ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I suggested that in recognizing elements of transcendence in human thought, McDowell incurs the responsibility of accounting for such powers by giving an account of the nature of the human person and explaining the origins of the distinctly human form of existence, in the sense of saying how this might have emerged out of non-rational nature, or failing that postulating some source of its superaddition. Evidently this is a metaphysical issue, but it also has ethical implications.
Although generally sensitive to the evaluative dimension of human experience, and attached to the idea that the possibility of moral awareness depends upon a special kind of nature, McDowell has not considered the ethical implications of these matters for the treatment of human beings. In this respect his humanism contrasts with that of Aquinas and his followers in the Catholic tradition for whom the special character of human beings as rational, moral subjects is taken to imply a requirement of respect extending from the beginning to the end of their lives. Although there is now a significant number of books and essays in which
Aquinas’s thought is examined in some detail many aspects of his writings remain unknown to those outside the field of thomistic studies; or if vaguely known, are generally misunderstood. These include issues which have been quite widely debated among followers and critics of Aquinas, and they number matters where Thomas’s own view is other than what might have been supposed. Examples include the nature of angels, the condition of disembodied souls, the extent of actual human knowledge of nature, and the origins of individual human life. The last of these is the subject of a chapter in a book by Robert Pasnau on
Aquinas on Human Nature, a work which itself is an example of this extended interest.2 Since many non-thomist readers’ knowledge of the issues in question will
come from Pasnau’s account, and since that account is contentious in substance, and advanced in advocacy of a particular moral interest, it is necessary to provide another more credible account of the issue of when human life begins, as this may be determined on the basis of known empirical facts and Aquinas’s metaphysics, and also a more accurate representation of how (and how extensively) this issue has been treated hitherto. Whatever readers may conclude about the substantive issue they should see that matters are other than as Pasnau presents them.
