Learning about the concept of metaphysical potentiality will equip socially conservative collegians to more effectively defend traditional moral positions on abortion, gender, and sexuality.
As college freshmen across the country begin their first weeks of classes, contentious debates around sexual ethics will arise in dorms, dining halls, and classrooms. Many social conservatives will arrive at predominantly liberal campuses ill-equipped to defend their moral convictions. If these conservative undergraduates do not succumb to the all-too-common trend of self-censorship, they will be asked to give an account for their apparently retrogressive beliefs about abortion, gender, and sexuality. While some may be able to marshal a slogan or muster a simple argument, most will be unprepared to weather sustained cross-examination about the rational foundation of their controversial beliefs.
For these young traditionalists, much of their moral formation may have been reinforced by their religious or social milieu. Faced with a difficult argument, these students may appeal to sentiment, intuition, or religious dogma. This tactic is unlikely to persuade an interlocutor, especially on secular campuses. Moreover, this maneuver buttresses the interlocutor’s suspicion that those who hold these beliefs are bigoted rubes who harbor prejudice toward women, gay people, and transgender individuals.
If the social positions held by these students truly are irrational and hateful, then they should abandon them. But just because these beliefs are difficult to defend or have disquieting implications does not necessarily mean they are wrong. As someone who once stood in these students’ shoes, I wish someone would have taken me aside to carefully explicate the metaphysical and moral principles that undergird socially conservative positions on sexual ethics. Below, I hope to offer such an explication to incoming undergraduates.
In my experience, basic familiarity with simple metaphysical concepts goes a long way toward blunting some of the most common objections to traditional positions on sexual ethics. Specifically, many of the difficulties in defending traditional beliefs around sex and gender stem from an unfamiliarity with the oft-overlooked but important, technical but intuitive concept of potentiality. By learning this one piece of conceptual machinery, the contemporary conservative collegian can acquire a more effective way to defend traditional social positions and a richer understanding of human nature to boot.
Many of the difficulties in defending traditional beliefs around sex and gender stem from an unfamiliarity with the oft-overlooked but important, technical but intuitive concept of potentiality.
Potentiality is a concept first explained by the Greek philosopher Aristotle and later developed by thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas. For these philosophers, potentiality, also called potency, is defined as the real capacity for some act. While the definition sounds technical, examples are intuitive. An acorn has the potentiality to become a tree, and a fish has the potentiality to swim. But an acorn does not have the potentiality to swim, and a fish does not have the potentiality to become a tree. Having a potentiality means more than being theoretically possible or conceivable. A potentiality is a power inherent in a particular type of thing, and this power is always directed toward a particular state of being or acting.
The potentialities of a thing are deeply intertwined with the kind of thing that it is. In other words, we can determine what something is by discovering the potentialities it has, and vice versa. For example, in chemistry, it may be hard to see the chemical structure of a particular molecule, but scientists can determine what a molecule is by determining the potentialities it has to react to various stimuli. In biology, scientists can determine what species an organism is by examining the potentialities it has for various functions.
The concept of potentiality clarifies many ideas that are obscured in contemporary discourse. Disability is a great example. While many of us are generally familiar with the idea of disability and know persons with disabilities, the concept can be hard to define. A disability is clearly the absence of some ability—but what kind of ability? Human beings cannot fly, but this inability is not a disability. Perhaps an inability that is not shared by the majority of humans? But if a global environmental pollutant gave everyone anosmia (the inability to smell), anosmia would still be a disability even though the majority of humans had it.
The concept of potentiality helps answer the question. A disability is the absence of some ability for which human beings have a potentiality, like sight or hearing. This potentiality is inherent in the kind of thing that humans are, and the failure to realize any of these potentialities constitutes a disability.
On the issue of gender, conservatives will rightly volley the “What is a woman?” gotcha question to stump supporters of transgenderism. But conservatives are often ill prepared to answer when the question is turned around on them. When answering, conservatives often err by appealing to some fully actual trait, characteristic, or body part that all women are supposed to have, like vaginas, uteruses, XX chromosomes, or ova.
But the problem is that not all women actually have these traits. This leaves the conservative vulnerable to several retorts: Are people who have had hysterectomies not women? Are people with Swyer syndrome not women? Are people with primary ovarian insufficiency not women? Instead, to truly get a clear understanding of what a woman is, we must turn to her potentialities. As Notre-Dame professor Abigail Favale writes in her cogent book, The Genesis of Gender,
A woman is the kind of human being whose body is organized around the potential to gestate new life. This potentiality that belongs to femaleness is always present, even if there is some kind of condition, such as age or disease, that prevents that potential from being actualized.
A question here arises: If a woman is infertile, does she not lose the potentiality to gestate new life? Here, it is worth distinguishing between two kinds of potentialities. I do not currently know how to play the guitar, but as a human being, I have the potential to learn how to do so. This kind of fundamental potentiality, based on the kind of thing something is, is called first potentiality. Notably, the first potentiality for an action remains even when the specific body parts that make the action possible are temporarily or even permanently damaged. My first potentiality to play the guitar remains even if my fingers are temporarily broken or permanently amputated. This kind of potentiality is distinguished from second potentiality, which can be called into action at a moment’s notice. If I were to learn how to play the guitar, I would have the potential to play the guitar at any time and thereby have a second potentiality to play the guitar.
Thus, an infertile woman may have permanently lost her second potentiality to conceive and gestate new life, just as a non-ovulating woman has temporarily lost her second potentiality to conceive and gestate new life. Regardless, in both of these situations, the woman nonetheless retains a first potentiality to do so based on the kind of creature that she is. The point becomes even clearer when we consider the sex binary. No matter the hormonal or surgical interventions, a woman will never have the potentiality to impregnate, just as a man will never have the potentiality to conceive and gestate new life.
Speaking of conceiving and gestating new life, potentiality is also relevant to debates around abortion. Specifically, potentiality has a bearing on the question of whether a fetus is a full human being deserving of moral respect. As with gender, debates around the personhood of fetuses often center around the question of actual traits the fetus possesses. Does it have a heartbeat? The ability to feel pain? Viability? Brain activity? Consciousness? At any given moment of prenatal development, it may be possible to say no to any of these questions. Some abortion advocates will take this fact as proof that at these stages of life, the fetus is not human, and it is therefore permissible to end its life.
If a human potentiality exists for some specific end, then humans should never intentionally actualize that potentiality in a way that perverts that end.
But this thinking is mistaken when you understand human beings from the perspective of potentiality. As a rational animal, human beings—fetuses included—necessarily have a first potentiality for rational thought. That said, at a particular moment, a particular human—whether a healthy fetus or an adult with a disability—might lack the second potentiality for rational thought. But for disabled people as well as fetuses, this lack of second potentiality makes them no less human. Under normal conditions, human fetuses are the kind of things that have the potential to develop into fully able human adults. Thus, when considered in light of potentiality, it becomes clear that fetuses, like persons with disabilities, are no less human than you and I.
As should be clear from the issues above, potentiality is relevant to our moral obligations. Potentiality helps elucidate what something is, and what something is has implications for what we should (and should not) do to it. In the case of gender, the potential for gestation shows that a human being is a female, and one should not suppress the natural development of female puberty except under grave medical circumstances. In the case of fetuses, the potential for rational thought shows that a fetus is a human being, and one should not intentionally kill an innocent human being.
In both of these cases, the moral principle at play involves a respect for the potentialities of the human body. If a human potentiality exists for some specific end, then humans should never intentionally actualize that potentiality in a way that perverts that end. Put otherwise, human beings should not intentionally actualize human potentialities only to frustrate them. This principle has bearings on other principles of traditional sexual ethics like the proscriptions of contraception, IVF, masturbation, sodomy, incest, necrophilia, bestiality, fornication, and adultery—all of which intentionally pervert the proper potentiality of the sexual act.
Some clarifications are in order. First, to be immoral, the perversion of these potentialities must be intentional. Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex provides examples of this principle. Tiresias, the congenitally blind seer, is not culpable for his blindness, but Oedipus, who gouges his eyes out, is. Oedipus procreating with his mother Jocasta is wrong because it violates the proper potentiality of the sexual faculty, but Oedipus is not morally culpable because he did not know Jocasta was his mother.
Second, the requirement that one should not frustrate human potentialities comes with a caveat called the principle of totality and integrity. This principle states that humans may frustrate lower-order potentialities when it is medically necessary to preserve the integrity of the whole human being. For example, during the Civil War, doctors often had to amputate legs with bullet wounds to ensure that infection would not spread to the rest of the body. This was a permissible frustration of the leg’s potential because this potential could not be saved without losing the potential of the whole body.
No doubt these arguments and ideas are controversial, but they are arguments and not simply appeals to emotion or authority. A short article will be unable to resolve all possible objections to these arguments. That said, introducing the simple but versatile concept of potentiality will hopefully enable conservative undergraduates to dig deeper and elevate the discourse beyond simple sloganeering. Ideally, a ressourcement of potentiality and the rich metaphysical tradition that birthed it will inspire renewed and sustained reflection on the intricacies of our bodies and the purpose for which they are made.