1. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies I The Moral Significance of the Question When a Human Being Begins to Exist

2. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard The Target Barry Smith, Berit Brogaard: Sixteen Days Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. In Press.

3. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard Smith and Brogaard on When a Human Being Begins to exist Smith and Brogaard provide an account, in ontological terms, of the multi-stage process whose result is the formation of a human individual.

4. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard The Thesis The human being begins to exist no later than sixteen days after fertilization. (a priori) The relevant substantial change occurs at the very end of the sixteen day period. (a posteriori)

5. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard The Moral Insignificance “What follows is an exercise in ontology, and clearly no conclusions of an ethical sort can be drawn directly from the answer to any ontological question. [...] It seems to us, however, to be equally clear that an answer to the question as to when a human organism begins to exist can be of some help in settling the difficult problems which arise in connection with the issue of abortion and embryonic stem cell experimentation.”

6. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard The Moral Significance for Speciecists or Potentialists According to such views, human beings have a special moral status qua their being human, they have a different moral status from that of beings of other kinds.

7. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard Speciecism Human beings possess a special moral status because their species is a species that has its special moral status essentially.

8. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard Potentialism Human beings possess a special moral status because members of this species share a unique additional property which is of special moral status (e.g. the dispositional property or potential dispositional property of being self-conscious or of having an interest in one's own future existence).

9. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard The Beginning of Human Life There are two senses of the term "life", the mass sense and the count sense. Are both equally deserving of protection?

10. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard A common view It is human life (mass sense) that is of essential moral significance. Smith and Brogaard: Only the count sense matters.

11. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard Why take the life rather than the human being? One life might lead to two beings and two lives might lead to one, but all these lives potentially lead to human beings and if – as for potentialists – potentiality is considered to be of any significance at all, the lives of two human beings could be gained by the protection of a single life and the eventual saving of only one human being after a case of fusion should be worth the protection of two human lives.

12. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard Significance for Peter-Singerists Find a point at which the species member in question starts to gain a morally significant feature actually (as opposed to merely potentially), and this will presumably be a feature additional to that of species-membership. At the stage of gastrulation there is no such new morally significant feature that is gained by the species member in question. So even for these ethical views, Smith's and Brogaard's conception cannot serve as an ontological plug-in.

13. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard The Metaphysical Significance Smith and Brogaard criticize the philosophical tradition since Locke for locating the beginning of existence of a human being at the beginning of self- consciousness.

14. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard Locke “And whatever is talked of other definitions, ingenious observation puts it past doubt, that the idea in our minds, of which the sound man is the sign, is nothing else but of an animal of such a certain form: since I think I may be confident, that, whoever should see a creature of his own shape or make, though it had no more reason all its life than a cat or a parrot, would call him still a man [...].”

15. 16 Days and 16 Fallacies Comments on Smith and Brogaard Equivocation For Locke the question of when a human being begins to exist is thus a biological question. The interesting metaphysical problem is the problem when we, as persons, begin to exist.