How could a human individual not be a human person?

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o_mlly said:
Nevertheless, just as we must prudently infer the dignity of a human person from conception, we must also not prematurely infer their death in order to harvest their organs. A body harvested of its organs is dead, as I believe, are all the organs harvested, including a heart beating in a box. If the person is alive when the harvesting team takes control then the harvesting procedure itself becomes the cause of death.
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I absolutely agree.
 
O_mlly: I agree with all of your concerns. Working in medicine I’ve participated in making these kinds of determinations, though I do not pronounce as I’m not an MD. In many circumstances it is very difficult to determine if someone is alive or dead, and it becomes more complicated every year.

Discussions about personhood and the presence of the rational soul aren’t merely academic exercises for people in the medical field, and people unfamiliar with the kinds of discussions that go on within medicine might be surprised at how much overlap there actually is between theological/philosophical “ivory tower” work and discussions about life and death in a secular medical environment. While the soul itself typically isn’t discussed in obvious terms, the implications of the soul, even of a rational soul, and how life is defined and determined play a huge part in medical ethics.

For what it’s worth I agree with you that if a human body is still alive then the rational soul is present. While this may pose some serious moral dilemmas, I think in general the principle of double-effect can be applied to circumstances where the removal of a heart will save the life of another (incidentally, the principle of double-effect is discussed and utilized in secular medical ethics). The issue becomes murkier when we start talking about simply disconnecting people from machines and letting them die.
 
Ghosty1981 said:
in general the principle of double-effect can be applied to circumstances where the removal of a heart will save the life of another
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Can you articulate the reasoning that comes to that conclusion? While killing the near-dead is not the Intention of removal of the heart, such an act (remove heart) by its very nature, kills (assuming the person is alive). It would be condemned by virtue of moral object, would it not?
 
Adam fell asleep, and God procured/created Eve from his rib. Not sure a rib is an organ. But certainly the first donor 😉
 
Rau said:
Can you articulate the reasoning that comes to that conclusion? While killing the near-dead is not the Intention of removal of the heart, such an act (remove heart) by its very nature, kills (assuming the person is alive). It would be condemned by virtue of moral object, would it not?
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I don’t have a firmly settled reasoning for my inclination on this point. I would say that, since we are talking about a clinically dead donor, removal of the heart does not cause them to be “deader” than they were (brain death is actually considered more certain than cardiac death, as hearts can stop and restart, and people can live with completely artificial hearts) so we are not directly killing them in order to save the life of another; their status actually remains the same before and after the procedure. While I believe that the rational soul must be animating the body, it is generally accepted in Catholic moral teaching that brain death is a sufficient reason to treat the person as being actually dead. This may change with further reflection and advancements in technology, but I’m comfortable with the moral certainty that this is morally permissible as we understand things now.

Another point to consider is that this donor is, by definition, being kept alive (insofar as we call them alive) through extraordinary means. Such a person can be disconnected and allowed to die, and this is considered morally acceptable. If they can licitely be allowed to completely die (in the sense of absolute cessation of all biological life functions) simply by unplugging the ventilator, then I don’t see how removing their organs while they are “alive” in order to allow another person to continue living is morally more grave; if I can licitely disconnect the ventilator pumping oxygen, shouldn’t I be able to disconnect the heart that is pumping the oxygenated blood? I’m not morally obligated to replace the heart with a machine in order to prolong life in a clinically dead person, either.

Again, these aren’t firmly established reasons, more like reasoned inclinations. It is a subject that is always developing, and I’m not settled on any notion absolute certainty. I just need enough moral certainty to do my job, and at the moment I’m reasonably comfortable with the position I’ve laid out here.

How do you view and understand the removal of the heart in the death of the donor?
 
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Ghosty1981 said:
How do you view and understand the removal of the heart in the death of the donor?
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If your reasoning rests on a view about the alive vs dead state of a person who is brain dead, then I can’t really contribute as I don’t feel competent in that area. I wished only to note that a person not “dead”, but then caused to die by heart removal, has been killed by the surgeon’s hand.
 
Ghosty1981 said:
In many circumstances it is very difficult to determine if someone is alive or dead, and it becomes more complicated every year.
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I agree. Fear of being buried alive gave us the precautionary “wake,” and the “bell on the pinky” practices to insure the person to be buried was dead.
Ghosty1981 said:
While the soul itself typically isn’t discussed in obvious terms, the implications of the soul, even of a rational soul, and how life is defined and determined play a huge part in medical ethics.
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The longstanding Catholic tradition identifying the soul as the integrating principle of the body was adopted by the scientific community at the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research. However, the non-philosophical assignment of this immaterial form to a specific material body part, the brain, is the cause of much confusion. The resulting Dead Donor Rule is a self-contradiction inferring that a dead body possesses living body parts. Another thread for another day.
Ghosty1981 said:
For what it’s worth I agree with you that if a human body is still alive then the rational soul is present.
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I think that is the OP’s main question. How does a human person gain or lose personhood? My answer is the two phrases are synonymous, that is, all human individuals are human persons. The idea of a plurality of forms in the integration or disintegration (vegetative and animal to rational animal) errs in reducing what is to only what we can observe it to be. Action follows being, not vice versa.
 
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o_mlly said:
The longstanding Catholic tradition identifying the soul as the integrating principle of the body
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It was simply the prevailing “science” of the day. Pure Aristotle in fact…who also wrote on medicine - and not without humour.
 
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JimG said:
Every human being is by nature a human person. Personhood is not defined by abilities, but by the fact of being an individual of the human species.

Every human individual has his or her beginning as a unique human individual at conception.
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I concur, you are right
 
Rau said:
If your reasoning rests on a view about the alive vs dead state of a person who is brain dead, then I can’t really contribute as I don’t feel competent in that area. I wished only to note that a person not “dead”, but then caused to die by heart removal, has been killed by the surgeon’s hand.
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I understand, and for what it’s worth I agree that the point you are making is important. For now I am comfortable with the Church’s acceptance of the modern clinical definition of death even if it raises philosophical difficulties. In a clinical setting with limited resources we have to make informed decisions about what kind of care a patient can receive.

In the U.S. at least we have opt-in organ donation as opposed to opt-out, so the neurologically deceased person must have consented to donate their organs before removal. In many other countries consent is assumed, so doctors make to decision to remove the organs of the neuroligicallly deceased unless the dobor previously indicated that they do not want to donate.
 
Ghosty1981 said:
On the general topic of ensoulment, I’m curious what people think of the case of “heart in a box” transplant technology.
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I’ll say a few things and try to tie them together.
  1. Parts are less real than wholes. IOW, parts only exist virtually until removed from the whole. For example, a splinter only exists when it is removed from a piece of wood. Splinters only exist when they are extracted.
  2. The heart exists virtually inside a man until it is removed.
  3. A man is alive. The heart moves in virtue of his soul. The heart is not a thing that lives distinct from the thing that animates it.
Once the heart is removed, it exists as an independent thing. It is alive? If so, what spirit animates it? It moves on its own accord which implies it is alive. My opinion at this point is that it as a thing independent from a man has --once independent-- a material spirit. I conclude this because left to it’s own devices, it will never reason. We analyze the nature of things in order to understand their essences.

PS Once a part of someone else, it ceases to have independent reality and now virtually exists.
 
Ghosty1981 said:
I actually did mention the ovum, though I didn’t go into great technical detail about conception and cloning. That detail is neither here nor there, however, as the point is that the human genome springs to life when in the appropriate environment.

Tell me what you think is the qualitative difference is between a human genome in an ovum, which is what a conceptus is, and a human genome in an ovum, which is what a fresh clone is. The difference is the manner in which the genome came to be in the ovum, but the function of the genome after it is present in the ovum is exactly the same.
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Even if a human genome from skin in an ovum is a person (which I tend to agree with), the human genome is not a person. The ovum is an essential material cause (and part) of the person and not simply its environment. At the point in which these parts would regularly act in unison by their own nature to mature into a person, they may be said to no longer be many things but one thing and have a spirit/soul.

PS I appreciate that this point was originally made to rebut the individuation charges above but I thought I’d butt in regardless.

PPS My discussion about virtual existence would also be my response to the 8 cell zygote. IOW those cells only exist virtually and separating a cell causes twinning by making that cell its own actual (non-virtual) thing. Whether pushing that cell back in could constitute murder I’ll have to scratch my head about for a while.
 
buffgbob said:
My opinion at this point is that it as a thing independent from a man has --once independent-- a material spirit. I conclude this because left to it’s own devices, it will never reason.
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I think it is alive but it doesn’t possess life. I don’t believe it is an independent life. It’s life is contingent. The heart doesn’t determine it’s own growth apart from the body it is a member of. Even a plant can do that. For that reason I can’t see a soul animating it at all.
 
buffgbob said:
Parts are less real than wholes. IOW, parts only exist virtually until removed from the whole. For example, a splinter only exists when it is removed from a piece of wood. Splinters only exist when they are extracted.

The heart exists virtually inside a man until it is removed.

A man is alive. The heart moves in virtue of his soul. The heart is not a thing that lives distinct from the thing that animates it.
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I’m not sure that I can agree that parts are less real than wholes, at least not speaking absolutely. It depends on the “whole” in question. After all, is a class more real than the students that make it up? Sometimes the whole is virtual, and the parts are real. I believe I understand the point you’re trying to make, but I’m not sure that we can make such statements easily when it comes to the human person.

What I would say is that the heart is the heart of a man by definition, and is therefore defined by its relation to a particular man. That the heart is alive is indisputable, at least by all empirical definitions, so by Catholic belief it is animated by a soul. Is this the soul of a man, or is it a vegetative or animal soul?
buffgbob said:
Once the heart is removed, it exists as an independent thing. It is alive? If so, what spirit animates it? It moves on its own accord which implies it is alive. My opinion at this point is that it as a thing independent from a man has --once independent-- a material spirit. I conclude this because left to it’s own devices, it will never reason. We analyze the nature of things in order to understand their essences.
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A child with severe brain damage will never reason, but we consider them a man. A person in a persistent coma will never reason, but we consider them a man. We can’t say that actually reasoning makes a man, and we can’t say that the physical capacity to reason makes a man; we can say that the spiritual capacity to reason makes a man, but we can’t p(name removed by moderator)oint when the spiritual soul ceases to enliven a body. We can say that the spiritual soul has the power to reason, but without the ability to identify where a spiritual soul resides and where it doesn’t this statement doesn’t amount to much. All we can do is say that a thing that reasons has a spiritual soul, but we can’t say that a thing that doesn’t actually reason does not have a spiritual soul, unless we are willing to deny a spiritual soul to the sleeping, the comatose, and the newborn.

If the capacity for actual reasoning is not the basis for determining humanity, then what makes the heart different from the man in a persistent coma? What makes the heart different from the man in a persistent coma who has lost their arms and legs, and therefore is only part of the man they once were? If the heart does not require an immaterial soul because it can’t reason, then what makes us think that the man in a coma has an immaterial soul? Do the severely mentally disabled have immaterial souls? At what point does the body cease to be united by a rational soul and become a mere collection of organs?

continued…
 
I think that one thing that is being lost in this discussion is the fact that the capacity for reason is not the defining identifier for the presence of a rational soul, but rather that the presence of a living body of a rational animal is the defining identifier for the presence of a rational soul. Aristotle and Aquinas did not argue that the fetus was capable of reason at 40 days, they argued that it was an identifiable, living human body at 40 days and therefore had a rational soul. They believed that prior to that point the material that would make the human body was being organized, and once assembled into an appropriate form the rational soul would animate it. Fitting matter, in this case, is not matter that is capable of rational thought, but rather matter that is identifiably human.

Now all of this goes a long way from your discussion of virtual existence, and I appreciate your points and will explore them further, but I feel that it’s worth laying out my thoughts on the principles you’ve brought up before I dig in to the concept itself. I think the angle you are working with, namely with regard to parts and wholes, has definite merit and I’d like to continue along this line.

What makes the heart a part of a man, but a head on a torso a “whole” man? I don’t believe the difference is the capacity for reason, as I’ve laid out above that there are things that can’t reason that we still call man. I’m also uncomfortable with identifying the soul too closely to the operations of one particular organ or bodily system, namely the brain and neurological system. I agree that there seems to be a difference between a heart in a box and a man in coma, but I’m not sure how to p(name removed by moderator)oint that difference yet, and I don’t believe it lies in the use of reason just as I don’t believe it lies in one being alive and the other being dead.

This is something I’ll give some more thought to and share later when I have more time.
 
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buffgbob said:
Even if a human genome from skin in an ovum is a person (which I tend to agree with), the human genome is not a person.
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I agree completely. My point about the genome becoming a new person relates to the fuzzy concept of “irreversible individuation” as a defining characteristic of individual life. The human genome is not a person, but the person from whom the genome is drawn is a person, and this person can become a twin through cloning long after the supposed line of “irreversible individuation”. If twinning after the point of “irreversible individuation” does not cause us to question the personhood of the donor, then it shouldn’t give us pause in the case of the embryo.

In case it bears repeating, I don’t believe the human genome is a person. I do hold that the human genome is one of the requirements for the “material form” of the human animal, but it is not sufficient in itself to be a human person. I’m not certain that the ovum is an absolutely necessary material cause, however, as recent experiments are pointing the way towards cloning without an ovum. The ovum is simply the best material to utilize in cloning because it comes with all of the necessary “machinery” to facilitate the development of the genome into a human body.
buffgbob said:
PPS My discussion about virtual existence would also be my response to the 8 cell zygote. IOW those cells only exist virtually and separating a cell causes twinning by making that cell its own actual (non-virtual) thing. Whether pushing that cell back in could constitute murder I’ll have to scratch my head about for a while.
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This is along the lines of my thinking as well. So long as the cells are united as one organism they are one person, and in the instant that they cease functioning as one organism and split into two we have a new life. The unity of the whole makes the person, and with a single unity we have one person regardless of the potential of those parts.

When these cells split from eachother we either have one or two new persons as we have two individual organisms; whether the original dies to produce two new lives is a mystery to me, and ultimately irrelevant. If these two persons merge then we have the death of one, or perhaps both, and a single life remains. That one dies doesn’t cause me to question the individuality of either embryo, and it leaves us no with more questions than any other kind of early embryonic/fetal death.
 
Ghosty1981 said:
Aristotle and Aquinas did not argue that the fetus was capable of reason at 40 days, they argued that it was an identifiable, living human body at 40 days and therefore had a rational soul. They believed that prior to that point the material that would make the human body was being organized, and once assembled into an appropriate form the rational soul would animate it. Fitting matter, in this case, is not matter that is capable of rational thought, but rather matter that is identifiably human.
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That is a confident take on Aquinas. You may well be right but what are your best texts and commentary on this position. Anything I have come across is stolidly ambiguous.
 
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