# Body & Soul: The Crisis in Ethics (Moreland)



## RamistThomist (Mar 12, 2015)

Moreland, J. P. and Rae, Scott. _Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics_, InterVarsityPress.

It’s hard to put the book’s importance into words, which makes writing this review rather difficult. One has to start somewhere, I suppose. Moreland and Rae (hereafter MR) argue for a form of Thomistic substance dualism in their doctrine of human nature. Accordingly, the soul is an individuated essence that makes the body a human body (MR 202). 

States and faculties of the soul: The soul has capacities. Capacities come in hierarchies. 1st order hierarchy: a capacity that is realized. 2nd order: capability faculty: a faculty is a compartment of the soul that contains a natural family of related capacities (204). The key word here is “capacities.” Fetuses and those on life-support have the latent capacity for the later functions of personhood. What all this means is, contra to any form of naturalism, the soul is an essence that survives change. It cannot be reduced to a form of different functions.
Such an entity has the ability to make rational choices.

Further, personhood is something that is absolute, not degreed. Here MR are following the lead of Thomas Reid and most of Christendom. commonsense view (Reid, Butler). Persons differ from physical artifacts in that they maintain absolute sameness through change. Leibniz’s law holds between all the moments a person exists except tenses. PI is unanalyzable and primitive. It cannot be broken down further.

Moreover, Leibniz’s law states (x)(y)[(x=y)--->(P)(Px<-->Py)]; For any x, and for any y, if they are identical to each other, then for any property P, P will be true of x iff P is true of y. This means, negatively, that the soul is not the same thing as the body. The person is not the same thing as the body. Positively, a person maintains identity over time, a position that scientific naturalism really can’t account for.

Applied Ethics

The second half of the book takes the Thomistic doctrine and applies it to abortion and end-of-life debates. Scott Rae is the main contributor in this section. He analyzes a number of pro-abortion arguments and notes that they all hinge on a defective view of the person. most abortion-rights advocates define personhood in terms of a set of functions or actualized capacities. The problem with this approach is that it logically justifies killing:
mentally handicapped and the newborn (it’s not clear at what age infants can meet reasoning capacities to justify their living)
Abortion-rights advocates are unable to tell at what point a developing human becomes a person.
Newborns have sentience, but so do unborn. Isn’t it somewhat arbitrary for abortion advocates to draw the line at breaching the vagina as ‘suddenly okay to live?.” [But even here, pro-abortion logic breaks down, given our President’s ghoulish endorsement of killing babies who have breached the vagina]
Functionalist definitions of personhood presuppose a property-thing ontology, rather than a substance one.
A person under general anesthesia cannot function. Does he cease to be a person? Why not? As Rae notes, “To appeal to some higher-order capacities as determinate of personhood” cannot be done without acknowledging that personhood is not dependent on lower-order capacities (Moreland and Rae 251). These higher-order capacities are latent, just as they are with the unborn.

There is a rather interesting chapter on genetic cloning. The main question is whether clones have souls. Noting the difficulty of answering this question, the authors conclude “probably.” 

The book ends with a powerful chapter on end-of-life ethics.

Evaluation

Moreland in particular writes with Kingdom Power. I learned more philosophical terminology in one week studying and outlining this book than I did in the previous year. And this philosophy isn’t arcane. It literally is life-and-death. Because of this book I feel confident in giving coherent and rational responses in the abortion debate.


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