Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 13:48:21 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Abortion & Human Nature


In message <199801250017.QAA13142-AT-mail.netwiz.net>, bill hard
<billhard-AT-netwizards.net> writes
>I maintain human nature is US. If permitted to express itself it will do
>just fine. Suppress or mold it into some socially "beneficial" conception,
>and we are going to get in big trouble. Arguments about whether dislodging a
>petri dish from a lab top containing a cloned or "natural" potential fetus
>should be manslaughter are intellectual exercises. We start with feelings.
>If it can be shown, for example, that at a certain stage of development a
>fetus suffers, that will kick in my "human nature" and I will modify my
>thinking. (So far I know of no one who can describe the experience. I can't
>remember anything prior to one year old).

Perhaps this passage illustrates the weakness of social constructionist
ideas of the person. Fixing on the intersubjective relations at the
level of personal feeling perhaps you can talk of a fetus' 'feelings',
or its natural reflex kicking as social interaction. But for me that
just shows that the social constructionist idea of society is
underdeveloped. If your view of personhood is vague enough to include a
fetus, then I suggest that you don't know what it is to be a person.

There is no doubt that the myth of the natural individual has been
substantially exploded by sociology. However, for all their faults,
theories of natural individuals persist because they provide a more
muscular defence of autonomy and subjectivity than do sociological
theories of the social constitution of the individual.

Fraternally
-- 
James Heartfield


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