The Potential of Potentiality Arguments

Abstract

We contend that both the defenders and critics of potentiality arguments in the abortion debate have failed to appreciate the morally relevant aspects of potential. Crucial for understanding the moral significance of potentiality is the fact that mindless organisms have interests but only in their healthy development. Unlike most kinds of organisms that develop minds, the operations of a healthy human mind are of a sophistication and range that bestows them with great value and enables their possessors to obtain unrivaled levels of well-being. Thus the frustration of those interests in healthy mental development is a great harm. Since the healthy development that is in the fetus’s interest can require all sorts of extrinsic interventions, the morally relevant potential isn’t limited to that which is intrinsic, active, normal or probable. And given those real or hypothesized non-human beings that are supposed to show the absurdity of protecting potential are not unhealthy if the mere possibility of their personhood isn’t actualized, then it follows that they don’t have any interests frustrated by that potential going untapped. So potentiality properly construed in terms of healthy development is not susceptible to reductio, unlike understandings of potentiality as metaphysical or physical possibility.