The Last Superstition: Black and White Morality
Chapter 4: Reference: My ass, personal communication
For the most part, Feser’s opinions are private, harmless affairs: whether he thinks that all things have final causes, or only some; or whether he thinks things have “essences” “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”, as a famous person once said. But then he uses these opinions to advocate policies that cause unnecessary suffering:
Again, the soul is just the form of the human organism, so it is necessarily there as long as the living organism is. Hence it “leaves” only when the organism dies; and that means death, not severe brain damage, and not a person’s lapsing into a “persistent vegetative state.” […] abortion necessarily counts as murder at any point from conception onward, and whatever the circumstances of the conception, including rape and incest […] if you do agree that every innocent human being has a right to life, then you cannot consistently fail to take a “pro-life” position and thus favor outlawing all abortions (and all forms of euthanasia too) just as you’d favor outlawing any other form of murder. [p. 130]
The reason he mentions “persistent vegetative state” is Terry Schiavo, whom he mentions several times in the book. He argues that both she and a fertilized egg have “rational souls”: neither one is rational in the sense of being able to think or speak, but both have the potential to do so: ova by developing into adult humans, and Terry Schiavo by, presumably, recuperating.
This, of course, makes a mockery of the word “potential”: Schiavo had massive brain damage, and couldn’t possibly have recuperated without the sort of miracle that, elsewhere (p. 128, if you’re curious), Feser rules out in considerations of what “potential” means.
So in practice, when Feser says that X has a “rational soul”, this means little more than “X has human DNA”. And to the extent that he does this, he weakens the argument that the presence of a rational soul, by itself, makes it immoral to kill a being. Is it really murder to terminate an ectopic pregnancy? Or to help someone suffering an incurable disease to end their suffering?
We can all agree that it’s wrong to kill people. We all want to enjoy life, and to have more of it; and by the same logic, we can see that everyone else does, and we’ll all be happier if we don’t go around killing each other, and stop people from killing others. But as we consider cases further and further away from this simple, ordinary case, we can run into cases where the assumptions that led to the initial conclusion no longer hold, and thus the conclusion may no longer be the same. But it looks as though Feser wants a world of black and white morality.
Well, it’s nice that he wants that. And people in Hell want ice water, as a friend of mine used to say.