesn't include the right not to be killed if that person should inadvertently end up parasitizing another person's body against their will.

It's an interesting claim. But that's not what I want to go into right now.

What actually has been nagging at me is the example I gave to show why "life begins at conception" isn't really a viable position. I'm going to modify it slightly to provide some symmetry for the point I'm going to be making, but I don't think it really changes the base analysis:

If a fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you can only save a petri dish with three blastulae or a four-year old child, who do you save if all are equally persons?

The point of the question is that I'd clearly save the four-year old. And I would not feel the slightest bit guilty about it. By contrast, if the blastulae were equally "persons" to the child, I'd presumably be obligated to save the blastulae (there being more of them), and leave the child. I can't imagine any person with a soul actually doing that though.

The problem, though, is that on further reflection, the argument may prove too much. Consider this modified scenario:

If a fire breaks out in a hospital and you can only save three newly born, 5-week old triplets, or a four-year old child, who do you save if all are equally persons?

Here's where the problem lies, because I'd still probably save the four year old. I'd feel incredibly guilty about it, but I cannot imagine I'd turn away from a child crying for help in the face of a few infants. I'm just guessing my visceral reaction here, but I really think I'd do it. However, I don't think that infants are not full moral human beings, and I don't think they can be generally deprived of their rights as persons.

At first, I was willing to chalk this up to my predisposition to linking moral personhood to enhanced brain activity--four-year olds top infants on that score. Problem number one with that approach is that it ruins my brightline--I dislike stupid people, but I definitely don't think they deserve fewer rights, so creating a sliding scale of protection linked to brain function is problematic. Problem number two is that the analogy falls apart in the face of the next scenario:

If a fire breaks out in an office building, and you can only save three fifty-year old accountants, or a four-year old child, who do you save if all are equally persons?

Uh-oh. Even here I can easily see myself saving the child. Again, with lots of guilty feelings, but that's my gut. Why is that? It's hard to think of a rational reason. I think that we have a deep-set aversion to letting children come to harm. It seems that at least part of that sentiment stems from the feeling that a child's gifts have not had time to develop, the potential they hold within them is still untapped. Oh God, the potential argument! I thought we got rid of that back in the last post, when responding to the point that a fetus was a "potential" human being. But, like a video game boss character, it has re-emerged from the dead, in far stronger form than when we last battled. Whereas the mere potential of a fetus to become a human being does not intuitively drive me to recognize its full rights as a person, the potential of a toddler to become a great poet or brilliant scientist leads me to give it considerably enhanced protection compared to other persons.

Of course we give additional protection to small children all the time, for a variety of reasons. But none seems particularly applicable here. Small children are comparatively more helpless than adults, but then, so are fetuses (and blastulae). Society has a special interest in developing the talents of its young, but generally "special interests" don't extend to letting many people die so that one can live. Nor is this a triage situation; the child is no more or less likely to survive the fire than the accountants, should you choose to rescue her.

I'm not even precisely sure how this relates back to the abortion debate (if it does at all). But it's a moral dilemma that's been troubling me for some time. Am I entirely off-base here? Or is there some justification for my decision to over-protect four-year olds over other people?

What does this all mean?