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and Hockett (1960) called duality of patterning, and which the latter identified as the last of his thirteen design features of human languages. Duality of patterning, which is found in all known spoken languages and not in the natural communication systems of animals, is the existence in a linguistic system of two levels of combinatorial structure. At the first level, meaningful elements (morphemes and words) are combined into larger meaningful units; at the second level, phonology, meaningless elements (speech sounds) are combined to form the sound signals of the meaningful elements of the first articulation. 1 The combination |
Because every known spoken language has a dual system, it is tempting to believe that a language cannot exist without duality of patterning. Pinker and Jackendoff (2005:212) explain that "A combinatorial sound system is a solution to the problem of encoding a large number of concepts (tens of thousands) into a far smaller number of discriminable speech sounds (dozens). A fixed inventory of sounds, when combined into strings, can multiply out to encode a large number of words, without requiring listeners to make finer and finer analogue discriminations among physically similar sounds." Jackendoff (1999) proposes |
The manual-visual modality could have an impact on the number of holistic signals that could be amassed in a communication system before duality becomes necessary. First of all, the manual-visual modality more easily accommodates iconically motivated signs, while the vocal-auditory modality significantly restricts the possibility of iconicity, requiring a more arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. This suggests that a gesture based language could acquire a greater inventory of interpretable holistic signals before requiring duality of patterning. In addition, the visual system has the capacity to perceive and interpret simultaneously presented aspects of a visual array, while the auditory system is |
Because sign languages are transmitted in the visual medium and are, in some respects, iconically motivated, one might not expect sign languages to have phonology. Instead, each sign might be a holistic, meaningful unit, precluding the existence of a meaningless level of structure. But for Stokoe, a primary argument for calling American Sign Language (ASL) a true language was the fact that it indeed had phonological structure (Stokoe 1960 ). Stokoe's observation about ASL phonology has since been extended to other established sign languages around the world, so that linguists have come to see duality of |
The question of how a phonological level arises in language has never been addressed on an empirical basis, and we offer the work reported here as a first step. In a new language, we observe unexpected variance on the one hand, and budding formal regularity on the other. We use these phenomena to frame issues to be addressed in future research-our own, and that of other investigators. When William Stokoe observed patterns in American Sign Language and used them to argue for phonology in that language, the groundwork was laid for further phonological and psycholinguistic investigation. This resulted in deeper understanding of the nature of phonology |
We will argue in this article that Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) proves Hockett to have been correct about the relative timetable for the emergence of dual patterning. ABSL is new and, like other sign languages, it is communicated through sight rather than through sound, possibly lending the system more options for conveying a larger array of concepts iconically than a spoken language has. ABSL might therefore get along very well without dual patterning, and, as we will argue, it does. Our data suggest that, unlike other, older sign languages, a phonological system has not crystallized in |
According to Hockett (1960) and to Pinker and Jackendoff (2005), duality of patterning arises because the message set gets larger and larger, making discrimination between signals more and more difficult, especially in noisy conditions. Thus, duality is seen as a product of interaction among individuals in a community who together create large vocabularies of conventional signals and must distinguish them from one another. Individuals may independently develop formal regularities in their language (Goldin-Meadow et al. 1995), and the possible emergence of phonological organization in an individual will ultimately add to our understanding of |
The general outline of the paper is as follows. Taking examples mainly from Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the language used by the majority of Israel's 10,000-member deaf community, we begin in Sect. 1 by demonstrating what it means for a sign language to have phonology. 5 We then go on to argue in Sect. 2 that ABSL, a sign language used in an insular, homogeneous community of about 120-150 deaf signers (and an unknown number of hearing signers), has not yet organized its articulatory level into a system of meaningless units with a structure of its own. |
The single most influential finding in sign language studies was Stokoe's (1960) discovery that American Sign Language (ASL) has phonology, which he called cherology (from Classical Greek [xeir] 'hand') because the signs are produced with the hands. His work focused mainly on minimal pairs, showing that each of the major categories of handshape, location, and movement contains a finite list of features, and that substituting one for another in a given category could result in a change in meaning, just as features of traditional consonant and vowel phonemes in spoken languages do. The reason that Stokoe |
Once the floodgate was opened, research on various aspects of sign language structure surged through, investigating the morphology, syntax, and, of special interest to us here, phonology of ASL and other sign languages. In the subsequent sections, we sketch some of the main findings in sign language phonology, to demonstrate that it makes sense to talk of duality in visual languages. 6 In the subsections that follow, aspects of the phonological structure of sign languages are presented, as are constraints on that structure. We note that these structural properties seem to characterize many sign languages that have been studied. Two factors contribute to these similarities |
To say that there is a phonological level of structure means that there are discrete and meaningless formational elements that work together in a system (like Morse code dots and dashes). The existence of minimal pairs-meaningful words distinguished by such elements drawn from a finite list-is strong evidence for a system of this kind. In spoken languages, distinctions between words are made by sounds that are divided at the highest level into the categories of consonants and vowels. In sign languages, the major categories of phonological organization are Hand Configuration, Location, and Movement, each with its own hierarchy of features. Most of the phonological properties we illustrate here |
One of the characteristics of organization at the level of meaningless formational units is the fact that the elements of the system are constrained in terms of the ways in which they may co-occur. Some of these constraints are language-specific, and others are general. For example, the way in which sounds are ordered on either side of a syllable peak is nearly universally determined primarily by the relative sonority of the sounds. Sonority rises before the peak and falls following it (pr, not rp syllableinitially, but rp and not pr syllable finally). Yet the number of consonants that may occur in a cluster |
7 See Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006), Chap. 9 for a treatment of the sequential aspects of sign language structure. 8 Much of the discussion that follows relies on details of the Hand Tier model (Sandler 1989; Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006). Other models that differ in various ways have been proposed (e.g., Liddell and Johnson 1989; van der Hulst 1993 van der Hulst, 1996 Brentari 1998; van der Kooij 2002). All demonstrate duality of patter |
All sign language lexicons contain both one-handed and two-handed signs. Two robust constraints on two-handed mono-morphemic signs are the Dominance Condition, and the Symmetry Condition (Battison 1978). The Dominance Condition holds for two-handed signs in which the dominant hand moves and the nondominant hand functions as a place of articulation. In such signs, the nondominant hand may either have the same shape as the dominant hand, or, if different, it must have one of a set of unmarked shapes. The Symmetry Condition holds for signs in which both hands move. In these signs |
The domain of most of the constraints described is the simplex lexical sign, supporting the claim that the constraints are phonological rather than merely motoric (phonetic). They can be violated when more than one morpheme is combined, even if combined in a single, still 'pronounceable' syllable. 13, 14 For example, the two hands need not obey the symmetry condition in complex classifier constructions, in which each hand is a separate morpheme (see Aronoff et al. 2003 for an example), and the selected fingers constraint does not hold in compounds, comprised of two morphemes, even if they |
Phonological alternations provide crucial evidence for a phonological level of structure, since they make reference to formational properties of sublexical elements that bear no meaning. The pattern of assimilation in lexical compounds in ASL and ISL indicates that this is a (morpho-)phonological process rather than simple coarticulation resulting from motoric factors. Specifically, the compounds reduce by truncation (deletion of sequential segments, Liddell and Johnson 1986), and the hand configuration of the second member of the compounds is assimilated regressively by the first member of the compound (Sandler 1987; S |
Assimilation of handshape without orientation is not attested in any of the set of lexicalized compounds studied. 15 For this reason, Sandler (1987 Sandler (, 1989 following Clements (1985) for spoken language, argues for a hierarchical representation of these feature classes, with orientation dominated by handshape. The same pattern is found in ISL (Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006). The important point is that handshapeonly assimilation, i.e., without orientation, is perfectly possible physically, but is not attested. This tells us that the constraint on assimilation |
The Al-Sayyid Bedouin group was founded about 200 years ago in the Negev region of present-day Israel. According to folkore, the first settler in the area migrated there from Egypt and was a fallaah, 'peasant', not a Bedouin. Today, his descendants live as Bedouin and are regarded as Bedouin. The group is now in its seventh generation and numbers about 4,000 members -all of whom reside together in a single community exclusive of outsiders. Consanguineous marriage has been the norm in the group since its third generation. Such marriage |
In the fifth generation since the founding of the community (about 75 years ago), four deaf siblings were born into the community. In the next two generations, deafness spread in many other families as well. The number of deaf individuals in the community today is estimated at about 120-150. The particular distribution of deafness in the community, typical of recessive congenital deafness (Lane et al. 2000), has had socio-linguistic implications: deaf members of the community are integrated into its social structure and are not shunned or stigmatized, and a sign language developed in the community as |
It is certainly not obvious a priori that a sign language should have a phonological level of structure, and, though it is hard to believe now almost 50 years later, Stokoe was initially ridiculed for his claim that ASL does. Considering the fact that many signs are iconically motivated, it was assumed, tacitly or explicitly, that signs are holistic gestural pictures of what they represent ("merely developments of ordinary gestures", in the words of Bloomfield 1933:144). But as the brief survey in Sect. 2 shows, this is not the case. Even these languages with a considerable |
In the naïve expectation that vocabulary would be similar across a small, insular community, we aimed to get a larger list of vocabulary items by using partly different stimuli for different groups of signers. What we did not expect was the wide range of variation that we found, both lexical and formational. The data were elicited in the field. For these reasons, the sample was too small to allow for useful statistical analysis. For example, if, in a group of seven signers, three used the same basic sign, and of those, two used a compound in which only one sign was the same for the three signers |
Fortunately, we have a good idea of the traces we would expect phonology to leave if it were indeed present in ABSL, and the traces are absent. First of all, we have encountered no minimal pairs in our study of the language to date. While we can't deny the logical possibility that minimal pairs are there but evading us, we find it striking that none have surfaced so far, in over 150 words of elicited vocabulary (in this study and Israel's study)-hundreds of elicited sentences, and numerous narratives and conversations. Second, while constraints on the form of a sign are not absent, they are |
Let us take as a first example the sign for an everyday object, LEMON. In a simple picture naming task, signers signed LEMON with different handshapes, orientations, and internal movements. For instance, one signer produces the sign in the space in front of the signer's torso with a rubbing movement of the index finger, middle finger, and thumb. Another signer uses all five fingers throughout the closing movement, and his sign has a different orientation than that of the one just described, palm down instead of to the side. Examples of two of the different handshapes that occurred for this sign are shown in Fig. 11 |
A third signer uses three fingers, but the location is next to the mouth instead of in neutral space in front of the signers. Several other versions occur in the data. We were struck by the amount and types of variation we found in our data, variation that we would not expect in the established sign languages with which we are familiar. In ABSL signs we see variation in the group of fingers selected, the orientation of the hand, and the location-all potentially contrastive in other sign languages. There is more than one way to squeeze a lemon, and that is the guiding force. The two handshapes shown here are contrastive |
The sign TEA was signed with three different handshapes across eight signers with the same sign for TEA. These are shown in Fig. 12. At first glance, the signs looked identical: the location is in front of the mouth, the palm orientation is comfortably toward the contralateral side, and the movement is a rotation of the hand at the wrist toward the mouth. But closer observation reveals differences in the position of the selected fingers (index and thumb), and in the position of the other, unselected fingers. The point is to hold a teacup by its handle, and not to use a particular form |
In DOG, major body areas that are contrastive places of articulation in other sign languages vary freely in ABSL. Figure 13 shows the head and the torso (or neutral space) as variants. Orientation, considered a feature class dominated by the Hand Configuration category (Sandler 1987), can also be contrastive in established sign languages, as Fig. 4 above demonstrated. In ABSL, we find unexpected variation in orientation as well. The sign SCORPION is shown in Fig. 14a with a palm out orientation rotating to palm down, and in Fig. 14b with palm up |
The sign for DOG, for which only two variants are shown in Fig. 13, is a good example of the kind of formational variation we encountered in this language. Of eleven signers, ten used the same lexical item, representing the barking mouth of a dog with the hand or hands. One signer represented a dog's ears and paws, this exception proving the rule that DOG was the same lexical item for the other subjects. Ten out of eleven is an unusually high consensus on a lexical item, and DOG therefore gives us a good opportunity to observe phonetic variation. While the sign is iconically motivated |
Across the exemplars of DOG in ABSL, there was a great deal of variation. The sign typically involved a repeated curving movement of the fingers, from laxly extended to curved. Yet one signer selected only three fingers; one closed the fingers (in an 'O' shape); some used two hands facing one another and some two hands facing outward. Some selected the head (the mouth) as the place of articulation (as shown in Fig. 13a), and some the space near the torso (shown in 13b). Compare with Fig. 2 above showing the ISL contrast between SEND and |
For example, while most ABSL signers select all fingers for DOG, one, signer A, selects only 3. Major body area, another high level distinction, varies from head to Fig. 15 Hierarchies of feature classes for Hand Configuration and Location (following Sandler 1989) torso to nondominant hand. The type of movement varies from hand internal movement (of the fingers or wrist, another variation not typically found in citation forms) to path movement, in subject Z. If the language does not exploit these broader categories to make distinctions, it seems unlikely that it will exploit finer distinctions. By looking |
In addition to variation in the fingers selected like those in the examples of LEMON in Fig. 11, ABSL sign productions are anomalous in another way as well. As explained, in established sign languages, the same fingers must be involved in a sign, obeying the Selected Finger Constraint (Mandel 1981). In other words, if the sign begins with two fingers extended and proceeds to a bending movement for example, that movement should involve only those two fingers throughout. We see that this constraint on the phonological form of signs does not always hold in ABSL. In Fig. 16, we see an |
In general, ABSL showed the most variation; ISL was next; and ASL showed the least amount of variation in sign production, leading Israel to suggest that social factors such as language age and size of the community contribute to convergence on phonological categories in a language. Taking the category of hand configuration as an example, ABSL varied more than the other two sign languages in each of the subclasses of finger selection: flexion, spreading, aperture, thumb position, unselected finger position, and orientation. With the exception of thumb position, the differences were not statistically significant in this small study. However, for most phonological sub |
When tokens were compared on a global measure of variation-that is, with variation in any category counted as a different variant of the sign-then the differences were clear. ASL has the lowest amount of variation (2.07 variants per lexical item), ISL follows with a higher level of variation (4.67 variants per lexical item), and ABSL has the highest amount of variation (6.47 variants per lexical item). An analysis of variance (ANOVA) found these cross-linguistic differences to be statistically significant (p < 0.0001). The combined results are shown in Table 2. The table |
In sum, we find three kinds of evidence for the claim that this new language has not yet converged on a set of abstract, meaningless phonological categories. The first red flag we noticed is a dearth of minimal pairs in our data so far. However, it has been observed that there may be fewer minimal pairs in sign languages than in spoken languages generally (van der Kooij 2002), so that this criterion alone is not decisive. The second form of evidence is in the more glaring violation of general sign language formational constraints than we expected from familiarity with more established sign languages. The third observation that led us to question |
ABSL syntax within clauses is highly regular. In a study of second generation signers, we found that the constituent order is quite rigidly SOV and the order of elements within phrases is head-modifier. These relations necessarily imply hierarchical structure, as subject, object, and verb belong to a clause, object and verb to a verb phrase, and noun and modifier to a noun phrase. The clause-internal order of constituents in ABSL contrasts with pragmatically-induced foregrounding, in which different orders may occur, for example, the patient argument introduced before the agent argument. The distinction between the clause internal order and the pragm |
The language has developed a particular type of compounding or affixation to specify the size and shape of objects. For example, TELEVISION +'small rectangular object' refers to a remote control device; WRITE + 'long thin object' refers to a pen. We will have more to say about these interesting forms in Sect. 4.1. There is also a compounding system for referring to place names in the area, by first articulating a sign that represents some physical characteristic associated with people of the region and then a pointing sign, with the two movements fluidly connected (Aronoff et al. 2008 |
Our claim is that ABSL as a language does not yet have a fully developed phonological system. However, a fine-grained examination of the sign productions in Al-Sayyid uncovers a blueprint for its development. Pinpointing the kernels of phonology in this way may be informative for the evolution of phonology more generally, an idea to which we return in the conclusion. Examples we will present here come from a closer look at handshapes in conventionalized word productions of one signer; alternations triggered by two productive word formation processes; and from the signing of members of a single family, promoting the notion of the family |
Our larger study on which this article is based relies mainly on 128 elicited items produced by 23 signers in response to pictures. In these elicitations, a large number of handshapes were recorded, pictured in Table 3. Many of these are uncommon or infrequent in the inventories of familiar sign languages, and would therefore not be expected to be included in the phoneme inventory of a new sign language. Further investigation suggests that they are not. It appears that these shapes occur randomly as signers seek to create visual images of items for which they have no conventionalized sign. 20 We followed up by looking |
What can we learn from this? Two hypotheses present themselves. The first is that the shape found most often is an unspecified one in the handshape space of which the two in Fig. 18 are phonetic variants. The second hypothesis is that this Table 3 Handshapes observed in ABSL. For each pair of lines, the second line (in brackets) contains shapes that differ only slightly from those in the line above, included for completeness. The top pair of lines shows shapes with all five fingers; the second pair shows one finger and one finger plus thumb shapes; the third pair of lines shows shapes with two fingers and two |
A common way of creating new lexical items is through compounding, and ABSL makes productive use of this option. In picture naming tasks, ABSL signers often produce two or more nominal signs together. We found that a particular kind of sign denoting the size and shape of the object, which we call a size and shape specifier, is commonly used in these constructions. We hypothesize that these forms are actually affixes rather than members of compounds because they do not occur alone; they are drawn from a small list of possible forms; and they are typically (but not uniformly) in final position. However, the discussion does |
The assimilation found in these affixed forms is not purely motoric in its motivation, since we do not see it in other nonsymmetrical two-handed signs where instead we find that the nondominant hand is overwhelmingly in a lax five-finger-extended shape, regardless of the shape of the dominant hand. It is intriguing that the handshape that assimilates is more typically in an extended index finger configuration. This is one of the two handshapes hypothesized above to form the beginning of a phonological system in ABSL, and, by assimilating in the few instances of assimilation we have found, we see |
That conventionalization is involved is supported by the fact that these examples of assimilation occur in a productive process of specifier affix formation (though the complex words themselves are mostly not conventionalized). Nor do we find handshape assimilation in compounds that are more randomly formed by idiosyncratically stringing together two, three, or four signs (Meir et al. 2010a ). The mechanism that adds an affix to specify classes of objects according to size and shape is conventionalized, commonly appearing in our data. This creates a degree of redundancy in form, in the sense that the pointing finger handshape is ' |
Within families with more than one deaf family member that we investigated, a single form is used. Figure 22 a, b shows the versions of two families for this con- (22a) is signed identically for the two deaf brothers and their hearing close-aged sibling in one family. A different version (22b) is signed identically for all five videotaped deaf members of a different family. This lexical uniformity within families is striking compared to the variation found across signers in this small village. It is likely that all the different versions would be intelligible across the community, due to iconicity, context, or the |
In the familylect of one family with many deaf members, we find a clue to how conventionalization can lead to duality. The family members include a deaf mother and five deaf children out of eight, a family in which all eight children are fluent signers. (The deaf mother has five deaf siblings herself.) The example we present is the sign for EGG, which is a compound made up of CHICKEN + SMALL-OVAL- OBJECT classifier. CHICKEN, a sign that is quite standard across the village, is produced with the index finger in a curved shape and the hand bending at the wrist twice, apparently motivated |
There are three reasons for believing that this is a phonological alternation, and not mere motoric coarticulation. First, assimilation does not occur in other villagers' sign for EGG. Second, it is confined to this family and occurs in EGG for all four members of the family that we videotaped. Third, it is not gradient, in the sense that all three fingers are selected and are in the same curved, spread position in both members of the compound. The assimilated form is counter-iconic, no longer conveying a narrow, pointed shape. Iconicity gives way to arbitrariness in the emergence of |
In any motor activity, actions may overlap and otherwise affect other actions in the same motor schema, and the articulations of language are no exception (Browman and Goldstein 1989). But systematic alternations of categories of elements in the same class of environments point to phonological organization, characterized by such properties as discreteness rather than gradience (Hayes 1999). 24 The handshape assimilation shown here is another example of what happens when a sign becomes fully conventionalized. The meaningful, holistic icon is no longer the target. Instead, the sign is represented as a formal entity, made up of |
The first example is the sign for TREE. There were a variety of responses among signers to the picture of a tree, most of them complex descriptions, conveying the trunk and then the leaves and then something about the nature of the tree, such as whether it is a date palm or some other kind. But the youngest person we videotaped, aged 5 at the time, signed TREE in a very different way. There was only one sign, consisting of one reduplicated syllable, in which the two hands move together, observing the symmetry condition described above-a well-formed sign by any phonological criteria. In addition, the sign |
In these examples, it is the fact that the signs are so conventionalized and familiar in these native signers that gives rise to duality. Iconicity is dormant; the hands are not required to represent a visual image as an iconic whole; and the formational elements are free to organize themselves into an independent system. A connection between arbitrariness and phonology was first noticed in a study of the history of ASL signs. In a comparison of ASL signs since 1913, Frishberg (1975) showed that signs tended to become less iconic and more arbitrary over time. Interestingly, the arbitrariness of |
Our work also suggests that it is not only the cognitive load of a large vocabulary that triggers the development of phonology, but other factors as well, notably conventionalization, and the concomitant weakening of a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning. This claim is compatible with the well-documented phenomenon of phonetic reduction in redundant material. The word nine in the adage A stitch in time saves nine is far more reduced in structure than the same word in the unpredictable context, The next number is nine (Lieberman 1963). Similarly, Gahl (2008) has shown that frequent words like time are |
The study puts forward the notion of the familylect, arising, we argue, from conventionalization within families that have rich sign language interaction. An additional motivation for the emergence of a familylect is sociological. Labov's work (1994 Labov's work (, 2001 ) has provided robust and widespread evidence for the importance of correlations between phonetic/phonological speech characteristics and membership in a social group. Docherty and Foulkes (2000:111), investigating the social distribution of preaspiration of voiceless stops in Tyneside English, explain the phenomenon this way: "... it seems |
Research has shown that deaf children exposed to irregular models tend to impose more regular structure on their language productions (Singleton and Newport 2004; Senghas et al. 2005), a phenomenon that is sometimes attributed to creolization. The nature of the processes behind "creolization" is a hotly debated issue. Even Bickerton, champion of the theory that creole grammar springs forth from the language bioprogram in the brains of children, attaches a great deal of importance to social factors in this process (Bickerton 1984), and there are certainly creolists who argue that adults |
We propose that conventionalization among signers, and the automaticity and redundancy that go with it, underlie the emergence of a meaningless formal level of structure in the language of a community. As a particular sign becomes conventionalized, attention to the form-meaning correspondence is reduced, and the formational elements themselves self-organize, under cognitive and motoric pressures for ease of articulation, formal symmetry, and the like. An element that is automatically and conventionally part of some sign may become redundant in the sense that the meaning of the sign does not directly rely on it, and it can then become vulnerable to permutation under formal |
In the familylect's conventionalized compound, EGG, the 'beakiness' of a handshape that looks like a bird's beak no longer contributes to its meaning, and production of the sign becomes automatic for the signers. In this case, we might hypothesize that the number of fingers selected for the first part of the sign becomes redundant through this conventionalization, and subject to assimilation for reasons such as ease of articulation. In productively formed classifier affixes, a gesture pointing to the articulating hand is no longer a pointing gesture, and the hand involved in the articulation of the sign is |
It seems reasonable to adopt, as Pinker and Jackendoff (2005) do, Hockett's suggestion that the need to create a large vocabulary contributes to the emergence of duality. At the same time, laboratory experiments suggest that humans may have a propensity to create duality even with a very small vocabulary of symbols (Del Giudice et al. 2010). In any case, it is likely that more than one kind of pressure is responsible for the phenomenon. We propose that conventionalization together with automaticity and redundancy propel the self organization of the system as well. 26 In a paper about the |
The aural/oral modality does not lend itself to iconicity to the same extent that the visual/corporeal modality does. In fact, the ability to transparently represent correspondence between the sound of a word and its meaning is so limited in the aural/oral medium that de Saussure (1916) proposed arbitrariness in the sound-meaning relation as a fundamental characteristic of language. Some languages, like Japanese (Hamano 1994) and Kambera (Klamer 2002), do have extensive subsystems of mimetics or expressives-sequences of sounds that evoke particular physical |
The research reported here resonates with current work in phonological theory that speaks to the issue of innateness in phonology. For example, Blevins (2004) provides persuasive evidence that most properties of the synchronic phonology of any language result from the interaction of physical, cognitive, and social forces in its history rather than from properties that are intrinsic to the language faculty. As ABSL has virtually no history, it is not surprising on this view that it has little in the way of phonology. Alternatively, Berent (to appear) brings together evidence from a number of disciplines and types of data (including sign |
centuries, its division from Galenism after the work of Vesalius and Harvey; its emergence in Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, and in Boerhaave and its modern re-emergence through Osier and 20th century ethical writing. I shall draw on the experiences of a Swann Hellenic cruise on "The Legacy of Hippocrates", [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] May 1989, |
Many believe that our nearest primate relatives fail to qualify as persons; their moral status is lower than ours. This difference is often attributed to their lesser mental capacity. Perhaps it is due to their lacking rationality, practical rationality, or the capacity for moral agency. But if chimpanzees and other primates possess lower moral status than persons in virtue of their lesser mental capacity, we might speculate that beings with greater mental capacity than us would possess a higher moral status than persons-a supra-personal moral status. This possibility has long been a topic of theological speculation. 1 More recently it has been attributed practical significance in one of |
Propositions (1) and (2) have been taken to support a range of moral reservations about human enhancements-interventions that augment the capacities of normal, healthy humans. These reservations have not been clearly specified, but in each case the initial thought seems to be that, at the very least (3) We (existing human persons) have moral reasons not to encourage certain human enhancements: those that would create supra-persons. 1 For example, in attempting to explain the origin of human suffering, the English writer and politician Soame Jenyns (1758, pp. 49-51) speculated that there existed |
One of Fukuyama's worries is that enhanced beings might claim greater rights than are enjoyed by unenhanced humans. But another concern is that enhanced beings would actually have greater rights than the unenhanced. This could be true if they possessed supra-personal moral status, as (1) maintains they might. 4 Even writers who are unpersuaded by most objections to human enhancement have taken the objection captured by (1)-(3) seriously. Allen Buchanan, Jeff McMahan and Julian Savulescu have all found it worthy of prolonged discussion, 5 and Buchanan (2011, p. 21) lists it |
assumption that the emergence of beings with a moral status higher than that of persons is possible, the emergence of [supra-persons] would not extinguish whatever rights the unenhanced have by virtue of being persons '' (2009, pp. 349-350). I will argue that (1) and (2) are in fact quite resilient-more resilient than Buchanan recognizes. Though we certainly lack conclusive evidence for their truth, we are not in a position to rule it out. We should remain open to the possibility that human enhancement could create supra-persons, and thereby harm ordinary, unenhanced humans. However |
First, some assumptions about moral status. The concept of moral status is most commonly deployed in attempts to explain or justify the attribution of certain basic moral protections, such as basic moral rights or claims, to certain beings. For example, it may be said that human fetuses or non-human primates have a right not to be killed because they have the same moral status as ordinary adult humans. These attempts usually appeal, ultimately, to the non-moral properties of the beings in question, for example, their mental capacities, potential mental capacities, or species membership. The concept of moral status simply serves as a way of picking out those non |
Beyond this, I wish to remain as open as possible to competing views about the relationship between moral status and moral rights and claims. However, I will need to assume that Assumption II Two beings of the same moral status may enjoy different rights and claims. This assumption is shared by those mentioned above who have discussed the objection that I address in this article. It is also consistent with common sense, which allows, for example, that two beings with the same moral status may have different rights or claims because of their different internal or external circumstances. For example, a more severely injured person may have a stronger claim to medical assistance than a less |
In addition to these assumptions about moral status, I also need to make some assumptions about the manner and circumstances in which beings of supra-personal moral status would be created, if they were to be created at all. I assume that suprapersons would be created through the enhancement of pre-existing human persons, not de novo (for example, by constructing sophisticated computers) nor via the enhancement of other beings (such as non-human animals or human embryos, if these do not qualify as persons). I also assume that these enhancements would not be heritable (the offspring of supra-persons would, in the absence of further enhancements, be |
In the next two sections I will assess (1) and (2) in the light of Buchanan's critique of them. In the subsequent sections, I offer and defend my own response to the objection. First, then, claim (1). Buchanan doubts though does not outright deny (1); he doubts that beings created through the enhancement of humans could have suprapersonal moral status. The view on which he leans most heavily in raising these doubts is the view that (Threshold) There is a threshold of mental capacity above which all beings have the same moral status and above which currently typical adult humans lie (Buchanan 200 |
Each of the possibilities depicted in (Fig. 2) is consistent with No Threshold. If Threshold is correct, then enhanced beings could not have greater moral status than ordinary humans: there simply exists no higher moral stratum. Threshold thus provides a sturdy bulwark against (1). On the other hand, No Threshold does not rule out the creation of supra-persons; it is consistent with (1). Buchanan argues that we should prefer Threshold to No Threshold and tentatively infers that human enhancement could not create supra-persons. He cites two main advantages of Threshold. First, it is easily able to accommodate the widely held intuition |
However, even if Threshold is superior to No Threshold, it will not follow that that human enhancement could not create supra-persons. Buchanan claims that unless one adopts No Threshold ''the worry that biomedical enhancements for some but not all would create a new moral status of [supra-person] is highly dubious'', or, as he later puts it, ''very implausible''(2009, pp. 368-369). His thought appears to be that rejecting No Threshold forces us into the arms of Threshold. But there are other possible relations between mental capacity and moral status, including some that are both plausible and consistent with the |
10 These accounts, as understood by Buchanan, have three important features. First, they hold that there is some mental capacity that confers a special 9 A similar view has also been entertained by McMahan (2009a, pp. 601-602). 10 See, for example, Buchanan (2009, pp. 357, 360-361), Rawls (1971, esp. pp. 504-512), Korsgaard (1986, esp. p. 93), and Darwall (2006). For discussion, see, Arneson (1999, |
moral status, and that is possessed by currently typical adult humans. This may be, for example, the capacity for practical reasoning, for moral agency, or for engaging in practices of mutual accountability. Second, they hold that the degree to which one possesses that capacity is unimportant to moral status; it matters only that one possesses the relevant capacity to some non-zero degree (which is what I will henceforth mean when I say that a being possesses a capacity without further specifying its degree of capacity). Third, as Buchanan interprets them, respect-based accounts include the assumption that there is no higher capacity, not possessed by currently typical adult |
Respect-based accounts of moral status thus support Threshold. I am aware of no popular competing account of moral status that supports Plateau. However, it is easy to imagine a variant of the respect-based account that would support it. Consider an account according to which two mental capacities, F and G, are all that matter for moral status. A being with both of these capacities has full moral status. A being with only one has lesser moral status, and a being with neither has none. There are thus three discrete tiers of moral status. Suppose further that Capacity F is possessed by no non-human animals but by all currently typical adult humans |
11 But this has little evidential significance. After all, philosophical work on moral status has typically been motivated by a desire to explain the elevated or equal moral status of humans, and, in some cases, to accommodate the common sense view that some animals also have significant moral status. If these are one's goals, there is no need to consider, indeed no point in considering, higher capacities that no animals or humans actually possess. The absence of such accounts from the literature thus provides little or no evidence for their falsity. There is, moreover, reason to consider such multi-tiered accounts as serious alternatives to respect-based accounts. There |
Alternatively, Buchanan might reply that it is difficult to call to mind any capacity that could plausibly confer supra-personal moral status. It is difficult to think of a mental capacity, lacked by ordinary humans but potentially possessed by enhanced beings, that could fill the role of Capacity G in the three tiered account that I sketched above. According to respect-based accounts of moral status, persons have greater moral status than lower beings not because they possess the same capacities to a greater degree, but because they possess entirely new capacities. They are not just better at performing the mental tasks that lower beings perform; they can do entirely different things, |
It is widely held that empathy is relevant to, and perhaps even necessary for, moral agency, and many philosophers have held that the capacity for moral agency is necessary for the higher form of moral status. Suppose, then, that supra-persons would have a capacity that would be better for moral agency than mere empathy. Suppose they could actually experience other individuals' mental states while simultaneously reflecting on those experiences in a selfconscious manner from their own point of view. This would require a divided form of consciousness, but that would be only a rather extreme instance of the fragmentation of consciousness of which we are increasingly aware in ourselves (McMahan |
I have a further suggestion, and one that may tax our imaginative abilities less than McMahan's. Perhaps supra-personal moral status would be conferred by the capacity for constructive participation in some new form of social co-operation. It is not inconceivable that quantitative increases in capacities for altruism, self-control and general intelligence might lead enhanced beings to develop new and qualitatively different forms of social co-operation. For example, these beings might replace existing political and legal institutions with an anarchic system in which individuals are assumed sufficiently altruistic and intelligent to avoid behaviors that contribute to collective action problems. Or they might replace existing economic markets with |
An obvious reason for denying (2) is that moral status is not zero-sum: one being's gain in moral status does not necessitate a loss for any other. So even if enhanced humans acquired supra-personal moral status, ordinary humans would retain their existing moral status-that associated with personhood. However, as Buchanan notes, even if one's moral status would not be diminished by the presence of beings with greater moral status, the value of that moral status for the individual might be diminished (2009, pp. 349, 363-364). One explanation for why moral status might be devalued in this way |
13 Suppose, as is somewhat plausible, that it is morally permissible for a person to kill one non-human primate if and only if this will (a) prevent the death of three or more primates of equal moral status, or (b) prevent the death of one or more primates of greater moral status. Now imagine a population of ten primates all with the same moral status. Each can be permissibly sacrificed (that is, intentionally killed) to prevent the death of three or more others, but none can be permissibly sacrificed to avert the death or one or two others. But now suppose five of |
In any case, Buchanan appears to accept that non-human animals might be harmed through losing immunity to permissible sacrifice (2009, p. 364). What he resists is the suggestion that persons-such as ordinary, unenhanced humanscould be harmed in this way. This resistance is based on the thought that being a person makes one inviolable, and that our inviolability protects us against permissible sacrifice of the sort that befalls the unenhanced primates. McMahan (2009a, pp. 601-602) has noted a difficulty with this response to (2): our inviolability, |
14 In saying that the unenhanced primates now have less immunity to permissible sacrifice, I do not mean that they may now be sacrificed for the sake of less important goals; I mean that they may be sacrificed in a wider range of circumstances. The reason that they can be sacrificed in a wider range of circumstances is precisely that some goals for which they previously could not be permissibly sacrificed-the saving of certain other primates-have increased in importance. 15 Buchanan (2009, p. 364 There is a further problem, however. There are cases in which one being might be permissibly sacrificed for the sake of |
In addition, there are varieties of permissible harm other than sacrifice (i.e., intentional killing) against which our maximal inviolability provides no protection at all. Even if I, as a person, am inviolable, and maximally so, it would be permissible for a charitable or public hospital to deprive me of headache cure in order to instead cure some other person with a worse or more easily curable headache. This is because my claim to the cure derives not from my inviolability, but from my interest in being free from headaches, and, as it happens, my competitor has a stronger interest of the same sort |
First, reasons not to impose the second order harm of reduced immunity to permissible harm (henceforth sometimes just 'immunity') are not always decisive. Suppose, as is plausible, that emergency medical staff have stronger moral claims than others to the avoidance of certain harms. Perhaps they have stronger claims to exemption from jury duty and to the waiving of charges for vaccination services. Imagine a society in which there are no emergency medics. A politician then decides to train and employ some. In doing so, that politician reduces the immunity of those who do not become emergency medics to certain permissible harms. If a situation arises in which Arnold |
The case just described is most naturally understood as one in which the politician reduces the immunity of some to permissible harm not by increasing the moral status of others, but by changing their circumstances. However, similar thoughts may apply to cases in which one reduces the immunity of some by bringing it about that others become supra-persons, for example, by encouraging status enhancements. The consequent reduction in the immunity of the unenhanced humans may generate some moral reason not to encourage status enhancements, but, as in the case of training emergency medics, this reason need not be decisive. For example, it might be outweighed by countervailing |
In fact, we might have good moral reasons to encourage status enhancements even if doing so would have no economic or scientific benefits. This is because, just as the status enhancements would reduce the immunity of, and thereby harm, unenhanced humans, so too they would increase the immunity of, and thereby benefit, those who make the transition from personhood to supra-personhood. The loss of immunity endured by the unenhanced humans would be matched by a gain in immunity enjoyed by those who undergo the enhancements. Thus, though we may have some reason not to encourage status enhancements, because of the reduction in the immunity this would impose on |
Thus, most believe that there is currently a grossly unequal distribution of immunity across different kinds of beings such that humans typically possess much more immunity than pigs, which possess much more immunity than chickens, which possess much more immunity than scallops. If these differences in immunity indeed exist, this must be because there are further differences, for example in moral status or morally relevant circumstances, that justify them. We may have difficulty spelling out these further differences, 17 but if we are to maintain that there is inequality in immunity, the differences must be there somewhere. If, say, there is no morally relevant difference between a human and a chicken |
By analogy, suppose that differences in culpability between persons give rise to differences in their moral liability to punishment. Then if there is a difference in culpability between two persons, there will be an inequality in their liability to punishment. But this inequality arises from a difference in culpability which also justifies it. Now suppose that two individuals are initially equally culpable, but one then does some wrongful act which makes him more culpable than the other. A new inequality in liability to punishment will have been produced. But, as with existing inequalities, that inequality will be justified, and for the same reason. The difference in culpability which |
It is, however, doubtful whether status enhancements by some, but not others, would inevitably lead to an unjust or otherwise disvaluable distribution of mental capacity across beings. Suppose, for example, that access to status enhancements is decided via a lottery procedure to which all agree in advance. Now, it seems doubtful whether the resulting distribution of mental capacity would be unjust or otherwise disvaluable. Or suppose status enhancements were made readily available to all, but that only some chose to use them, with others preferring to remain mere persons. Again, it seems doubtful whether resulting differences in mental capacity would be disvaluable. So it is difficult |
One way of defending greater concern for the losses than the gains would appeal to the idea that we should be partial towards those who suffer the losses of immunity-we should attach greater weight to the losses of immunity than to the gains of immunity because we should care more about ordinary, unenhanced human persons (henceforth, 'the unenhanced') than about the enhanced supra-persons (henceforth, 'the enhanced'). It is certainly natural to empathize more with the unenhanced than the enhanced: the unenhanced are more like us. Perhaps it could also be argued that we should care more about the unenh |
It might be responded that in deciding whether to encourage status enhancements, one could nevertheless be partial against the enhanced, though in a nonstandard kind of way. One could be partial in the sense that one cared less about gains and losses of immunity when those who received those gains and losses would, after receiving them, be enhanced individuals. This would, however, be an unappealing kind of partiality. It would be akin to the partiality that a doctor would exhibit if she cared less about the effect of an intervention on her patient A than about the effect of another intervention on her patient B on the basis that patient A would no |
In any case, even if we accept that this non-standard kind of partiality could be supported by moral reasons, it is difficult to see any reason why it would be so supported in the present case. It is difficult to see why the kinds of relations that hold between us and future unenhanced humans could support partiality, of either a standard or non-standard variety, towards them. We clearly have no relationship with these individuals of the sort that parents have with their children or doctors have with their patients. Certain significant relations do obtain between us and the unenhanced. For example, we existing humans stand in the relation of species |
It could be argued that merely bearing the relation of moral equality to another being-sharing one's moral status with it-is enough to give one reason to be partial to that being. On this view, persons should be partial to other persons, and supra-persons to other supra-persons. It is perhaps somewhat more plausible that the relation of moral equality could generate reasons to be partial than it is that sharing one's species membership generates similar reasons. Moral equality is, after all, morally significant in a way that species co-membership is not. However, it remains obscure why the relation of moral equality should be attached similar significance to being in |
In addition, the view that we should have greater concern for those who share our moral status has some unappealing implications. For example, it implies that in addition to our reasons to treat animals less well than ordinary humans, since they have lower moral status, we have a further reason to treat them less well: they have different moral status and therefore fall outside of the scope of our reasons to be partial. This is at least mildly counter-intuitive. Intuitively, if it is indeed permissible to treat animals less well than humans, it is their lower moral status, not their different moral status, that does all the normative |
A more promising way of arguing that we should attach greater weight to the losses of immunity caused by status enhancements than to the corresponding gains would appeal not to partiality, but to the claim that we have, quite generally, stronger reasons not to contribute to harms-normally understood as losses-than to contribute to benefits-normally understood as gains. This view is often said to be a part of common sense morality (McMahan 2009b). It can be formulated, in a general way, as follows: for any agent A, amount of harm/benefit x, and means of contributing to harm/benefit y, |
A problem, however, is that, according to common sense morality, we have some reason to contribute to benefits, though it may be weaker than the reason not to contribute to comparable harms. Moreover, if a benefit exceeds a harm by a wide margin, the reason to contribute to the benefit will, in many cases, be stronger than the reason not to contribute to the harm. Reasons not to contribute to harm are not often of invariably over-riding importance. This suggests that we could have sufficient reason to encourage status enhancements if they would cause a loss in immunity to the unenhanced, a comparable gain in immunity to those who undergo |
Of course, we may have more limited rights, such as rights not to have our immunity reduced in such-and-such a way, or to such-and-such degree, that would invariably be violated by encouraging status enhancements though they are not violated, for instance, by training emergency medics. I see no good reason for supposing that we have such rights, however. I cannot think of any cases eliciting intuitive responses that favor their existence, nor can I see any good theoretical grounding for them. It thus seems safest to conclude that encouraging status enhancements need violate no right to preservation of immunity. If this is correct, then, |
I have been describing status enhancements as transformations in which fixed individuals make the transition from personhood to supra-personhood. One final attempt to show that we have most reason not to encourage status enhancements would question the accuracy of this description. It would appeal to the thought that any human enhancement capable of creating a supra-person would be identity altering. The supra-person would not be the same individual as the person who existed prior to the enhancement. If this is right, then no individual gains immunity as a result of the status enhancement. Rather, a being with less moral status, and thus immunity, is simply replaced by another being with more moral status |
If status enhancements are identity altering, then the overall package of harms and benefits that a status enhancement produces is as follows. (1) There are harms, in the form of losses of immunity, suffered by those who remain unenhanced. (2) There is typically a harm, through going out of existence, for the person who undergoes the enhancement. On the other hand, there is no straightforward benefit in the form of a gain in immunity to any individual, though there may be (3) a noncomparative benefit, in the form of a high level of immunity, enjoyed by the supra-person brought into existence by |
Fortunately, for the proponent of human enhancement, it is very doubtful whether status enhancements would have to be identity altering. It is true that existing philosophical work on our identity tends to address the question 'what is required for personal identity?' This question is naturally read as presupposing that we are essentially persons; that we could not cease to be persons while remaining the same individual. Moreover, some have explicitly defended the view that we are essentially persons (Baker 1999 (Baker, pp. 154-155, 2000. If this view is correct, then identity could not be preserved across the transition from personhood |
It seems plausible, then, that identity could be preserved across the transition from personhood to supra-personhood. Of course, it might well be argued that identity could be preserved, but not in such a way as to retain its ordinary significance. Derek Parfit has argued that identity can be lost while what is normatively significant in survival is preserved (1984, pp. 199-280). Arguably, what is normatively significant in survival may also be lost while identity is preserved (McMahan 2002, p. 51). So it is worth noting that, plausibly, everything normatively |
Allen Buchanan responds to this objection by questioning (1) and (2), but I have argued that these claims are difficult to undermine. I have argued, contra Buchanan, that (1) and (2) could be true even if we reject the view that moral status constantly rises with mental capacity, and even if we allow that persons are inviolable. Moreover, I conceded that (1) and (2) do provide some support to (3). Nevertheless, the proponent of human enhancement may be able to respond adequately to this objection. The acquisition of supra-personal moral status by some could harm unenhanced humans by |
I have assumed throughout that supra-persons would be created through the enhancement of pre-existing persons. If they came about in some other way, for example, through the enhancement of early embryos that do not yet qualify as persons, then some of my arguments would not hold. In that case, there would be no persons who would benefit from becoming supra-persons, though there are others who would be harmed. This would leave room for one to oppose status enhancements on the basis that resulting changes in immunity would harm some persons without benefitting others. Whether this argument succeeds would depend on the relative importance of person-affecting and other moral considerations |
So here is an argument by a progressive thinker, seen by some as relativist himself, against the relativist zeitgeist, all the more surprising for coming from the pen of a man who was of a liberal persuasion at a time when autonomy is often seen hand-in-hand with a postmodernism that makes unifying normative projects unfashionable. Or perhaps this is also an example of true integrity in its more literal meaning, where a person's moral arguments, and their moral character, align with an internal cohesion and consistency, that they are not in constant 'deep conflict' as Grayling points out is often the view of other |
Dworkin's primary discipline was, of course, law, and so his purpose had been to explore philosophical investigations into the conceptual basis of legal argumentation. To those outside the legal academy, this might be off-putting and of dubious relevance at first glance as well as render some of his material difficult to follow for the uninitiated. However, the effort is rewarded for all those concerned with bioethics for two reasons: Firstly, he usually addressed issues of central concern to the field and, secondly, he was a wonderful writer. Indeed, one blog contributor suggests (kindly) that sometimes the beauty of his |
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