这是我关于堕胎的三篇文章中的最后一篇。In the earlier essays, I explained thatsome people think that referring to the unborn as “embryos” dehumanizes them, and just like the dehumanization of racial and ethnic minorities, this way of speaking is used to legitimate their murder. This analogy is mistaken. To dehumanize others is to think of them as dangerous animals or evil, monstrous beings. That’s not the case with embryos. Describing a being as an embryo is a far cry from considering it to be a creature akin to a cockroach or a beast or a monster.

Even so, opponents of abortion can still argue that if embryos belong to our species—which they obviously do—then they arehumanembryos, and they are therefore human beings. And if that’s right, they can argue that because killing innocent human beings is morally wrong, abortion is morally wrong.

I briefly explained inthe previous installmentwhy this argument doesn’t hold water. Now I want to dive deeper into why it doesn’t work and offer a diagnosis of what’s really at stake when people argue about the morality of abortion. This will open up basic questions about what it means to be human.

The problem with the pro-life argument that I sketched above is that being human and being a member of our species aren’t the same thing. Consider an alien from a distant planet that looks and behaves just like a member of our species. Is that alien human? You might answer, “No, of course not. She’s similar to a human, but she can’t be human, because she’s not a member of our species.” Or you might answer “Yes, the alien’s human. She’s just not an Earth human.”

Both responses turn on the question of whether the being in question is a human being. In that way, it’s similar to the pro-life argument. But there are big problems with this way of thinking. First of all, “human” isn’t even a scientific category. “Homo sapiens”is a scientific category, but “human” is a folk category. This means that the question of whetherHomo sapiensare humans is a question about whether a scientific term (“Homo sapiens”) and a vernacular term (“human”) name the very same things. When identifying water with H2O, we’re saying that everything that people call “water” (when using the term correctly, according to the rules of their linguistic community), is what chemists call H2O. That identity can be confirmed by performing chemical analyses of samples of the stuff called “water.”

但是“人”这个词远比“水”这个词更加混杂。有许多这样的例子:一群人把“人类”这个词保留给他们自己，而把其他群体描述为非人类或次人类，甚至还有一些文化把一些其他物种纳入人类的范畴。最重要的是，科学家们并不总是把人类等同于我们人类这个物种。有时他们也把尼安德特人或其他史前原始人定性为人类。So, it’s incorrect to say that “human” and “Homo sapiens” name the same beings. At best the relationship between the two terms is inexact, fluctuating, and contestable.

We’ve considered the question of the human taxonomically. Now let’s examine it developmentally. Some ways that we categorize living things only pertain to stages of their lives. For example, the American bullfrog(Lithobates catesbeianus) begins life as a fertilized egg, which hatches into a tadpole, which gradually becomes a frog. All of these developmental stages are stages of the same species, but only the final stage is properly characterized as a frog. Similarly, we can say that a fertilized ovum belongs to the speciesHomo sapiensbut it only becomes human at a certain stage in its development. And just as there is no sharp boundary between the tadpole stage and the frog stage of the developmental trajectory ofLithobates catesbeianus, there is no definite point whenHomo sapiens成为人类。So, even if allHomo sapienscanbecomehuman, it doesn’t follow that allHomo sapiensarehuman.

这些反思提出了令人生畏的问题，即人类意味着什么。我们对人类这个概念看得越仔细，它就显得越不确定。

The search for some definite property—some fact of the matter—that makes an individual a human being looks more and more like a wild goose chase. Fortunately, we don’t have to conceive of humanness in this way. There is a much more realistic interpretation of what’s going on when we regard others as human beings, and it’s one that has the advantage of encompassing the multitude of ways that we deploy the concept of the human.

To regard a being as human isn’t to recognize some fact about them. It’s toendow他们有一定的道德地位。我们不会因为他们是人就给予他们这样的地位。相反，是我们赋予他们的地位让他们成为人类。也许打个比方会有帮助。当一个人被英国女王封为骑士时，并不是因为他们已经拥有作为骑士的财产。当女王对埃尔顿·约翰说“我封你为埃尔顿·约翰爵士”时，她授予他骑士的身份。

Similarly, we make individuals human by assigning them a human status. That’s why the question of whether or not an embryo is a human being can’t be settled by facts about it.Strange as it may sound, it is neither true nor false to say that “human” embryos are human beings. It follows that the controversy over abortion isn’t really about the true nature of the unborn, even though it is often misconceived as such. It’s about whether to grant embryos the honorific title of “human” or to withhold it from them.

Image byDr. Vilas Gayakwadon Wikimedia