2011MICHAEL ASCIAK.Pdf

Syngamy or Karyogamy? Interfaces between Ethics and Science UNIVERSITY OF MALTA THESIS PRESENTED BY DR. MICHAEL ASCIAK TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY FOR THE DEGREE OF Doctor of Philosophy SUPERVISED BY PROFESSOR EMMANUEL AGIUS October 2011 DECLARATION OF OWN WORK I declare that this dissertation has been composed by myself and that the work presented is my own. i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Rev. Profs. Emmanuel Agius, for accepting to act as my supervisor, and for the clear criticism and useful encouragement that he provided of my dissertation. I must also thank other members of the staff at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Malta for their expert tips on material and content particularly Dr. George Grima and Dr. Mark Sultana. I would also like to thank all the staff at the European Documentation and Research Centre of the University of Malta, and of MCAST for both the possibility of studying within the parameters of their aegis, and also the logistic and research support provided throughout. I would like to extend my gratitude to the staff of the following libraries, the main library at the University of Malta, the Pope John XXIII library of the Jesuit Province in Malta, the libraries of the Malta Medical School, the Malta Institute of Health Care, the University of Malta Foundation for International Studies and Malta College for Arts Science and Technology (MCAST). I am grateful to the staff of the laboratory of Molecular Genetics, of the University of Malta, particularly Prof. A. Felice, Dr. Chris Scerri of the Faculty of Health Science, and the visiting staff at the MCAST MA and MSc. Course set up by Frauenhofer. I am also indebted to several individual members of the Bioethics Consultative Committee, particularly the late Dr. Lino German, for the fruitful discussions and opinions put forward, which were made possible only through their good dispositions. ii I must also thank Professor Joe Friggieri of the Department of Philosophy, for the support and kind advice extended, allowing me to carry out this work. I must also thank the many translators who helped me translate material from one language into another, the German-Maltese circle and particularly Dr Herbert Manfred Lenicker who was kind enough to help in reviewing material in German. I am also greatly obliged to Dr. Charles J. Farrugia of the Space Science Center of the University of New Hampshire, who helped me with the intricacies of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the physics that goes with it. I am also grateful to all the persons mentioned below who corresponded with me in many ways and provided information which led me to reach my own conclusions. These include in alphabetical order, C. Alonso, S. Bauzon, F.J. Bormann, E. Busuttil, I. Carrasco, J. Fleming, B. Gahl, S. Gellner, K. Golser, M. Hogan, L. Honnefelder, D. N. Irwing, A. R. Jonsen, E. Larson, J.A. Lombo, A.R. Luño, I. Marino, G. Rager, T.A. Shannon, C. Tauer, and G. Virt, and several others too numerous to mention. Last but not least, I am indebted to my wife Marthese, for her valued assistance and patience, and my daughters Danielle and Gillian, for having helped and suffered the brunt of my mental absence, during the work on this dissertation. Without the solidarity shown by all these people and the many others mentioned in this dissertation this work would never have seen the light of day. iii Syngamy or Karyogamy? Interfaces between Ethics and Science It is often discussed in academic circles, whether the human being exists at the beginning of the process of fertilization as soon as the sperm cell penetrates the ovum, or whether this occurs at some later stage particularly when the two pronuclei of both gametes have fused and they then form a new zygote, that is towards the end of the fertilization process. Opinions on this issue vary enormously especially since the whole process of fertilization or conception lasts about twenty-four hours and the only two landmarks available for verification, are when the process actually starts and when it ends. There is in effect, no moment of conception, but rather a process. In order to answer this question one must first of all set the parameters within which one has to work. The difference between the terms human person and human being has to be made clear during this study, as in society the terms are often interchangeable. I will deal with the philosophical discussions surrounding this enigma and will show in detail, that after taking every argument in perspective, one remains with that of ontological continuity as the only really valid argument to follow. I will look at the issue from the argument following from potentiality, which should be complemented by the argument following from ontogeny. I will start my research by alluding to the scientific arguments surrounding fertilization in Chapter One. Following this, in Chapter Two I will take a look at the philosophical arguments particularly from a natural law perspective, which can shed light on the beginning of human life. I will particularly look at the classical iv philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and particularly Aristotle, and the scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Since the beginning, the Greek philosophers tried to come up with several explanations for these apparent two sides of man. Could the mind exist without the body and vice-versa? Plato wrote about his hypothesis of Forms, Aristotle wrote about Matter and Form. Plato's analogies have within them the understanding of a dual nature of the faculties of man. A physical one and a spiritual one existing as two separate substances. His Forms unlike Aristotle's, lay over and above the object of the senses. Aristotle believed that any object consists of basic shapeless stuff or matter on which a form is superimposed, which form gives matter its particular identity. The relationship between soul and body is analogous to that between Form and Matter, the Form being immanent within the objects one perceives. This is the so called Hylomorphic theory. Therefore there is no dual substantiality in man. One is immanent to the other. Aristotle’s laws of motion encompassing Act and Potency are also important in arriving at our conclusions on the beginning of human life. In the middle ages St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about and queried the time when the soul actually came into the body of the human embryo basing his deductive opinions on much of Aristotle's embryology and philosophy. For St. Thomas, the soul is the form of the body, and therefore the embryo could only be human at the time that the soul entered it, although he could not tell exactly when this time was. He even ascribed different times for coming into being of the male and female human foetus. This implied that prior to ensoulment, the embryo was not human at all and that ensoulment was an essential element for humanity to exist. He still perceived the possibility of the existence of the foetal body without the presence of the soul. Of course at the time of writing St. Thomas did not have a knowledge of embryology as is available today and was basing his conclusions deductively, not v scientifically. There always seems to have been a philosophical tension between man's dualistic or his monistic nature vis-a-vis the physical and the mental. The position regarding certain dual aspects of man was actually emphasized by the philosopher Descartes in what became known as the Cartesian view of Man and which has persisted in many circles up to this day! In this view, Descartes thinks of the mind as a bodiless consciousness and the body as an extended entity, meaning occupying space, comprising two separate substances hence the term dualism. There will also be some dwelling on the deontology of Immanuel Kant and some other modern philosophers. Chapter Three will deal with the concept of Process Philosophy. Many individuals argue that once the process of fertilization has started at sperm penetration, then human life has to be respected from that point because of the continuous nature of this process. I will argue with the help of the philosophy of process, referring to philosophers of process such as Alfred North Whitehead, Samuel Alexander, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin amongst others, that this is not so, and that even within process itself, it is possible to ascertain the existence of a human individual. I will also, in another chapter, Chapter Four, allude to positions by several intellectuals and other persons of standing who maintain that the start of the human being exists from the beginning of fertilization, and those who believe that it is in fact at syngamy, and I will show throughout the dissertation, why I consider this latter argument to be correct. Other positions beyond fertilization will also be investigated. Today scientific learning seems to have cleared the way to pointing out the time when one can safely deduce the moment of individuation and the start of ontological vi development of the human being. For the ethical evaluation of fertilization, the scientific facts act as important parameters for decision making. The obverse is also true. Scientific facts on human life need to keep in mind the ethical and philosophical perspectives that shed light on the interpretation of these facts and which lead to the respect that goes with human life. In Chapter Five, I will show that since many of the previous positions on personhood and being have been seen in the light of Newtonian concepts of the physical world, one must now more that ever, examine if these same philosophical constructs still hold sufficient water when looked at from a perspective where the passage of time is no longer known to be a constant.

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