Human Dignity and Bioethics

424 | Patrick Lee and Robert P. George
every human being, including human infants and unborn human
beings, has this basic natural capacity for conceptual thought. *
Human beings also have the basic natural capacity or potentiality
to deliberate among options and make free choices, choices that are
not determined by the events that preceded them, but are determined
by the person making the choice in the very act of choosing. That is,
for some choices, the antecedent events are not sufficient to bring
it about that these choices be made in this way rather than another
way. In such choices, a person could have chosen the other option, or
not chosen at all, under the very same conditions. If a choice is free,
then, given everything that happened to the person up to the point
just prior to his choice—including everything in his environment,
everything in his heredity, everything in his understanding and in his
character—it was still possible for him to choose the other option, or
not to choose at all. Expressed positively: he himself in the very act of
choosing determines the content of his willing. Human beings are ultimate
authors of their own acts of will and partial authors (together
with nature and nurture) of their own character. 19
How, then, does a person finally choose one course of action rather
than another? The person by his own act of choosing directs his will
toward this option rather than that one, and in such a way that he
capable of providing the kind of sense experience and organization of sense experience
that is suitable for data for concepts. Since the object of conceptual thought
is not restricted to a particular place and time, this is evidence that the power of
conceptual thought is non-material. So, we hold that human beings have a nonmaterial
aspect, the powers of conceptual thought and free choice.
* It is not essential to the defense of human dignity to argue that only humans have
this power of conceptual thought and (to be discussed in a moment) free choice.
However, there is no evidence of such conceptual thought or free choice in other
animals. It is sometimes argued that perhaps some nonhuman animals do have
minds like humans do, only at a diminished level. Perhaps, it is speculated, it is
only the complexity of the human brain, a difference only in degree, that distinguishes
humans from other animals. Perhaps other primates are intelligent but they
have lacked the opportunities to manifest their latent intelligence. But such speculation
is misguided. While intelligence is not directly observable, it is unreasonable
to think that an intelligence of the same type as human intelligence, no matter how
diminished, would fail to manifest itself in at least some of its characteristic effects.
If a group of beings possesses a power, and possesses that power over many years
(even decades or centuries), it is implausible to think that such a power would not
be actualized.