Bioethics and the Process of Embodiment

BIOETHICS AND THE PROCESS OF EMBODIMENT* H. TRISTRAM ENGELHARDT, JR., Ph.D., M.DA One of the core difficulties encountered in ethical judgments about humans is that human life is a process. What one is judging is in a process of change. Human gametes become zygotes, zygotes become infants, and infants become adult humans who grow old and die. The object of bioethics is life, and life is a process. In the course of this paper, I will argue for four theses concerning the significance of the human life process. These arguments will focus on a process view of embodiment: that moral claims emerge and withdraw in step with the process of embodiment. That is, the moral value and claims associated with a body depend on what is embodied. To accent process is to recognize that being embodied is a process of becoming—not a final static state. First, I will present reasons for viewing embodiment as a categorial, not a material, relation. The process view which I will advance will thus be more in a Hegelian or dialectical mode1 than in a Whiteheadian one. I will argue that mind and body are not two separable yet relatable things, but rather that mind and body are categories ofsignificance presented in *An ancestral draft of this paper was read at the symposium "Religion, Ethics and the Life Process," Institute of Religion and Human Development, Houston, Texas, March 18-19, 1974. tlnstitute for the Medical Humanities and Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas 77550. 1By a categorial account, I mean one which treats of the unities of being in thought. Categorial accounts have primarily a theoretical appeal. They offer an understanding of the ways in which the different significances of being can be comprehended and interrelated . As such, they contrast with metaphysical accounts or empirical scientific accounts, which deal with the structure of things rather than the rationale of things. What I will present is in many respects indebted to Hegel's concept of the dialectic as a method of relating categories so that they constitute an ordered progress from less to more encompassing categories. The dialectic is, in this sense, a metaontological method. When categories are ordered, one is offered a sequence ofconceptually significant levels ofbeing. When these relations appear sequentially in nature, they constitute a process which can be construed categorially. It is this sequence which I will treat as a process. The term "process" is appropriate, since a continuous change of categories is displayed through time. Though the categories are conceptually distinguishable, in reality they inseparably grade into each other. Finally, the temporal sequence ofthe categories is strictly an empirical fact and must be distinguished from the logical character of their categorial relations. That is, in the process of embodiment one observes a sequence of stages, the relations of which can be understood categorially while they occur temporally. 486 I H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. · Process of Embodiment the appearance ofcertain objects. They are conceptually distinguishable, but actually inseparable, aspects ofobjects such as human persons. Mind and body are distinctions as quality and quantity are; they are real but nevertheless not things. Though this approach is descriptive in its basis, it is ontological in its intent, aiming at the resolution of such quandaries as dualistic versus monistic construals of human nature and at enabling a process view of human reality. Second, I will argue that embodiment is not an all-or-nothing state, but a state admitting degrees as well as qualities of difference which occur in a process over time. Embodiment occurs over a continuum from mere vegetative life to personal life; living human bodies usually progress from "having" a nonpersonal to "having" a personal mind. Such qualitative changes are, I will argue, best understood through a categorial account of mind and body, by which account justice can be done to the process character of the ontogeny of living organisms. Third, I will argue that, over a continuum ofquantitative changes, the body alters in its significance, becoming categorially different and sustaining new and different moral claims. Different stages ofthe life cycle, in particular vegetative, sentient, conscious, and personal life, have different...