The purpose of this paper is to explore the question "What makes man to be a being of moral worth?" By a being of moral worth I mean an entity that is the subject of inalienable rights that are to be recognized by other entitles capable of recognizing rights and that demand legal protection by society. By a being of moral worth I mean an entity that is valuable, precious, irreplaceable just because it exists. By a being of moral worth I mean a being that cannot and must not be considered simply as a part related to some larger whole.

I believe that men are such entities. I realize, of course, that many people do not believe that men are beings of moral worth. But this belief is at the heart of Christian faith, and it is, moreover, central to the "American proposition". It is one of those truths that we hold in common, as a matter of shared consensus.¹ Although many of our contemporaries may radically deny this belief (that is, they consider it completely false as a proposition about the meaning of human existence), it is certainly operative on a pragmatic level in American society and, indeed it seems to be a belief operative in other societies as well, including the international society as organized in the United Nations. B.F. Skinner, it can safely be surmised, would hardly maintain that man is a being of moral worth as a statement of metaphysical truth, but he would maintain that he ought to be so treated and regarded in his sociopolitical life. For him and for many of our contemporaries it is "true" in a pragmatic sense that man is a being of moral worth; belief in this proposition makes good laws possible. None of our fellow citizens (no man, really), save for pathological conditions, wants his fellow men to treat him as an object that can be discarded, as something to be manipulated or managed or even destroyed for the interests of others.

That man is an entity of moral worth is something recognized publicly in the United States: the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and many subsequent ones as well, were intended to limit the power of government, and they limited this power in the name of rights belonging to individuals (and to states). The Supreme Court decisions in the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton cases, on the constitutionality of abortion laws, were based on the right (moral and legally protectable) to privacy of the woman seeking an abortion. The operative principle governing the Court was that a human being is an entity of moral worth, a subject of protectable rights.

In the Roe and Doe decisions the Supreme Court also held that a fetus is not such an entity. Although the Court did declare that it had no intention of settling the difficult question of when human life begins (it explicitly admitted that if the fetus is indeed humanly alive the decision it ultimately rendered would have been different, and in admitting this the Court implicitly acknowledged that being a human being is, coram lege, a morally significant factor),² it actually did determine this question. For it consistently maintained that the fetus, even after viability, is only "potential life" or the "potentiality of life".³ Obviously if the fetus is only "potential life" or the "potentiality of life" it is not life. My oldest boy, (for instance, is a potential father--he is not (so far as I know) actually a father. But were he actually a father he could not be potentially a father.

The abortion controversy as such is not of concern to us here. This controversy, however, is very illuminating for answering the question before us: "What makes man to be a being of moral worth?" Many of those who advocate abortion as a solution to some of the terrible problems confronting human society do not, of course, regard the fetus as a human being. They look upon it as "protoplasmic rubbish" (Philip Wylle),⁴ "genetic materials" (Joseph Fletcher),⁵ a "blueprint" (Garrett Hardin),⁶ a "part of the woman's body" (Havelock Ellis),⁷ or something of this kind. But others who will justify feticide--for this, after all, is what abortion actually is--are ready to concede that the fetus is a human being, that it is humanly alive (e.g., Daniel Callahan, who is ready to grant that a fetus is a human being at least after an electroencephalogram shows that brain activity is going on).⁸ In fact, medical and biological evidence falsifies any claims that the fetus is not humanly alive, and numerous writers are willing to concede, as does Charles Curran,⁹ that the fetus is alive as a fully individuated human entity from the time of implantation, that is, after it is no longer possible for twinning to occur or that two developing blastocysts--merge into one--a process completed between the eighth and the twelfth days after conception. But these writers still defend abortion (if not on request, at least when "indicated" by specifiable medical and psycho-socio-economic reasons) and argue that abortion is not the killing of a person or of an entity meaningfully human, even if it may truthfully be described as a killing of a human being. What this means, and this is a tendency discernible in much of the writing occasioned by the abortion controversy, is that many authors today make a very significant distinction between a human being and a person or a human being who is meaningfully human. They distinguish, in other words, between a human being and what I have called a being of moral worth. For these writers an entity is not a being of moral worth because it is a human being; rather it is such a being because it is, in addition to being a human being, a person or a meaningfully human entity. For all these writers the position taken by Daniel Callahan is paradigmatic: we can make nuanced distinctions among human beings, judging some as subjects of rights protectabIe by society and others as not being such subjects.¹⁰

There are, I believe, many problems with this position. The most basic of course is what is it that makes a human being a person or meaningfully human if it is something distinct from his membership in the human species? Who, in other words, is to count as a being of moral worth? Joseph Fletcher attempts to give us some "Indicators of Humanhood" and among them he includes an I.Q. of at least 20 and probably 40, self-awareness, self-control, a sense of time, and the capability to relate to others.¹¹ Obviously if this is what is meant by a person or a meaningfully human being (a being of moral rights), then many entities who can truthfully be said to be human do not count as beings of moral worth. The thrust of this direction in contemporary thought is, I believe, luminously and explicitly set forth in a provocative essay by Michael Tooley. According to Tooley an entity, in order to be the subject of moral rights (what other authors term a person or a meaningfully human being) must be a being "possessing the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states" and belief that "it is itself such a continuing entity".¹² It is obvious that a being such as the one described by Tooley is what most people have in mind when they speak of "persons", for the characteristics he lists are characteristics ordinarily attributed to persons.

What is significant about Tooley's position is that it explicitly denies that membership in a species is of moral significance.¹³ This denial ought logically to be acceptable to all those contemporary writers (and we can add Gerald Leach¹⁴ and Louis Dupré¹⁵ to those already mentioned) who distinguish between being a human and being a person or "meaningfully" human. In other words, for these writers the reason why a man is a being of moral worth is not something rooted in his being as a man, that is, an entity within an identifiable biological species, but rather in his being a person, and what makes him to be a person is something different from what makes him to be a man.

The position advanced here is that the reason why a man is a being of moral worth is rooted in his membership in the human species. What makes him to be a man simultaneously makes him to be a being of moral worth. This position, in brief, holds that membership in a species is a matter of serious moral significance, and it is so because the human species constitutes a class of beings who are different in kind from other living species. To be a human being is, of course, to be an animal, but it is to be an animal of a radically different kind from other animals, because of the presence of something within the human animal that is not present within any other animal we know of.

Before attempting to sketch the lines of argument that might help to establish the truth of this position it is first advisable to make some comments about "rights" and the bearers of rights. It is frequently asserted that only "persons" (meaningfully human entities?) are the subjects of rights and that non-personal entities--entities that are simply objects, things, and not subjects--have no rights. For instance, rocks, trees, dogs, cats, cows, and similar objects are usually not regarded as bearers of rights. I submit that our ecological consciousness is pertinent here--there has been, as it were, a lifting of our horizons. It is intelligible to maintain, in other words, that every being, every entity, is a bearer of rights in some significant sense; everything that is a bearer of what might he termed ontic rights. These rights, of course, can be recognized and articulated only by special sorts of entities, namely, those capable of intellectual knowledge, and they impose moral obligations only on these kinds of entities. But the fact that a tree is not aware of its own existence does not mean that it has no rights whatsoever and that these rights are not to be recognized by beings capable of recognizing them. It simply means that an entity like a tree might have different kinds of rights from those possessed by other kinds of entities. Trees are surely not bearers of moral worth; they are not irreplaceable, precious, priceless, of transcendent value in themselves.

The most basic right of any entity is to be recognized for what it is, and those entities capable of recognizing entities for what they are have the obligation to do so, to recognize them. Another basic right would be a claim of some sort, even if not inviolable or inadmissible, on those realities that are related to its basic needs, that is, a claim on goods truly perfective of it, goods that enable it to be what it is.

In the previous paragraph mention was made of "obligation". The kind of obligation referred to was a moral obligation, one rooted in the capacity to distinguish between is and ought. A leaf has no obligation, morally speaking, to fall to the ground when it is released from a tree; its falling to the ground is simply a matter of natural necessity. Of all the beings of our experience only men, so far as we know, are beings to whom moral obligations can meaningfully be attributed. Men are, in short, moral beings. By a moral being I mean something different from a being of moral worth, although I believe that these terms are interrelated and that what makes a man to be a moral being is what makes him to be a being of moral worth. A moral being is an entity that is the bearer of moral duties or obligations. We cannot meaningfully say that a rock or a tree or a dog or a cat or a chimpanzee is such an entity. For these beings there is no compelling evidence to lead us to the conclusion that they are capable of distinguishing between is and ought. There is for them no moral imputability or accountability or responsibility. Yet like all entities, these beings are the bearers of what I have termed ontic rights. Ontic rights, however, impose moral obligations only on men, that is, on entities for whom there is compelling evidence to support the judgment that they are moral beings, that they are entities for whom the distinction between is and ought is meaningful. It is meaningful for human beings to distinguish between is and ought because men are minded entities: as intelligent beings they can come to know what is and to recognize what is for what it is and respond to what is in an appropriate or fitting mode. Moreover, in responding to what is they are capable of self-determination, that is, of making the response their own. This capability is meaningless unless they can respond in ways that are not fitting or appropriate to the demands placed upon them by what is. A moral being, in other words, is a minded being, and by a minded being is meant a being capable of intellectual knowledge (of understanding what is for what it is) and of making choices that are properly his and not some other agent's.

Men are such entities, and their being entities of this sort is related to what the authors we have been criticizing have in mind when they speak of persons or meaningfully human beings. For a person (or an entity that possesses "meaningful" human life) is indeed a minded entity, that is, a self-conscious and self-determinative entity. Moreover, and this is something that we know by reflecting upon our experiences and coming to an understanding of them, not all men (not all entities that can truthfully be included within the human species) are actually moral beings. We do not think that neonates or infants or those suffering from insanity or many other members of the human species are capable of recognizing what is for what it is and of responding to the demands that what is imposes upon moral beings. Yet the reason why some human beings are capable of all this is rooted in their being human to begin with.

A moral being, we have said, is a minded entity. But what is it that makes or enables an entity to be minded? This, I believe is the nub of the matter. My thesis is that what makes or enables men to be minded entities is the presence, within human beings, of something that is not, so far as we know, present to other entities of our experience. This "something" has been variously named. It is the ruach of the Old Testament and the pneuma of the New Testament; it is the nous poietikos of Aristotle, the mens of Augustine, the anima subsistens of Aquinas, the memoire of Bergson, the Geist of Rahner. However it is named it is a principle immanent in man and making man to be what he is; it is a principle of immateriality or of transcendence from the limitations of matter.

But how do we know that a principle of this kind is constitutive of human beings? To answer this question it may be helpful to inquire into what we mean by minded entities. And here some empirical data and the observations of Jose Delgado, the famed Yale neurosurgeon, have special pertinence, particularly when they are linked to certain philosophical and theological notions that have had a long history and have found contemporary expression in the work of men such as Mortimer Adler and Bernard F.J. Lonergan.

First, let us look at the empirical data. There have been recorded instances of feral or "wolf" children, that is, children who have been abandoned or lost in the forest at a very tender age and who have been "adopted" and reared by wild beasts such as wolves. Such children obviously are human beings, members of the human species. When these children have been discovered they have been found totally lacking in any self-consciousness. They do not realize that they are selves, that they are subjects; they have no consciousness or awareness of themselves as enduring subjects of experience. Why? The reason apparently is that they have not been exposed to the process of inculturation or what might also be termed humanization. They have lacked contact with other human beings; they have not encountered in their experience beings who are aware that they are "selves". They have accordingly not been able to develop any kind of interpersonal, intersubjective relationships and through the development of these relationships to come to recognize themselves, to come to understand that they are indeed "selves" or subjects.¹⁶

Second, let us look at the views of Delgado. He argues that the mind is not, as many writers today maintain, simply the brain--a physical organ that has achieved an incredible degree of complexification in man. He maintains rather, that the mind must be understood in terms of its function, and so understood, it consists in the interrelationships between a brained entity and an environment that is cultured. Thus some entities that possess highly complex brains (e.g., feral children) are not minded entities because they do not interact with a cultural environment. But men are entities who are brains, and who do interact with such an environment and in so doing become minded. Delgado argues, and from his perspective rightly so, that at birth men are mindless although possessed of brains. They become minded entities (what the writers whom we have been criticizing term persons or meaningfully human beings) by interacting with their environment. This environment includes other men who have constructed a culture or mediate a culture to new entities who have the same kind of brain that they have. To support his argument he points to empirical data that cannot be ignored. For a human being to become minded (personal, meaningfully human in the terminology of many contemporary writers) it is necessary for him to exist within an environment that includes other men and their culture.¹⁷

Delgado is saying, in short, that a cultural environment is a necessary condition for the emergence of minded entities, and this conclusion seems warranted by the existence of feral or "wolf" children. A cultural environment is apparently a sine qua non for the existence of entities actually capable of self-consciousness and self-determination, actually capable of recognizing what is for what it is and of responding responsibly to the demands imposed by this recognition. Moreover, because only brained entities, and entities with a brain of certain complexification, become "minded" by interacting with a cultural environment, it also would seem to follow that a particular kind of brain is also a necessary condition for the existence of entities actually capable of such performances. But are culture and the brain sufficient to explain adequately the existence of such entities?

To answer this question let us first look at one of the conditions seemingly indispensable for the emergence of minded entities, namely culture. A culture is not something subsistent in itself; it is not a phenomenon that occurs by nature or by reason of natural necessity. It is rather an artifact, the creation of entities that do exist "in nature", and these entities are obviously the beings we call men. Cultures "exist" because men exist; man is the culture-building animal. This is something recognized by those who, like William S. Heck, would surely reject the view that man is, in any metaphysical sense, a being of moral worth, a being who is unique, irreplaceable, precious in himself, a value transcending the material universe. Although for Beck and many of our contemporaries man is simply a material entity in no way discontinuous with the rest of the material universe, he is the culture building animal. Beck writes:

life is a web of which man is part and prisoner. . . . What of man, the organism? What is he? What is his origin, his state, and his destiny? Man, we know, is an animal, which like all other animals seeks food, shelter and security, mates and reproduces, who fights off the encroachments of a hostile environment until it is possible to fight no longer. Then like all animals, he dies. But man is unique among animals, for he alone has the ability to build cultures. His growth is not completed by reproduction, nor is it fulfilled by death, because the biological pattern of man has made his nature self-surpassing.¹⁸

When he says that "the biological pattern of man has made his nature self-surpassing," Beck is saying that something within the makeup of the human animal enables him to surpass or transcend himself and, because of this, build culture. Along with many other writers today, he would argue that the brain (the other conditio sine qua non referred to before for the emergence of minded entities) is this enabling factor. And the human brain is an enormously complex organ, consisting of over 10,000 million neuron cells and capable of storing information, reading signals, transmitting messages and explaining many of the activities that human beings do.¹⁹ But the question can legitimately be raised whether everything that human beings do and are capable of doing can be explained sufficiently and adequately ln terms of the neurological processes going on within the brain in interaction with the environment. For human beings are not only capable of transmitting messages or signals; they are capable of transmitting the messengers as well. That is, human beings can share and communicate their lives, their very selves. They are capable of being related to themselves, and this is a very unusual kind of relationship. We speak, and speak meaningfully, of human beings who are "in possession" of themselves; we speak of "self-possessed" persons. Human beings can love one another in the sense that they can value other human beings in and for themselves and not by reason of any benefits to themselves that can be gained. They can "give" themselves to others in love, and in the very action of giving themselves away in love they do not, paradoxically, lose possession of themselves but come to possess themselves in an utterly new way. In fact, it can even be said that a human being who does not possess himself cannot really give himself away in love to another, and reciprocally it seems that a human being cannot truly possess himself, cannot truly love himself, without loving others. Human activities include communion with others; human language, and a language that is not only verbal but includes as well "body" language and human activities, goes beyond communication to communion. Through understanding and love human beings are capable of living in a new way, of existing in a new way. These human activities of possessing themselves, giving themselves away in love and understanding--not only messages, but messengers--are central to the building up of culture.

It is for this reason that it is worth reflecting upon the views of contemporary writers such as Mortimer Adler and Bernard Lonergan, who stand in a long philosophical and theological tradition. What arguments do they marshall for answering our question of what it is that makes man to be a being of moral worth--irreplaceable, precious, priceless and transcending the society of which he is a part.

With Beck and others both Adler and Lonergan agree that man is the culture-building animal. For Adler, man builds culture because he is capable of propositional speech, and he is capable of this because he is capable of conceptual thought. For Lonergan man builds culture because he is the questioning, inquiring animal, the animal who is capable of raising transcendental, as distinct from categorical, questions. What do they mean by this? We can begin with Adler.

Adler argues--and the argument that he advances is, as he himself notes, not one peculiar to himself but is shared by many and has a long history--in two major steps. He first presents arguments to support the distinction between what can be termed perceptual thought and conceptual thought, and then seeks to show that what is called conceptual thought can be explained adequately if and only if there is a power present in the human animal that can properly be said to be immaterial.

Adler will grant, along with many contemporary philosophers, that animals other than men "think", if by thinking we mean the ability to learn from experience, to generalize, to discriminate, to solve problems by trial and error and even to make inductive inferences from empirically learned cues.²⁰ This kind of thinking may be termed perceptual thought in order to distinguish this type of thinking from conceptual thought. But how are percepts, the products of perceptual thought, different from concepts, the products of conceptual thought? Both are unobserved and are thus, Adler holds, inferred factors or psychological constructs. Both, consequently, should be described in terms of the functions they are postulated to perform. A percept, if so described, is an acquired disposition or learned ability to recognize the kind of thing a perceived object is--an ant, a dog, a rabbit, a man. A concept, on the other hand, is an acquired disposition to perform this function, but in addition is a disposition to understand what that kind of thing is like. The concept of dog, for instance, is chiefly and primarily a disposition to understand what dogs are like, that is, to understand what it is that makes a dog to be a dog rather than some other kind of being. Because of this it is likewise a disposition to recognize this or that particular perceived entity as a dog, and in performing this function it is doing what a percept is intended to do. A further distinguishing characteristic between a concept and a percept is that concepts can fulfill their function when the perceptible objects are not actually being perceived, whereas percepts are operative only when the particular objects in question are actually perceived.²¹ In brief, Adler writes, "all perceptual abstractions--in animals and in men--are dispositions that are operative only in the presence of perceived particulars, but human concepts, even when they relate to perceived particulars, are not operative only in the perceptible presence of these particulars; and not all human concepts relate to perceived particulars."²²

To support further this distinction between a percept and a concept Adler argues that a word, in itself a meaningless physical mark or sound, acquires its denotative and connotative meaning, enabling it to serve as a designator (pointing to a concept in the mind) rather than as a mere signal or percept (pointing to a neuronal state of affairs in the brain), not from the perceived object itself (otherwise why would different words such as poodle, dog, animal all be used to designate the same object?), "but from the whole class of objects to particular instances of which it is applied as a name."²³ Since a class of objects is not itself an object of perception--for all that we can perceive is a particular object or instance of a class--the ability to understand what a class is involves more than the ability to recognize that a particular instance of that class is an instance of that class. In other words, the designative meaning (conceptual meaning) of our common names cannot be explained by reference to any factor or construct within the reach of our perceptual powers. In short, "common or general names that function as designators of perceived objects but have different connotative and denotative significance as designators, get their different meanings from the perceived objects according as these objects are differently conceived."²⁴ In addition our concepts refer to realities that are not perceptible at all, for instance, justice, loyalty, triangularity, etc.

Although concepts and conceptual thinking cannot be explained on the basis of the psychological processes of perception--processes that we share with other animals--might it be possible for concepts to be explained by changes occurring in the neurons of the brain? Many contemporary writers think that they can, and advance what has been named the "identity hypothesis". This is a "materialist" position inasmuch as it holds that the conceptual thinking necessary for man to build cultures can be explained adequately without attributing to the human animal any immaterial principle or power. But it is not materialistic in the crude sense of reducing psychical activity to physical activity, for it does admit that the mind and the brain are analytically distinct, even though they are existentially or entitatively the same.²⁵

But Adler and others²⁶ maintain that the power of conceptual thought cannot be adequately accounted for by the identity hypothesis. This power is, in Adler's words, the power

that man exercises in naming things, in uttering sentences that can be true or false, in making judgments about their truth or falsity in the light of relevant evidence and arguments, in stating inferences and giving reasons, and in developing . . . mathematics, art, science, history, philosophy, religion, the state and all the other institutions of civilized life.²⁷

It is in virtue of the power of conceptual thought that we are able to be related to our own selves, to be capable of reflective knowledge. It is only because we have this ability that we can truly be said to possess ourselves and to give ourselves away to other human beings in love. It is this power that makes it possible for us to enter into communion with others, to live a life of dialogue, not monologue. It is this power that enables us to be minded beings, for it is the antecedent condition making it possible for an entity with a particular type of brain to reflect or interact with a cultural environment. And this power, Adler and the philosophical tradition that he represents maintain, cannot be accounted for in terms of material reality, in terms of neuronal changes occurring within the brain. Why not? The argument to support this inference, Adler writes,

hinges on two propositions. The first proposition asserts that the concepts whereby we understand what different kinds of classes of things are like consist in meanings or intentions that are universal. The second proposition asserts that nothing that exists physically is actually universal; anything that is embodied in matter exists as an individual and as such it can be a particular instance of this class or that. From these two propositions, the conclusion follows that our concepts must be immaterial. If they were acts of a bodily organ such as the brain, they would exist in matter, and so would be individual. But they are universal. Hence they do not and cannot exist in matter, and the power of conceptual thought by which we form and use concepts must be an immaterial power, i.e., one the acts of which are not the acts of a bodily organ.²⁸

This, in essence, is the line of thought developed by Adler. It is an argument that calls attention to the radical power underlying man's cultural capacities. It is the power "from which," as another writer puts it, "conjecture springs". It is the root source of man's ability, as this author continues, "to form mental images of things and situations which do not yet exist but which may be found, brought about, or constructed by his efforts. To this root capacity the term intellectus is traditionally applied."²⁹ It is because of this power of conceptual thought, of intellectus, of mens, that man is that being "capable of a superior realizing, an opening and keeping open that derives from an ability to perceive things as having an existence independent of their proximate affective references; and so, seeing beyond each immediate need of physiological valence, able to carve out for himself, so to speak, a transcendent environmental niche always a little wider and more supple than the biologically given."³⁰ This is a power that transcends matter and hence requires us to infer the presence within man of a principle of immateriality.

Lonergan's thought focuses on the character of human existence as a life of inquiry, of questioning. For Lonergan the human animal is driven from within to question continually the meaning of his existence. It is this dynamism that makes culture possible; it is the antecedent condition rooted in man's being that makes progress possible. His thought is lucidly summarized in a passage in which he describes the dynamism that moves the human animal ever onward in his quest for meaning, truth, and responsible action. He writes:

Spontaneously we move from experiencing to the effort to understand; and this spontaneity is not unconscious or blind; on the contrary, it is constitutive of our conscious intelligence; just as the absence of the effort to understand is constitutive of stupidity. Spontaneously we move from understanding with its manifold and conflicting expressions to critical reflection; again, the spontaneity is not unconscious or blind; it is constitutive of our critical rationality, of the demand within us for sufficient reason, a demand that operates prior to any formulation of a principle of sufficient reason; and it is the neglect or absence of this demand that constitutes silliness. Spontaneously we move from judgments of fact or possibility to judgments of value and to the deliberateness of decision and commitment; and that spontaneity is not unconscious or blind; it constitutes us as conscientious, responsible persons, and its absence would leave us psychopaths.³¹

Although many questions could be asked about this passage, its major thrust is clear. Human civilization, culture, progress are possible because man is the being who asks questions, who inquires, seeking to understand his experience, testing his understanding of that experience for its truth, and acting responsibly in accord with a true understanding of himself and his world. The dynamism that is responsible for this movement from experience to understanding to truth to responsible action, "far from being the product of cultural advance, is the condition of its possibility".³²

As a questioning, inquiring being man raises various kinds of questions. Some are meaningful and can be given quick, final, definitive yes-no answers: Is it raining outside? What is the chemical composition of salt? These are what Lonergan terms "categorical" questions, and they play a large role in human culture. But there are other questions, questions that are meaningful, that man raises, and these questions can only be answered partially; a final, definitive response can never be given simply because the questions reach out for or intend the unknown whole or totality of which our answers reveal only a part. Questions of this kind, called "transcendental" by Lonergan, move us from what we know already to seek what we do not yet know.³³ The capacity to raise these questions--and among them we might include such questions as the true meaning of parenthood, justice, honor, loyalty, man himself, God--discloses to us something about the human animal. About his entitative makeup. Man is for Lonergan characterized by an unrestricted, pure desire to know, and to know all that is. He is this kind of being because he is capable of raising questions, including transcendental questions, and of coming to know, truthfully even if only partially, their answers. But to a being of this kind man must be a being whose constitutive makeup requires the presence of intellect, of a power surpassing or transcending the conditions of matter.³⁴

The considerations brought to our attention by contemporary writers like Lonergan and Adler are, of course, subject to intelligent debate. The argument that they advance (and that are advanced by the philosophical tradition of which they are representatives) to support the position that human culture and the emergence of a minded entity demands, not only a cultural environment and a brain of a particular kind, but also the presence within man of an immaterial intellect can surely be questioned--but again, is not the ability to question this position itself indicative of the meaning of being human?

Geneticists like Theodozius Dobzhansky maintain that to be a man, that is, to be a human being, one must have a human genotype.³⁵ Yet Dobzhansky admits that "the genotype of the human species is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for cultural development."³⁶ What is incontrovertible is that "the human organism has a constitutional capacity to react to objects . . . without the specific content or form of the reaction being in any way physiologically given, and on the basis of this capacity "the human attains levels of organization beyond those open to animals".³⁷ We can ask wherein this "constitutional capacity" consists, and answer that it consists in man's being as the questioning, inquiring animal, the animal capable of asking transcendental questions. And this pure desire to know and to think conceptually can be explained adequately only if rooted in a principle of immateriality, a principle that does indeed make man capable of transcending the entire material universe.

Thus, in answer to the question, "What makes man to be a being of moral worth?" I reply that it is his being as a man, that is, in being an entity whose constitution or makeup includes a principle of immateriality. It is this principle that ultimately makes him to be a man and to be minded, to be capable of building culture or entering into intersubjective relationships, of determining his own life through his own choice, of possessing himself and the world in understanding, and of giving himself away in love to other human beings while remaining fully in possession of himself.

It is in virtue of his immateriality that a human being is what he is, namely a person. It is in virtue of his immateriality that he is a being of moral worth and capable of becoming a moral being. In order for a human being to develop the capacities that are his by reason of what he is, a brain and a cultural environment are necessary. But neither the brain nor a cultural environment makes men to be a being of moral worth. What makes him to be this is something else that is constitutive of his being as a man, and it is something that is not material. To be man is to be this kind of being; and by definition to be a member of the human species is to be a man. Any entity that counts as a member of the human species, therefore, is this kind of being. Membership in the human species is of critical moral significance simply because human animals are different kinds of animals. They are different, not because of culture or brains, but because of who they are, that is, beings ultimately minded because within them is a principle of immateriality, of transcendence. Members of this species are beings of moral worth not by reason of anything that they do or achieve, but by reason of what they are.

Consequently, criteria sufficient to establish that an entity is a human being, a member of the human species, are sufficient to establish that that entity is a being of moral worth--a being who is priceless, precious, irreplaceable, valuable in itself, transcending or surpassing the material order, an entity that must be considered not merely as a part related to some larger whole but only as a whole. What are these criteria? I submit that the criteria for establishing whether an entity is a member of the human species are conception by human parents, possession of the human genetic code, and individuated existence. All these criteria are unquestionably verified, according to incontrovertible biomedical evidence by any human fetus after implantation. Such entities are fully individuated both with respect to their parents and any possible siblings, are alive and humanly alive because they are identifiably human and not non-human. Even prior to implantation we know that we are faced with an entity that is individuated with respect to its parents and that is humanly alive; we do not know with absolute certitude whether this entity is individuated with respect to any possible siblings, but it presumptively is stochiastically.

Many entities other than fetuses can be positively identified as members of the human species that do not exhibit the properties that we associate with persons or "meaningfully" human beings, if by the latter we understand entities capable of entering into intersubjective relationships, aware of themselves as enduring subjects of experience, and so forth. Among these we can include neonates and infants, the insane and the autistic, those in comatose conditions. But all these entities are members of the human species; all are human beings. and what makes them to be human beings is what makes them to be beings of moral worth.

I submit that this is the only intelligent stance that we can take if justice is to reign and if human life is to be really human. Human existence would be intolerable without trust, and trust is possible only if we are ready to accept our fellow species members as we trust that they will accept us, namely as beings of moral worth.

In concluding this paper perhaps we can return to the abortion controversy. In its Roe and Doe decisions the Supreme Court explicitly recognized that the mother-to-be is a being of moral worth, a being entitled to privacy and a being whose rights demanded protection by society. What makes that mother-to-be a being of moral worth is her humanity, her membership in the human species. It is not by reason of something that she possesses or by reason of something that she has done or by reason of the humanization or inculturation process that she is such a being. She is this kind of being, that is, an entity of moral worth, by reason of what she is: a human being. The fetus she carries is, like her, a fellow species member, a fellow human being, and so likewise are neonates and infant and imbeciles and morons and many others who are, for various reasons, incapable of entering into meaningful intersubjective relationships or of experiencing themselves as enduring subjects of experience. These entities are our fellow species members, as are too the scum of the earth, the bums and hoboes and neo-Nazis and terrorists. As fellow human subjects they put claims on us who are capable of recognizing them for what they are, human beings like ourselves, beings of moral worth.

From a religious perspective we might say that what makes man to be a being of moral worth is that he is the image of God, the living eikon of the God who is love and who made man so that he can share and communicate his life to a being like unto himself. To be a human being is to be, in this religious perspective, the treated logos or word of the living God. We are the created words that the Uncreated Word became. What makes us to be these logoi theou is, at root, what makes us to be the zoa logika of Aristotle, the animals who can not only speak but even enter into communion with his fellows and, through communion with them, encounter the One who has uttered them.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

1. See John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960), pp. 97-105.

2. Roe v. Wade. The United States Law Week 41 LW (1-23-73), X, 4227.

3. Ibid. X and XI, 4228-4229.

4. Philip Wylle, The Magic Animal (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 272.

5. This is the term Fletcher uses to describe the developing fetus in his article, "New Beginnings of Life", in William Hamilton, ed., The New Genetics and the Future of Man (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 76-91.

6. Garrett Hardin, "Abortion or Compulsory Pregnancy?" Journal of Marriage and the Family (1968), p. 250.

7. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 6, Sex in Relation to Society (Philadelphia: PA: Davis, 1910), pp. 607-608.

8. Daniel Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 409 ff.

9. Charles Curran, "Abortion: Law and Morality in Contemporary Catholic Theology", The Jurist 33 973, 180.

10. See Callahan, op. cit., pp. 388-389. Here it is instructive to read the penetrating analysis and criticism of Callahan's position offered by Paul Ramsey in his "Abortion: A Review Article", The Thomist (1973), 174-226, in particular 176-188.

11. Joseph Fletcher, "Indicators of Humanhood", The Hastings Center Report 2 (1972), 1-4.

12. Michael Tooley, "Abortion and Infanticide", Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972), 44, 48, 55.

13. Ibid., p. 48.

14. See Gerald Leach, The Biocrats (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970). Leach obviously considers the fetus a human being (see p. 161) but in his advocacy of infanticide (pp. 102-104) he equally obviously considers that not only fetuses but even infants are not subjects of moral worth.

15. Louis Dupré, "New Approach to Abortion Problem", Theological Studies, 34 (1973), 481-488.

16. See Joseph Sing, Wolf Children and Feral Children (New York: Basic Books, 1962).

17. Jose Delgado, The Physical Control of the Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 32-59.

18. William S. Beck, Modern Science and the Nature of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 17.

19. On the brain, see Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain (New York: Knopf, 1974).

20. Mortimer Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Meridian, 1968), p. 157.

21. Ibid., p. 156.

22. Ibid., p. 157.

23. Ibid., p. 185.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., pp. 200-201.

26. For example, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Bergson. Bergson, of course, attacked what he termed the cinematographic characteristics of rational thought, but he clearly posited within man a power enabling him to reach true judgments about reality.

27. Adler, op. cit., pp. 133-134.

28. Ibid., pp. 220-221.

29. John Deely, "The Emergence of Man" in The Problem of Evolution: A Study of the philosophical Repercussions of Evolutionary Science, edited by John N. Deely and Raymond J. Nogar (New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1973), p. 136. The internal citation is taken from Theodozius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 338.

30. Deely, art. cit., p. 135.

31. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 18.

32. Ibid., p. 12.

33. On the distinction between categorical and transcendental questions see Ibid., pp. 11-12, 105-106; Lonergan, Insight (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), pp. 638-639, 272-275, 683-685; see also David Tracy, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), pp. 125-128.

34. Lonergan, Insight, pp. 638-639, 683-685.

35. Dobzhansky, op. cit., p. 25.

36. Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 28; cf. pp. 119-120.

37. T. Parsons and E. Shils, ed., Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 10 and 17. Cited in Deely, art. cit., p. 135.