To speak sensibly of seeing or treating or taking persons as persons -
or of seeing or treating or taking a (human) body as giving expression to
a (human) soul - will similarly presuppose that there is some competing
way in which persons - or bodies - may be seen or treated or taken.  Many
people, and some philosophers, speak disapprovingly of treating others,
or regarding them, as things.  But it is none too clear what possibility is
being envisioned here.  _What_ thing might someone be treated as?

What else could a person be other than a person?  One might be a King.
It is reasonably clear what it means to treat a King as a King (Goneril and
Regan could not see the necessity once the King had, so to speak, abdicated),
or for the King to wish to be treated as a man (Lear prays for this
with the onset of madness).  But surely we are in no doubt that the King
is a person (at least one person), a human being?  Things and goats aren't
Kings!  But must a human being be something in addition, as it were, to
being the person he or she is - say a master or a slave, a parent or a child,
a writer, a weaver, a stranger?  If there are special ways of treating persons
under such titles, that is because there are ways of behaving peculiar to
holding them.  Is there some special way of behaving peculiar to human
beings as such?  When religion and morality are moved to speak of duties
owed to others simply as persons, this does not imply that duties owewd
them under their special titles are as it were duties to non-persons.  It is
sometimes imperative to say that women or children or black people or
criminals are human beings.  This is a call for justice.  For justice to be
done, a change of perception, a modification of seeing, may be called for.
But does it follow that those whose perceptions, or whose natural reactions,
must suffer change have until that time been seeing women or children or
black people or criminals as something _other_ than human beings?

It is sometimes said that slaveowners do not see or treat their slaves as
human beings, but rather, say, as livestock; some slaveowners themselves
have been known to say so.  And it is said that some soldiers do not treat
their enemies as human beings; soldiers themselves sometimes say so.
Conservatives on the abortion question sometimes say that liberals do not
regard human embryos as human beings; liberals seemed forced to agree.
- But does one really believe such assertions?  My feeling is that they
cannot really be meant.  Of course the words mean something; they are
not spoken at random.  In what spirit are such words said?

There comes a time when the institution of slavery cannot be justified
on any ground other than the sheer denial of the slave's humanity.  There
was a time when the institution itself was thought good, or anyway went
unquestioned: for example, it was the harsh but legitimate exercise of a
conqueror's rights, one of the benefits of victory in war.  But no one of
sound mind thinks, or has ever thought, that abortion is, of itself, good;
that it is one of the benefits of pregnancy, or a reason for intercourse.
Here is a reason I think I do not follow Roger Wertheimer, in the course
of his outstanding essay on what he calls the abortion argument, in his
likening (or his speculating about the likeness) of the slaveholder who fails
to see his slave's humanity with the condition of the liberal who fails to
see human embryos as humans.  The most a liberal thinks is that abortion
is a moral option, that the cost in human suffering is immeasurably
greater without the option than with it, and that the state unwisely or
tyrannically exercises its police powers when it attempts to close off this
option.  The time may have come when the option of abortion can only
be ttacked on the ground that the human embryo is a human being.
(There was a time when it  was generally attacked on the ground, and
when it was true, that it was too great a risk to the mother's health.)  The
trouble with the ultimate attack is not merely that the argument that human
embryos are human beings cannot finally be won, but that the statement
that they are cannot be fully meant - which is not surprising, if the
argument against it is exactly as strong as the argument in its favor.  (I
assume that the statement need not rely on the doctrine that the embryo
has a soul.  Here the liberal is likely to be left quite behind; this argument
will take place in other company.)  This is not a matter of a lack of
sincerity, but a matter of a lack of ways to express this sincerity.  There
is just one definite thing the conservative does not want done to this
embryo, and nothing at all, or nothing more, he can want for it.  There is,
however, something clear he wants and something he sees and something
he feels.  What he wants is for the embryo to be seen _as_ a human being:
he wants the internal relation between human embryos and human beings
to strike you.  He can see it that way, and demand that perception of you,
because he sees that the human embryo is human (not _a_ human; but human
as opposed to, say, wolf); you can also say that it is a human in embryo.
That is enough to be struck by to found a feeling of abhorrence at
the idea that this life should be aborted.  A person can understandably be
blind to these preceptions.  I claim not to be, and yet I claim to be a
liberal on the issue of abortion - not merely tolerant of it but passionately
in favor of its legalization, convinced that those who wish to oppose
it legally are tyrannical and sentimental hypocrites.

Evidently I abhor other things more than I do abortion.  What these
things are is anything but original, yet important to specify.  Unjust laws,
for example; in this case, ones that discriminate against the poor and the
uneducated and the abandoned.  And, for example, the facts of unwanted
or neglected children.  That legal abortion is an alternative to unjust laws
and neglected children is a matter not of good logic but of bad institutions.
If, for a start, society were so arranged that adopting a child were
no more difficult to cause than having a child; and that children were
adopted only by people who will continue to want them and will care for
them, and that there are enough such people to care for all the children
who need them, and that one nows how to tell who these people are; and
that any grain of shame or discrimination attached to bastardy or to the
fact of unwed motherhood or to parents who give their babies up for
adoption were itself seen to be shameful; and, supposing that contraception
is known to be physically harmless to those who practice it, that it
were conscientiously practiced; and that women were supplied with experet
and congenial help during pregnancy and the father entitled, with
the mother, to parental leave from work, so that abortion need be sanctioned
only if, and would always be granted if, there were a definite and
dire physical or psychological risk to the mother (the psychological
risk should by now be confined to the terror or pregnancy and childbirth
themselves); then my liberalism on the issue of abortion would fade, my
abhorrence of abortion would flower.  I might even imagine that there should be
a law against it (if there were laws seeing to it that the minimum conditions
I listed just now were put into effect), ie., that the state has an
interest in preventing it.  My reason would not be that people who request
and perform abortions are a danger to the unborn (that is reasonably obvious
already) but that they are a danger to themselves.  But as a liberal I would
still oppose invoking the police power on such a ground.  So I am secretly
imagining that if the conditions I envision were in effect there would be
no cases of voluntary abortion, anyway no more than there now are of voluntary
suicide.  -  The upshot of these considerations is that the abortion
argument, so far as it is based on the status of the human embryo, not
only cannot but must not be won.  Voluntary abortion is less bad than its
criminalization is; but it is not therefore all right.  The more terrible one
takes it to be, the more terrible one should take its indictment of society
to be.  It is a mark of social failure, not unlike the existence of prisons.

It follows that I do not think that performing an abortion is a case of
premeditated murder, and, in particular, murder of the most innocent.
And in saying that the conservative cannot fully mean that human
embyros are human beings I am saying that no conservative of sound mind
abhors those who request and perform abortions as he would or should
abhor Herod and the minions of Herod - at least as he would a discriminating
Herod, one who slated the slaughter only of those children he did
not want, or found inconvenient.  Herod must at all costs be stopped.  I do
not say that all the conservative feels is mere disapproval or distaste, as at
something despicable or ugly, and that he merely wishes to legislate his
moral tastes.  (I do not rule this out, either.)  I have already claimed
to see room for abhorrence.  It is like the abhorrence one would feel toward a
people who left their dead unattended, either left them in their tracks, or
threw them out with the rubbish.  This is bad; it is imbruting; there ought to
be a law against it; but it is not murder.

_The Claim of Reason_ pp. 372-375