Yet if acorns are like human embryos then oak saplings are like human toddlers. If acorns are to embryos as oak trees are to people, then what about oak saplings? Forest managers often cull oak saplings to prevent excessive crowding of trees and promote the health of the forest, and no one has any misgivings about such a practice. George and Lee make other telling points against Sandel’s analogy. Sandel has made accidental features of oak trees and humans the most important things about them even though they are not. The grandeur, size, and beauty of the tree are accidental features that do not make it an oak tree. Thus, a scrawny, scruffy, diseased oak tree with twisted bark is just as much an oak tree as a large, grand one.
Acorn and oak saying skin#
Even though some argued that people with dark skin were not human persons, this is plainly ridiculous because a person can have light or dark skin and still be a person – skin color is an accidental attribute. Herein lies the whole reason why it was evil for people with lighter skin to enslave those who had darker skin. If their skin color changes, like when they get a tan in the summer and lighten up in the winter, they are still people. People can have red, yellow, black or white skin and still be people. You can change an accidental attribute of something without affecting what it is. This is just a fancy way of describing a feature that is incidental to who you are and not essential. Robert George and Franciscan University of Stubenville philosopher Patrick Lee have pointed out that the characteristics Sandel uses to categorize oak trees and acorns into different groups, like grandeur, beauty and so on, are “accidental” attributes. Sandel acknowledges this at first, and then denies it based on features that the oak tree acquires later in its development. They are the same organism at different stages of development. Acorns and oak trees are both oaks, that is, members of the genus Quercus.
In the first place, it begins with a significant biological error. This argument has a lot of things wrong with it. Therefore just as an acorn is a different kind of thing from an oak tree, a human embryo is a different kind of thing than a mature human person. The same kind of disparate response is evoked by the loss of a mature human being over the loss of a human embryo.
While the loss of the oak tree is received with distress and disappointment, the loss of the acorn hardly evokes a response. Sandel states that even though every oak tree was at one time in its life an acorn, “it does not follow that acorns are oak trees.” Why? Compare how we might regard the loss of a magnificent oak tree over the loss of a single acorn. Michael Sandel is a professor of political theory at Harvard University and was a member of President George W.
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