The Dispute over Delayed Animation: When Does a Human Being Begin?

Abstract

The dispute over delayed animation, although it has its beginnings already in ancient philosophy and culture, started for good only in contemporary times when the right to kill unborn children (so-called abortion ) entered the canon of constitutional law and, what is even stranger, started to be proposed for inclusion into basic human rights. Despite being discussed nowadays mainly in medical and legal sciences, the problem involves disputes of an ethical, religious and ideological nature. In these discussions one can notice a clear lack of anthropological and metaphysical argumentation that would address the question about the beginning of the human being (which entails the question about the beginning of being per se ) in the light of common properties that belong to really existing beings, and the metaphysical laws that govern the manner in which things (including human embryos) exist. This article discusses understandings of the human being as they are found in Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical anthropology. It is this triad of approaches: Platonic, Aristotelian and Thomistic, that allows one both to notice the specificity of Aquinas’s approach and to resolve the dispute concerning delayed animation.