While browsing Google News, the following headline caught my eye: "State's 'personhood' initiative at odds with science." It was penned by a certain Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
I was intrigued by what salient facts he might bring forward to decided the admittedly difficult philosophical issue. I was sorely disappointed and instead of finding fascinating facts found only blatant fallacies, more accurately one blatant fallacy developed into an article.
It seems to me the whole article can be summed up in one quotation:
What science has found is that around half of all conceptions don't make it to implantation. Calling a fertilized egg a person flies in the face of this cruel biological reality. Half of all fertilized eggs cannot even become an embryo, much less a person.
See what he did? He assumes his own private definition of 'person'--he never says what he means by 'person'--and simply postulates without any defense that an embryo is not yet one and that since most embryos do not develop into one (whatever is required to be a person according to Dr. Caplan) it is wrong to call embryos persons. How such terrible logic got passed into a published article baffles me.
This is a textbook example of circular logic and just says, Most embryos will never become persons, therefore embryos are not persons. But there was no attempt to establish the principle which itself contains what the author is trying to prove. I believe we call this technically a petitio principii.
How does a person capable of writing such utter tripe get a doctorate, let alone a job teaching Bioethics at an Ivy?
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