Читать книгу Bioethics - Группа авторов - Страница 75

Imagine there are times when you have perceptual experiences and bodily sensations unaccompanied by any thoughts. Concerned, you contact your doctor, who tells you of a new virus that temporarily prevents you having any thoughts. Asking about your prognosis, you learn that the temporal gaps between such occurrences will gradually become less and less, until, finally, your ability to have thoughts no longer exists. You ask whether there is any treatment, and are told that there is a drug that, if successful, will completely cure you, but otherwise will kill you.

Consider, now, what it would be like to have sensory experiences and bodily sensations, but to have no thoughts at all at any time – no thoughts about your present experiences, no thoughts about what you did in the past, no thoughts when someone speaks to you, no thoughts about anything. What value would you assign to such a life?

Suppose p is the probability that the drug will cure you, and thus (1 – p) the probability that it will kill you. How high does p have to be for you to decide to take the drug at some point before you permanently lose the capacity for thought? The answer to that question will fix the value that a life lacking forever the capacity for thought has for you.

Many people I have talked to about this have said that they would ultimately opt for the drug regardless of how close to zero the value of p was. That, however, would imply that the extent to which one values the continued existence of a life with experiences and sensations, but with no capacity for thought, is essentially zero.

The idea is then that it seems plausible to think that there should be a connection between the extent to which people would value such a life and the intrinsic wrongness of killing a person with such a life. If so, the conclusion would be that the wrongness of killing a conscious being permanently lacking the capacity for thought is essentially zero, in which case it would be plausible to conclude that conscious beings permanently lacking a capacity for thought, and thus who are not neo‐Lockean persons, lack a right to continued existence.

Notice that the conclusion here is that being a neo‐Lockean person is a necessary condition for having a right to continued existence, and not that it is also a sufficient condition, since one might hold, as many philosophers do, that one must also have desires, preferences, or interests in order to have a right to continued existence, and neither Locke’s account of a person, nor mine, refers to such mental states. Whether such states are necessary for moral status is a deep and difficult issue in normative ethics, and happily, not one we need not explore here.