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Setting Aside Naturalism in Favor of Personhood in Extreme Cases Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2011 Restoring the Balance: Setting Aside Naturalism in Favor of Personhood in Extreme Cases Brian Joseph Buckley Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Buckley, Brian Joseph, "Restoring the Balance: Setting Aside Naturalism in Favor of Personhood in Extreme Cases" (2011). Dissertations. 216. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/216 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2011 Brian Joseph Buckley LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO RESTORING THE BALANCE: SETTING ASIDE NATURALISM IN FAVOR OF PERSONHOOD IN EXTREME CASES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY BRIAN JOSEPH BUCKLEY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 2011 Copyright by Brian J. Buckley, 2011 All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER TWO: TAYLOR AND HABERMAS ON NATURALISM AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 11 Introduction 11 Charles Taylor and Naturalism 14 Scenarios 40 Habermas and the Concerns for The Future of Human Nature 44 Conclusion 72 CHAPTER THREE: VARIOUS DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING ANENCEPHALIC CHILDREN AND PERSONHOOD, WITH SPECIESIST CRITIQUES 75 Introduction 75 Brief Definition of Speciesism 77 Legal Personhood 82 Political Personhood 89 Religious/Natural Law Views of the Person 111 Leon Kass, Hans Jonas, and Prudence 129 Conclusion 146 CHAPTER FOUR: LEVINAS AND THE FACE AS A BASIS FOR DISCUSSIONS OF PERSONHOOD AND RELATIONSHIPS WITH ANENCEPHALIC CHILDREN 148 Introduction 148 Alterity, Sameness, and Traditional Philosophy 150 Face 156 Infinity 160 Relationships 165 What About Those Who Do Not See? 168 Break with Phenomenology and Ontology 171 Conclusion 175 CHAPTER FIVE: RELATIONSHIPS, PERSONHOOD, AND PHENOMENOLOGY 178 Introduction 178 Naturalistic Criteria for Personhood 180 Levinas, the Anencephalic Child, and Relationships 192 Disengagement 213 Conclusion 231 CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION 234 BIBLIOGRAPHY 242 iii VITA 253 iv CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Imagine that you pick up a newspaper and there is a story about an accident involving an ambulance. The story headline is, ―Four People Die in Ambulance Crash on Hwy 152.‖ Interested because you live nearby, you read on about how the road was slick from summer rains and that that vehicle lost control, went over an embankment, and crashed 30 feet below in a wooded ravine. The article says that ―John Sanchez, 32 of San Jose, Michael James, 23, of Gilroy, Virginia Medding, newborn, of San Martin, and Samuel Vierra, 28, of Morgan Hill were among those killed in the accident. Sanchez was driving while James, the EMT, assisted Vierra, the critical care nurse, in attending to the patient Medding.‖ As you read on, the story tells you that Virginia was being transported from a local hospital to a hospice 15 miles away. Virginia, it turns out, was born with a case of anencephaly 10 days before and, despite predictions from her doctors, had survived beyond the normal range for such a severe neurological disorder. The doctors at this point felt that palliative care was best for her because the hospital knew that she would eventually succumb to the malady afflicting her. Putting the newspaper down, a few questions occur to you: Was it a mistake to count Virginia among the ―people‖ who died in the accident? Was Virginia a person in name only? Would there be a funeral for Virginia? Would her family mourn her? Would they talk about her presence in their 1 2 lives? Would she be buried? Would there be a gravestone with her name and dates? Why was she named in the first place? Does her family have pictures of her? Did her family enjoy buying clothes for her? Did her parents hold her and kiss her goodbye when they put her in the ambulance? Would her siblings in years to come speak of ―my sister who died in the car accident‖? Why should such resources be spent on such an extreme case? What is the proper way to address humans with such severe damage? Could anyone learn anything from her life, from her presence in their lives? This dissertation will attempt to answer these questions in such a way that a reader may reasonably conclude that Virginia, a child with only a brain stem, is indeed a person, where ―person‖ is understood as having a special status, worthy of moral recognition, that attaches to the individual. To do this, I will provide a philosophically sophisticated account that withdraws from the usual naturalistic considerations of personhood, with their accompanying checklists, requirements, etc., and instead asks the reader to look toward a human sciences model of personhood, with relationships, narrativity, embodiedness, historicity, and meaning. I will argue that these and these alone may possibly address who can count as a person. The objectivistic data of the natural sciences tradition will be set aside here as inadequate. No EEG, reflexivity test, or MRI, for example, can take the place of embeddedness, encounters with other persons, and relational interpretations, to determine whether or not Virginia is a person. In claiming this, I will concentrate heavily on the anencephalic child as the paradigm case for personhood, but will feel comfortable analogizing to other extreme cases, such as those in a persistent vegetative state or those who otherwise lack a higher consciousness. 3 Chapter Two will initiate the dissertation by addressing in significant detail the prevailing naturalistic tendencies today. These will be shown to rely heavily on the use of certain, empirically verified data as a firm basis for truth. The naturalistic tendencies will be found not only in the natural sciences but also in the work of philosophers impressed with their precision. Of course, having naturalistic paradigms, protocols, and algorithms in the natural sciences is not problematic when the subject of those inquiries is a rock, light waves, or even the human heart itself. And it is certainly apparent after several centuries that natural science has indeed many achievements that render it a powerful paradigm for progress. The constant growth in pharmaceutical options, the prevalence of breakthroughs in surgical techniques, the fruits in cancer research, the increasing understanding of the brain for psychology—these all are immediately understood as helpful to the longevity of human lives and to the relief of certain maladies or the symptoms thereof. This can certainly be extended into fields outside medicine, such as renewable resource technologies, space travel, and use of building materials to shore up buildings in an earthquake. In its domain, natural science is without question an extraordinary achievement and ought to be praised. The problem, however, is that those same methods and models that are so successful when in a particular field of endeavor, with a particular subject and particular questions, are applied in other areas where they are inapt. Chapter Two addresses this naturalistic tendency by exploring in detail the work of Charles Taylor, Jurgen Habermas, and Axel Honneth. These three philosophers will take on the scientistic tendency to take a successful protocol or matrix, with its high levels of precision, and apply it to the human subject. The human individual is someone 4 with a history, with an embedded nature in a time, in a place, in a narrative of his or her own. To such a person, life is not merely absorbed; it is lived in a trajectory, in a series of questions that provoke and that matter to that person. Such a life is a tapestry of interpretations, where what matters to the individual is essential to understanding what he or she sees or knows or even what is best for them. For example, two people can enter into a large room at a garage sale or flea market and, in essence, ―see‖ different things. The one, the dog lover, sees pictures of dogs and the owner‘s dog sitting up front by the cash register. The other can leave having no memory of the dog pictures or dog up front (although all of them did in fact run over his optic nerve) because he concentrated on the old model cars. These two persons were in the same room at the same time and even came and left together. But, as distinct individuals, they did not interact with the room in even remotely the same manner. Such subjective accounts, accounts that explain why this person said this or did that, are lost on the naturalistic sciences. In this scenario, naturalistic methods might include monitoring brain waves or doing a study afterwards of the external data (what the parties touched or the words they said), but it is highly questionable whether such exterior data can ever capture the individual‘s thoughts and interpretations. To obtain knowledge from these two people requires addressing them, intersecting with them, engaging them with questions and evaluations. Taylor especially, using Heideggerian and Gadamerian language, will address the naturalistic sciences here as in essence out of their league. They hit wide of the mark and demand conformity to their own strictures. They are in essence guilty of acting out the aphorism ―He who is good with a hammer thinks that everything is a nail.‖ 5 In addition to Taylor, Habermas and Honneth address the rise of naturalistic tendencies in technology and how they may be applied in such a way as to render the human person essentially something to be disposed over or something that may be improved by libertarian desires to adjust genetic makeups.
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