Abortion - Why are people pro life?
I am from England in where abortion is legal throughout the country, support is there for those who need it and I would argue that the general consensus is that an abortion is ok to do. According to a recent Ipsos survey, 59% of people agree that abortion should be legally available for all who want it, while 27% disagree.
Me personally I am completely pro-choice. In the UK, you can legally have an abortion up to 23 weeks and 6 days of pregnancy, and I have absolutely no issue with that.
I have never heard a compelling argument for pro-life. All of them have been based on religion or personal feelings in which my answer is always to simply not have an abortion. The fact that abortions are legal doesn't force you to do anything, you can choose to have the child. My main issue with pro-life is that your taking away a choice for people that don't share the same beliefs when having it the other way, everyone can do what they want.
I thought it would be an interesting discussion especially as it is such a hot topic in America right now and I was wondering if someone on here would take me up on the offer to explain why they think banning abortion is the right thing to do.
Me personally I am completely pro-choice. In the UK, you can legally have an abortion up to 23 weeks and 6 days of pregnancy, and I have absolutely no issue with that.
I have never heard a compelling argument for pro-life. All of them have been based on religion or personal feelings in which my answer is always to simply not have an abortion. The fact that abortions are legal doesn't force you to do anything, you can choose to have the child. My main issue with pro-life is that your taking away a choice for people that don't share the same beliefs when having it the other way, everyone can do what they want.
I thought it would be an interesting discussion especially as it is such a hot topic in America right now and I was wondering if someone on here would take me up on the offer to explain why they think banning abortion is the right thing to do.
Comments (1399)
My concern isn’t so much the taxonomy but the flesh-and-blood entity that you are justifying killing. I don’t require categories to tell me when it is or isn’t appropriate to take a life, and I don’t need to dehumanize someone. Simple justice and dignity suffices to inform how it is appropriate to treat another living being.
So if it isn’t human life what kind of life would you suggest it is?
What were you even asking when you asked "assuming that it is optional, the mother has every right, and no one would intervene, should she kill her offspring?"
Having both "optional" and "should" as part of the same question makes no sense, and you're just confusing matters.
It's not the case that she should and it's not the case that she shouldn't; it's the case that she may.
It’s a simple question: should she kill her offspring? Should she abort or not? Why or why not? Why can’t you guys answer this?
She neither should nor she shouldn't. She just may if she wants. What is so difficult to understand?
I do understand, I’m just asking why you can’t answer the question when we all here have the capacity to discern whether or not someone else should perform some behavior or not perform some behavior. Ought she or ought she not abort her offspring?
Neither. It's a false dichotomy. Is English not your first language? I'll try to teach you something:
1. She should have toast for breakfast tomorrow
2. She should not have toast for breakfast tomorrow
Both of these are false. Whether or not she will have toast for breakfast tomorrow is her free choice and either decision is morally acceptable.
So:
1. She should have an abortion
2. She should not have an abortion
Both of these are false. Whether or not she will have an abortion is her free choice and either decision is morally acceptable.
It’s a normative question. Of course it isn’t true or false.
I’ll put it in a language you might understand. There’s a trolly coming down the track, about to split in different directions. A mother stands at the lever can can choose where the trolly can go. Down one track lies her offspring. On the other is nothing. Which way should she send the trolly?
The more appropriate comparison is:
There’s a trolly coming down the track, about to split in different directions. A woman stands at the lever and can choose where the trolly can go. Down one track lies an apple. On the other an orange. Which way should she send the trolly?
She may do whatever she wants. There is nothing she should do. Either choice is morally acceptable.
Of course she can do whatever she wants. But she has to choose to do something or not do something. What should she choose?
You can’t say, can you? Your ethics leave the building on this one question, whether it is right or wrong for a mother to abort her offspring.
Should she run over the apple or the orange? There is no right or wrong decision.
Quoting NOS4A2
I have said, many times. It is acceptable to have an abortion and it is acceptable to not have an abortion. It is acceptable to have toast for breakfast and it is acceptable to not have toast for breakfast.
Quoting NOS4A2
You're not asking if it's right or wrong; you're asking if she should or if she shouldn't. This is a false dichotomy as I have explained very clearly.
You're presenting it as if only one of the choices is morally acceptable, when in fact both are.
Except there is a human being on one track and no one on the next.
Right or wrong, moral or immoral, good or bad, correct or incorrect…these are the reasons informing why someone should or shouldn’t perform some behavior on another. The behavior in this instance is killing a living human, and the choice whether to do so or not lies with the moral agent.
You lack any insight on whether she should or shouldn’t pull the lever, or you think it doesn’t matter. I’ll reframe the question. Why is it morally acceptable for a mother to kill her offspring?
I've already explained to you in past posts why it isn't wrong to kill a zygote or embryo or early stage foetus. I only interjected now to explain that you were misrepresenting @Banno. He is only saying that having an abortion is morally acceptable; he is not saying that women should have an abortion.
Sure you can. The point is only that we may identify things based on our goals. For instance, if our goals are pragmatic in nature we may identify something one way and if our goals are spiritual in nature we may identify them a different way.
A cup can be an instrument for drinking or a sacred object and we would treat it differently based on our vision of it. The secular cup is useless for attaining spiritual goals and the sacred cup is useless for attaining practical goals (if sacrilegious to use it that way).
Quoting Fire Ologist
Don’t you think this influences how you identify things?
If it isn’t wrong then is it right to kill human in his early stages?
If by "right" you mean "morally acceptable", then yes. Having an abortion is morally acceptable.
I get that you accept her choice. You don’t need to restate your opinion on that matter. But I do want to hear the reasoning behind why think it is right to kill a human zygote.
See my past posts. I ain't going to repeat them.
You’d just be repeating evasions anyways. They all contain reasons why you accept her choice, not whether the act itself is right or wrong.
Abortion isn't wrong because it's not wrong to kill single-celled organisms, regardless of what species biologists categorise these single-celled organisms to belong to, and regardless of what these single-celled organisms could grow into.
Humans are single-celled for a few days at best. But no need to reiterate the position.
I think the focus on the single cell is for the insult value. "Let me talk at you instead of with you. Zygotes aren't human and neither are you as far as I'm concerned.". It's not a strategy, it's just venting.
Dehumanization is the method. I’m curious what it does psychologically, as the behavior that commonly follows it is rarely moral.
Hitler liked the word "vermin."
Being dehumanized can cause significant psychological harm. Zygotes, blastocysts, and fetuses often feel alienated, isolated, and humiliated, which can lead to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Chronic dehumanization, like in cases of systemic discrimination, can contribute to long-term mental health issues.
It's addressing his position. In his own words, "we know that an individual human lifecycle begins at conception, since it cannot begin anywhere else, and any scalpel through the spine or intentional deprivation of essential nutrients after this point is to kill an individual human being."
If it isn't wrong to kill a single-celled zygote then either an individual human lifecycle begins after conception or it can sometimes be acceptable to kill (innocent) humans (e.g. when they are still single-celled zygotes).
Fair enough. Others who used that terminology appeared to be reducing all abortion to zygote termination.
I think it works to negate the conscience.
Oh, sorry, I assumed you cared about the victims of dehumanization. My mistake.
Btw, if pro-choice advocates don’t believe that human zygotes, blastocysts, and fetuses are human what species do they think they are?
“Those who dehumanize others often experience moral disengagement, which allows them to justify harmful behaviors. This disengagement, while protective in some cases (e.g., soldiers in wartime), can desensitize people to violence and diminish empathy, affecting their relationships and broader social behaviors.”
If your theory is that legal abortion diminishes empathy and whatnot in society then maybe try to show how that could be the case.
I'd ask for and listen to their reasons.
I don't think anyone worth speaking to could deny this. Yet, Banno's flimsy point beats it.
No reasonable person could read all three beings as morally hte same, without doing some loop-de-loops which rest on embarrassment, basically.
I don't agree. In order to have one conversation, like we are doing, something has to be fixed between us that is not subject to only my goals or your goals, or else we could never speak. Maybe we never actually communicate. I disagree with that. I see communication as a product of the fixed and the changing, not just the changing. So if either one of us says "abortion" and wants to communicate about this with the other, we must come to some agreement regarding something objective, something fixed, that we each separately agree on. For example, if we each agree "abortion is terminating a pregnancy", neither is free to identify "abortion" as anything less than that. When saying "abortion" we must say "pregnancy" and "termination" or there is no conversation possible. There may be more to an abortion, or maybe not. Or we could both be wrong. But while we seek to communicate with each other about abortion, and while we agree 'abortion terminates a pregnancy' we take that to be an objective fact, fixed in the world we are discussing. Your goals and values, and my goals and values, are no longer up for debate or even relevant on the now agreed fact "abortion terminates a pregnancy" - our values may tell us why we concluded "abortion terminates a pregnancy" but once concluded and posited in a conversation, we move nowhere unless we both hold that fact out as a fact, a fixed objective ground for the next statement (the next motion in the conversation). Now let's say I say "a fetal human being is an early stage adult human being, so a terminated pregnancy means a fetal human being has died" and you say "a terminated pregnancy does not terminate a human being, because a fetus isn't a human being", so we disagree. While we may now discuss what a human is, neither of us can base this further discussion on any other definition of abortion besides "abortion terminates a pregnancy" because that must remain fixed or we get nowhere, and we cannot communicate, and we've said nothing with any meaning or use or purpose. (This doesn't mean definitions like "abortion terminates a pregnancy" aren't revisable, just that we don't get to revise definitions all by ourselves and think we are having a conversation.)
While I understand that my values and my perception abilities and my biases and the structure of consciousness all mediate between me and anything else, and I understand that everything is in motion, there is nothing left to say about anything unless it is also the case that when we speak at all, we can only do our best at fixing permanent unchanging objects buried in all of this change. That's what speaking is, what it does. That's what reason is, what it does. We construct our lines to see if they can withstand all the changing motions. If the lines I construct can only exist for me, (such as what I value might), then there can be no communication or point to a having a conversation.
Basically, if valuation is the base act of human cognition, and every object I consider is only made of my values and nothing at all outside of those values, there is no point to speaking because there is either nothing outside of my values to speak of, and/or we would never be able to actually agree on anything ever (as I would have nothing to point to when I said 'I see what you mean').
Essentialism is only half the story. It's the story part; it's the identity of an individuated thing part. Motion is what the story is about. Existence and essence feed into each other, cause each other so to speak.
We don't get to avoid defining when a new human being comes into being if we want to say "human", and think we are advancing any communication or conversation about "abortion."
Quoting praxis
Not when I'm trying to identify where the car keys are. Religious views need not cloud everything. I'm not trying to determine whether an abortion is a sin or not. In fact I think some abortions might be sins, and some definitely are not. But someone else's sin, like some other woman's pregnancy, is none of my business. I'm not relying on the term "soul" or "God" in anything I'm saying. I'm trying to avoid even "right" or "wrong" as the moral/ethical/social aspects of this are to me, just a total mess of a conversation. I'm just trying say what an abortion is, like what a car is, or what keys are. So, no, not in this conversation.
Just like the question “how far would you go to save an adult?”, it is so nuanced I am not sure where to begin on that one. Let me address the other things you said and we can see if you want to dive in deeper.
1. No one, per se, is obligated to save a person trapped in a burning building.
2. Some people are obligated, because of their duties (e.g., a firefighter, a father, a mother, etc.).
3. A person who is not obligated to save the person that is trapped, may legitimately decide to save an adult but not a baby; a baby but not an adult; a zygote but not a baby; a baby but not a zygote; an adult but not super old adults; etc. They are not obligated to do it, so there’s nothing immoral happening if they choose not to or choose based off of morally relevant, but not obligatory, reasons.
4. You are right to note that it is morally relevant that a zygote in a petri dish is significantly different than an adult in a burning building but this is only relevant in the case that saving them is not obligatory; and does not deny that they are persons (in the pre-modern sense) or non-persons which will develop into persons (in the modern sense).
If you are asking about me personally, I would not run in an incredibly on-fire house to save a stranger—no matter if they are a zygote or a child. I have no obligation to do so, because they are not related to me (as family nor as a close friend or acquaintance) and I have not assumed the role of a member of society that would (like a firefighter), and I find it not worth it.
Now, if you are wondering if I see the obvious morally relevant differences between the zygote in the petri dish and, e.g., a baby in the case that I have to save one of them (and only one) (without using one as a means towards saving the other), then, yes, I would save the baby.
You are sort of correct: we do find morally relevant differences between people in moral dilemmas (e.g., being super old vs. young, having rich vs. poor conscious experience, etc.) but, what you are missing is, that doesn’t apply to rights. This is why @Banno keeps avoiding my questions on rights, because they know that the zygote has a right to life and that the morally relevant differences between them and, e.g., an adult for purposes of certain dilemmas do not apply here because one can never violate a person’s rights for a good end or to produce a good effect.
E.g., I may, and certainly will, admit that there is a morally relevant difference between a really old vs. young person such that if I have to save a 90-year old vs. a teenager where each is in a separate, burning building; then I am going to save the teenager. However, this does not admit that the 90-year old doesn’t have a right to life; nor that I could, e.g., murder them to harvest their organs to save a teenager from an illness. Do you see the difference between these two examples? This is why this is false:
All that is relevant for your view, if I dare say, is that what you call “non-actual persons” are not persons and so they do not have rights.
The funny thing is that NOS's and Frank's point underscores that human zygotes, blastocysts, and fetuses are not fully human in that there's no concern of them being psychologically harmed by being considered mere human zygotes, blastocysts, and fetuses.
Doesn't this perhaps go to the point made by @Banno earlier that religion or essentialism are influencing such views?
What's your view on the OP? I've lost your position in all of these 35 pages.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Are you a progressive Christian? Is that the right term?
My question would be this: an acorn is a potential oak tree. We wouldn't identity the acorn as an oak tree, though. Destroying an acorn is not equivalent to destroying an oak tree. Do you see humans as differing from this?
:snicker:
Ok. I think you might not realize that there are 8 US states that have no restrictions on abortion at any stage. It's legal to abort a fetus that could easily live outside the womb in those areas. That's part of the story of abortion in the US. I think it would probably make you ill to witness that kind of abortion. It would me. So here, it's really not limited to a story about blastocysts.
So there could be reasons to value the life of an adult more than the life of a baby?
Are values so subjective, that you could see someone make a policy that you can kill babies? China had that policy for years.
I’ll put it this way. Others on this thread have said that if I think a fetal human has as much value as an adult human, my values must be off. Would someone who says you can kill babies but you can’t kill adults because adults are more valuable have a problem with their values? Or do you think values are totally up to each individual (so no one’s values can actually be off as there is no objective measuring stick anyway).
Could be. I don't know all the potential ideas/scenarios which might exist. I have certainly heard that amongst Aboriginal peoples in my country, infanticide was sometimes practiced because food was't plentiful enough to sustain babies and the adults of the tribe. But one can imagine some funky scenarios - war, crisis, famine, etc, where a baby might be assessed as being of less value than an adult. Overall situations are more significant to me than categorical imperatives.
You don’t want to trust me. You don’t believe me or think I don’t have my own mind. I’m just a religious zealot (even though I don’t sound like one or ever raised the issue and I as just honestly responding to you).
Come on bro, let’s get back to the topic.
Isn’t whatever your agenda is a reason for me to doubt everything you say as well? Should I focus the conversation on what you REALLY think instead of what you are saying?
You already are...
Quoting Fire Ologist
Some of the things you say are glaringly contradictory.
The preceding line attests to my assent :P This is me using Banno's point in a way I think is slightly less pedantic, and more effective (to me, personally, anyhow).
I am pro-choice on the grounds that I care about women, I don't care about fetuses other than in respect of the woman carrying it (..any given..). Fetuses, on my view, cannot suffer in a way remotely morally relevant.
I’ve been dying to raise the oak tree, so thank you for doing that! This, to me, is the real conversation. What is a life, and what is a human life? Without having this conversation you aren’t really talking about abortion. We must discuss new life and coming to be to discuss whether killing a fetal human is like killing an adult human in any way.
So here is how I lay it out in the context of an oak tree.
First we need to understand “tree”. There are Maples and Ashes as well as Oaks. So to clarify tree, a tree is an organism with a trunk, branches and leaves.
Next we clarify “oak”. This has to do with an organism’s DNA. An oak is different than a maple as distinguished by their DNA.
Now, to discuss the “acorn” I need another word. “Plant”.
An acorn is planted in the ground and begins to grow. It breaks the surface of the ground and grows into a sapling, later into a tree. At all stages, this was a plant, a unique, individuated organism. What type of organism or plant is this - it’s an Oak. Acorn planted in the ground and growing, sapling and tree are all what an Oak is.
Same for human beings. A human zygote isn’t a different thing than a human adult - it’s what a human being is when it is first conceived like the adult is what a human being is when it is grown.
I would appreciate you giving me the biggest contradiction, particularly with regard to the essentialist/change part of the discussion. I am happy to challenge my own ideas. What’s a good glaring one that might matter to discuss?
I think you nailed the competing interests here. Some are focused on more specific scenarios and situations, and me, I am focused on anything universal that might be gleaned from it.
I would posit this as the most important, clear, contradiction in your thinking.
If they are not 'different thing's then they cannot be alternate states of 'one another', let's say. They would be the same thing. There is a difference, which you acknowledge here.
Yes, this is interesting. Our values and interests are direct reflections of our dispositions. I'm not drawn towards totalizing principles or universal notions or even consistency in many cases.
Yet even those who are anti-abortion don't seem to think that a person who has an abortion should be treated in the same way as we would someone who invited an innocent person into their home and then shot them. So, what our reason tells us about the morality of abortions does not tally with them being the killing of a person.
Why isn't that evidence that fetuses are not persons? I think it may be.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Quoting Fire Ologist
Your position of being against abortion without exception appears to contradict your belief that some abortions are definitely not a sin (immoral, wrong, erroneous, or whatever).
This is because it is hard to describe a living thing with a static word “thing”. We have to be precise and language, which fixes things, is trying to fix a living, changing organism. So it’s messy.
An adult organism is constantly changing too. So if we want to say an adult human Is a “thing”, and then say it constantly changes, tomorrow morning we have a new “thing” too according to you. Really, moment to moment everything changes.
So “thing” becomes a meaningless term. There are no things anywhere ever anymore.
But if we want to believe that, in the changing motion, there is some sort of temporary but for a time lasting component to reality, as in, a pregnant woman that can last nine or so months, we can integrate constant change with its permanent subject of that change.
Now when a sperm fertilizes an egg, we can say the constantly changing sperm is a thing that, once joined with the egg, ceases to be a thing, and the egg and sperm together start the motions and changes of a new thing.
I’m saying that the motions and changes of that new thing, the zygote, if left to play out, move on to fetal forms, infant form, adolescent and adult, and I’m saying this is the life of that one thing.
It's true the acorn and the oak are the same species, so in that sense, the same thing, but the loss of an acorn is very different from the loss of a tree. The loss of an oak tree has a far reaching impact on the area in which it lived, just like the loss of an adult impacts children, friends, employers, etc., while the loss of a fetus is usually felt as the loss of what could have been. I'm speaking from watching people lose relatives in a hospital environment. Infants don't have distinct personalities, so when they die, though it may be devastating to parents, it's not like the loss of an individual with specific traits. It's the loss of what was hoped for, or maybe it's the loss of a potential person the parents bonded to prior to it's even existing.
The loss of an elderly relative is a matter of letting go of someone who has lived a full life. There's grief, but there's no sense that this shouldn't have happened. It's natural. The worst death of all is that of a child. It was an individual. He or she was a distinct person, and it's always counter to nature. It's never ok, and it can never be ok. This leaves me with the sense that we value real personhood over potential. Potential isn't something we can hold in our hands. It's only in our minds, you know? How would you address that?
Ok, I mistook you to be skeptical of my motives. You were skeptical of my ability to make a coherent point. Fair enough.
Abortion without exception - means abortion any time for any reason.
I personally am against someone having an abortion for any reason they want. So personally, I am anti abortion without exception. This opinion only comes up when someone asks. It’s not a tee-shirt I hand out at rallies. I don’t go to rallies.
But I am fine letting people use their own reason to figure out their own choices about a lot of things. I don’t think we need nearly as many laws as we have. So practically, I’m pro private right of abortion with certain limitations (up to six months or something, then for life of the mother, etc).
Anything more metaphysical seem contradictory?
Somewhat presumptuous of you.
There's more than one issue here, of course, and many an intractable problem. In todays ABC news is a report concerning problems with accessing abortion on NSW. One story is of a mother of two who traveled for two hours to a hospital for a procedure to terminate a malformed foetus at 14 weeks, but due to a misunderstanding here procedure was canceled, forcing a later term abortion. Another case was a woman who sort an abortion at nine weeks but was not supported by here doctor on conscientious grounds and eventually needed an abortion at 22 weeks.
The issue here is why folk stand against abortion at all. This is not to deny the import of when and how. But that is a seperate discussion.
Added: And both of these issues are seperate to the issue of language chosen. Your reference to Hitler was insipid.
My argument is that it is wrong to kill one’s offspring. My question about the psychology of humanization is about what it does to the one who behaves that way, how it hinders the conscience. because it has a clear psychological purpose. A fetus need not be aware of it.
Why did she need an abortion?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-30/abortion-access-regional-australia-denying-women-health-care/104387416
I agree with this, and I think this is why this particular debate always ends up coming down to a 'gut feeling', such as that contains any meaning.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I'm only in partial agreement here. An adult organism is always changing, but with the exception of something like surgical removal or addition, it's form does not change. We do not expect an adult human to become another form. We do with younger humans - even toddlers. Proportions change drastically in those first 10 years, and then function changes drastically in the next four or five. Once that's relatively settled by roughly 25, we do not expect any more significant changes. Nay, we couldn't expect any that are not aberrations. I think this is important and supports my distinction.
Quoting Fire Ologist
This seems, sorry to say, a totally unreasonable strawman. It doesn't actually address the use of 'thing' anyway. It addresses it's application to a changeable entity.
Quoting Fire Ologist
In my view, it's not 'we can'. It is the case. There's nothing further.
Quoting Fire Ologist
We certainly could. But, if you want to do this, you need also take on board some other very, VERY important aspects of gestation that would provide a new 'thing'. And that also supports both my view above, and that we can have various ideas of what a 'person' or 'human being' comes into existence. The gut feeling determinant remains.
Oh you were wondering how I think that, because all abortion is the killing of a person, only some abortions might be sins. An easy example is an abortion to save the life of the mother. It’s not a sin in a crappy situation to do the best you can to save lives, and if the way to save any lives involves killing the fetal human, it’s not a sin or immoral to do so.
Hmmm, let's ask what a third disinterested party thinks.
Hey @chatgpt, what does anti-abortion without exception mean?
I don't see what the point of humanizing (making it more civilized or whatever) a fetus would be if they weren't aware of it in some way. I've heard of parents playing classical music during pregnancy for their unborn child. Couldn't hurt, I think.
Hmm. The problem is more general than that, to do with the NSW government failing to provide adequate health care in rural areas. But even given that there is no way I would trade our health system for your mess.
You slide through multiple issues without accountability.
Quoting frank
No, it isn't.
Quoting frank
Godwin's law.
Quoting frank
You do not know what I "realise".
Quoting frank
Can't women be trusted to make their own decisions when provided with professional support?
Quoting frank
More presumption.
Yes. I'm a butthead. So are you.
You are learning. :wink:
It's not clear what you mean by this. A human zygote is a single-celled organism – 46 chromosomes surrounded by cytoplasm surrounded by a cell wall. A human adult is a multi-cellular organism with a brain and other organs, limbs, and capable of thinking and feeling. In terms of morphology and physiology, there are very real and very significant physical differences between a zygote and an adult. The only "similarity" is that the 46 chromosomes contained within the nucleus of a zygote contain roughly the same DNA as that contained within the cells of some human adult.
So what do you mean by saying that a human zygote is the same thing as an adult? And why is this sense of being the same thing morally relevant?
If it's just about the DNA, then the second question is what matters most. DNA is just a bunch of chemicals. Why is a particular combination of chemicals morally significant?
Say there are two zygotes; one containing chromosomes with human DNA (and so is counted as a human zygote) and one containing chromosomes with frog DNA (and so is counted as a frog zygote). What is it about the former set of molecules that morally distinguishes it from the latter set of molecules?
You can only ever act on your categories. It's why you don't have a problem killing a fly as a fly is not a human even though it has flesh and blood. As I said before, we will agree 99% of the time what a human is. A vast majority of these "flesh-and-blood" entities fall neatly into that category. It is only those entities that are on the fringes of the category that we might disagree. In fact, a zygote has no flesh or blood, so according to your own words, they would not qualify.
What I am focusing on is those grey areas in those boundaries where life starts and life ends. How is terminating a life that is in a coma and may never come out, or ending a life that is on life support and may never be able to come off of it, dehumanizing someone? People make those decisions frequently and we don't say that they are being de-humanizing, rather the opposite. Terminating a zygote or embryo when it wasn't wanted in the first place, or when tests show that there could be serious mental or physical problems, or is a threat to the mother's life, isn't any more dehumanizing than terminating those at the end of their lives to give them some semblance of dignity. You are free to have an abortion or not. You are not free to force others to have children when they don't want them and the pregnancy is still in an early stage. Thinking you can force a woman that was raped to have a child, or to have a child with severe mental or physical disabilities when you aren't the one that will have to worry about that child's well-being through it's life and after the mother dies, is dehumanizing.
I get it that it looks contradictory The term “anti abortion-without-exception” is confusing, depending on where the hyphens go.
It’s a stupid term. There’s “anti-abortion, without exception” which is what chat GPT defined, and then there’s someone who is against (anti) unrestricted abortion for any reason (abortion without exception), which what I am.
Although I think I was very clear, in the interest of exchanging more discussion with you on my supporting arguments, I’ll try to clear up what my conclusions are as you’ve asked.
Public policy: Abortion should be legal to be conducted for any reason up to six months, and then after should be restricted to cases of necessity.
Personal reasoning on the issue: Since even a zygote is a human being, I would not ever recommend an abortion except in cases of necessity (ie, life of the mother).
So, given my public policy stance and private personal stance I say I’d basically leave the law so others can have room for different personal stances, but I am personally against abortion unless it is for a necessary reason. I called this anti abortion-without-exception (versus pro abortion-without-exception) and created the contradiction controversy. The better catch phrase might be anti-private right of abortion-without-exception. And because this phrase is open to some limited abortion rights, I, without contradiction, leave space for a public stance that is pro- public right of abortion with some limitation.
I hope that helps. Sorry about the confusion. There’s no contradiction there. It’s a fairly common bunch of conclusions.
Personally none of the above is really interesting, except to catch me in a contradiction, which is relevant because why should you continue speaking with someone who contradicts themselves.
But now that we’ve cleared that up, what about all of the other things I said to you about what a zygote must be biologically and metaphysically speaking?
One can act on his principles and experiences. I don’t kill flies because they are flies but because I am at eternal war with them.
The abortion itself isn’t dehumanizing. Dehumanizing someone isn’t the act of killing, but of considering someone inhuman so as to make killing them easier. It’s a psychological and linguistic process. You strip away mentally as many human qualities as possible, question his humanity, so the homicide leaves a softer mark on the conscience. It’s why you cannot say what other species of life you are killing, despite questioning that he is human.
I’m completely against prohibition or forced births, and always was. But fairly recent advances in embryology and genetics makes it clear we’re ending an innocent human life. “Personhood” isn’t a coherent ground to stand on either, and the notion comes off as more superstitious than the transmigration of souls. So personally I cannot be dismissive of the victim and pretend abortion is some moral good to be celebrated.
There’s no controversy. I’d trust you more if you admitted to goofing around. Honestly though, I don’t care if you’re sincere or not. Let’s play pretend…
Quoting Fire Ologist
You’ll have to describe your religious views in order to get into this. I’m sure they will be interesting.
What human qualities does a zygote have? It is 46 molecules of DNA wrapped in proteins contained within cytoplasm and a cell wall.
It strikes me that you keep equivocating on the term "human", where you want it to be both a term that just refers to any organism with certain genetic information and also a term that carries moral significance. The former does not entail the latter.
All humans go through that phase in their development and are born of human parents. Is it not human? because you are forever trying to dismiss that term.
So first, I am treating these two questions completely separately. The first question is: when does a new thing that comes into being, have to be called a “human being”? When does something like you and me first begin to exist?
I have no interest yet in assigning value or moral relevance to whatever may be the answer. I’m treating a human being like a frog, as just any old organism, and asking when does an individual organism first come to be? At this point, there is nothing of moral value anywhere in the discussion, for me.
I think much, but not all, of the controversy on the moral (second) question is because of bad or no answer on this metaphysical/biological (first) question.
When we get to the moral question, I don’t intend to give equal moral relevance to anything other than a person. But for now, I just intend to lay out some definition of a person, and point to where on the timeline such a creature pops into existence.
Is that a conversation you want to have? The metaphysical/biological question of when any new type of life is new?
I don't believe in essentialism. If you want to use the term "human" to refer to any organism – even single-celled organisms – with such-and-such DNA then you're welcome to, but this linguistic practice carries no moral relevance.
If this is all you mean by "human" then the claim "it is wrong to kill innocent humans" is the claim "it is wrong to kill innocent organisms with such-and-such DNA", and this second claim hasn't been justified. What is so special about this DNA?
If you were to argue that it is wrong to kill any innocent organism regardless of its DNA (and so regardless of its assigned taxonomy) then that would be one thing, but the fact that you keep talking about it being human and dehumanization shows that you think there's something special about our DNA, but you refuse to ever explain what or why this is.
Are you reading my whole posts? The time I’m putting in to try to answer your questions.
I admitted the phrase you took to GPT was confusing AND I cleared up my thoughts again. If you think there was any goofing around, are you still not understanding me?
Quoting praxis
That came out of nowhere. You’ll have to describe how religious views have any bearing or relevance in conversation about when an animal first comes to exist.
This all has nothing to do with religion to me.
I’d rather you just lay out and explain your own view or we can keep circling around some point about me and what I must really think.
Quoting praxis
Odd thing is, I couldn’t be more clear about exactly what my conclusions are. There is nothing left to hide.
Wish you would take your turn.
You don’t believe in essentialism, yet insist that it is essentially just a single-celled organism, no different than any other single-celled organisms.
But this single-celled organism came about different than other single-cells organisms. The act and the beings who created it also make it human. Its creation, its development, its biology, its surroundings, and yes its DNA, make it a certain kind of single-celled organism.
That's where I disagree. I don't think the first question matters. I'm not an essentialist. There is no such thing as some necessary and sufficient set of conditions that must be satisfied for an organism to "count" as human. We simply use the word "human" to refer to a group of similar organisms, but disagree on whether or not zygotes and embryos and foetuses are similar enough to us to warrant the use of the term "human" to refer to them. There's no "right" or "wrong" answer; it is a linguistic convention either way.
To better explain this, consider these three sentences:
1. It is wrong to kill X because X is an innocent human
2. It is wrong to kill X because X is an innocent frog
3. It is not wrong to kill X because X is an innocent frog
These are all non sequiturs. One cannot go from "X is a member of species Y" to "therefore it is wrong/not wrong to kill X". At the very least each of these needs some additional supporting premise, such as:
4. It is wrong to kill an innocent human
5. It is wrong to kill an innocent frog
6. It is not wrong to kill an innocent frog
But then each of these must be justified. We need some other additional supporting premise, such as:
7. It is wrong to kill an innocent human because an innocent human has/is Y
8. It is wrong to kill an innocent frog because an innocent frog has/is Y
9. It is not wrong to kill an innocent frog because an innocent frog doesn't have/isn't Y
Y is what matters. When we determine what Y is we can then ask whether or not zygotes (or frogs, or some extra-terrestrial species) have/are Y.
For me, that Y concerns a sufficient degree of consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence, etc., and I can use this to judge the moral worth of other organisms, whether they be zygotes, frogs, Kryptonians, or whatever.
And why is that morally relevant?
That's who you're killing. That's the victim. How is it morally irrelevant?
That's true of every single-celled organism. I want you to explain what makes single-celled humans special.
That's not true of every single-celled organism because do not abort other single-celled organisms.
We can, and do, kill non-human organisms, including single-celled organisms. You admit to killing flies. Is any of this wrong? If not, why are single-celled humans special? Physically they only differ from non-humans in their DNA and the manner in which they are created. So why is their DNA and manner of creation morally relevant?
That’s why your religious views are interesting. Why not share them?
Also, you mentioned that you’re religious. Why mention it if this has nothing to do with religion for you? Another contradiction.
Just make something up if you like.
I’m not religious, btw.
Thank you for saying what you think and explaining it to add some content for us to talk about.
I am focused on the question: “what does any human being have/is?” (These are your terms, invoked by you to make your argument.)
Quoting Michael
Y is what matters most to me too. What a nominal "human" has/is is my question.
Quoting Michael
I still think it does matter. I think you need to speak to it as well.
Quoting Michael
You are saying a human being is something that has/is a sufficient degree of consciousness/self-consciousness/intelligence. Correct? I'm sure there is more you would and could say, but you are saying at least this, correct? So for you, "it is wrong to kill an innocent human, because an innocent human has/is a degree of consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence." Correct? Or do we need more premises, maybe about valuing consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence in the first place?
No, I'm saying that (most) humans have a sufficient degree of consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence, and that it is wrong to kill things with a sufficient degree of consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence.
Non-humans (e.g. aliens) might also have a sufficient degree of consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence, and so it would be wrong to kill them even though they're not human.
Zygotes don't have a sufficient degree of consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence and so it is acceptable to kill them even if they're human.
Whether or not something is human is irrelevant. With respect to killing an organism, it is that organism's degree of consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence that is morally relevant, not it's taxonomy.
You brought it up first, not me. I was just being open and honest and responding fully to you.
Where are you trying to go with the conversation? Still digging for subtext? Where is Praxis?
That doesn't track for me. "has/is" has become "do have". And because of this you make a distinction between the phrases:
"a human being is something that has/is a sufficient degree of consciousness/self-consciousness/intelligence"
and
"humans do have a sufficient degree of consciousness/self-consciousness/intelligence,"
What is the distinction between these two phrases?
Quoting Michael
I agree with that but that obviously would be outside the general topic of abortion, which is a human practice.
"X is intelligent therefore X is human" is a non sequitur; something can be intelligent but not be human (e.g. an alien).
It is not the case that I am human because I am intelligent; it is only the case that I am human and I am intelligent.
The reason it's wrong to kill me is because I'm intelligent, not because I'm human; it would be wrong to kill intelligent non-humans too.
I did not ask if you were religious. You volunteered that information, for no apparent reason.
The fact that you refuse to describe your religious views strongly indicates that they have everything to do with the subject. If they had nothing to do with the subject there would be no reason to refuse.
Where you want to go, metaphysics and zygotes. Knowing your religious views would be essential, but you don’t want to talk about your religious views. Another contradiction.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
I see what you are saying. You are focused on the “because” part of these statements. You don’t want to bother with some underlying subject/substance like “human being” and then attach conditions to that substance like “intelligence”. That would allow people like me to equate “it is wrong to kill human beings” with “it is wrong to intelligent beings” and these aren’t equivalent. And once essentialists make this equivocation we can subsume the “intelligence” as part of the essence and just talk about “human beings” as if the nuance “with intelligence” wasn’t the more material thing.
So can I assume there is some thing called “intelligent being” that we are talking about?
There are organisms, like me, that are self-aware, can feel pain, can want things, and so on. It is wrong to kill organisms like this.
Zygotes aren't self-aware, they can't feel pain, they can't want things. Nothing about them warrants moral consideration; they are just a tiny mixture of chemicals. It is acceptable to abort them if that is what the woman wishes.
That was the first time the word “religion” was used between us.
Contradiction contradicted. Again.
What’s your next really important issue in this debate discussion?
Perfectly coherent position based on facts we can both observe for ourselves.
Good. I agree with all of this verbatim:
Quoting Michael
You said it. I would say it. Exact same page.
So before I go back the positive route of positing what a human being is (because that would be essentialist of me), can I just ask, to go as broadly as possible, are you saying a human being is an organism with enough structure to feel pain, or to just feel or perceive anything, or do you need to be able to want things and be self-aware too?
You implied that I asked you about it. I didn’t.
Why did you volunteer that you’re religious?
I wonder if there’s a law similar to Godwin.
True. As I continue to be completely open I'll admit that I implied you may have been interested to know who you were talking to when the words "religion" and "spiritual" came to your mind and you bothered to put them in your post.
Do you think we are having a conversation? I think we are having some sort of job interview. I don't think you trust my answers for some reason. And I'm curious why but really would rather hear some sort of argument relating to abortion from you.
Essentialism is false. Whether we call zygotes, corpses, the brain dead. or babies born with anencephaly “human” is a choice, with no moral significance.
Ha!
Quoting Michael
Damn. So ends the conversation.
Quoting Michael
Is that a choice?
Is there any physical/biological fact in this context we both have to accept?
Yes. Some say that one lone organ isn’t an organism, but that 5 of them (brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver) working to keep each other alive are. That’s an arbitrary decision (even within science), not something that is a discoverable fact capable of verification or falsification by empirical investigation.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I don’t quite understand the question. We (or at least biologists) pretty much fully understand the genetics and morphology and physiology of both zygotes and adults (except for the relationship between the brain and consciousness).
Do I have to see a difference between zygotes and adults in order to understand the significance of what you are saying? I think the answer has to be yes.
I don’t understand this either. If you can’t see a difference between these two photos then you should get your eyes checked.
Is your position that a Zygote and an Adult Human are the same thing?
This seems, to me, akin to someone who does not know the difference between a fly and a human. Your experience doesn't matter if you're trying to reason your way to a position.
Given the above, I'm unsure you're even having a 'moral' conversation if that's the case.
Why not just answer the question then? My eyes and your eyes are now the context, you are saying we both, if our eyes are working, must see a difference between a zygote and an adult.
Correct?
So the answer is yes, there are biological facts we both have agree on; if our eyes are working, we will both see the same thing, namely, that a zygote and an adult are clearly different.
I don’t know what you mean by asking if we “must” see a difference. If we have working eyes then we will see a difference. If you cannot visually determine that a human has a head and that a zygote is a single cell then you are either blind or hallucinating.
This is a difficult question to answer in the context of a living organism.
So let me ask, is me today the same thing as me yesterday?
In some senses no. Too many atoms and cells and other things changed to use the word “same” naively. Heraclitus figured that out long ago and I don’t refute it.
But if we leave it at that, there is nothing left to talk about. How can we even compare me today with me yesterday, when even me today is in motion and not the same thing as me two minutes ago?
I don’t refute any of this. And if you look at a zygote and an adult it is much easier to see they are not the same thing.
But there is another sense to this question. If by “me today” I mean a living, growing, changing body having self-awareness and intelligence, then yes, despite all of the bodily motions, me today endured through all of the changes occurring to me yesterday.
So we need to define a “me” or an adult or a zygote and choose a sense in which the term “same thing” is being used.
Does that track?
Words are always important, but they don’t need to be the focus as when making a semantical point. I think you split hairs on “will/must” without the distinction making a difference in your point.
Quoting Michael
You are saying anyone with eyes will see the difference, and if those eyes are working they must see a difference or else they are “blind or hallucinating.”
So I still see you asserting facts, visual differences in an objective world no longer subject to debate or choices, that working eyes will see, must see, are clear…
Well, yes. I’m not a solipsist or an idealist. There is an independent material world, and two facts about that material world are that adults have heads and that zygotes are a single cell. Given the way objects reflect light, the way light stimulates the eyes, and the way the brain responds to the eyes, looking at an adult is going to cause a significantly different visual experience than looking at a zygote.
I honestly have no idea what it is you’re trying to argue here.
I’m at least a collection of particles.
That’s all I need to be to have this conversation.
The conversation, to me, is can we draw a line, a distinction between me and say, my clothing, naming me a “human being” and naming my clothes “not a human being”. So we are taking clumps of particles and distinguishing them from one another giving them names.
And the conversation, to me, is can we draw a line and say when, the clump of particles we now call a human being because of its distinction from clothing and other clumps, when did this human being first pop onto the scene?
That’s it for me. Rather we pretend no one ever thought of religion or even morality. I think this is enough material for tons of further analysis.
The law is said to have its letter, and also its spirit. I don't see why you and I need to manage with less?
Very well, let's proceed and assume all things you've said are true. It will force me to make some assumptions about your views and it would be far more productive if you simply said what your views are, but I'm game.
What we know about your views so far:
There's a good chance of survival for birth at six months. This could be critical. Perhaps the religion that you belong to requires the ritual sacrifice of babies as young as possible or at least younger than six months. This could account for the wish that abortion be legal for up to six months. Killing babies after that cutoff date would be useless. It may even anger the God or Gods to be offered a sacrifice that's past its stale date.
I'm guessing that you're personally against killing babies because hemophobia prevents you from plunging the sacrificial knife yourself.
Maybe you can't say what religion you belong to because it's a secret sect of :naughty: Satanism :naughty: and you would be killed if you said anything.
Sound about right?
I agree with all of that.
But that means to me, neither of us have any choice in the matter.
“There is an independent material world”.
I’ll even stipulate that we could revisit this as a question and maybe there is no material world. But for our purposes, sharing our thoughts in a conversation, and for purposes of having a conversation about abortion, “there is an independent material world.”
So maybe we are choosing to stipulate this together, but for now, the choice is made. Everything we say further will rely on this as a fact that neither of us can choose to ignore it or we will no longer be addressing the subject.
“There is an independent material world” is itself an essentialist, objectivist position. Such a world is independent from our choices, correct? Maybe we only engage with it through choice, but it, in itself is independent, or you wouldn’t have said “independent”.
Do you want to keep going? Eventually I’d be talking about the independent differences between a fetal, a newly born and an adult human organism, and whether these differences are independent of me and my choices, or not.
That is exactly right. No goofing around. You nailed it. I had no idea who I was dealing with. Impressive.
Now. Do you have any of your own views? Or…where do you want to go with this? I mean I don’t want to waste your time.
If I'm right then you've just sealed your death warrant by revealing the secret sect of Satanism.
I don’t think it helps at all to have this conversation in religious terms.
I think some religious people think that the reason human beings are valuable is because they have a soul, and souls come from God at conception. Great. Wonderful for them. But there is nothing to argue about there, nothing to talk about, nothing to measure and no explanatory power. You just end up replacing one question “what is a human being” with another “what is a soul” and now there is less chance of answering anything.
Kind of creepy. But really spot on analysis.
That’s not essentialism. Essentialism is “the idea that things have an ‘essence’ or ‘form’ that defines their identity.”
For some things this makes sense, e.g. being a triangle, but for other things it doesn’t, e.g. being a game.
Whether or not some entity is a member of some biological taxonomy is of the latter kind, not the former.
Secret religions and abortion at six months is definitely creepy.
"The spirit of the law" is not a religious term. But I don't think it helps to have the conversation in purely physical terms either, and that is my point. Matter and cells - some we are made of, some we eat, What's the difference?
The issue doesn't have to be whether the distinctions we make refer to objects that are independent of us, or objects we invent as part of the game of conversation. I am just saying we can't keep shifting the ground on which we rest subsequent assertions, or we get nowhere.
If you say adults have heads and zygotes don't, which I say as well, we can't move on to the next point without leaving this as fixed, either fixed in an independent material world, or fixed as a choice we've made to continue the discussion.
To skip all the painful steps in between, I'm sure we agree on a lot of the facts (gamed or gleaned).
It is coherent to me to say that a person is an organism that thinks, desires, values, etc. A zygote cannot do any of those. Therefore, a zygote is not a person. That's coherent.
Further, I think it would be coherent with the above to say that an infant doesn't think, desire or value anything. It's more like a zygote. So an infant is not a person either. (You can still say that an infant has great value to many adults, and therefore, we will protect it's life because we want to, but it would not be because it is a person...but that's another conversation.)
Staying within the game we've started, you could go the biological route and show how a infant does think and desire, and is thereby a person, or not.
Or, we could start over and say that a person is a thing (organism) with 46 chromosomes and that is sentient. So now infants certainly fit the bill, and we would place the moment a new person comes into being closer to 6 months development after conception. That's also completely consistent.
Now I know that all of the above might make you cringe because of all of its essentialist-speak, but saying "If you cannot visually determine that a human has a head and that a zygote is a single cell then you are either blind or hallucinating." is using the same type of language I'm using.
Are you asking "what are 'we'"? Are you acknowledging that we are made of cells and asking "what else are we?"
That's what I'm asking. The spirit of the conversation is an answer to that question. Pre-valuation of any cells, or eating.
Living things go through changes. They are still one living thing. That is not a premise, it's a conclusion so maybe you agree or disagree with this conclusion. But I'm operating under the assumption that there are things, objects, like a person, and these living things go through changes, and these changes don't redefine what type or individual thing they are, they extend it. A puppy is one thing; when it becomes an adult, it is still that one thing, now grown.
So let's say a person is a thinking thing. An organism in the zygote stage can't think. So if a person is a thinking thing, a zygote is not a person.
Fine, no more need to discuss it, and we can apply this to abortion however we like.
But some say, hey, but a baby doesn't look like it thinks at all. We measure brain waves and we can't see enough similarity to an adult thinker, so it is really these brain waves that are the structure and foundation of when a new human being comes into being. We might apply abortion questions to the baby then however we like.
So let's say instead, that a person is a being that can sense pain. If we leave it at that, we cannot tell the difference between a person and goat, at any stage in any life. So we need more. A person is an organism that can sense pain and has 46 chromosomes. Great, now we have a person first coming into being around 6 months or something of gestation. We can apply this to abortion however we like.
My argument is everything is arbitrary after you have a living organism with 46 chromosomes. Waiting for thought capabilities, or desiring or sentience is like waiting for laughter or pooping, or any other activity. Also, my argument is a sort of reductio ad absurdum - if a person is thinking, then to be consistent, many newborns are not persons. I think that's not an explanation of person that anyone is after.
Aside from my values being out of whack for even asking the question, I'd like to hear how actively thinking and/or sentience must be occurring before we have a person actively being. I think there are good arguments for that, but I'd like to hear some from somewhere else. I keep having to make all the substantive points for all of us to pick apart.
First you were talking about being human, now you're talking about being a person. These are not the same thing (e.g. intelligent aliens would be non-human persons). It would help if you were consistent with your terminology.
My issue is with the notion of being human. Humanity evolved from non-human life, but there was never some generation where two non-human parents birthed a human child. It's a gradual process from Homo heidelbergensis to Homo sapiens, with a large grey area in between where there is no non-arbitrary justification to call it a member of the one species or the other.
My other issue is that this is utterly irrelevant to the abortion debate. Membership of a species simply doesn't matter. The claim that it's acceptable to abort one baby because it's Homo heidelbergensis but not another because it's Homo sapiens is absurd.
As I keep saying, it can be unacceptable to kill something even if it's not human, and it can be acceptable to kill something even if it's human.
Whether or not it is wrong to kill something is determined by something other than its biological taxonomy. Consciousness, to me, is a morally relevant characteristic. At the very least I can say that it's morally acceptable to kill any organism that clearly has no consciousness, e.g. plants, bacteria, and so on (and assuming that doing so does not entail consequences that impact conscious organisms, such as the destruction of all plant life causing us to starve).
The degree to which an organism must be conscious for it to then be morally unacceptable to kill it is certainly a problem worth consideration, but at the very least we have accepted that the presence of some degree of consciousness is a necessary requirement, and zygotes lack this entirely.
By the way. I've stated what my religion is more than a few times in the forum. It's no secret. I'm just not telling you here. Because Satan told me, not to worry, he'll take care of you.
I found a great quote:
"Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere aude! [Dare to know!] Have the courage to use your own understanding! That is the motto of enlightenment."
- Immanuel Kant, 1784
So I'll ask one more time. What is your thought and supporting argument on the topic of abortion and new human life, etc?
Actually, there is indeed something important to argue about: public policy. It is understandable that the sort of religious person you described would want to stop people from killing zygotes, and there's no reason why they can't try to influence public policy.
Regarding the core matter that we're discussing, I'd just say that "individual human being" is a fuzzy concept, so there is no objectively correct answer as to when a developing entity is a full-fledged human being.
When I saw you quoting someone saying that a "human has a head...", I thought of Abby and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins that share a single body (one torso, one set of arms and legs)- so (by every definition I've seen) they comprise a single organism , but it wouldn't make sense to treat them as a single person.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Even that doesn't work. People with Klinefelter syndrome have 47 chromosomes, and there is also a condition where a person has 48 chromosomes.
So, on earth, where do you find persons?
If you want to draw a distinction between a person and a human being, you have to show me what a person has or does, and what a human being has or does. You are distinguishing them. That's perfectly fine.
Presumably persons are where we find thinking/self-awareness/desires etc., and human beings are just a category? So "person" is the thing, and "human" is the biological category that is a non sequitur?
We could figure out exceptions to the rule. But we need a rule first. Is anything a human being?
There isn’t just one aspect to being human obviously. NOS and Frank are dissatisfied with the humanity of pre-borns and feel they must be somehow humanized. I suggested playing classical music for early enculturation. Not sure what else could be done.
Great assertion. How about some aspects.
Music appreciation.
It's like asking for the difference between a human and a language user. On Earth it happens to be the case that humans are the only language users, but being human and being a language user do not mean the same thing. Something could be a language user but not be human (e.g. alien life, artificial life, or some future species that chimpanzees could evolve into), and something could be human but not be a language user (e.g. suffer from severe aphasia).
I assume all those reading this popped into existence sometime. And you are human type organism doing personal things. Except for Praxis. Praxis might be God. For anyone else, when would you say you started existing?
No.
That's the bit you are missing.
Exceptions demonstrate the problem with a rule. Suppose we establish the rule (as a law) that a 6-month fetus is a human being. There are instances where the carrying to term of a (damaged) 6-month fetus will kill the mother. The rule would necessitate killing the mother.
No rule, no definition of "individual human being" can work universally because "individual human being" is fundamentally a fuzzy concept. Any definition will have exceptions - and that was the point I was trying to make. Establishing a definition in the law (if that's what you're after) is therefore pointless. Rather, the law ought to be based on the reality that it IS a fuzzy concept. This permits individuals to make their own decisions in their own circumstances.
I thought your argument was that you can tell by sight.
So is this because:
no one can say it?
no one can know it to then say of it?
nothing can be known?
or, there is no such moment (or time frame) when I first existed?
Seems unscientific to not be able to even address when something is and when something is not, like a person for instance, or like a value-making-subject for instance. I mean, if I am a values granting subject, and I am pretty sure I am doing this value-making in space and time with a body among bodies, and I am pretty sure I didn’t used to be here, isn’t there a moment when I first came to be?
Seems like there has to be an answer.
Odd choice of quote for the context. Any keywords that would help me discover the secret?
The question was Quoting Fire Ologist Note "say".
Immaturity.
You can see it, but you can't put it into words?
:lol: Not helpful.
Oh, I don't know. Scientism and essentialism might be seen as things that dissipate with experience.
So my question everyone wants to point out how difficult it is to ask, and how difficult it is to answer, is: what is a human being/person and when does it first come into being?
Pro-choice is a public moniker for what I would call Pro-abortion rights. Because we need to make public policy, and the above question is philosophically deep and no one will ever agree on this (or even talk about it), I choose the “pro-choice” public policy route with certain limitations. Everyone get's to ask these questions for themselves and up to like 6 months or so, when most agree the fetal thing should start to feel pain or has some sort of experience, up until then, they can answer it any way they like. Or they can completely avoid these questions, assert that they don't value 2 week old blastocysts or 2 month old fetuses, etc, or just say they don't even care to think about it, they just don't want to be pregnant and have an abortion. Be done with the public policy by compromise where abortion for any reason is allowed until the fetus becomes some sort of thing that should be protected by the state. And be done with it.
Now back to the question.
Quoting Relativist
I agree, no definition of "individual human being" works to make a public policy based on that definition, because its fuzzy and no one agrees on the less fuzzy parts even. But if we were to all agree that abortion would remain legal forever, even up to the moment of birth, carve the law in stone and make it a constitutional amendment, is anyone still interested in being a philosopher and answering the question of when my life or his life or her life actually begins? Just for curiosity sake? Anyone?
Seems just weird for someone to say he didn't always exist (which he didn't) but that he won't even conjecture on which point or time period in history when he'd have to say he started existing.
Just no way out? We're here. We're human. Got over it.
Quoting Banno
That was clever. But still doesn't explain Praxis' immaturity. Only mine maybe.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Cat’s out of the bag now, Fire. You got some splaining ta do.
Explain what? To whom?
You worried about whether I am contradicting myself again, or whether I might be a servant of Satan, hiding in the Catholic Church?
So is there anyone here who is atheist or agnostic and opposes abortion?
The second thesis is that opposition to abortion derives from essentialism, the notion that there is some statable property had by any entity that makes it what it is. On this account there is a property had by a zygote in virtue of which it has a value equal to that of an adult human. This is variously thought of as a soul, or being a person, or being a human being.
Is there anyone here who rejects essentialism and opposes abortion?
The following for starters. Six months is pretty extreme.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Quoting Fire Ologist
To your fellow Catholics. To God. And if you don’t care about them and how you represent the Catholic faith, to anyone who reads the thread.
Is there anyone here who rejects essentialism and opposes anything?
It's probably mostly religious groups that spearhead pro-life. OP answered. Shrug?
Fine. Your are talking public policy. Make it 4 months. We’ll call it the Praxis rule.
Quoting praxis
Is this confession? Or are you a canon lawyer? Why would I think you could understand what I am saying at this point?
Divorce is a legal process. I don’t see any reason to change policy there.
There is no divorce allowed in the Catholic Church.
So others can get a divorce, but I won’t, because I agree with the Catholic Church.
Same thing with abortion policy.
Splaining done.
Supporting policy that is against your principles or faith only means that your principles or faith are weak.
** Before continuing I'd like to personally thank @frank for invoking Godwin's Law. **
If the policy of the land was genocide would you support it?
For centuries the answer was limbo because they are unbaptized. Relatively recently the higherup decided that the fate of the unbaptized was up to God. Generous of them to let God decide.
You acknowledge the concept is fuzzy, and yet you think it should be possible to identify a point at which a human life begins.
Consider another fuzzy concept (with no pun intended): having a beard vs being clean-shaven. What's the point at which whisker growth constitutes a beard? Even after shaving there are follicles present. Shall we say, 1mm of growth? 1cm? Any point we identify is arbitrary.
A human life is something that gradually emerges, similarly a beard gradually emerges. There is no objective point of demarcation. That's what it means to be a fuzzy concept. Fuzzy doesn't mean it's a mystery to be solved- it means there is no fact of the matter that determines a boundary.
Here's an article that discusses the problem of vague concepts, which is exactly what I'm referring to.
Quoting Fire Ologist
And "46chromosomes" is not arbitrary?
Suppose in fact there doesn't have to be an answer. Suppose we have to make decisions about the rights and wrongs and the life and death of our neighbours in peace and in war; for the saints and the murderers, for the unformed and the agonised. Suppose the difference between murder and justified killing is something we establish and disagree about arbitrarily without end?
I'll tell you where I stand; I don't like abortion. But if a woman in society is in such a situation that her pregnancy is not wonderful news, or at least a bearable interruption, then the whole society is guilty. And I take the same stance about kids shooting their fellows in schools, and Trump, and Hitler, and Jews and Palestinians and Ukrainians and Russians.
Perhaps this is what is unique about 46 chromosomes; our capacity for unlimited cruelty to ourselves; our propensity to condemn each other while taking no responsibility for each other.
You assume wrong. The world is a mess of ever-changing matter doing ever-changing things. This matter gradually coalesces into various forms and behaviours, and we pragmatically label easily distinguishable forms and behaviours, but it is almost never the case where something has some inherent identity that unambiguously starts at one instant and ends at another.
See for example the ship of Theseus, the Sorites paradox, twins, chimeras, and two Homo heidelbergensis (not) giving birth to a Homo sapiens.
You are persistently committing to essentialism which is a mistaken philosophy.
It’s the only single-celled organism that develops into children and adult human beings. You were one, for instance. Are human beings morally irrelevant?
In your examples you treat of artefacts which most philosophers agree are mere accidental configurations of matter. But reductionism wrt humans is far more controversial. Read up about what quantum mechanics says on the issue of holism:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-holism/
Why does it matter what the single-celled organism develops into? Why is it acceptable to kill a single-celled organism that develops into an adult fly but not acceptable to kill a single-celled organism that develops into an adult human?
Quoting NOS4A2
They are when they're single-celled zygotes. They're not when they're babies or children or adults.
I did specify that it was "almost never the case" because I was specifically considering the fundamental particles of the Standard Model.
Quoting Johnnie
That's precisely the issue. One cannot reduce being human to a particular configuration of matter (e.g. the presence of 46 chromosomes containing specific DNA), and so asking for some "point" at which some material object "becomes" human is a foolish question.
It’s not the same species as us. Why do you think humans are as morally relevant as flies?
So are you saying that it is only wrong kill an innocent organism if that organism is the same species as us? Are you saying that it wouldn't be wrong to kill an innocent intelligent alien? Are you saying that it wouldn't be wrong for an intelligent alien to kill an innocent human?
Quoting NOS4A2
I'm not saying they are. I'm asking you what it is about humans that makes us special.
It all depends on the species. Is the alien one that inserts eggs into the human abdomen, so that they rip out the chest as soon as they are old enough? Flies too can lay eggs in humans. So I kill them.
So what about a species determines whether or not it is wrong to kill its innocent members?
I don’t know how science could be the ultimate authority on the issue. It can’t, for instance, prove or disprove the existence of a soul.
Are you trying to get around to saying all single-cells organisms are of the same moral worth?
I have explicitly said several times that all single-celled organisms are of the same moral worth (specifically, worthless).
Whereas you have continually avoided explaining why the single-celled organisms of one species has a greater moral worth than the single-celled organisms of another species.
Humans are of the same moral worth as flies, ie. worthless. I mean, what can I say to that?
Single-celled humans are of the same moral worth as single-celled flies, i.e. worthless. Don't fabricate strawmen.
If a woman you knew wanted implant one of those single-celled organisms into her womb so as to incubate it, which one would you choose?
No, I'm explicitly not an essentialist.
I wouldn't choose, it's got nothing to do with me.
You’d allow her to attempt to carry a fly to term?
Allow her? I don't know why you're suggesting that I'm allowed to tell women what to do.
Ok, in the future men can get pregnant. You have the choice between two single-celled organisms, a human and a fly? Which one do you choose to carry to term, nurse, and care for into early adulthood?
Spot on, great discussion.
What process did you use to identify "beard"? Or "clean shaven"? In order to look for the gray, fuzzy relationship that may or may not exist between the two, you demarked a clear, black and white difference between a bearded and a clean-shaven face. What did you do there? That process is what I am trying to apply to the concept of "me" meaning a bi-pedal hominid stinking up the earth.
You invoked "beard" and "not-beard" and pointed in two different directions with these invocations. What allows you to do that and convey any significance to some third party like me who has to look for differences and make my own demarcations all by myself? You can't say "clean shaven" is more like "not-beard" and "beard" is more like "not clean shaven" without saying "beard" and "clean shaven" are different, otherwise you would not be able to point to a gray fuzzy relationship between "beard" and "clean-shaven", AND, I couldn't see what you are saying if there was in fact, no difference between a beard and clean-shaven, OR, I couldn't see what you are saying if you were not constructing a black and white difference between beard and clean-shaven in your language.
Quoting Relativist
I'm not saying fertilization doesn't occur in time. There is a fuzzy border at every turn for us. If it sounds like I am somehow relying on the notion that persons pop into existence in an instant, I'm not. I have been calling it "the moment of conception" so I can see why you might think the temporal duration is important to my argument. But that time can be longer and include some additional steps besides fertilization. I am positing my own counter-arguments that allow for the development of the person from not-person over time, but in order to do that, I have to say what a person is at any point.
At some point in time we no longer see the gray, and black or white emerges, or we never get beyond the gray. We either see clearly that an animal such as a human being, is different than a hurricane, or we don't and the black and white swirls back to gray. But the way I see it, in order to have black, we also need not-black; in order to have gray we need black; in order to have white we need gray; in order to have black and white and we need gray; in order to have gray we need black and white; in order to have white we need black.... Or is there only gray? In which case a beard and a clean-shaven face are both a zygote, which is a person, or an ice-cream truck?
You have a sperm with 23 chromosomes and an egg with 23 chromosomes before fertilization. After fertilization you no longer have a sperm and an egg (like no more clean face), and instead have a 46 chromosome new thing (like a beard). While the first two chromosomes of the sperm attach to the first two chromosomes of the egg, and the third chromosome of each is beginning to attach, can we call it a sperm or an egg anymore? Do we have a half-human/half non-human thing?
And with that, I've just deconstructed of the notion of "moment" of conception for you. There is a duration of time during which any change occurs and we are talking about the change in our history from things that are not people (like zygotes in many arguments) to things that are people (like Mrs. Smith). But because duration is a reality and "moment" is a fabrication, have I deconstructed my whole argument? I don't think so. There is still a difference between a growing zygote (black) and an adult person (white) that I need to explain (unfortunately, always using gray terms).
I'm open to an argument that the gray fuzzy period of time could be from conception to brain-stem formation, or from conception to consciousness formation, or self-awareness formation, or language formation, or concept formation, or adult conversation formation. Maybe it takes 20 years for a "person" to come to be in time. Lay those arguments on me.
But I can't abandon the notion of a "person" entirely and make any of these arguments. And neither can you, and neither are you abandoning the concept of "person".
Banno and Michael, and now you with the beard and the clean-shaven face, keep pointing to differences. Nobody is arguing that there is no difference between an adult organism and a fetal organism. (There are many differences between two adults.) So we all seem to agree that there is "difference" in our experience. I certainly agree with all of you that there are differences.
I think we would disagree that saying "there are differences" is a metaphysical statement, and that metaphysics is science, and that science is a pursuit of objectivity we share. But I agree with you that there are differences in the world in itself.
An essentialist, to me, takes those differences and tries to apply them to substances hiding on either side of the demarcation line now called the difference. They see some fuzzy line between a beard and clean-shaven and say things like: "the essence of clean-shaven is no whiskers visible, allowing for direct slapping of the skin when the face is being slapped" for instance. They think they don't need to compare "clean-shaven" to anything else or refer to the beard at all, and think the essence of clean-shaven can be found with the in-itself of the clean-shaven face. The essence of clean-shaven-ness. A non-essentialist, to me, takes the differences and sees them only by the comparison. There is no way to look at just the clean-shaven face, and understand what a clean-shaven face is; you have to hold it up to its context to even begin to see why we might say "clean" or "shaven", and see the beard along with the clean in order to proceed to identify a difference between the two. The default is everything is the same one, and the break from that lies in between multiple same ones, not some fairy essence in the multiplicity.
But the different approaches to meaningful speech (essentialist or non-essentialist) about face maintenance are, to me, semantic. Both types of discussion are recognizing the same fact of difference between one thing and another thing, they only place the significance of that difference in a different location - an essentialist sees it in the two things, a non-essentialist sees it somewhere between the two now amorphous "things". Same meaning to the same topic of the same discussion, just two different semantical devices to get there.
I happen to think the non-essentialist process is the better process. It is why we rarely find a clear line between anything. It is why Heraclitus was the wisest of them all. It is why Aristotle is easy to dismiss (although he was the second-wisest). It is why Kant's phenomenal veil will always be pulled over our eyes. It is why Hegel may be the third wisest. It is why eastern thinkers who take essence and show how it must implode as it crystalizes are also wise...
But there is no speaking, no significance to any word, if we don't acknowledge gray, fuzzy lines of difference. It is easier to talk in essentialist terms, so essentialism is more like a tool of language.
You have to sound like an essentialist to say "beard versus clean-shaven" at all. To avoid essentialist speak is to conduct tiresome linguistic acrobatics to bring us to the same place anyway - the difference between this and that.
What I don't think, is that, because the line between beard and clean-shaven is fuzzy, there is no such thing as "beard" or "clean-shaven" either. At least for a time, for some duration, differences hold between face and not-face, or clean and not-clean. I don't abandon the mind-independent, physical, objective, world just because I have such epistemological and metaphysical difficulties, as well as perceptual difficulties of sensation, with grasping or even just experiencing it. I still see difference, (like you all keep seeming to see as well), and I see more to that difference on either side of the difference. The line between beard and clean-shaven, as well as the beard, and the clean-shaveness, these are all fuzzy. But in order for me to maintain the concept that a "a beard is, and it is different than clean-shaven" I have to admit I am recognizing something clearly, in black, not-white, as well.
And if I want to talk about this at all, I have to sound like an essentialist. Like you did when you simply pointed to "beard." Here is an example of sounding like an essentialist:
Quoting Michael
There must be an essence to essentialism in order to put a box around it and file it under the "false" category of judgment, or in order to just say "essentialism is". OR, non-essentially speaking, there must be a comparable difference between essentialism and something else (anything else, everything else) in order to point away from whatever essentialism is to some thing else. Otherwise, there is no significance to saying "essentialism" at all, and nothing has been said.
We need the differences in order to make any moves, both when crossing the room, or laying out a sentence.
Don't call the significance of these differences anything "essential" if you want. Instead, take the effort to have a conversation otherwise, but you haven't refuted the fact that there are persons in the world, independent of us all, who are distinct from grapefruit and soda, and that only by recognizing black and white clear differences can you say this, or make sentences that attempt to refute it.
There is a lot more to say before the above could really be recognized as an important part of the abortion playing board, but the prosecution will adjourn for lunch.
None, I don't want children.
What is the purpose of these bizarre questions? They do not appear to have anything to do with whether or not membership of a particular species grants a single-celled organism greater moral worth than membership of other species.
See language games and family resemblances, e.g. Wittgensetin's question "what is a game?"
In the opening of the article: “…the Augustinian picture of language which might be correct but which is, nevertheless, strictly limited because it ignores the essential role of action in establishing…”
Painful. Wish those making non-essentialist points would stop making essential distinctions.
I studied Wittgenstein. But I’ll keep reading if it is for the purpose of continuing the discussion. After all I said above, are you just fed up or unwilling to teach me yourself, handing me over to Wittgenstein?
You don't seem to understand what essentialism is if that it your response to that particular use of the term "essential".
True, you wouldn’t be able to put a box around what I understand from that one sentence - it could mean anything.
But the last line of the article comparing early and later Witt:
“In other words, the grand question of interpreting
Wittgenstein, i.e., the question of continuities or
breaks, remains at the forefront of understanding
Wittgenstein.”
The question of continuities or breaks.
Remains.
Maybe Wittgenstein didn’t really know what Wittgenstein meant either. And if that was his point, we all need more therapy, because the questions remain for many of us who have read Wittgenstein.
Resemblance requires something like the black, the white and the grey to be used meaningfully, or to have use if that makes you feel better about my adherence to proper grammar found in this game.
I don’t know why you think I’m not in the same game with you here. As if if a mere assertion “you don’t know what essentialism means” deserves nothing more. As if none of what I said is not specifically what Wittgenstein was trying to address.
I keep telling these guys there are fairy essences hiding in the assertions they are making. I think it is because they are not being careful with their language mostly. But ultimately, I think it’s because they are dealing with mind-independent facts, like fundamental particles, for instance, like the rest of us are.
In this attempted conversation regarding whether we can or even need to identify a functional use for the word “human being” that is relevant to the question of why someone would be pro-life, I don’t think the introduction of the term “soul” is going to be anything but a catastrophe.
My answer in the context of this discussion is - I don’t have any idea if “souls” ever “go” at all, let alone where or how they would go when bodies die, as in when a fetus is destroyed in an abortion.
In this context, I would just think of a soul as a euphemism for “person” as in “how many souls went into the water when the Titanic sunk.” We are still trying to come to terms with “person” or “human being.”
Fair enough?
Catholics have an idea and you claim to be a Catholic.
That’s dumb. No they don’t.
We trust God on the issues we can’t use our own reason and senses to sort out.
Where do souls go? They remain in God’s hands as they are all along.
Do you think you know me, or Catholics now? Have I said anything that has meaning to you? Doesn’t seem like it.
Again, what is your point in speaking to me?
Roman Catholicism
The Roman Catholic view is that baptism is necessary for salvation and that it frees the recipient from original sin. Roman Catholic tradition teaches that unbaptized infants, not being freed from original sin, go to Limbo (Latin: limbus infantium), which is an afterlife condition distinct from Hell.
But I am speaking with you now. So, this is utterly meaningless drivel and I wouldn't even know where to start to take another step in such a conversation.
How about starting with whether or not you reject essentialism?
I’m not doing anymore work for you.
Define essentialism. Tell me how it is relevant in your mind to a conversation regarding abortion.
Essentially, a Catholic cannot reject essentialism because of the belief in an immoral soul. Catholics believe that the soul enters the body at conception.
:rofl: So you are an essentialist too! Like the Catholics.
You believe that using words is essentialist?
I don’t think that religious beliefs are immutable. If fact, earlier I mentioned how the Catholic position on the fate of unbaptized souls has recently changed.
No. But can you say otherwise? I presume you can’t because you won’t say what essentialism essentially is.
And there is no logical connection between essentialism and belief in a soul - what are you talking about? That can’t be why a Catholic cannot reject essentialism. Why can’t souls be as amorphous as whatever else we are talking about?
Maybe Catholics really are essentialists, but you need to do more to support this.
You keep getting nowhere with me, or towards advancing any interesting point.
In this context that the phase "being human" refers to some unambiguous set of necessary and sufficient conditions such that if some entity does not satisfy all of these conditions then it is not human and if it does then it is.
Although some terms, like "triangle", have such an unambiguous set of necessary and sufficient conditions, other terms, like "human", do not. This can be shown from the facts that humans evolved from non-human ancestors and that there was never a specific generation where two non-human parents birthed a human child (the "first" human).
And it still hasn't been explained what the hell this has to do with abortion. Biological taxonomies are not the source of moral worth. If evolution had taken a different route then perhaps the Earth would be populated by some other intelligent species, and they would rightly ask whether or not abortion is morally acceptable despite the fact that they wouldn't be human.
I think they can be. There is actually a lot of freedom in the concept. The sticking point is that the concept is part of a tradition and traditions are by nature slow to change.
What this overly simplistic, knee-jerk response fails to acknowledge is that if we lived In an era where the majority of people concluded as you propose, we'd be in a level of human cultural development where you and I could reasonably conclude as you suggested. The attitude of the majority can honestly best be evaluated in the moral framework of the era. Thus why a moral stance that enjoys majority acceptance, when evaluated in it's own era, the majority acceptance signifies that the moral stance is reasonable (though perhaps not optimal) within the framework of it's era.
:victory:
Ok, just above, you said Catholics have to be essentialist because Catholics believe in an immortal soul.
I then said that this doesn’t follow as there is nothing about the amorphous term soul that requires belief in essentialism.
You agreed they can be amorphous.
So then are you agreeing with me that you did not make a good enough argument about Catholics and essentialism? Maybe Catholics are essentialist, but you haven’t shown that yet, correct?
You willing to acknowledge me as a partner in a conversation?
That would be a victory for us both, and for this thread.
Quoting praxis
Your words. Agreeing with my words
You either just concede on this tiny point, or you should provide a lot of ‘splaining on how you still made a point despite the amorphousness of the “soul” concept, which is fine if you want.
But I hope you just agree because I really don’t think the Catholic/soul speak will be fruitful here.
A doctor identifies a 7.5 month old fetus meeting specific criteria so that he can remove it without removing too much more during an abortion.
A prosecutor says the doctor violated the law and murdered a person, because the law says after the close of 6th month the fetus shall be treated as a person, having met the criteria of being a human fetus more than 6 months old.
The doctor defends he hasn’t met the necessary and sufficient criteria for “murder” because he only intended to save the life of the mother…
Roe v. Wade case spent a lot of time considering this.
And it’s not a taxonomy question.
The only reason anyone cares at all about the abortion procedure is because people think it’s a person, think it’s not a person, or don’t know.
The only reason people think it might be a person is because biologists and doctors show us before we could walk and talk, we used to be a zygote.
Saying the metaphysics are linguistic problems will never help the doctor defend a charge of murder or the lawmaker, or most women who haven’t decided yet what they think about abortion.
I was talking about being human, not about being a person. Do you understand that the words "human" and "person" mean different things? Do you understand that Kryptonians, if real, would be people but not be humans?
Your posts show why it's such an emotionally charged topic. :strong:
Majority acceptance does not signify that a moral stance is right. That's what matters.
Can you say this without using the word “things” because that makes me think you might be able to point to a person, and separately point to a human being.
They mean different things. Are they each a thing at all?
The distinction between human being and person may to you be like a distinction between “an organism with 46 chromosomes” and “intelligence”.
All you “person” people have to do is admit there is no “person” present in a newborn. That’s fine. Would be consistent. You can still love and value your babies, but to call them “persons” if that means “intelligence” is bullshit.
It's not the amorphous nature of the concept that makes it essentialist, it's the immortal nature. We touched on this before you volunteered your faith and took a defensive posture. You agreed with me that everything seems to be in a constant state of change, but then also said that you could be wrong and things may exist that are static and unchanging.
Catholics don't believe that souls are mortal.
Quoting praxis
Are you saying immortal equals unchanging?
Why is that?
But doesn’t seem relevant to essentialism either.
Do you think essences immortal or something?
How will any of this move the ball regarding what abortions you like and which ones you don’t?
I hate to answer a question with a question but can you name anything that doesn’t die or decay?
No, but Catholic's do. If the immortal soul isn’t the essence of someone then what is it?
I’m not sure what it means for something to equate with essentialism.
Catholics believe that the soul is immortal (can’t die or decay) and is the essence of a person from conception (maybe before that?) to beyond the grave. Physicality doesn’t seem to matter so what could change it?
Something that exists in a life from conception to beyond life and regardless of the physical condition of any part of life sounds pretty fixed to me. Also, immortality is an attribute, an eternal attribute.
The soul may be immortal, but that says nothing about whether it is damned or not. The soul's essential nature is subject to change - that's the bit I think you are missing. It's immortality is incidental. And for me it's the most relevant given the above discussion since the soul is not essentially saved or good. But I get your point.
And about being damned, the damning is eternal. The eternal part of eternal damnation is far from incidental, if you asked me. :grimace:
I looked it up and the Catholic Church considers abortion murder, so if you’ve been involved in an abortion somehow and are unrepentant, and maybe especially if you’re unbaptized, you’ll be eternally separated from God. I think that means damned.
"Human" and "solider" mean different things.
"Human" and "swimmer" mean different things.
"Human" and "person" mean different things.
And by "mean different things" I mean that the words are not synonyms.
Something can be a solider, a swimmer, and a person without being human, e.g. if it is an alien, or if in a million years chimpanzees evolve into a new intelligent species.
My claim is that being human has no unambiguous set of necessary and sufficient conditions. The gradual evolution from non-human to human was just that; gradual. There was never some point where the first human was born (to non-human parents). Biological taxonomies just don't work that way.
We can say at one extreme that we are human and at another extreme that Homo heidelbergensis were not human (if by "human" we mean "Homo sapiens"), but in between there's a large grey area where any designation as being a member of the one species or the other (or some intermediate species) is arbitrary.
Here is what is so difficult: how do you know they mean different things? Can’t you use words to define them in some way?
Quoting Michael
I hate to say it, but this is a non sequitur. A straw man. You are just pointing to more undefined, ambiguous “things”.
Quoting Michael
So you will say “human” means something different than “soldier”, which means to me you must be able to set out some condition, even just one condition would be sufficient, to show a difference between what “human” and”soldier” mean - you can do that - but for “being human” you can’t even begin to define it. Although you know a human zygote cannot be called a human being.
Quoting Michael
Agreed, although I’m not sure what method you used to identify some “non-human” bunch of beings that gradually grew into “human beings”.
By raising evolution, you really just restate the problem over a longer period of time. You need some necessary conditions that allows you to put beings into those two different buckets.
Instead of millions and hundreds of thousands of years, what if the life of a human being was 15 seconds long? Pregnancy lasted two seconds and boom the infant pops out, grows through childhood to old age and dies in 15 seconds. Would it still make sense yo draw a line between whatever such a being is at 1 second compared to whatever you want to call it at 10 seconds? Would we still want to say this creature didn’t start its short life until sometime after 2 or 3 seconds?
Quoting Michael
Spreading the same issue out over millions of years and just replacing the ambiguous zygote with the ambiguous Homo heidelbergensis, and replacing the ambiguous adult human being with what you now refer to as any human being that evolved, doesn’t really help your point.
I get that we have a starting point where there is no human being, and an end point where we clearly have a human being, and that the motion from non-human thing (like some pre-hominid ape) to human being (like Mrs. Smith), is a gray swirling mess of ambiguity, but, since people are asking me about when we can or maybe can’t terminate pregnancies, about when was the time period that we get critical mass, I press on into the gray swirling mess.
It just seems weird to be able to say you obviously value a pregnant adult woman, and obviously do t value her human zygote, but then say there are no conditions you will make necessary in defining “human being” when you wrap your arms fully around the woman to hug her in a tough time, and wrap the scalpel fully around the human zygote being.
It’s a dance that takes advantage of the gray motion of biological growth, here in order to assert things like there is no essence, or a “human zygote” means something totally different than a “human being” and human beings are organisms whose beginnings are gray enough that it makes sense to you to honor and value it as an adult, but kill it without any concern when it is gray.
It’s all just full of holes to me. Life is ambiguous. 2+2 may always equal 4, but we don’t see all the equations. In the meantime, new adults pop on the scene. When does that happen - probably sometime between 16 and 30 years of age, depending on how you define “adult”.
And in the meantime, pregnant women want advice from their doctors - should I get an abortion, what is the procedure like, how long does it take, will it hurt me, what do you do with the fetus afterwards, what is the law on time frames - these all need answers. Some women ask whether the fetus will feel pain, or is it a human being, or when does it become a person even. They want to make a fully informed decision and, since their own moms carried zygotes to term once, they think it’s a legitimate question.
Your answer to these latter questions seems to be “who the hell knows, that’s up to you to figure out, I mean intelligent aliens would be persons, and Homo Heidelbergensis is in the mix, but just look at a picture of a zygote - an ugly clump of cells. I won’t conjecture when that clump might begin to be personal or human or intelligent or a soldier. But you, Mrs. pregnant Smith, you are certainly a valuable human being and a person with intelligence - for some reason, I can say that much.”
Brutal.
I'm a native speaker. I know what the words "swimmer", "solider", and "person" mean, and that they don't mean the same thing. For example, Michael Phelps is a swimmer, not a solider.
If you can't even understand this very simple fact then I don't know what else I can tell you. I'm not interested in teaching you English.
No one said the majority moral opinion automatically makes an opinion "right", so I don't know who you're addressing. I said when viewed in it's own era a majority opinion is reasonable. That is a logical train of thought can lead to that opinion. Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the reality that when dealing with complex issues reasonable, thoughtful individuals can come to different conclusions.
So if you're a 2nd Century BCE Carthaginian, it's moral to sacrifice babies to Baal. What does this have to do with anything?
In the news today, Josseli Barnica from Texas died of an infection because doctors couldn’t properly treat her miscarriage.
Also Nevaeh Crain from Texas.
I suppose that pro-life advocates must view Josseli Barnica and Navaeh Crain as necessarily sacrifices based on religious beliefs. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Am I being unreasonable or something? Is this forum only a verbal boxing ring? Everyone more interested in connecting with punches.
Can’t we make something more of it?
These could be good conversations. Maybe 200 years from now some grad student writing a thesis on when essentialism finally died will cite “Michael, from TPF, circa 2025 - On the ‘Human’” because you made such a good argument.
Is an English lesson really all you think I need, or are you just shrugging me off? Or what did I do wrong again?? Or what is wrong with you?
I am actually interested in how you and others think.
And before sending me away from the forum to get the English class I needed, you didn’t even attempt to make an argument. It’s your forum.
You may be right that I can’t say the things I say about a person and/or a human being. You may be right, along with Witttgenstein, that seeking “essence” is a wrong turn, a linguistically caused misunderstanding, and think that any pregnant woman who would ask you when you think her fetus might have to be considered a human being would be better off rethinking her question instead of trying to answer it.
You might be right.
But I don’t think it’s that simple, at all. And just asserting things isn’t doing philosophy, and isn’t having a dialogue. This is a forum to dialogue, correct?
I admit, I am emotional and come off as belittling sometimes. So maybe it’s my own fault that I get treated like this (ie - “I’m not teaching you English”), but I think I’m mostly being reasonable, and my rough edge is usually in response to people treating me like a fool. (ie, showing me pictures of a an adult human being and a clump of cells and telling me if I can’t see that the whole abortion debate is thereby resolved, I need my eyes fixed.). Give me the slightest break.
This is the perfect scenario for you to educate, in arguments, about what you know, or what I need to unlearn, or to show me how I never knew what I thought I knew. Or just try to exchange ideas. Why smack that down with insulting shrug offs?
Cash your arguments out. I’m listening for it. I think this is fun and interesting and important.
——————-
So back on topic, “human” and “swimmer” mean different things.
Got it on its face. I speak English natively too. I am swimmer and I’m not a soldier. “Human” can be used many different ways.
But when you say “mean” do you simply mean they are words used in different contexts for different purposes? Or do you mean, they point to or name different objects, or types of objects? What do you mean by “mean” when you say these words mean different things?
(Also, to be clear, “swimmer”, “person” and “soldier” are fairly strictly nouns, whereas “human” can also be used as an adjective, so I assume you meant to say “a human being and swimmer” mean two different things, or “a human and person” mean two different things. I don’t want to misunderstand you because of a typo or small lack of clarity.)
Are you just saying human is an adjective and person is a noun? (Sounds like English class!)
But back to “mean”.
Can I say: “we use the word ‘swimmer’ to point to or refer to or mean a being in the physical world, like a fish or a dolphin, or Michael Phelps”? Swimming is a physical activity, and a swimmer is a doer in the physical world. Would you say something similar to these things? “Mean” here means “point to in the physical world.”
The reason I ask is, if you would use “swimmer” only in reference to physical states of affairs, does “human being” point to something in the physical world too? Or no?
How about person - is that physical (likely not). I don’t think “person” is a “thing” to you, like a “dolphin” or “Michael Phelps swimming” might be a thing in the physical world to you. But if we name a “human being” and point to some being, is that a being in a physical sense?
Or is it only some kind of category only, like “homo sapien”? In which case a human means something different than a swimmer, as one is a universal type categorization device and the other is a thing in a pool?
I’m trying to get at what is the best word to use to have this conversation to point to the adult thing that gets pregnant in her physical sense. She may be more (and I may not know all of the things about her be they physical or whatever), but we need a word we can both agree on that refers to all pregnant women in their full valuable state. We need a word for all that matters about adult human person thing. Or else what are we talking about and how are we talking about it. What word do you want use here?
I have been using “human being” and “person” interchangably because, the point I’m trying to make, is that the whole abortion debate is about bodies acting on bodies. A distinction between “human being” and “person” only matters if you can physically kill or not kill one of them because it’s a body, and not possibly physically kill the other because it is not a body. (Kill because of the abortion context). I’m not interested in something that can’t be killed because it is not a body. If we can’t use a knife to isolate and kill the mind, or cut the intellect or the “person” or the “category human”, then all those things are not relevant to the physical act of abortion or any physical act. Abortion, under my argument, kills a human body (whole organism, not like just a kidney which isn’t an organism), and killing a human body is killing a person’s body, or killing a human being.
The body part of the equation subsumes person/human being distinctions for me, and makes them functionally equivalent terms. What do you want me to call the organism?
What is the fetus is a biological question first. Abortions are physical acts first. What is the adult is biological question. There are no adult mountains (see, I speak some English). Only living biological entities, without metaphor, can be called “adult” or “fetal” at the time of abortion. So I don’t think it is relevant to discuss “persons” if they are souls, or intellects, or minds, or bundles of attributes, or functions of a brain, or happenings in adult brains, unless you can show that this “person” thing comes later than the “human being” thing, and some human being things are not persons, or not yet persons. If you want to make a distinction between being a person and being a human being, IN THE FETUS OR THE ADULT (not an alien or other hominid because those are not at issue) that’s fine, but then you need to show where in the physical world, the world of abortions, this person fits in.
When does “person” or “human being” happen so that it matters in discussion about abortion. That’s the money time period or moment.
Maybe you have said this. You said person is like intelligence. Ok, so a fetus can’t structurally have an intellect until it has a certain brain and that brain does certain things. True, but let’s consistently apply the working theory. If a person is the happening of intelligence, then is a baby a person? Am I a person when I am sleeping and not dreaming? I think the consistent answer has to be no. When I am sleeping, I don’t have an intellect. I don’t even have an “I”. Without consciousness, the brain isn’t doing that which generates the activity or process or intellect labeled as “person”. The person already is not there, not yet formed, when consciousness isn’t turned on for any reason, so that human body is not a “person” anymore.
So can you explain how the distinction between person and human being discussed above is wrong, or wrongly applied to sleeping babies for instance, or, if not, refute that it is inconsistent to point to a baby or an unconscious human body and say that it’s a person?
I am trying to have an honest conversation for my part. I am interested in challenging my thoughts and my reasoning. That should be obvious to you as I keep throwing out all of this content hoping for the reasoned, philosophical counter point. I see someone who thinks differently than me, like you and others, and I want to see how they might be reasonable too, which challenges me to question why I think what I think.
English class. Really? All we all need is a good dictionary and the abortion discussion is over?
The term "person" highlights aspects of existence tied to social, moral, or individual recognition rather than strictly biological features.
Did you really need someone to explain that?
No. I relied on it to make my point and ask a question that hasn’t been addressed. I bolded it so you wouldn’t miss it: Quoting Fire Ologist
How is that not consistent? Babies aren’t people either then? Which is fine if you want to be consistent.
And what do you mean by “aspects”? “Aspects of existence”? How is that meaningful to you? And what is “individual recognition” anyway?
When does “individual recognition” become an “aspect” of “existence”? Something adult persons do in their sleep?
Quoting NOS4A2
What makes it easier to "dehumanize" a zygote vs an adult human if not a difference in the number of human qualities they have? I don't have to strip away any human qualities from a zygote. It's just a single-cell. If you want to point to the cause of the zygote being sexual intercourse between two humans then this is an arbitrary decision on your part as others would argue that killing an unwanted dolphin or chimpanzee is inhumane.
Quoting NOS4A2
I never said it was a moral good to be celebrated. It's something that should be rare is not a situation most people want to be in to have to decide. As such, we should respect others predicament and let them choose what works best for them, because you are not them. It is dehumanizing to think that you can impose your arbitrary definitions on others when they are making a personal, private decision regarding something they did not want to happen in the first place.
This is not a picture of a person, Fire.
Some people may think it's a person because that's what they've been led to believe.
There is a reason that people have been led to believe it's a person. Is that reason based on morality or something else?
If that is an human zygote, every person who has ever existed goes through this stage in their lifecycle. What leads you to believe it is not a person?
I can’t touch, feel, smell or hear it. Visually it doesn’t look like a person to me. Do you see a person?
Referring to someone as a human being emphasizes their biological identity as a member of the species Homo sapiens. Referring to someone as a person focuses on qualities that go beyond biology—like individuality. In the following image, we can see clear meaningful differences that distinguish two persons in the upper portion of the image. The bottom portion of the image shows virtually identical twin embryos. There's nothing to distinguish the twin embryos as different persons so how can they be persons?
Your question about two identical twin human zygotes and whether they can both be persons if there is no way to distinguish them is a good one and interesting. But if you would:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Basically, the same question from way way back that I’ve asked multiple people over and over to directly address in any way: If a human zygote is not a “person” and a human adult is a “person”,is a human newborn baby a “person” and please explain your answer either way in light of the above quote.
A zygote can develop into multiple persons.
You asked specifically about the aspect of individual recognition in personhood and I responded. You said my response was interesting and good. We don’t need to go through every aspect of personhood do we?
No, you don't have to be an essentialist to say "beard versus clean-shaven" or "individual human person" or not. As you've noted elsewhere, essentialism is the notion that there are necessary and sufficient properties that define what is the "essence" of a thing (or type of thing). Essence is a metaphysical concept.
Without appealing to essences, we can define SORTALS - a set of properties that we use to segregate objects into sets. It is conceptual, like set theory, not metaphysical. So we could define "having a beard" as "facial hair growth with a mean length of 5cm", and thus sort men into the bearded and unbearded in this way. My point is that there's no objective basis for defining a sortal in this way, when there is vagueness in the concept of what we're trying to distinguish.
We could define "individual human being" in such a way that we could sort the objects of the world on this basis. But there will be some degree of arbitrariness to it, at the boundaries. For most purposes, the boundary conditions don't matter. For abortion, it does.
Absolutely not. Probably a bottomless pit.
But, won’t you just say, whatever the qualities are that make whatever a person is, a newborn baby is (or is not) a person?
If you say no the newborn is not a person, that seems consistent with saying a zygote is not a person either, as both of them are nothing like an adult human that we call a person. If you say yes, a newborn is a person, that seems inconsistent with saying an adult is a person but a zygote is not, so if you say “yes” I’d appreciate your reasoning.
I recognize the image on the right as a person. I don't recognize the image on the left as a person.
If you recognize the image on the left as a person, can you explain how you recognize it as a person?
All the more reason to let it live.
In theory, your skin cells (which contain a complete set of your DNA) could be manipulated into developing into human beings.
“Material” doesn’t encapsulate what it is and what is occurring, whether it is living or non-living, and so on. Everything in there is a material by definition. The difference is this is the one thing in there with its own distinct and unique genetics, occupying its own unique and distinct position in space and time, and will remain as such until the end of its life.
Just going by the definition used by
No, we're talking about the medical term, "abortion." They're both abortion. You're just separating the two to appeal to emotion.
Identical twins begin with the same genetic material, they lack this uniqueness you mention. So unique genetics can't be the basis for identifying an individual human life.
It's true that every adult human's existence can be tracked back to a specific zygote. Similarly, every oak tree can be traced back to a specific acorn - but an acorn is not an oak tree. An acorn merely has the potential to develop into an oak tree, and a zygote merely has the potential to develop into 1 or more human beings.
And 2 zygotes have the potential to develop into 1 human being (a chimera).
Much like a sperm and an ovum have the potential to develop into 1 human being.
The genetics only distinguishes the zygotic human being from the rest of his environment, ie, from his parents. But I also included the principium individuationis, his location in space and time, as the marker of his uniqueness.
It occupies its own unique and distinct position in space and time. A zygote is alive. At no point does a zygote die and get replaced by another living being. If left to live a zygote can continue his life, without interruption, for upwards to one hundred years.
Twins are individuated at the zygote level until it reproduces asexually, then there are two individuals.
Quoting praxis
So an instance of a “new born human baby” (which can be depicted as you’ve depicted it), equals an instance of “a person”. Recognizing a new born baby is recognizing a person.
That answers one of my questions directly and I appreciate that.
But the question isn’t really answered without some of your reasoning because if a human zygote is NOT recognized as a person, but a new born baby IS recognized as a person, you must have some sense of what a “person” means in order to not recognize those meanings in a human zygote. So what does a “person” mean such that you recognize these meanings in a new born baby but not a zygote?
Basically, why do you think a new born baby is a person? What “personal” things are you recognizing about a new born baby?
Quoting Fire Ologist
The one on the left is what the one on the right looked like about 9 months earlier. In those 9 months, what changed for you?
I already explained because I recognize it as such.
Quoting Fire Ologist
We can see many personal things about the baby in the picture. It looks caucasian, has light hair, etc.
If you recognize the image on the left as a person, can you explain how you recognize it as a person?
This is a tangent. I have no problem with identifying an individual identity as a series of causally-connected spatiotemporal stages. The objection I have is in defining the "natural kind" (for lack of a better term) of "individual human being". This would have to be based on a well-defined set of necessary and sufficient properties, that unambiguously identify an object as either being one of these, or not. An object that can produce multiple human beings cannot possible be said to be an individual human being, even though it is commonly in the developmental history of human beings. The same is true of blasotocysts- clusters of cells, that may produce multiple human beings at several stages.
So my position is that an individual human being (i.e. an object of that type) is something that emerges. gradually during fetal development. I regard a properly functioning individual human being as a self-sustaining organism with certain physical and intellectual capabilities, including a sense of self. You can disagree, because there is no unequivocally correct answer. But you have no rational basis for denying me (or women) the privilege of deciding for ourselves.
All objects that can produce multiple human beings are individual human beings. A mother, for instance, can do that. But this is also true of asexual reproduction. An individual amoeba, for instance, can produce another amoeba. Unfortunately (and oddly), we may have to think of one zygotic twin as the parent of the other.
I would never deny you or other women your privileges, but your distinctions are completely arbitrary. Worse, they are inapplicable to those with developmental disabilities, those who cannot care for themselves, and those without your favored set of physical and intellectual capabilities. At any rate, the reduction of humanity and dignity to that of “material” is the name of the game for anyone who wants to end such a life.
I absolutely agree with that. I don’t think that is enough, but “sense of self” is a good one when talking about “person”.
The phrases “I regard” or “I recognize” have no explanatory powers here, because I recognize and I regard a human zygote as and individual human being and you seem to think I must be blind or need my powers of recognition and regard checked. The question is WHY would either of us recognize distinctions or similarities?
A newborn baby isn’t self-sustaining. It won’t eat unless other things feed it.
A newborn baby has no intellectual capabilities.
A newborn baby has no sense of self.
So is a newborn baby a person or not?
We can’t use “Caucasian” to identify a person, because what about other non-Caucasian organisms? Making “caucasian” have anything to do with being a “person” sounds racist. I know you didn’t mean that, but I don’t know how referencing the race of a person tells you anything at all about why a newborn is a person but a zygote is not.
“Light hair” - what about bald babies? What about bald adults? What about dark haired babies? Again, this provides no insight into why an adult and a baby are both persons, but a zygote is not.
Babies and adults have qualities that match my concept of ‘person’.
I assume by not answering that you do not recognize the image on the left as a person just as I don’t recognize it as a person.
Come on, let’s stay with you for a bit more. I don’t want us to have to talk about my crappy reasoning yet, I’d rather we get back to your crappy reasoning.
I assume by not answering my questions you have no idea why you regard the image on the right as a person. You just do. It’s cute and cuddly. A zygote is slimey, so it can’t be a “person”. Is something like that the best we got?
What are those qualities, besides Caucasian, and hair? If Caucasian and hair matter at all towards a definition of person, all people from India, Asia, Africa, along with zygotes, are off your list of persons.
You're proposing a sufficient condition, but not a necessary one. I reject this as a sufficient condition: we could theoretically produce multiple humans from each stem cell in your body. Each stem cell fits your stated condition.
[Quote]would never deny you or other women your privileges, but your distinctions are completely arbitrary. Worse, they are inapplicable to those with developmental disabilities[/quote]
I referred to a "properly functioning human being". This doesn't imply one must be proper functioning to be a human. I wasn't even trying to suggest a necessary condition; I was defining a typical human being, not excluding the atypical.
[Quote] At any rate, the reduction of humanity and dignity to that of “material” is the name of the game for anyone who wants to end such a life.[/quote]
You're reading that into what I said. I do happen to think that humans are material; the only alternative is immaterial; it's a well defined dichotomy. Nevertheless, I never said humans are nothing more than material. Being a human is absolutely something in addition to being material.
Quoting Fire Ologist
:roll:
I doubt waiting will improve it. I’ll just assume that, like myself, you don’t recognize the image on the left as a person.
:rofl:
I recognize the image on the right as a person and I don't recognize the image on the left as a person.
The one on the right has a functioning brain. That’s an important difference because it’s an especially important organ. If my heart gives out and I’m on life support then I’m still a person but if the brain gives out and I’m on life support then there’s no person anymore, just a body.
If the brain gives out it just means the brain gives out. Just a body before and just a body after.
Im assuming that you value the newborn but not the zygote because of their difference in personhood. This simply pushes the moral question back, does it not? You recognise a newborn baby as a person, but why should we value persons?
There is a moral difference between a living body with a functioning brain and a living body without a functioning brain.
Brain death is death of the person.
And if the brain could be removed but kept alive then even though it's a single organ it's also a person.
Your point being that if I value persons I should also value zygotes? I do value zygotes.
Wasnt trying to make a point but asking a question to understand your moral system better. However, I thought you were saying that you value newborns but dont value zygotes. From what you just said, I'm assuming I was wrong and that you value life from conception?
I never kid about zygotes.
lol, I see. Well, why do you value zygotes?
It seems like there’s a point to these questions so please, let’s skip to the point.
Im confused by this response. I am asking you why you value zygotes because I dont understand why you see them as valuable, and so I wish to evaluate your reasoning and see if I can provide a counter to it. Not sure why you require a meta-analysis here, its generally an assumed state of affairs on a forum like this.
Alright, have it your way. Why do I value human life? I think it’s deeply ingrained, shaped by a mix of biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors. I think the reason valuing human life is ingrained in me is basically because it promotes gene propagation and the survival of our species.
Looking forward to your counter argument.
You didnt provide an argument for why you have a value, but a vague and blanket scientific explanation for why values exist at all. If your entire position is without any rational thought and is simply driven directly by your genes, then Im not sure how you would defend it or even justify it to yourself. It also is a false scientific explanation, since zygotes are a part of modern knowledge that couldnt have evolved into our psyches, which you can see by the vast majority of humanity having no emotional issue with zygote termination. Typically its instead driven by a philosophical grounding in "humanness" which you commonly find in religious thought that tries to map the concept of souls and divinity onto this scientific understanding of human development.
If it were necessary for zygotes to have ‘evolved into our psyches’ then there couldn’t be a minority that values them.
And a repeat of the mistake of suggesting that values must be justified.
But I don't see any progress in the argument in the last week or so; just a different group of folk making much the same errors.
Thats only a problem if you believe value derives from evolution, a proposition you presented but which I dont hold. You even mentioned social and cultural factors yourself, but then you immediately overule them with the gene propagation idea.
I already presented why I think people hold these values, and its mostly a case of religious philosophy, not some innate emotional reaction that derives from their biology.
Quoting Banno
Values dont *have* to be justfied. However, you cant expect anyone to understand your perspective without an explanation of that perspective. It seems rather silly to sit in a forum and say that people are making such a "mistake", when the point of the forum is to discuss ideas in the first place. Its equivalent to bringing up solipsisim when talking about charity, its completely irrelevent to the level of conversation occuring.
Quoting Banno
Your correct here that valuing a zygote doesnt mean someone neccesarily believes it ought not to be aborted. Afterall, I can value human life and still believe in self-defence. However, you somehow got an implication that didnt exist at all.
There’s a lot of really bad slight of hand going on. According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a complex skill.
I provided fairly extensive argument earlier in the thread.
If not evolution then from God?
Quoting Ourora Aureis
I wrote that valuing human life is ingrained and the reason (you requested reasoning) I think it's ingrained is because it promotes gene propagation and the survival of our species.
Quoting Ourora Aureis
I thought you were asking me why I value zygotes. Granted religious thought has been somewhat ingrained in me even though I've never really been religious.
Yet not a single person you’ve met was a brain. So there is no moral difference.
I've never met a person who doesn't have a brain.
There is a moral difference between a single-celled zygote and a conscious, talking adult. If you don't agree on this very basic point then I don't know what to tell you.
Continuum fallacy.
…or a body.
The only difference between a zygote and a conscious adult is time. All adults were zygotes. The so-called moral difference is immeasurable.
I never said there is no difference, only that one has developed out of the other.
The differences between you now and you at the beginning of your life are profound, but at each stage you were present and identical to both. No kind of thing died and was replaced by another kind of thing.
Remove the arms and legs and they're still a person. Remove the arms and legs and skeleton (but keep the brain alive) and they're still a person. Remove the arms and legs and skeleton and torso (but keep the brain alive) and they're still a person.
Whereas if you remove the brain but keep the heart and lungs alive then it's not a person.
Quoting NOS4A2
That is not the only difference. A conscious adult has a functioning brain, a zygote doesn't. That is a very real physical and morally relevant difference.
That's why it's acceptable to end life support on a brain-dead body. There's no relevant purpose in keeping the rest of the organs alive (except to be used in transplants for people who are actually alive).
Who is NOS4A2 and who is me after the operation?
The person follows the brain. I have a new body after the operation, not a new brain.
Notice that this is the only organ that this is true for. Switch hearts or lungs or whatever then I have a new heart and lungs. I can never have a new brain. The brain is the seat of personhood.
That depends entirely on how you account for an individual identity. There is no objective basis for doing so.
Why is it still a person if you remove one organ, but not a person if you remove another?
You would still be you and I would still be me. We can compare pictures from before and after to confirm this. We’d be vegetables, but we’d still be occupying the same location in space and time.
Because the brain is where personhood is found. Personhood concerns consciousness, and consciousness is what the brain does.
Quoting NOS4A2
Say currently I'm a white guy and you're a black guy. We have a brain transplant. What colour is my skin after the transplant? I say it's black because my brain has been placed in a black-skinned body, and I am my brain.
How many brains have you met and had a conversation with?
I’d say it’s white because that’s what you looked like before.
Sure there is. Technically we could film or track the entire life of a human being from beginning of his lifecycle to the end, and the identity of that being remains the same.
You're claiming that this temporal-causal relationship between the stages identify an individual identity. That's a consistent definition, but not objective.
I am a human being: a self-sustaining complex organism, with a functioning brain, capable of thoughts, dreams, and emotions. A zygote is not a human being, per this definition. Rather, it is an entity that has the potential to develop into one or more human beings. Therefore I do not share an identity with the zygote from which I emerged. You will disagree, because of the definition you've chosen. My point is that the definition you choose is subjective.
Hundreds? Thousands?
You think that from my perspective I’d fall asleep looking down at my white-skinned body, the operation would be performed, and then I’d wake up looking down at the same white-skinned body, but with a new brain?
Whereas I think that from my perspective I’d fall asleep looking down at my white-skinned body, the operation would be performed, and then I’d wake up looking down at my new black-skinned body.
A and B are cut in half along the midsection. A’s lower half is attached to B’s upper half and B’s lower half is attached to A’s upper half. They are both kept alive during this operation.
Afterwards, who is A and who is B? Did the person’s identity follow the lower half or the upper half? Does A have a new pair of legs or a new head?
I think it’s obvious: A has a new pair of legs because his identity followed his upper half because that’s where the brain is.
That’s patently untrue. Brains can’t speak. A great deal more is required to utter a single word.
You wouldn’t wake up, for one. You said yourself brain-death is the death of the person, and once the brain is removed from the rest, it’s dead. Second, the vast majority of you is still left on the other table.
All human being go through that stage, just as many of them go through the stage of childhood. Zygotes, neonates, children, adults—these are stages, not different organisms.
The brain uses the lungs and mouth to speak. Much like right now you are using a computer/phone to speak to me.
Quoting NOS4A2
For the sake of this discussion we are able to keep the brain alive after removing it. It's then placed inside another body and all the necessary connections made.
From my perspective I am put to sleep in one body and then wake up in another body. I don't wake up in the same body but with a new brain.
Or for a real example there's Vladimir Demikhov, who transplanted the upper body of one dog onto another.
There's also Robert White who performed a head transplant on a monkey.
If you awoke with your brain in a different body, and you were a hot girl, I'd be all over that.
Now we're even with the disturbing posts.
The person uses his lungs and mouth to speak. The brain is only an organ of the person, like the lungs, heart, bones, etc. You are not speaking to a brain any more than you are speaking to a set of lungs. There is more there.
Someone gave the definition of a person as someone who can sustain themselves: self-sustaining. Given that your person needs to be kept alive by external forces, just like a zygote or fetus, wouldn’t your thought experiment contradict that definition?
That isn't my definition. Someone in hospital on a ventilator is still a person.
Quoting NOS4A2
I'm speaking to a person.
Remove someone's limbs and they're still a person (and the same person). Cut out their tongue and they're still a person (and the same person). Collapse their lungs and they're still a person (and the same person).
But kill the brain and the person is dead, regardless of if the rest of the body is kept alive. The brain is the only essential organ. It either is the person (if reductive physicalism is correct) or it is the organ upon which the person supervenes.
Which is why if this experiment is performed then A and B each receive a new lower body, not a new upper body. And if rather than being cut at the midsection they're cut at the neck, A and B each receive a new torso and limbs, not a new head. That is certainly how they will each consider the matter from their perspective; they won't wake up and believe that they've swapped brains and memories. "I'm A but I remember being B" would be an absurd thing to claim. If that absurdity is required to defend your view on abortion then your view on abortion is absurd.
It isn’t the only essential organ. The heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs are also essential. Hence the phrase “vital organs”. And the vital organs are nothing, or at least hindered, without all the rest to protect and support them.
I would agree that A and B each receive a new lower body, that person A and person B are upper bodies. But this is because the upper body hasn’t died yet, whereas the lower body, being excised from the rest and all vital functions, has. It is only by staving away putrefaction that it is possible to still use it. Bodily survival is the criterion of physical continuity when it comes to personal identity.
But suppose a cancerous brain is replaced over-time with a series of machines that work to maintain mental functions until the brain is fully a machine, and no more cancerous brain remains. Are you still your brain?
In the case of gradual updates, yes, much like the Ship of Theseus. This is the only way I can imagine something like "mind uploads" to actually work (as opposed to the upload being just a copy), as explained on Wikipedia:
"Mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: copy-and-upload or copy-and-delete by gradual replacement of neurons (which can be considered as a gradual destructive uploading), until the original organic brain no longer exists and a computer program emulating the brain takes control of the body."
Quoting NOS4A2
Then what of the head transplant? My head is removed and kept alive (and conscious) by one machine and my torso kept alive by another machine. Are there now two people instead of one? Which one is me? The same procedure is also performed on Jane. Which one is Jane? My head is then attached to Jane's body and Jane's head is then attached to my body. Which organism is Jane and which organism is me? The person with my head and Jane's body will have all of my memories and will think of itself as me, and the person with Jane's head and my body will have all of Jane's memories and will think of itself as Jane. And that's all the matters.
Quoting NOS4A2
I was referring to the organ being essential for personhood. The heart and kidneys and lungs and liver are vital to keep the body alive, but we can replace all of them either with artificial machines or the organs of another without dying or becoming a new person.
The same can't be said about the brain. I can't cure myself of brain cancer by removing the entirety of my brain and replacing it with another. That would be to kill me and to give someone else my body.
The question is whether or not you think potential life has value, and whether or not it can be terminated with impunity.
AND
Whether or not you feel like governments should get a say in any of it.
'Yay for 1 (ergo. potential life has value, and cannot be terminated with impunity) and 'Nay' for 2 (governments should not be given the power to decide whether or not women shall give birth).
So the question becomes, how do we deal with moral issues that cannot be arbitrated by governments?
Well, we can't, really.
It turns out some things should be left to people to figure out amongst themselves, because governments can't be trusted with the kind of power that would allow them to decide otherwise.
I don't know. I don’t get similar intuitions. I suppose these beings would neither be you nor jane, but a mix of the two, a chimera. On the one hand you have Jane’s fingerprints, her body, on the other hand she has a different eye, hair color, and dental records. The biological markers of this person’s identification are skewed. But only one part of her is different. And given that you have a female body, and most of the markers of her identification (height, weight, sex), I can only say that you are mostly Jane. This suggests to me that Jane is mostly still Jane, even with your head.
Does your notion of identity not include biological markers of identity?
No, it's not the same organism, because it isn't identical. You aren't strictly identical to the NOS4A2 of yesterday: some cells have died, some replaced. On the other hand, the only thing you have in common with the zygote from which you emerged is a similar (but not identical) sequence of DNA. So what does it mean to share an identity with something that is not identical?
A 2-inch diameter ball of pure snow rolls down a snow-covered mountain. During the descent, more snow is compacted into it, and it picks up dirt and pine needles on the way, growing into a 20-ft diameter ball of snow and other debris. Does the 20-ft diameter ball share an identity with the 2-incher? If it hit a tree on the way down and split in half, which half gets the identity of the 2-inch original? Does it matter how much of that original is contained in each half?
If an identity endures over time, what is it that is actually enduring?
Consider it from your perspective. You undergo the operation. When you wake up do you start identifying as Jane simply because you have her arms and legs and chest and organs? Or do you continue to identify as NOS4A2, having grown up in wherever it is that NOS4A2 grew up in, your (only) parents being NOS4A2's parents? You don't have Jane's memories, not because you forgot, but because you're not Jane.
What if it was just a limb transplant? What if it was just a heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver transplant? How much of the body (excluding the brain) would it take for you to "become" someone else?
But to answer your question, the only "biological marker" that matters to me is the brain because that's where my consciousness is found, either reducible to neurological activity or as some supervenient phenomenon. The rest is incidental.
When you wake up, would you think "where is my mind?". Surely not. Would you look down - see two legs and think "where are my legs"?
Are the ones you now have Jane's legs? Then you're still you. Are they your legs? Then you're Jane.
If I woke up with amnesia or hallucinating I was Jesus, with no accurate Hanover memory, I'm still Hanover.
Isn't this just a Ship of Theseus question?
I'm not saying that he's not Jane because he doesn't have Jane's memories; I'm saying that he doesn't have Jane's memories because he's not Jane.
Quoting Hanover
I think that if we take any one part of the Ship of Theseus and replace it with a new part then it's still the Ship of Theseus, but that if we "replace" my head (and brain) with a new head (and brain) then it's no longer me, it's someone else. I'm the disembodied head living in a jar like in Futurama. There certainly can't be two of me, which would seem to follow from NOS4A2's position.
I don't know. I think you can play with these analogies to come up with anything, which is why essentialism is hard to maintain in any form. If you awoke with all your memories in Jane's body, you'd say you were you now in Jane's body even if your brain matter were entirely different. You also say you're you today even though you share no atom in common with your childhood self. If you lost all your memories when you were 10 years old and now had all new memories at 30 years of age, you'd still say you've maintained identity over time even though you share neither memories or cells with your former self.
If you took boards off the Ship of Theseus and rebuilt a new ship with those boards slowly (as you also replaced boards on your original ship), you could argue you've simply moved the ship piece by piece, and you could also argue that the other ship remained the Ship of Theseus because it maintained the same design and functionality over time. That is, you'd end up with two Ships of Theseus.
I'm not denying the significance of brains and memories in how they define identity, but there's always a counterexample that can be found to whatever definition you arrive at.
I'm just considering a very simple example; Jane and I are decapitated, but our heads (and so brains) are kept alive. Jane's head (and so brain) is attached to my body and my head (and so brain) is placed in a jar.
Given that I cannot be two people it cannot be that I am both the person with a body and the person in the jar. Either I am one of them or neither of them.
My claim is that I am the person in the jar and that Jane is the person with a body. I think that any reasonable person should accept this, showing that the brain plays a special role in establishing identity that is very unlike that of any other organ.
If you were in a vegetative state on a table and your brain was removed to the jar, there'd be no distinction between the you on the table and the you in the jar. That is, there is a position that entails you are the person with the body, you are the person in the jar, and you are the person in the body and the jar. If you say you are not both on the table and in the jar, then which one is you?
The reason we get this result is because you are equating the brain to the contents of the brain, namely the memories and the phenomenal state of consciousness. That is, you are positing your memories and consciousness as your essence, and so when I remove those things from the brain, the body tissue and brain tissue become equal under an essence analysis.
But that creates even more complexities because even if those memories and the feeling of personal identity linked to your being Michael were to corrupt, we'd still say you were Michael. That is, if we took your brain out and put in the jar and that made you think you were someone else, we'd still assert yourself to be you because you had the same brain. But who is the person on the table?
And then suppose we could download your brain contents to another brain such that it replicated the mental contents of the first one and gave that other entity the exact feeling of Michaelness you have? Would we have two Michaels? What if the download from Michael 1 to Michael 2 was an actual transfer such that Michael 1 was empty of thoughts once Michael 2 was filled up? Who would be Micheal then?
I would re-write your statement to be: If I am my brain, then "Any position which entails a) I am the person with a body, b) I am not the person in the jar, or c) I am both the person with a body and the person in the jar is wrong."
We then just have to find situations where the antecdent is not satisfied or at least calls it into question.
As discussed in the other thread, if the antecedent is false then the material conditional is true, i.e “if P then Q” is true if “P” is false.
Quoting Hanover
There would be two people who each identify as being Michael, and we would identify one as being the original and the other as being a copy (and they would perhaps identify themselves the same way).
Quoting Hanover
I’m not sure specifically about a vegetative state, but in the case of brain death there is no person any more, just a body.
In the case I was considering the head is kept alive, like on Futurama. It can think and see and talk.
If I cut off my arm, the arm on the table isn’t me. If I cut out my liver, the liver on the table isn’t me. If I cut off both arms, both legs, and cut out every organ except my brain, heart, and lungs then all the pieces on the table aren’t me. If I cut out my heart and lungs (using a machine to keep oxygenated blood flowing to my brain) then the heart and lungs on the table aren’t me.
Are you identifying the brain as Michael, or just the contents of that brain? If I download a pdf to your computer, why does the original RAM where the pdf was stored matter in terms of pdf identity? Does it matter if I cut and paste the pdf or if I copy and paste the pdf in terms of where the true pdf is?
When Frank reads my post and you read my post, which post is the original that is being read?
I'd say the program is the code regardless of where it's stored in terms of identifying the program.
The brain in the jar is you if it contains your thoughts, which is why a vegetative brain is no different than you arm. Your essence isn't the brain. It's what the brain happens to be storing, which means you could be you in someone else's brain or on a USB drive.
What we then need to do is itemize all your thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and whatever else is stored in that hard drive and then zap them dead one at a time. Once you stop being you, we can then know what essential thought made you you once and for all. But we're talking about internal feeling now, not brains. The brain is just vehicle with a person behind the wheel in your example, but not the person itself, right?
I'm undecided. I don't know whether consciousness is reducible to neurological activity or if it's some (non-physical?) supervenient phenomenon.
I am only explaining that a brain transplant is unlike a heart transplant. I can replace my heart with another's but I cannot replace my brain with another's.
Quoting Hanover
I don't think that's quite right. There's a difference between a working clock and a broken clock, but it's not like the working clock has some additional entity that can be taken from it and added to a different clock; it's just the case that a different clock can be made to behave in the exact same type of way.
Brains are perhaps just very complicated clocks. I am a specific (living) brain. Any other brain made to behave in the exact same type of way is a different token individual.
Sorry, I thought I hit “post” days ago.
I would be deceased. Jane would identify as Jane because it is Jane that is still surviving, still alive. I say this because one person’s body, via the immune system, would reject the other’s. I suspect that it would be Jane’s immune system rejecting my tissue, meaning my tissue is foreign, ie. not of the person.
All of it could be changed. So long as the survival of the organism or animal is maintained I remain the same organism or animal.
If we could split your brain, put one half in body A, the other half in body B, where is your location as a person?
So, for you, a brain transplant is a memory and personality transplant? Jane receives your brain and with it loses her memories and personality but gains yours in their place?
Quoting NOS4A2
What counts as an organism?
We've mentioned before that there are five "vital" organs; brain, heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. At the very least we both appear to accept that we can replace the heart and still be the same person, replace the lungs and still be the same person, replace the liver and still be the same person, and replace the kidneys and still be the same person.
So let's say we separate your body into two, one part containing the brain, liver, and kidneys, and another part containing the heart and lungs. Each part's missing organs are replaced with artificial alternatives, sufficient to keep them all alive.
Are there two living organisms? Which one are you? I say the one with the brain.
Quoting NOS4A2
I don't think either would be me. I'd be dead (even if the rest of my body is kept alive by machines), and there'd be two new people (assuming that half a brain is capable of supporting a sufficient level of consciousness).
I'm curious; let's assume that brain transplants are possible and easy and that you have been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Would you accept a brain transplant as a cure (with your diseased brain being destroyed)?
Because I certainly wouldn't. I understand that this would mean my death.
What if they could upload your consciousness and store it until the new body is ready?
An upload is just a copy, it's not me. It's not like there's some physical substance that is literally removed from my brain and placed on a computer for safekeeping.
I've never been a brain. My memories and personality have only ever related to a certain organism.
I would remain as one organism, except I'd be one that's been cut in half. So I guess I'd have to choose both sides as me.
How would you die? Split-brain patients can live through such a procedure.
I wouldn't because it would be extremely painful and debilitating. I would choose death before that. But if I did I don't think I'd be numerically identical to someone else.
Physical substance is removed pretty regularly from your brain, though. Brain cells eat and poop like all other living things. Do little bits of you go down the toilet with the neuron poop?
That doesn't answer my question. Jane's brain is removed and replaced with yours. According to you, it's still Jane. But given that memories are stored in the brain, it would then follow that Jane no longer has her (original) memories and instead has yours. So she remembers growing up as a boy named [your name] rather than as a girl named Jane.
Quoting NOS4A2
But there are two unconnected bodies. How can they be one organism?
Quoting NOS4A2
"Split brain" patients aren't fully split. They are still joined at the stem. It's only the connection between the hemispheres that is removed.
Quoting NOS4A2
In this scenario it isn't extremely painful and debilitating. We're advanced enough that it's like a kidney transplant.
But my point is that it would be death, so it's not a choice between living (in pain) or dying; it's a choice between dying of brain cancer or dying of brain extraction-and-destruction, i.e. you're opting for euthanasia.
The body that's kept alive by a new brain just ain't you.
I doubt she remembers anything. She’d have to form new memories.
You cut it in half.
So how did you as a person die if both halves of your brain survived and were placed in two different heads?
I just don’t see how I would die if I was still alive after such a procedure.
The brain has all the connections it had before it was removed from your body, so she will have your memories.
And I think that's absurd. It's not the case that Jane forgets her life and remembers yours; it's the case that Jane is dead and you're alive in her body.
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes, and in doing so it became two organisms, such as what happens naturally with some worms.
Quoting NOS4A2
I can't be a single person in two disconnected bodies with two disconnected brains, and neither half is somehow privileged such that one is me and the other isn't. So it must be that neither is me. Therefore I'm dead.
Quoting NOS4A2
You wouldn't still be alive, you'd be dead. The body would still be alive, but the body isn't you. The body now belongs to someone else (the person whose brain replaced yours).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_transplant
I think this is the proper way to understand it.
This isn't particularly difficult to grasp, I don't think. It just gives us the extremely uncomfortable conclusion that (for example) in a situation of teletransportation, you die. You don't come to in place 2. You simply die. Someone new, with your same memories, exists in place 2. For some, that is comforting. As long as someone who will be you continues to drive toward your goals and desires, all is well. For me, its terrifying.
Now, that runs counter to most intuitions about identity, for sure. But that is likely irrelevant. As regards Ship of Theseus, no. I am expressly avoiding that question. The body is not that relevant - it just a way of testing the conclusion as against the opposite (i.e "oh! Those are my legs" would indicate no change in psychological continuity in the Jane example).
Why do I have to use teleportation? Why can't I just say I existed as a baby at Time 1, Location 1 and now I'm at Time 1,000 at Location 1,000? This creates the same situation. I have nothing in common with myself across all those times and locations, not even a consistency of memory. Do I die and get reborn every time I shed my old body for my new one?
You don't have to interrupt the time/space continuim to create these questions. I still think they're just Ship of Theseus problems dealing with identity.
I didn't say you did. It was an example. Which is what I posited it as. Bizarre question.
Quoting Hanover
Because you wouldn't think this was the case. It wouldn't be open to you in my example, which is clearly, and vastly different to yours. You wouldn't be saying it. You'd be dead.
In your case, you DO have the memories. You have psychological continuity. You're free to say you were not 'you' before, say, age 4 when clear memories coalesced. That is another semi-discomforting conclusion from the Relation R take (i.e psychological continuity) which terrifies me, and comforts others. These two ways of thinking aren't really in any kind of conflict.
It's always very hard to know what hte heck Banno is trying to say, as he tends to do drive-by thought-wanking but it seems he's pointing hte same out.
Your continuity as you is all that matters. If that continuity is irreversibly broken (i.e there is no one alive who remembers being you) then you don't exist anymore. This doesn't require any essentialism. It requires a vague, but obviously felt, reality of psychological continuity.
Quoting Hanover
Then I'd say you're not adequately contending with the ideas put forward. Mine are specifically designed to avoid that insurmountable sorities issue.
I'm really not following. I'm not just trying to be difficult. Why do you lose memories when you teleport and why do you posit that I have a continuous memory from birth to now? You're distinguishing your example from mine, and I don't see how teleporting erases memory and I don't see why moving slowly through life preserves it.
I thought teleporting challenged identity because it was not possible to show what of the same matter existed from Point A to Point B. Everything disappeared and went away and then popped back. I get how that causes an indentity problem.
But if I go from Point A to Point B over 50 years and not a single same cell or single same memory exists from age 1 to age 50, then don't I have the same identity problem as you noted in the teleporting?
And then how isn't all this Ship of Theseus problems?
I should say, in my limited experience most people seem to start out with a view about what the self is and then just stick to it, rather than trying to extract the implications of our intuitions about cases. I take it to be obvious that this is a wrong-headed approach as, by hypothesis, we are trying to find out what kind of an entity the mind is and so shouldn't start out thinking we already know.
Imagine there's a machine made by someone famous. Turing, say. As such it is worth a fortune. Imagine we start the machine working. And now imagine that, without interrupting its functioning, we start gradually replacing its parts (the machine has some redundancy built in, so this is possible - that is, we can remove individual parts without stopping it working, so long as we do so bit by bit, replacing them as we go).
Eventually all the parts have been replaced. There is still a functioning machine there. All the parts that were removed were then reassembled. So now there are two machines side by side, and one of them is functioning away and has never ceased functioning.
There's an auction coming up. Which of the two machines is worth a fortune? The second one, obviously. The one that is made of the parts crafted by Turing. So, not the machine that's functioning, but the one beside it.
What can we conclude? That the 'valuable' machine is the one made of the parts that Turing crafted. That's why the value tracks the bits, not the functioning.
Applied to brains and minds, if our minds are our brains, then minds track brain matter. And that would mean that if we engaged in the same procedure as that outlined above - so gradually removed parts of a brain without interrupting its functioning and reassembled them beside it, so that eventually we have two brains - then it would be the reaassmbled brain that would be the mind that was previouisly in the position of the functioning mind.
On the other hand, if the mind stays with the functioning, then the mind stays where it is and the reassembled brain is either just a lump of meat or another mind, but it isn't the original one.
I don't know about you, but my reason represents - and represents very clearly - the original brain whose functioning has not been interrupted to remain the bearer of the mind. That seems to me to imply that my mind tracks my consciousness, not the matter of my brain.
But it also seems clear that whether consciousness is interrupted or not also makes no difference, for it seems counter-intuitive to suppose that if there was an interruption the mind would suddenly go with the material of the brain and not stay where it is.
In that case, this seems to imply that my mind is not the matter of my brain, nor is it my consciousness, but is instead something that (sometimes) has consciousness
I don't really see how this illuminates the abortion issue, however, as whatever the mind is - whether material or immaterial - the question of whether the fetus has one remains.
It's not as if belief in the soul commits one to thinking that the soul is in the fetus from the moment of conception, or at any other point, up to and including birth.
This is something that puzzles me over the abortion debate. Those on the 'soul' side seem to think they're somehow committed to thinking the fetus is a person....why? Whatever kind of a thing the mind is, this doesn't seem to me to shed light on the morality of abortion...
Please forgive any prickliness here. It seems, outright, you are not reading my entire posts. Eg, the above vs:
Quoting AmadeusD
So, to be clear, I can;t answer your question because I did not make the claim it refers to. I will do my best to ignore this, as it comes up, and just respond to what I can stand behind. So, apologies if things seemed to be missed and such.
Quoting Hanover
By the fact that, in 'my' (it's actually Derek Parfit) case, you choose to use a machine which purports to "recreate" you somewhere else. But what actually happens, is that you go into a machine, it copies you perfectly - atom for atom - then destroys you and sends the data to another machine which 3d-prints you from that data. This is clearly not like your case of simply living through life, even if this reduces to saying they're are just different cases.
Ignoring the question of whether this would preserve psychological continuity (relation R) at all (reductionists are essentially committed to saying yes, it would, by virtue of being your exact physical double at the moment of transfer) and the question of how, moments after re-creation, you couldn't be the original person as your memories now diverge sufficiently to defeat the rule of identity, the point is this:
If there is someone who recalls being you, and is physically identical do you - is this you? The reason this is an important thing to nail down about identity is presented in:
the kicker for this thought experiment is what's called the 'branch-line case" in which the machine malfunctions, and you survive several hours after the transfer and can talk to your double. You are, though, destined to die in the 'normal' way, in several hours time.
Can there be two "you"s? Uncomfortable. But seems fairly true, if relation R holds. You may simply disagree that this is the correct notion of identity and that's totally fine. I've just not come across a better one, however much this has increased my fear of death.
Quoting Hanover
I think the underlined is not quite right. This might be rectified by moving the date forward to age 4, per the above correction I've made to your initial questions. But that said, in your example - not a single cell, and not a single memory remain? You are not the same person. That seems simple. It relies on the same logic/reasoning/position as the teletransporter case. That case is simply the reverse. Can someone who does have the exact physical make-up, and psychological make-up as you.. actually be you? It seems they can. And, for me, the only issue is how to get around the possibility of two "you"s. For me, this is solved by the fact that the exact instant one becomes aware they did not die in the machine, the two have disparate memory banks. Nothing ship-of-theseus rears its head.
Quoting Clearbury
Parfit outlines several versions of this in Reasons and Persons as related to humans. He uses surgeries replacing body parts, and swapping body parts to tease out the intuitions. Far too long to summarize, but that may be helpful in you find the discussion. DM me if you need further help on that...
Quoting Clearbury
This is a conclusion for a different thought experiment, on my view. Yours speaks to "at what point" certain things become, or are disestablished. The whole-sale transference of matter in the sense of "Reassembling" is not the same question, I don't think. However, I think when you turn this to brains and minds, we don't know enough about functional memory and where/what in the brain houses/contributes to/eliminates memories to justly answer whether or not the "old, reassembled" brain would carry any memories with it.
I think it's about the one described as there seems to be a radical difference between what our reason tells us about where the valuable machine goes, and where the mind goes, even though we have exactly the same replacement process at play in both.
If our minds are our brains - a view I think is false - then our minds would, like the valuable machine, go with the matter. That there was uninterrupted consciousness in the other place - like the uninterrupted functioning of the machine - would be irrelevant.
But my reason anyway represents my mind to stay with the uninterrupted consciousness.
But it can't plausibly be that the consciousness was uninterrupted that explains why my mind stayed where it was (even though it assures us of it), for clearly a mind can be unconscious for a stretch and still be the same mind afterwards (just as a machine can stop functioning for a while and still be the same machine afterwards).
It's this combination that then implies that the mind is not the brain, but a bearer of conscious states that is associated with brains. That the consciousness was uninterrupted assures us that the mind was present there the whole time, but the consciousness is not the mind, but simply a state the mind was in.
"If someone is willing to kill even their own unborn children, then how can they be counted on that they won't kill other people?"
This, as far as I can reconstruct, is the concern that is actually behind some of the disapproval of abortion, although I've never heard it directly voiced like this (which is not surprising, given the content).
This also explains why anti-abortionists generally don't have a problem with capital punishment -- it's killing innocents that ix wrong, but not criminals. And also why they are in favor of firearm possession -- it's for personal protection, as they fear for their lives, living among those who are casually willing to kill even their own, innocent children.
Most abortion debates get nowhere because they're focusing on the personhood status of the unborn or the lack of such status, rather than looking at the intention for abortion and the implications of such intention.
What are the implications?
You mean my brain is alive in her body. Every person you’ve ever met, and will ever meet, is more than a brain. So that’s large and ever-increasing body of observable evidence just left to the side. It’s why you cannot imagine yourself being a disembodied brain without some sort of mechanism to keep you alive while you’re outside the body. And here I thought persons were supposed to be autonomous, but we are treating the brain like a dependent fetus, something that needs to be kept alive through intervention.
But your brain is still alive. If a person is a brain, and the brain is still alive, the person is still alive, no?
And there is a person. That person remembers growing up as you, not as Jane. Your claim is that this person is Jane because it's Jane's body and my claim is that this person is you because it's your brain (and memories and personality and so on).
I think that my view is more reasonable than your view.
Quoting NOS4A2
As I said above, I am a single person. If my brain is cut in half and each part kept alive and put in two different bodies then there are now two people. Given that I am not two people and given that neither new person is privileged, it must be that neither of these two people are me, and so I am dead.
The same reasoning applies to your claim that the organism is the person; if your body is cut in half and each half kept alive by replacement organs then there are now two organisms, not one. You cannot be both, therefore either neither is you or one of them is privileged. But at least in this case I would say that the half that kept the brain is the privileged half and so is you; the other half is just a bunch of organs, not a person.
Quoting NOS4A2
I certainly could imagine it. It's just not biologically feasible as a brain cannot survive without help.
Relevant to this is this:
There is, perhaps, at least a few seconds where the brain is alive (and a conscious person).
To clarify why I think not, your conclusion requires a different question: What is the nature of consciousness? WHich is not the same as whether or not it is transitive, specifically. In your conclusion, there are several issues I can see: "if the mind stays with teh functioning" cuts across both ways. At some point, both 'items' become 'functional' as built-in to the thought experiment. In this case, it's the basic nature of consciousness, rather htan it's relationship to the brain that would be in question, I think - but I could be misconstruing.
Quoting Clearbury
I don't think we can say that an uninterrupted consciousness is required. We sleep, for instance. It's not hte same, no, but it gives us pause. It's entirely possible that consciousness can be interrupted (perhaps true NDEs are in this category) and return to it's initial state, based on it's carrier. That could support it arising from the brain, and all its unique complexity, or it could support that mind is something else (or atleast, somewhere else)
Quoting Clearbury
Similarly, I think it's entirely plausible that this is the reason. We just don't know.. My intuition is also that more than likely, the mind is not synonymous with the brain. But its extremely hard to see why...
It seems sufficient for a mind to remain where is that there has been no interruption of consciousness. If we can maintain consciousness yet replace the matter of the brain, then that would seem to show that the mind isn't the brain.
I think Parfit was one of those who saw puzzles where there was actually just evidence for the soul.
I can’t see what you’re seeing because I don’t think there is evidence for a soul. He wasn’t seeing evidence of anything - he was trying to answer a question. The soul is just the easiest, and one of the least-plausible accounts he canvasses imo
if the mind is the brain, then when we gradually remove the brain parts and reassemble them, then the mind would 'be' the reassembled brain. For that is what happened in the valuable machine case. In teh valuable machine case it is not in dispute that what has value is the parts of the machine, and thus when we gradually remove them and reassemble them it is the reassembled machine that is valuable, not the original one that is still functioning but has no parts in common.
When we perform the same exercise with a person - so, we gradually remove their brain without interrupting their consciousness - then the mind does not go with the parts we removed. Thus, the person is not their brain. That is what our reason tells us. If we respect what our reason tells us about cases, then it is telling us our minds are souls.
There are a whole stack of other arguments for the soul. There are no good ones for the idea that the mind is the brain, it's just a working hypothesis. But that's not evidence.
But given this thread is about abortion, how does it bear on the matter?
It seems that most of those who believe in the soul seem to think this implies that the soul is present from conception. That's bizarre. Why think that? It's not implied at all (and historically this has not been what people have thought). Whether the mind is material or immaterial makes no difference to the reasonableness or otherwise of assuming the fetus has a mind (for the issues are distinct - there's what has a mind, and then there's what a mind is made of). And yet that is the main issue that's going to bear on whether abortions are right or wrong.
I believe in the soul, yet it seems to me that the evidence indicates (but does not establish) that that fetuses do not have souls.
Absolute nonsense.
Quoting Clearbury
No. You're confusing several positions with one where the brain physically is hte mind. Emergentism might be a better avenue to attack here.
Quoting Clearbury
Good luck.
Quoting Clearbury
That is not the position. There are extremely good reasons to think the mind is confined to, or arises from the brain,. If you reject htem, so be it.
Quoting Clearbury
If there is no Soul, then any argument from a religious perspective fails and any discussion about personhood can proceed unhindered.
Quoting Clearbury
Sorry to say, I find this absurd to a point that I have to assume you've made some assumptions that are terminal. Such as "there's good evidence for the soul" when there is literally zero.
Quoting Hyper
Murder is a legal term. It is fundamentally a different species of concept from abortion.
If a neuron dies, you won't lose consciousness. So, if we replace your neurons, one by one, with functionally equivalent mechanical neurons, you wouldn't lose consciousness during the process. Why would you? And now you, who have been conscious the whole time, has a mechanical brain. Your original biological brain is no longer a factor in who you are as a person anymore.
Quoting AmadeusD
I said fundamentally, which means that they have the same effect of terminating life.
Why, or why not, is the entire question.
It may be that different neurons (in terms of identity) precludes your conclusion. We don't know. That's why I say good luck..
Quoting Hyper
Oh. Well, fair. Sorry. I would say there's a fundamental difference between ending a clump of cell's life and an adult human's life. They are plainly not hte same thing.
As to your last position, i'd agree. It is not hte brain that matters, but psychological continuity. If it were the case that replacing every neuron, one by one, with an artificial one could maintain the same consciousness as the brain they, collectively, replace, sure. I think this does nothing to your identity.
Kudos for recognizing a kindred spirit.
No doubt? How can you have no doubt without seeing me attempt to argue? Tuck in your shirt, your arrogance is showing.
But the intention for doing either is the same: destroying someone, acting in a way so that someone would not exist.
When and how are just practical matters, whether it takes a gun, a rope, a scalpel, chemicals, etc.
The reason people have abortions is to prevent that "clump of cells" developing and being born a human person.
People don't have abortions merely to remove a "clump of cells". They remove that "clump of cells" precisely because it has the potential of becoming a person, and it's the person they want not to exist.
Quoting praxis
Like I said right away in the post you're quoting:
Quoting baker
Where in the world is there a place where people won’t kill other people? In the United States the federal death penalty applies in all 50 states and U.S. territories. There was around 20k murders in the U.S. last year.
So much for the social contract ...
Abortion erodes social trust, like I sketched out above.
As does adultery or any other crime.
But perhaps you want to go all Rand/Thatcher and declare there is no society and everyone is solely responsible for themselves?
Other people? This implies that the fetus is a person. And what if the mother's life is at stake or we're dealing with a rape victim? You would prohibit abortion in those cases too? After all, if a rape victim will kill her own child, who knows what she's capable of in the future, right?
No. It's about the intention to kill. I've been talking about it all along.
These are statistical minorities.
The vast majority of abortions are simply advanced contraception measures. In old sex education books, abortion was actually listed in the chapter on contraceptives.
*sigh*
Abortion debates typically suffer from a lack of precision.
I see little problem with aborting pregnancies due to rape or concerns for the wellbeing of the prospective mother or child. Those are just unfortunate situations.
It's abortions that are simply advanced contraception measures that are morally problematic.
The other big problem is equating the two categories, as if aborting in a case of, for example, preeclampsia, were somehow no different than aborting in the case of failed contraception.
How does that square with: ""If someone is willing to kill even their own unborn children, then how can they be counted on that they won't kill other people?""
Why should the rape victim be allowed to kill their child? How can she be counted on to not kill another person? Are you making some exceptions to your rule here? If you're allowing rape victims to have abortions, what about women who's husbands have died and they can't afford the child?
I can't speak for other nations but the majority in the U.S. favor access to abortion. Just this month seven states passed legislation supporting women's right to choose. So I don't know what you're talking about when you say,"So much for the social contract..."
Ironic. I wasn't arguing.
Quoting baker
I don't think so. This formulation doesn't apply to murder. "would not exist" applies to a fetus, when you do not consider it an extant person. Perhaps this is purely a wording problem in your comment, but this illustrates, to me, the fundamental difference. Ending the potential for an adult life is not hte same as ending an adult life. Maybe that's neither here nor there for the debate? It seems reasonable to consider it to me. Quoting baker
I do not think this is a reasonable way to talk about motivations for abortion. Abortion is generally sought to avoid everything else about hte situation - not avoiding a human coming into existence, per se. Again, the difference is illustrated to me in this. If the woman seeking an abortion could simply flick a switch and have a ten year old, most I have known (including several intimate partners) would have done so. It wasn't avoiding the person that matter. It was avoiding the externalities of that eventuality. Again, this may not weight much for you - but it does for me :)
That was the point. I made a case. You didn't.
Quoting Clearbury
This was the totality of your 'case'. That asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I'm also not massive interested in that debate.
The concept of the soul, to me, is nonsensical and metaphysically bereft of any real meaning. It's a gap-filler. Nothing describes the soul, or how it could function in any literature i've seen. So, I have no reason to take it seriously. Your claim to plenty of proofs is simply an empty claim, in that regard. You are certainly free to present any you want me to consider, though.
I also take hte point that you're kind of worked up over it, which gives me the sense you're not even relying on those points, but your intuitions. Which is fine, but I don't need to take those seriously without more.
If the mind is material, then slowly transferring the bits of material constituting it to another place would move the mind. That's a premise. It says 'if P, then Q'
The next premise is that transferring the bits does not transfer the mind, for one can in principle transfer the bits without interrupting functioning - as in the valuable machine case - and yet unlike in the valuable machine case, it is self-evident that the mind remains where it is.
That says 'not Q'
The conclusion that follows is "not P", or "the mind is NOT material".
That's called a 'case'. You must deny a premise, yet both premises seem true.
It's one of loads and loads of cases that can be made for the immateriality of the mind.
It is by intuition - which is used by philosophers to mean something very specific, namely a representation of our reason, not some arbitrary assumption - that we are aware that arguments are valid, for instance.
So, if you reject intuitions then you're rejecting the one and only source of evidence. Nothing else can possibly qualify as evidence unless we 'intuit' it to count as evidence, which just goes to show that all appeals to evidence are appeals to intuition.
Now imagine the person is pregnant. Are you now entitled to stop them? My reason delivers the same verdict: no. That person is just as entitled to kill themselves, it would seem (if my reason is accurate).
A person is not entitled to kill themselves if doing so would kill another, however. For example, if a person is driving a car with an innocent passenger and decides to drive it into a tree at speed, that would be wrong precisely because it would kill another innocent person.
So, if the fetus is a person, then we would predict that a pregnant person would not be entitled to kill themselves. If our reason tells us that a pregnant person is entitled to kill themselves, then it is thereby telling us that the fetus is not a person.
Another variation: going back to teh suicidal driver with a passenger case - if a third party can stop the suicidal driver from killing both themselves and their passenger by shooting dead the driver before the driver has a chance to drive the car into the tree, then they're entitled to do that. And what justifies them in doing this is saving the passenger's life.
But now imagine that a pregnant woman is about to kill herself by jumping off a building onto an empty street below. Would a third party be entitled to shoot her dead if by doing so this will stop her jumping off the building? My reason says 'no'. Yet we'd predict that the third party would be entitled to do this if the fetus was a person, for then it'd be morally no different from the passenger case.
If your reason concurs, then we have evidence that the fetus is not a person. What our reason tells us about the morality of abortion implies that abortions do not involve the destruction of a person.
I have the same intuition. I'm partial to thought experiments where a person must save a child or x amount of zygotes. No matter what x is, a rational person will always save the child. That, to me, is decisive.
My reason tells me that this would not be permitted. Whereas it would be permitted to shoot the suicidal driver dead in order to stop them from crashing the car and killing the innocent passenger.
My reason represents the cases not to be moral equivalents. Yet they would be moral equivalents if a fetus was a person. The implication is that the fetus is not a person.
In the suicidal pregnant woman case, it does not seem justifiable to shoot dead the pregnant woman if that is the only way to stop her jumping off the building.
BUt this is a mere assertion. It is not 'a case' other than a case to be discussed, not a case for the outcome you posit. I have made a case for why this might not be true. If that was missed, that's fine.
Quoting Clearbury
Only tautologically. That is not making a case or presenting a premise, in the proper sense.
Quoting Clearbury
It is not. It is an assertion on the back of two assertions. If that's your style, so be it.
Quoting Clearbury
In some sense - but some are presenting empirical difficulties. But this is an equivocation. "a case" (the way i've mentioned above) is about the same as a thought experiment. It doesn't "make a case" for one or other outcome, until the discussion is had. That didn't quite happen here. Anyway, this is not very interesting stuff.
Quoting Clearbury
No, not quite. Intuitions tease out our blindspots, along with where our reason is running well. It is not an indication of well-reasoned thinking that something is an intuition.
Quoting Clearbury
Well that certainly explains your comportment.
Quoting Clearbury
Not in the vast, vast majority of countries and jurisdictions - not according to the vast majority of religions. If this is your intuition, it is an empirical nonsense in the way you're using it. It doesn't apply to others.
Quoting Clearbury
No. Not at all. This is just an instance of confused, un-examined reasoning.
Two people. But again, this would come down to personhood.
It seems completely, and patently wrong to equivocate between a mother and her fetus. That seems plainly wrong. So we need to figure out how to not do that, while maintaining some delineation between "killing a person" and "killing a fetus", even if we can't neatly package each.
I would still maintain your criticisms of Clearbury are pretty on-point, but I think it is wrong to analogise in the way you have. Killing hte adult passenger in your car cannot be equivalent to killing your pregnant self, on my view.
Sure, but there is no tie-breaker so that makes it very hard to come to any other statement about it. It seems, on the facts, wrong. I can't understand another avenue to get to a different conclusion.. .so we go head-to-head, it seems :P
Quoting Hyper
Hmm, interesting. This seems, to me, understandable, but ridiculous. The fetus doesn't have anything to live for. On some conceptions, it is not yet 'living'. I fail to understand how ending the life of something unaware it exists is more immoral than killing an existing deliberative entity which understands its mortality, and has (assumably) several extremely strong interests in living, as do those around them. Can that be parsed out a bit?
The bold: I can grok this one, but its for entirely different reasons. A person who has lived for say 80 years and has fulfilled their impulse to procreate (let's assume) has far, far less interest in existing than does an infant (though, the difference between and infant and a fetus is stark and important too, so maybe we should be looking at apples and apples). BUT unless the geriatric has requested to end their life, neither is permissible without necessity.
There's a car. It contains two people. One of them decides to kill themselves by means of crashing the car. If we can stop that from happening - thus saving the other person's life - by shooting the driver dead, then we are clearly morally permitted to do that.
There's a pregnant woman. She decides she is going to kill herself by jumping off a building to any an empty street below. if we can stop her doing that by shooting her dead, are we morally permitted to do so? No.
Now if - IF - the pregnant woman's act was going not just to kill herself but also another innocent person, then it would have been morally permissible to kill her to save the innocent person inside her. It's not.
If that's what our reason says about the pregnant woman case, then it is telling us that there's an important difference between the two cases. In one - the car one - another innocent person's life is at stake (hence why we're entitled to shoot the driver). In the other, there isn't.