Are You Your Mother?

In this short essay, I will ultimately argue that a baby is not identical to its mother, i.e., that what the mother is, is her parts (body parts), and that the baby is not identical to any part of the mother. I argue for this from the ambiguous phrase 'my body, my choice'. I start by explaining what an argument is and also some topics discussed within the essay. I then go on to ask what the phrase 'my body, my choice' might mean. I give what I think could be meant by such, and ultimately see what would follow if we were to accept the truth of one of those interpretations. I will also not focus too heavily on providing answers to each of the questions raised in this essay. One of the purposes of this essay is to introduce the readers to new topics that they might not have been introduced to before, such as logic and personal identity. Thus, I will refrain from giving a more in-depth analysis of each premise, i.e., I will not focus much on possible objections/counterexamples; if I do, I do so lightly and in a way to inspire critical thinking about a very sensitive topic.

You might have noticed a couple of terms in the above paragraph that you are unfamiliar with (like 'premise' and 'counterexample'). To understand these we will need to first understand what an argument is. I will briefly explain such here. An argument takes the form of the following, which is a classic example in logic: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, thus, Socrates is mortal. The premises of this argument are 'all men are mortal' and 'Socrates is a man', the premises are steps in an argument that lead up to a conclusion. The conclusion in this particular argument is 'thus, Socrates is mortal'. This type of argument is a deductive argument, i.e., one that guarantees the truth of the conclusion. A counterexample to a premise, say, all dogs are red, is when there is a situation where there is a dog, but that dog is not red, and thus a counterexample to the truth of the premise that 'all dogs are red'. Similarly, a counterexample to an argument shows that premises to be true but the conclusion false.

I'd like to introduce a few other topics that are needed to understand this short essay. The first topic will be that of identity. I will use this term quite a bit here; two ideas about identity are 'qualitative identity' and 'numerical identity'. 'Qualitative identity' can be described as: we can say something is qualitatively identical to another when they share the same properties or qualities. 'Numerical identity' can be described as: we can say something is numerically identical to another thing if it is the same object. To give an example, my truck may be painted blue right now, but say I were to get it painted red, it wouldn't be qualitatively identical to the truck since it no longer shares the same qualities (generally), but it is still numerically identical since it is still the one and same object even though the properties have changed. To think of it another way, you are still the same person you were in the past in a numerical sense, but you have many different qualities than the toddler you (You are in this sense, not qualitatively identical.) The last thing is using identity in logic, which is expressed as '=' which means 'is identical to', and '≠' which means ''not identical to'.

One of the things I have been recently thinking about when it comes to identity is the "my body, my choice" phrase that proponents of abortion typically use in favor of their position (or to express their position). I'm not entirely interested in the political aspects of abortion, thus I won't be taking a side or a position on abortion. What I am instead interested in is what does the phrase "my body, my choice" really mean? Does it mean the mother is identical to the fetus? That the fetus is identical to the mother's body? Or that the fetus or baby (whatever here is fine) is a part of the mother's body? I'm not too sure what this means, but I think what I can instead do is start with a simple argument that shows what one is committed to given an interpretation of the phrase to mean 'I am identical to my body and what my body is consist in its parts'. I will now give an argument using this interpretation in conjunction with an argument using identity.

1. I am not identical to my mother (where the indexical 'I' refers to the person who uttered such, i.e., myself 'Alex'.)

2. I am identical to my past self.

3. If I am identical to my past self, then I am identical to the thing that I was when I was in the womb.

4. Thus, I am identical to the thing that I was when I was in the womb. (2,3,)

5. Thus, my mother is not identical to the thing that I was when I was in the womb. (1,4)

6. If 'my body, my choice' means 'I am identical to my body and what my body is consists in its parts', then this means 'I am identical to my parts (body parts that is).'

7. If the phrase means 'I am identical to my parts', then my mother is identical to her parts.

8. Thus, If 'my body, my choice' means 'I am identical to my body and what my body is consists in its parts', then my mother is identical to her parts. (6,7)

9. Suppose it is the case that the 'my body, my choice' means 'I am identical to my body and what my body is consist in its parts' (Asm)

10. Thus, my mother is identical to her parts. (8,9)

11. Thus, I am not identical to my mother's parts. (1,10)

Before continuing to the premises individually, I want to express that I take premises (1) and (2) as self-evident or obvious. Thus, I will not provide a great amount of support to them, I will mainly focus on making them more clear.

Let's start with the first premise 'I am not identical to my mother '. What should we take this to mean? As shown in the first paragraph there can be a couple of meanings behind 'identity', i.e., qualitative and numerical. I think in this instance both of the latter can work here; indeed, my mother and I aren't numerically the same (we aren't one and the same object), but it also seems true that we aren't qualitatively identical. We don't share the same properties, e.g., the space that I currently occupy is not occupied by my mother. Likewise, the property of being male and of being a philosophy major is only had by one of us. Thus, we can conclude that we aren't qualitatively identical, since there are some properties we don't share.

What about premise two? What does this mean? I take this premise to express that of numerical identity. For the reason that there are many properties or propositional facts about myself when I was younger that don't hold as of now. For example, I am enrolled in high school, I am a toddler, and I cannot drive legally. Much of these facts or qualities about myself may have been true in the past, but they are no longer true descriptions of the person that I am now, and thus, it is not the case that I am qualitatively identical to my past self that holds to these descriptions. But why numerical identity? Well, I think that it is quite obvious that I am the one and same person as I was ten seconds ago when I asked that question. Some might not share the same intuition, but for sake of keeping this essay as short as I can, I will mainly focus on those who do.

For premise three, the reasoning behind this is that there was a time when I was in the womb and that my continued existence depends ultimately upon my previous existence, i.e., I am the thing that sustains my existence. If one denies premise three then one would need to provide a counterexample showing that it is true that 'I am identical to my past self' (here we'll focus on numerical), but false that 'I am identical to the thing that I was when I was in the womb', one might not like the phrasing here, we can take this to also mean 'I am identical to the thing that was in my others womb at this given description___'.

But the problem with this is that then it seems that the causal history of a thing would be cut off abruptly, i.e., the thing just came into existence right after the object exited the womb or maybe a while after. Another issue is that when it seems as if there were two numerically distinct objects. But this seems to lead to absurdity as well, as where does this second object go? Does it no longer exist? If one says that it transitioned into the person after it came out of the womb, then this doesn't solve the issue, in fact, the just shows that there is only one object and that it has a causal history and thus the premise remains true (since we are mainly focusing here on numerical identity). But if one wants to focus on qualitative identity, this is going to be a hard thing to accept since it seems one is constantly changing, e.g., spatial-temporal locations.

One might posit some unique property that is given or created at a certain point in time that creates a new person and thus is numerically identical to the thing before and yet it wasn't 'you', i.e., maybe there was some essential (where 'essential' means a necessary property, and property that you must have, or essence, the thing that you fundamentally are) property that was missing that wasn't there before. But what is that thing that creates the person? Is it a physical property (some sort of cell or biological fact that makes you 'you'), or an abstract property (maybe a mind)? These are genuine problems that won't be solved here. But they do shed some light on a factor at play in the abortion debate, namely, what is one's personal identity? Which is a popular topic in metaphysics. Some answers to this question appear in a few theories; In the no-self theory, there is no self, and thus there is no personal identity. There isn't anything I am identical to since there is no 'I'. Materialism is the view that what you are over time is that you have the same brain. Most might hold to the soul theory, i.e., the view that one is a non-physical mind.

Moving on to premise four. Four follows logically from (2) and (3) via modus ponens, i.e., if we have some conditional statement 'if..., then...' and we have the antecedent, the 'if', then the consequence, the 'then' follows logically.

To explain why premise five follows from four and one, it is due to a rule in logic called identity-elimination. This rule states that if two things are identical, then what holds of one, holds of the other. In the case of premise five, since it holds that I am identical to the thing I was in the womb (A=W, 'Alex is identical to the thing I in my mother's womb at given description ___')and it holds that I am not identical to my mother (A ≠ M, 'Alex is not identical to his mother'), then it follows that W≠M, i.e., the thing in my mother's womb is not identical to her.

This essay is becoming much longer than I would have liked, so I'll give a brief overview of the premises (6-8). (6) interprets the phrase as saying one is identical to one's body/ body parts. (7) states that if such is the case, then it follows that what one is identical to their body/body parts (this is taken to apply to all people, thus we should take it to be the equivalent to, everything that is a person/human is identical to their body parts). (8) follows from (6-7) from the use of a rule called hypothetical-syllogism, i.e., if we have two instances of a conditional ( (P-->Q) & (Q-->R)), where the consequent 'Q' of one(Q of (P-->Q)) is the antecedent 'Q' (Q of (Q-->P)) of another, then we can conclude that whatever is the antecedent of the one that gets that consequent that leads to another consequent, also gets the consequent of that one's antecedent, thus (P-->R). In this case, we get "If 'my body, my choice' means 'I am identical to my body and what my body is, consists in its parts', then my mother is identical to her parts."

Now I am not arguing that the phrase 'my body, my choice' actually means 'I am identical to my parts', this could be false. But this wouldn't render premise (8) false, to do that, the antecedent would need to be true and the consequent of (8) would need to be false. The interpretation being false would make both false, and thus the premise would still be true. And thus the overall argument premises (1-8) would still be sound.

Moving on to the main bit of the argument. The conclusions that follow from the assumption of (9). Again, this could be false (9), I'm only suggesting that this could be one of many interpretations of 'my body, my choice', and that in conjunction with certain premises, the ones I offered above, we would get the following conclusions. The first conclusion we get is 'Thus, my mother is identical to her parts.' this follows from another instance of modus ponens. The second conclusion we get is 'Thus, I am not identical to my mother's parts.' which follows from another instance of identity-elimination, i.e., because I am not identical to my mother, and my mother IS identical to her parts, what holds of my mother holds of her parts, namely, that they are not identical to me. What is the importance of this conclusion? It seems that if this (9) is what the phrase means, then when one tries to make the argument for bodily autonomy, they aren't getting the conclusion that they desire, the conclusion that the fetus is also a part of them, a part that they can decide what to do with. There is a lot more that could be discussed, and I don't know whether or not I agree with this argument, but I have hoped to have shed some insight on the problem of abortion. That within such lies the problem of personal identity.

All the ideas and thoughts in this essay are of Alexander Jasso-Onsurez and NOT endorsed by the Bona Fide Blog nor its other writers.