Richard Dawkins, primarily noted for his works that deny the existence of God, has stirred a lively controversy recently in offering his opinion about unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome: “For what it’s worth, my own choice would be to abort the Down fetus and, assuming you want a baby at all, try again.” This view is hardly original. Peter Singer offered a similar view in his 1995 book, Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics. “We may not want a child to start on life’s uncertain voyage if the prospects are clouded,” he wrote. “Instead of going forward and putting all or effort into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning.”
Dawkins and Singer would be making perfect sense if they were talking about commodities. It is not ethically problematic to return a defective appliance to the store and have it replaced with one that is in good working condition. When the dessert trolley comes along, the diner might say, “No, I don’t think I will have this one. I will have that one instead.” But human creatures are not commodities. Each individual human being is “this” human being and that is all he will ever be. There is no replacement human being either conceived or yet to be conceived, that can assume the individual identity of the one he is assumed to replace. When God creates a new child, he is giving the parents “this” child.
By accepting the view of Dawkins and Singer, not only is the “defective” child looked upon as a commodity, but also the “replacement” child. In other words, no child has an intrinsic right to life; his life is dependent on the will of someone else, someone who is not God. God does will the existence of the child he creates and in creating that child endows it with an intrinsic worth and right to be. Dawkins and Singer are both atheists, so that the notion of God does not enter into their thinking. But in trying to justify the abortion of defective babies, born or unborn, they, by the same stroke, reduce all others to commodities. In doing injustice to some, they do injustice to all. The “replacement” is just as much a commodity as the “replacee”.
Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”. This was achievement through power. The novelist Joseph Conrad said, “Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world”. This was achievement through persuasion. If there is a single word that characterizes Christianity, it is love. If there is a single word that characterizes a particular philosopher it belongs to a 13th century Franciscan philosopher by the name of John Duns Scotus, and the word he coined is haecceitas, translated into English as “thisness”. For Scotus, each being had a singularity and an existence that was all its own. It was “this” and not “that”. “Thisness” is what gives a thing its individuality and identity. As far as human beings are concerned, my haecceitas is what differentiates me from all other human beings. Because of my “thisness”, I am irreplaceable.
The notion of “thisness” needs to be restored. Each one of us is an irreplaceable “this” one. It is my “thisness” that grounds me in reality and gives me my uniqueness. No one can take my place. No one can take anyone’s place. In baseball, a pinch-hitter may be a better hitter than the batter he replaces, but such a replacement is on the level of an activity, not on the ground of one’s being.
There is another sinister consequence to the Dawkins/Singer philosophy. If no one is truly himself, truly a unique person, then he cannot be loved, for love is directed to the unique self. The reasons proposed for aborting defective children extends to aborting the dignity of all human beings and leaving them unlovable commodities that may or not replace others who are their inferior in one way or another. My only hope is to be a “this,” and I cannot be a “that”.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT, and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad and Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart are available through Amazon.com.
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