Defending the substance view against its critics

Abstract

Recently, the substance view of persons has been heavily criticized for the counterintuitive conclusions it seems to imply in scenarios such as embryo rescue cases and embryo loss. These criticisms have obscured the considerable success of the substance view in supporting other intuitions that are widely shared, and that competing accounts such as the psychological view have difficulties accounting for. Here, I examine common intuitions regarding identity, human exceptionalism, the moral equality of children and adults, infanticide, and prenatal injury. I conclude that when we broaden the range of intuitions examined, the substance view emerges as just as plausible an account of our nature as the more widely accepted psychological view.

KEYWORDS:

• substance view
• psychological view
• personal identity
• person
• moral intuition
• abortion

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jeremy Williams for the discussion that motivated this paper. I am also grateful for the very helpful feedback provided by Daniel Rodger and Nicholas Colgrove, as well as two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to the most recent PhilPapers survey, over one third of philosophers nominated the psychological view of personal identity, by far the most popular account of personal identity (Bourget and Chalmers 2014).

2 It is worth noting that some in the prolife movement feel strongly that abortion deserves a similar punishment to that given to the murder of developed human beings (Rebussini 2019).

3 Amy Berg responds by claiming that substance view proponents are bystanders with respect to induced abortion, and so these are also cases of letting die (2017, p. 1222). Blackshaw and Rodger (2019) counter this by citing Thomas Pogge’s view that in a democratic society, all citizens are responsible for a legal system that permits induced abortions, and so all citizens participate to an extent in killing (Pogge 2010, p.127). Pogge suggests an analogy with slavery, arguing that all citizens were similarly morally responsible for laws permitting slavery. So, for abortion, all citizens are, to some extent, killing rather than letting die.

4 As Pruss observes, we do not know what happens to an individual when twinning occurs. However, as twinning is rare, we should presume that it does not occur (2011).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Bruce P. Blackshaw

Bruce P. Blackshaw is a philosophy PhD student at the University of Birmingham with interests in bioethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and information ethics. He is an associate research fellow with the Bios Centre, London, and is also a software entrepreneur.