Surrogates

PERSONALIZED SURROGATES

3. PERSONALIZED SURROGATES To be human is to own and make use of one’s person. This has sometimes been identified as a soul, taken to have a divine origin, to quicken, guide, and control the body, and to be responsible for what one does with the lived body and organism. Current discussions about the right of a mother to abort her embryo, it has already been noted, depend in good part on the supposition that this has been endowed with a God-given soul. That soul is sometimes understood to be identical with a person, and sometimes with a singular being that expresses itself in and through a person, and an organism as well. Even some of those who speak confidently of it as immortal sometimes hesitate to say, while others even deny, that the soul is inserted in the embryo, by God, at the moment of conception. No one, it has already been noted, advocates baptizing the unborn, though baptism is thought to be so important a right and task that in emergencies atheists are said, by some Roman Catholic theologians, to be qualified to perform it. No satisfactory warrants have been provided by anyone to show when a fertilized human’s egg becomes a human, or that there is a divinely produced soul that owns and expresses itself in and through an organism. Apart from those who take humans to be socialized beings from the beginning of their lives, everyone apparently holds that a living human owns a person as well as an organism, leaving over the question of how they are interrelated, and whether or not they are used by a being that is distinct from both. Today, Americans live under a Supreme Court’s practical decision to set an arbitrary date after which abortions are illegal. It was a wise decision, giving some comfort to each side, and providing a freedom of choice to the bearer of a living human embryo. An individual owns and uses a person and an organism. It also owns and uses a lived body, and is thereupon able to function as a member of the humanized world. Any one of the three could be used as a surrogate for the other two. Each of them has subdivisions that could be used as surrogates for one another, and for it as well. A person is not identifiable with any organism, or with any part of one. It does not eat or drink. It has neither size nor weight. It cannot be located in some part of space. Not identifiable with an individual, it is owned and used by this. I feel hungry as a person, but do not, so far, have an appetite or a weight. My lived body is used to write this. My organism has kept at a rather constant weight for a half dozen years or so, but I do not have a good grasp of all the things it does and could do, even those, like standing up, that it does quite well. Sometimes I use an idea as a surrogate for an act. Sometimes, I do the reverse. A memory, a hope, a fear, a belief, a determination, or a feeling may be used as a surrogate for some one of the others. I do not usually know the reason why I do that. Nor do I give much thought to the questions of when or how I should. Something is used that seems to promise to provide what will add to my satisfactions, but I usually neither know nor care to know how it does this. Each entity can do something that others cannot do there and then, and in just that way. One must acknowledge a multiplicity of units, each of which differs from the others, and seems able to do what these could not or might not do. The election of a surrogate depends at least in part on a power to identify abilities and likelihoods in what could be used in place of what is being entertained. Whatever there is available may be used as a surrogate in place of anything else that might be entertained. The source of the most radical, monstrous evil can be used as a warning, a reminder, or an example. One may replace and may even recommend the replacement of an interest in something excellent by the abhorrent, not because this has some intrinsic merit, but because it satisfies a need to know what should be avoided...