The Engaged Thomist

Most if not all pro-choice philosophers try to cite certain properties which determine personhood such as consciousness or the capacity to experience pain or pleasure. There are some metaphysical objections to this that have been pointed out by David Oderberg, but there is one that is incredibly fundamental (see here: https://www.classicaltheism.com/unbornhuman/ ). The reason properties cannot determine personhood is because they depend on the substance and so cannot determine what the substance is. The only way to avoid this is to say that personhood is an accidental property, but this has its own problems, most notably numerous horrific ethical consequences to this view. However, there is, again, a more metaphysical problem with this view. It is fair to assume that personhood is that which confers rights on a certain entity, otherwise the personhood of the fetus would not be what grounds the fetus' right to life, as both pro-choice and pro-life philosophers grant. Oderberg point

A while ago, Omar Fahkri published a new version of the modal collapse objection to classical theism (CT) (see here: https://philarchive.org/rec/FAKALA ). In the paper, he argues that while the typical modal collapse argument does not show that CT is internally incoherent, the objection illuminates an explanatory advantage that non-CTists have over CTists. This, according to Fahkri, is based on the fact that the non-CT God has parts and these parts can change across possible worlds and so provide richer explanations for different creations in different possible worlds than the CT God can since the CT God is absolutely simple. The first thing to note is that the explanatory difference that Fahkri says gives an explanatory advantage to the non-CT is actually open to the CT because of the virtual distinction. Explanation is about making things intelligible to the intellect and so using the virtual distinction to point out intentional distinctions in God could help the CT get out of the ch

In my last post, I examined two papers which tried to identify a morally relevant difference between abortion and infanticide. The first paper argued that there are two ways an individual can be a person: either “i. an individual capable of conceiving of herself as the subject of a life that she values” and/or “ii. an individual capable of valuing certain aims, for which the continuation of her life is instrumentally necessary” (see here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/353 ). The second article argued that personhood can be conferred on a person in virtue of the relations an individual shares with other persons. I argued that both views failed, but I realized that there is a more fundamental problem with the second paper’s thesis than I originally thought. On this view, the personhood that an infant has is an extrinsic property since it is in virtue of extrinsic relations that the infant is a person. Extrinsic views of rights, however, fall into circularity rather quickly: if there