Rational Souls and the Beginning of Life

Our previous essay to which Robert Pasnau responds in his article ‘Souls and the Beginning of Life’, took issue with several aspects of his original discussion in Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (hereafter ‘Aquinas’) of human ensoulment and of traditional Roman Catholic teaching on the matter of abortion and the value of human life. Our primary concerns were twofold. First, to provide readers, whose only knowledge of the issues might come through reading Pasnau’s original discussion, with another account of the question of when human life begins, as this may be determined on the basis of Aquinas’s metaphysical views and known empirical facts about conception and embryonic development. And second, to offer a fuller and more balanced representation of how this issue has been treated hitherto. In his response, Pasnau writes of the ‘fierceness’ of our reply and conjectures that this may be due to the fact that the work of Aquinas has a great deal of authority with people keen to attack the legality of abortion, and because the details of Aquinas’s argument about the origins of individual human life are especially attractive to such people (p. 2). We did not discuss the political question of whether abortion should be legal, but since Pasnau himself now writes that abortion ‘should be considered murder’ (sic.) ‘after roughly the middle of the second trimester’ (p. 1) presumably he himself is among those who think that such terminations at least should be prohibited by law. Where our tone was strongly critical was not in relation to any of the substantive issues concerning the metaphysics of human gener-