Perdure and Murder

The rich resources of the Four-Dimensional metaphysics have been brought to bear upon many traditional philosophical problems in recent years. Alas, the implications of Four-Dimensionalism for bioethics have gone largely unexplored. Hud Hudson is the rare exception. Relying upon a FourDimensional metaphysics of temporal parts and a belief in unrestricted composition, 2 he argues that there is little reason to identify the perduring human embryonic animal and the perduring human person. He makes the intriguing claim that if abortion is wrong, then it is not because the human animal within its mother’s womb is a person. This he rightly claims “is a very significant result” for “an overwhelming amount of the literature on abortion and infanticide (as well as much of the public debate on these topics) seems to turn on the question of whether or not the human fetus is a person.” [3, p. 153]. However, I am going to argue that one doesn’t have to reject unrestricted composition and the FourDimensionalist claim that things perdure to consider mindless embryonic human animals to be persons. Thus if abortion is wrong, it may be due, in part, to the mindless embryo being identical to a later thinking person. Let’s now turn to the reason why if there are temporal parts and composition is unrestricted, Hudson insists the person can’t be identified with the animal. He maintains that animals are not persons for, at best, they would merely share some of the thinking stages, i.e., momentary temporal parts, composing a person. The normal human animal typically consists of thinking stages through most of its