[...]... us whether we are human organisms Consider, by way of analogy, a statue that has been fashioned out of a lump of bronze Whether the statue is one and the same thing as the lump of bronze (that is, whether it is numerically identical with the lump of bronze) is not a question that science can answer That the statue and the lump of bronze occupy the same region of space and are composed of exactly the. .. hylomorphism, the soul is to the matter of the body as the shape is to the bronze Just as the bronze would not be a particular statue without its particular shape, so the matter of the body would not constitute a human being without the form imparted to it by the soul This analogy is illuminating in another way Just as the shape of a statue is not separable from the bronze of which the statue is made, so the. .. Given the theological and moral significance that most believers in the soul attribute to the idea that that is what we are, the implications of recognizing that every cockroach is also a soul would be intolerable The claim that we are souls is often cited, particularly in the context of the debate about abortion, as the basis for the belief in the special sanctity and inviolability of human life If... beliefs about the soul, is actually incompatible with what we know about the mind I suspect that the most common view of what we essentially are is that we are souls and that the most common view of when we begin to exist is that we begin to exist at conception What does this combination of views imply about the nature of the soul? One possibility is that the soul is actually conscious at conception... a human being, the matter of the body must have a certain form That form is the human soul This is the hylomorphic conception of the soul—from the Greek roots hyle (body) and morphe (form) The idea ¯ ¯ that the soul is the form of the body is often elucidated by reference to an analogy with a statue Only when a lump of bronze (matter) is given a particular shape (form) is there a statue According to... shepherd Over the course of the ten days, there will be a living dog continuously present on the operating table But at the beginning of the first day this will be a male golden retriever while at the end of the tenth it will be a female German shepherd Most of us will be inclined to say that, despite the overlapping of their various parts on the operating table over the ten-day period, the golden retriever... way, the soul could in principle be multiply instantiated, so that each of us would have to be a type of thing rather than an individual entity.11) Proponents of hylomorphism often write as if the soul were more than just a mode of organization or the way in which the matter of the body is structured They assume that it is in some sense a “spiritual” entity—rather more than a mere aspect of matter... hylomorphism, the soul is just the inherent organization of the matter of the body in a distinctive way, so that the matter constitutes an individual of a particular sort What sort of individual it is depends on the capacities and powers it is organized to have We can, admittedly, discern a tendency in the Thomist tradition to reify the soul as that which organizes the matter of the body This is the tendency,... and no doubt to you the reader as well, that the life of every individual organism, human or not, begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that thenceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism [T]he onset of individual life is not a dogma of the Church but a fact of science.1 It does seem true that a new human life begins to exist... communicating with the experimenters through some part of the body which it alone controlled, demonstrated awareness of having been presented with certain information of which the other hemisphere was unaware 20 the ethics of killing What can the believer in the cartesian soul say about these cases? It seems incoherent to claim that, following the operation, there is a single cartesian soul that encompasses . y0 w1 h0" alt="" The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life Jeff McMahan OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS THE ETHICS OF KILLING PROBLEMS AT THE MARGINS OF LIFE OXFORD ETHICS SERIES Series. or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McMahan, Jeff. The ethics of killing : problems at the margins of life. This book, subtitled Problems at the Margins of Life, may thus be regarded as the first volume of a two-volume work on The Ethics of Killing, of which the sec- ond volume will be the projected book