For the embryo to be considered a human person, he would already have to be an individual in its own right. However, that the embryo is lifetime does not make him immediately a living being. It is therefore possible, for F. Kaplan, to determine at all certainty to which stage the embryo is not a human being.
Since February 6, the date on which the Court of Cassation declared that any fetus or even dead embryo could be declared in the civil status, this book has taken a hot news. It should indeed be known that it is possible to pronounce rationally on the status of the embryo. Is he a human being ? In a series of short chapters, this is the challenge that this book takes up and which we also confront problems such as the abortion or the use of embryos for therapeutic purposes. This survey is also an opportunity to know if it is possible to conduct, in the field of contemporary ethics, a rational argument that is not saturated a priori by ideological presuppositions.
The author’s thesis is to assert that the embryo cannot be a human being, since he is not even a living being. The book therefore operates a displacement which forces us to come back to a presupposition: what is a living being ?
Be a living being
The argument of the book is based on the distinction made between alive And be a living being. The embryo is, certainly, in the lifetime, a set of tissues and cells (in the same way as a hand or an eye) but it is not A Living being, that is to say an individual, endowed with unity, identity and independence. The idea ofA Being living indeed involves sufficient independence, functioning and autonomous development. A living being is not only defined by the fact that he has functions (many parts of the living have them), he must still have all the functions that allow him to live. This does not mean that it must be completely autarkic – which is moreover impossible and contrary to the concept of life – but that it should not depend on one (or more) function (s) of another living being to ensure its survival.
However, the author shows that this is the case of the embryo whose main functions are in fact ensured by the mother’s body. For example, it is the secretions of certain mother’s cells that provide the embryo with the metabolites necessary for its establishment and the functioning of its metabolism. The glucose he needs is provided to him by the digestive and glycogenic functions of the mother’s liver. The air is provided to him by his respiratory function. The renal function evacuates its waste, the maternal immune function protects it (p. 38-39). Certainly the embryo fulfills certain functions, especially metabolic, but, as we can see, it depends entirely on the biological activity of the mother’s body to keep themselves alive.
Unlike appearances, this functional assistance does not merge with the supply of food for the individual organism. Indeed, it is not necessary to confuse the non -biological gift of self by which a dead organism is assimilated by a living organism and the replacement of a biological function. Thus, for example, it is not a question of nourishing the embryo, but of digesting for him.
We also learn with surprise that the relationships of the embryo with the functional body and organizer of the mother are massively absent from the embryology treaties (p. 38). From there to think that the embryo as such, in its isolation, is an epistemological fiction, in the same way as the hand or the foot, …
Individualization: biology and metaphysics of becoming
The author does not stick to his thesis, he takes into account the logical alternatives as well as the objections which can be presented to him. In particular, it takes into account the argument of the potential person or the human being in power: since the development of the embryo leads to a human being, is it not a human being in power ? And, is not a human being, is he not a human being ?
By this, we realize that the status of the embryo does not only concern factual biological data but engages a theory of individualization, which itself is based on a theory of becoming. In a process in the making, the result is already present at the beginning ? The author then endeavors to show the difficulty of the concept of becoming: on the one hand he affirms the continuity of a training, on the other hand he prohibits thinking this continuity in the form of a permanence. If the result of the process was already present at the beginning, there would be precisely not to become, that is to say passage from power to action, but a simple change of being in action.
More specifically, it is necessary to distinguish between two meanings from the concept of power (p. 49-50): power as a simple possibility (the statue in the marble block) and the power as necessity (the plant in the seed). If we hear that the embryo is a living being in the sense of a simple possibility, it will not be more a living being, that a block of marble is a statue, or a virgin leaf a drawing. Its determination remains external, dependent on the agent who will implement it. He is therefore not by himself a living being. If we hear the power in the sense of a need to become, we must be able to show that the embryo will become a living being by itself, by an internal development, which will necessarily occur if it is not hampered by external causes. However, the functional dependence of the embryo with regard to the mother’s body prevents it from conceiving it as a living being in power in this sense.
Beforehand F. Kaplan will have shown the difficulty to which the Catholic Church is exposed by affirming the humanity of the embryo: to say that humanity is present from the embryo, amounts to supporting a materialist theory of the soul – which were well kept certain fathers and doctors like Grégoire de Nysse or Thomas of Aquin !
Be sufficiently a living being or the logic of the continuous
The difficulties in thinking about becoming, or the process of individuation are in fact the problems posed by the continuous (p. 86-88). How do you go from the status of being living in the status of being a living being ?
The author notes that our understanding and our language do not allow you to think of continuous but only to sequence discontinuous phases. So we do not perceive the exact moment of the passage between not being a living being and being a living being. F. Kaplan proposes to forge a new concept, with fuzzy contours: “ be enough a living being ». Indeed, living beings themselves are experiencing variations, they are not uniformly living beings: certain functions may be injured, prevented. You can be sick without ceasing to be a living being. It is therefore necessary to open the notion of being living at a power of variation, the limits of which remain unclear. The question would not be “ be “Or” not to be “But” be enough ».
It is this concept of “ be x That the author proposes and would like to use to found a logic allowing us to find ourselves in becoming.
Indeed, it allows us to rationally answer the important question of the criterion which makes it possible to determine the moment when we are in the presence of a living being. Until when abortion is possible without being a crime ? When the embryo becomes a living being (and therefore possibly a human being) ?
The difficulty of thinking about continuous prevents us from having definitive and undoubted criteria. But with great relevance, the author reverses the question: what matters is to know how much we can be sure that the embryo is not a human being (since he is not even a living being) ? It is enough to show that there are stadiums where the embryo is not sufficiently alive, which is the case until the end of the first quarter, where it does not yet have a neuronal activity.
The embryo and the desire for a child
If we can rationally demonstrate that the embryo is not a living being, you still have to ask yourself why, psychologically, adults – and often parents – are mourning in the event of an early miscarriage or feel guilty to intervene on the embryo.
The author does justice to this feeling: it is a natural tendency resulting from the desire to be to come. However, it specifies that a natural tendency is morally neutral, and cannot be worth as an ethical argument. Respect for the mourning of a desire does not decide the ontological status of the embryo.
As we can see, the author does not practice a reducing rationalism which ignores the difficulties of the field to which he applies, but an argumentative rationalism which proposes an operational thought. This short work therefore makes available to the reader a rigorous investigation concerning one of the fundamental ethical issues of our time.