Essential Property Argument Analysis

The main argument based on the essential personhood focusing on identity and property presented earlier can be summarized once again here. The argument is making the following four points: 1) I am the same individual living being as the foetus from which I am developed; 2) I am a person essentially, 3) If an individual living being has an essential property at one point in time, then it has that property at every point in its existence; 4) The foetus from which I developed was a person. As noted earlier the crux of this argument is the second statement which says that that the individual human being is essentially a person. The critics of the essential personhood have thus taken issue with this point. The critics point out that if person in

Following Christopher Megone (2002) and in light of the discussion on Aristotle and abortion, one can modify and improve the essential property argument to the extent that the essential argument based on substance view does not lead to the implication that its critics are concerned with. The main conclusion that one might draw from the discussion of Aristotle and Megone is that it is not necessary for the proponents of the essential property arguments to consider the moment of conception as the marker for the onset of life of a human being. Although the essential property argument based on the substance view of human beings is derived from the works of Aristotle, the argument can differ from Aristotle is in its understanding and definition of essential properties. For Aristotle, an essential property is the property which an entity cannot lose without ceasing to be the kind of entity it is. Whereas, for the proponents of the contemporary essential property arguments, an essential property is a property which an entity cannot lose without ceasing to exist. This little change in wording can make a world of difference as shown earlier. Thus, the essential property argument need not be rejected by critics just because it advocates foetal inviolability from the moment of conception. The Aristotelean view provides a different interpretation of the essential

It was mentioned earlier that the essential property argument is often, mistakenly, treated as an argument from potentiality. If the essential personhood argument considers foetus as a potential person, then it is indeed an argument from potentiality. If so, the following objection can be raised. The bare fact that some thing can ‘become’ X is not a good reason for treating it as if it now as if it were X. For example, the mere fact that an acorn will become an oak tree is not a good reason to treat the acorn as if it were an oak tree. In terms of the abortion debate, the fact that the foetus can become a mature adult with an intrinsic worth, is not a good reason for treating it now as if it were an adult. The moral treatment for an adult and the foetus cannot be the same if the foetus is a potential adult. As already mentioned the essential property argument is not claiming that foetus is a potential person. It is an essential person with the same potentials as mature adults. Once again, this can be clarified by briefly looking at the idea of potentialities in Aristotle as a philosophical basis for the substance view of human beings. For Aristotle, as already mentioned, natural substances have an inner source of change. Potentiality, he further argues, is the principle of change. This way potentiality becomes part of the essential property of the natural substances.