Replies

Sentience

Richard Werner argues "that being a sentient human being is the relevant criterion for being a fully fledged member of the moral community, for having full moral rights. . . . "¹¹ The argument is based on the idea "that we have no obligations except when some improvement or impairment of someone's life is involved ... [and] also that we have a prima facie obligation whenever this is involved."¹²

Werner states his argument as follows:

Simply put, one cannot make a creature's life good or bad, better or worse unless that creature is capable of experiencing and, in particular, capable of experiencing pleasure, satisfaction, happiness, pain, dissatisfaction, or anguish. One cannot help or harm another creature unless that creature is capable of help or harm, capable of having experiences consonant with help or harm. Clearly, a creature that has no experiences is not capable of having experiences consonant with helping or harming the creature. If the creature is destroyed before it becomes sentient, appeal to the better or worse condition of its future experiences is irrelevant. Hence, one cannot have moral obligations to a being that is not sentient and will not become sentient and, thereby, such a being cannot have moral rights.

In the case of a being that is not yet sentient but will become sentient, certainly we can help or harm this being by an action we perform today that will affect the future experiences of the being. However, it would seem that our moral obligations are not to the nonsentient being that now exists. So a being would not have rights until it became sentient.¹³

In reply, the mere addition of sentience cannot turn a nonperson into a person. If there is no person before sentience, adding this feature will not transform it into a person. An insentient frog does not become a person by acquiring sentience. And if there is a person after sentience is acquired, that being must already have been there, as the being who acquires this feature, as the same being who first lacks sentience then has it. Sentience comes about through physical development of the being who is there, before and after sentience is attained.

After sentience is acquired, there is a being who can function as a person on an elementary level; for example, he can feel pain. But his being a person is not affected by this; he was that already. An adult who is awake can function as a person: feel pain, think, communicate, etc. But he is equally a person, the same person, when he is under anesthesia, even though he cannot then function as a person since he temporarily lacks sentience.

Sentience, then, does not affect the being in question (whether person or not), but only a capacity of certain beings (persons, animals) to function as sentient beings, for example, feel pain.

To kill a small, very young, nonsentient baby in the womb, or to kill an adult under anesthesia, both are cases of killing a nonsentient being who, were he not killed, would wake up to sentience. The only difference is that the child was never sentient while the adult was. But this makes no moral difference. To kill the child is to deprive him of the only sentient existence he would ever have. If anything, abortion is therefore a still greater evil.

Suppose, through some strange disease, a baby were born insentient and did not acquire sentience until, say, age one. Would it be right to kill such a child after birth? But if not after birth, why before birth? If not when the insentience is abnormal, why when it is normal?

That a baby in the very early phases of her existence in the womb is insentient simply means that she is in a kind of deep sleep. This says something about the level of her development; it says nothing about her as a person. Clearly, sentience is not a place to draw the line. It represents merely the acquisition of another characteristic by the child in the womb, a further dimension of her development.¹⁴