The words covered in this article are dichotomy, culpable, warrant, accrue, and viable. Day 1 words that will reoccur today are equivocal and ambiguity.
Yesterday, we talked about how seemingly simple words such as ‘saw’, ‘bat’ and ‘chicken’ are in fact equivocal and if we do not take care to convey precisely which of the many possible definitions we have in mind, we may be misunderstood. Because Frigaliment and B.N.S. did not consider the inherent ambiguity in the word ‘chicken’ when drawing their trade contract, they wasted much time, effort and money in defending their respective understanding of the word in a courtroom.
Today, we will talk about another word that can mean different things to different people – ‘life.’
How will you define it?
Here is my attempt: ‘Life’ is the property that sets apart the living from the dead. What do I mean by ‘living’? Well, a living organism is any biological entity that was born but is not dead yet.
Basically, I am defining ‘life’ as ‘the opposite of death.’ My answer is based on the assumption that life and death are nonoverlapping, dichotomous states: a person can be either alive or dead, not both.
Dichotomy
A dichotomy is a division into two mutually exclusive and contrasting categories. It is a binary classification and allows for only two possible values – EITHER this OR that, EITHER 0 OR 1, EITHER True OR False, EITHER Black OR White etc.
This word is made up of Greek dika (i.e. ‘two’) and tomos (i.e. ‘a cutting’), and so denotes ‘a cutting up into two (parts).’ Similarly, the word ‘binary’ is derived from the Latin word bini, which means ‘comprised of two (parts).’
Life and death are generally believed to be dichotomous states. We think that there is one definite moment when, all of a sudden, life begins, and one definite moment when it ends. A baby has no existence till abruptly, as if an electric switch has been turned on, it exists; and, a person who was living till a second before is at this second dead, going as quickly from ‘1’ to ‘0’ as an electric switch that is turned off.
The common view of life and death as a strict dichotomy – as the poles of a binary opposition – can be contrasted with the view that both life and death are the end-results of a multi-stage process, and in those stages, a person is neither alive nor dead, or both alive and dead. Those stages are the gray zones between the whiteness of life and the darkness of death.
Now comes my next question to you:
Is a fetus living or non-living? When does life begin – at conception, at birth or at some time in between?
What are your answers?
These are important questions that go to the very heart of one of the most passionately debated issues in modern America – the legality of abortion.
For the people who believe that life begins at conception, abortions are nothing less than murders, for which both the pregnant women who obtain abortions and the doctors who perform them are equally culpable – at least morally culpable if not criminally so. In fact, before 1973, laws in 15 American states had provisions to punish women for choosing to end their pregnancies. In 1973, while deciding a case popularly known as Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court of America ruled that American women have a fundamental right to get an abortion in the initial stages of pregnancy where the fetus is incapable of surviving on its own. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned its 1973 ruling and decided that abortion laws would henceforth be determined solely by individual states, many of which quickly passed laws that medical doctors or other persons who performed abortions past a certain stage of pregnancy would be held criminally culpable and meet with harsh punishments.
Culpable
Culpable means blameworthy.
Being ‘morally culpable’ means deserving blame on moral grounds and being ‘criminally culpable’means deserving blame as per the criminal laws of the land. Criminally culpable acts warrant punishment by a court of law.
Warrant
Warrant as a verb means to justify or to require.
You’ll probably be more familiar with the noun form of this word, as in ‘an arrest warrant’ or ‘a search warrant.’ This is an order from a judge that legitimizes the arrest of a person or the search of a property by a police team. If someone protests against such police action, the policemen will show them the warrant and say, “We are required to do this by the court,” or “This court order justifies our doing whatever we are doing.”
The adjective form of this word is warranted, meaning justified. The opposite of this is unwarranted, meaning unjustified.
Homicide means to kill a person (Greek homo means ‘man’ and -cidium means ‘killing’). The legal systems of most Commonwealth countries (countries that were once a part of the British Empire) use the term ‘culpable homicide’ to denote the illegal and blameworthy killing of a person. Murder and killing someone in a road accident due to rash/drunk driving are both examples of culpable homicide. On the other hand, killing an armed dacoit in self-defense would be considered non-culpable homicide, meaning that such a killing is not considered blameworthy or punishable.
There are people who want both the women who get abortions and the doctors who conduct the abortions to be charged with culpable homicide and punished accordingly. These people call themselves ‘pro-lifers’ because they advocate the right of a fetus to live.
Then, there are people who frame the abortion decision in terms of a woman’s right to choose what is best for her, because having a baby fundamentally affects her body and entire future. They are commonly known as ‘pro-choice advocates’.
In between the pro-lifers and the pro-choice advocates lies a third group of people who feel okay about abortions made in the initial months of pregnancy but are uncomfortable with later-term abortions. They believe that human rights accrue gradually along the continuum from zygote to blastocyst to embryo to fetus to viable baby in the womb.
Accrue
The verb accrue means to grow or to get added as a matter of periodic gain. For example, interest accrues in your bank account, and wisdom accrues with age.
The people who belong to this third group probably do not believe in a strict dichotomy between life and death. Rather, they are likely to think that the beginning of life is a gradual process, that life (and, therefore, the rights associated with a living person) accrues proportionately to a zygote as it advances through its stages of development.
Viable
The adjective viable when used for a fetus or a newborn means capable of surviving outside the uterus.
The more general meaning of this word is capable of surviving or of success. For example, a commercially viable product is one that can survive and succeed in the marketplace, meaning that it is profitable. If a CEO lifts a company back to commercial viability, this means that the company had been dying previously – perhaps its products no longer sold, it was reeling under debts and was on the verge of bankruptcy – but this person turned it around and made it profitable again.
The origin of this word is Latin vita, ‘life’, which led to the French vie, also meaning ‘life’. So vie + –able means ‘able to live.’
The human fetus becomes viable at seven months. So, if it is taken out of the mother’s womb in or after the seventh month, it can survive.
We will continue this discussion tomorrow.
But before we call it a day, I want to talk a bit more about Dichotomy.
Imagine that the black rectangle in this image represents the universal set (the set of all possible outcomes for a particular query). A dichotomy then will be represented as a rectangle with only one red circle drawn inside it. There are only two possibilities in this universe – your position in the rectangle can either be ‘in the red circle’ or ‘out of the red circle.’ Either this or that, no third option – that’s a dichotomy.
Here are some usage examples of dichotomy:
- The dichotomy of organisms into ‘vertebrates’ and ‘invertebrates’ is based on whether the answer to the question “Does it have a backbone?” is yes or no, respectively.
- Gender was traditionally dichotomized into masculine and feminine. However, this either-or view has been increasingly questioned, and ‘not masculine’ now does not necessarily mean ‘feminine’, and vice-versa.
- The dichotomy of “good and evil” is present in most religions and moral traditions.
- The ‘Moral-Practical Dichotomy’ is the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites and mutually exclusive.
- We dichotomize genius into two kinds – natural and learned, and of the two, it is natural brilliance that most of us love, respect and secretly hope for.
- A division into two parts is called a dichotomy, into three, a trichotomy, and into many, a polytomy. For example, the division of angles is trichotomous – angles are right, acute, or obtuse.