Читать книгу Bioethics - Группа авторов - Страница 80

Consider fully active potentialities, understood as states of affairs inevitably leading to a certain result in the absence of outside interference, and consider the thesis that the destruction of a fully active potentiality for the emergence of a neo‐Lockean person is seriously wrong. Elsewhere I have offered several arguments against this principle (2009, 42–51). Here is one of the simpler arguments.

Suppose artificial wombs have been perfected, and there is a device containing an unfertilized human egg cell and a human spermatozoon, where if the device is not interfered with, fertilization will result, and the fertilized human egg cell will be transferred to an artificial womb, from which will emerge, in nine months' time, a healthy newborn human. Such a situation involves not merely an “almost active” potentiality for personhood – as in the case of a fertilized human egg cell on its own – but, rather, a fully active potentiality for personhood. To turn off this device, then, thereby allowing the unfertilized egg cell to die, would involve the destruction of an active potentiality for personhood. Consequently, that action would be seriously wrong if the above, fully active potentiality principle were correct. The action of turning off the device, however, is not morally wrong. Therefore it is not wrong to destroy an active potentiality for personhood.