Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Ontologically Uncertain Status

6 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Ontologisch unklarer Status

The ontologically uncertain status is a methodological determination for beings whose personhood can be neither clearly affirmed nor clearly denied.

This is not a lack of diligence but a fitting classification wherever either

  1. the usual epistemic criterion (in particular, origination through fertilization in accordance with the beginning of human existence) does not apply, or
  2. the empirical evidence for the presence of a rational nature (cf. rationality) is insufficient.

In such cases the status is not an open gap in the model but an independent ontological determination: the entity belongs to a class that designates precisely the openness of its personal status.

A Methodological Principle: in dubio pro persona

Wherever personal status remains open, the traditional principle in dubio pro persona applies (analogous to the criminal-law principle in dubio pro reo). Where there is uncertainty about the personhood of a being, that being is to be treated as though personhood were possible, until a reliable empirical decision determines otherwise.

This principle is not an additional ethical standard — it is the same methodological line that the substance-ontological concept of person brings to bear against premature exclusions from the circle of persons.

Symmetry with the Critique of Singer

The empirical-functionalist concept of person (Locke, Parfit, Singer) is criticized, among other things, by the exclusion objection: it withdraws personal status from embryos, those with severe dementia, and the comatose, even though the ontological evidence for this denial is inadequate.

This critique is methodologically symmetrical: whoever prematurely ascribes personal status to an entity risks a category confusion; whoever prematurely denies it risks precisely the error that personal ontology criticizes in Singer. The “ontologically uncertain status” keeps this symmetry visible — it is the point at which the method is applied to itself.

Asymmetry of the Burden of Proof

From in dubio pro persona there follows an asymmetry in the burden of proof: the burden of proof lies with those who wish to deny personhood, not with those who hold it to be possible. Premature denial is, ontologically as well as historically, riskier than premature affirmation.

This asymmetry is not a merely rhetorical priority but follows from the substantive content itself: a falsely affirmed personhood leads to caution without necessity; a falsely denied personhood leads to the negation of a real person. The harm function is therefore asymmetrical.

Two Kinds of Uncertainty

The principle does not reach equally far everywhere, and this distinction decides its force. Not every open classification is a doubt about the person.

Person-relevantly open is the status wherever, among the candidacies seriously in view, at least one stands whose obtaining would include personhood or at least leave it open. What triggers it is not mere uncertainty but the presence of prior grounds marking the being as a possible bearer of a rational nature: human biological substrate on the organismic developmental line, with a developmental programme of its own and a trajectory that carries forward from within. Only here does in dubio pro persona apply with full force. Mere similarity in behaviour does not suffice — otherwise the standard would shift unnoticed from nature to function, and the position criticized above would have prevailed through the back door.

Merely taxonomically indeterminate is the status wherever the assignment of kind is indeed open, but none of the serious candidacies touches the question of personhood. A doubt between “gamete” and “artefact” is ontologically genuine and personal-ontologically mute. If tutiorism is extended to this, it becomes boundless — and loses its force precisely where the candidacy is real. Whoever demands caution everywhere is no longer heard where caution is due.

What matters is what this second classification does not say. It does not deny personhood; it states that no positive candidacy for it exists. The difference is not rhetorical. Were an absent capacity for development to count as a sufficient ground for denying personhood, that would adopt exactly the functionalist criterion against which the critique above is directed: an actually absent capacity would decide about the nature — and the same criterion would then also be available against developmentally impaired embryos. Hence even the merely taxonomically indeterminate status stands in no hard exclusion from the person. Should a ground later arise that opens a person-relevant candidacy, the case is to be reclassified without anything having to be retracted.

This also determines more precisely the symmetry with the critique of Singer noted above: it is not complete. In the embryo and the severely demented there are positive grounds for the presence of the rational nature, and only its exercise is lacking; with an artefact it is contested whether such a nature is present at all. The rule about the burden of proof holds in both cases, but it does not hold equally far.

Cases of Application

In the present discourse, the ontologically uncertain status is relevant above all for three classes of entities:

  • Synthetic embryo models (iBlastoids, SEMs) — originating not through fertilization, yet growing in biological proximity to the embryo (Hanna Lab 2023, Liu et al. 2021).
  • Beings produced by cloning technology (somatic cell nuclear transfer) — no fertilization, but a concrete line of life of an existing human genome.
  • Conceivable in future: beings arising from in vitro gametogenesis through the union of artificially produced gametes.

In all three cases the methodologically clean classification is neither “is a person” nor “is not a person,” but rather: “status open, in dubio pro persona.”

How sharply the two kinds of uncertainty must be held apart is shown by mitomeiosis: there they lie immediately side by side within one procedure. The state before the forced reductional division is person-relevantly open — it is materially the same construction as in cloning, and only the operator’s next action decides what it is to be classified as. The state after it is merely taxonomically indeterminate: haploid, without a developmental programme of its own, without a trajectory other than fusion. To treat both as one case blurs precisely the boundary at which the principle has its force.

Ontological Classification

The ontologically uncertain status is an independent determination alongside “is a person” and “is not a person.” It stands deliberately not in a hard exclusion from human person or person — avoiding precisely such a separation is its very point.

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Spaemann, Robert: Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 (on the methodology of recognition and the reservation against premature determinations).
  • George, Robert P. & Tollefsen, Christopher (2008): Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. New York: Doubleday — ch. 4 (“The Argument from Potential”) and ch. 6 (“Difficult Cases”) on the burden-of-proof argument.
  • Snead, O. Carter (2020): What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press — an anthropology of vulnerability.

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