Over at Pea Soup, the ethics blog, there's an interesting
discussion about souls. The basic discussion starts since so many
ethical debates, especially in biology, depend upon whether there
is a soul or not. Many, if not most, naturalists reject the soul.
The majority of Americans believe in a soul. Clearly this affects
debates such as stem cell research, cloning and so forth. The
argument is whether this leads to problems. The author conducts
the argument in terms of an Augustinian soul, rather than an
Thomist soul. As I mentioned in the comments, I wonder if the
problem would disappear if we adopt a Leibnizean view of souls.
There we don't have normal dualism between an immortal soul and
then material bodies. Rather material bodies of any kind are
composed of monads - souls. Thus within any body there are an
infinite number of souls. If we clone the body we have to provide
it with different souls. Indeed one can note that Leibniz' view of
souls arises out of his
Identity of indiscernables.
Of course one can easily say that cloning arguments of this sort are always somewhat problematic, since the believer in souls can always just deny that the thought experiment is possible. i.e. that a soul without a body will be dead; that if we clone a body it gets a new soul; or that we simply can't clone people the way some think.
Still the discussion is quite interesting, in my mind, especially in the abortion debate. As I said though, I think Leibniz enables us to avoid it.
BTW - the picture is William Blake's "The Caging of the Soul." If you read the discussion at Pea Soup, you'll see that it is appropriate somehow.
Just to add to the above, I probably should mention Chisholm's argument that "something" must endure in people - an argument against the normal four dimensionalist. (This wouldn't apply, I feel, to my own views due to the place I think transcendence has) It forms the backdrop to the discussion of the soul.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
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Blogged by Clark Goble