Abortion, IT'S A Problem
[quote=Wikipedia]The genitive form its has been used to refer to human babies and animals, although with the passage of time this usage has come to be considered too impersonal in the case of babies[/quote]
For more information on "IT" visit IT (PRONOUN)
I'm only asking that we consider the intuition behind the usage of the word "it" to refer to babies. Last I checked, "it" is used for inanimate objects, animals and, most intriguingly also for babies. A child from a certain unspecified age or an adult human being is either a "he" or a "she" or, if the LGBT community has its way, a "fae".
Take into account the fact that inanimate objects like a rock or an animal are missing something crucial - personhood that one quality that confers on those who possess it what we've fondly come to know as rights. Among the many rights that states try to ensure for us, one is the right to life, the violation of which, as when murder occurs, invites on the perpetrator legal punitive measures of all kinds, from life imprisonment to even the death penalty.
A rock or an animal has no rights, at least not to the same extent as adult humans have them. Most pertinently, apart from the fact that an inanimate object can't be killed, slaying an animal is taken very lightly, even completely ignored by the community and even the legal establishment.
If this general worldview where "it" is a valid pronoun for rocks, animals and babies is taken to its logical conclusion abortion should be permissible as it isn't murder.
Another odd phenomenon is that mothers (women) when they undergo an ultrasound of the fetus growing inside them display so much love for "it" that anyone around her is extremely careful not to refer to the fetus as "it". This bespeaks the fact that mothers (women) attach personhood to the fetus in their womb.
In summary, an analysis of language suggests that babies, ergo fetuses, don't have personhood and therefore abortion should be ok but the way people in general and mothers in particular resent people who refer to their babies as an "it" indicates the opposite - fetuses are persons.
What gives? :chin:
For more information on "IT" visit IT (PRONOUN)
I'm only asking that we consider the intuition behind the usage of the word "it" to refer to babies. Last I checked, "it" is used for inanimate objects, animals and, most intriguingly also for babies. A child from a certain unspecified age or an adult human being is either a "he" or a "she" or, if the LGBT community has its way, a "fae".
Take into account the fact that inanimate objects like a rock or an animal are missing something crucial - personhood that one quality that confers on those who possess it what we've fondly come to know as rights. Among the many rights that states try to ensure for us, one is the right to life, the violation of which, as when murder occurs, invites on the perpetrator legal punitive measures of all kinds, from life imprisonment to even the death penalty.
A rock or an animal has no rights, at least not to the same extent as adult humans have them. Most pertinently, apart from the fact that an inanimate object can't be killed, slaying an animal is taken very lightly, even completely ignored by the community and even the legal establishment.
If this general worldview where "it" is a valid pronoun for rocks, animals and babies is taken to its logical conclusion abortion should be permissible as it isn't murder.
Another odd phenomenon is that mothers (women) when they undergo an ultrasound of the fetus growing inside them display so much love for "it" that anyone around her is extremely careful not to refer to the fetus as "it". This bespeaks the fact that mothers (women) attach personhood to the fetus in their womb.
In summary, an analysis of language suggests that babies, ergo fetuses, don't have personhood and therefore abortion should be ok but the way people in general and mothers in particular resent people who refer to their babies as an "it" indicates the opposite - fetuses are persons.
What gives? :chin:
Comments (84)
Fetuses physically resemble human people, just like the moon sometimes looks like a face but it's really just a hunk of rock.
A human != a person.
As far as language is concerned they're both "it" just as a piece of rock is one. Abortion then isn't murder. Just as you take off your shoe and turn it upside down to get rid of that irritating pebble that found its way inside your shoe with no moral consequences so can a pregnant woman pay a visit to the nearest abortion clinic without ruffling anyone's feathers.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Tell that to a mother who wants her baby.
The neuter genitive would be the natural locution for a foetus whose sex is unknowable and whose survival is uncertain. Infant mortality is so low as to be neglected in people's thinking these days, but of yore, one did not over-invest in the humanity of that which may well not survive to speak.
Quoting TheMadFool
What will you tell a mother who has lost the baby she wanted? The Catholic church has a doctrine on these matters, but other philosophers should manage without.
Can you give the manifestations of this personhood by which we can say that an entity has the quality personhood i.e that some entity is eligible for personhood.
Personhood
Philosopher Thomas I. White argues that the criteria for a person are as follows: (1) is alive, (2) is aware, (3) feels positive and negative sensations, (4) has emotions, (5) has a sense of self, (6) controls its own behaviour, (7) recognises other persons and treats them appropriately, and (8) has a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities. While many of White's criteria are somewhat anthropocentric, some animals such as dolphins would still be considered persons.[16] Some animal rights groups have also championed recognition for animals as "persons".[17]
In this case the fetus doesn't qualify as a person but:
A person is recognized by law as such, not because they are human, but because rights and duties are ascribed to them. The person is the legal subject or substance of which the rights and duties are attributes. An individual human being considered to be having such attributes is what lawyers call a "natural person."
In this case the fetus can qualify as a person. I am in a state of cognitive dissonance and I think I have to put more effort to figure it out.
An embryonic nemesis?
Quoting TheMadFool
That despite reason there’s an inescapable intuition of life and kinship.
Or two lines. If far enough apart they can be as blurred as you please, yet maintain an absolute distinction.
Fetus’ are human beings in their earliest stages of life. We all used to be one. And we accept that there may be a conflict of rights between a person in its earliest stages and post birth. It certainly is a problem and an argument worth having. What pronouns we use might not be as important a topic.
I thought of that but it doesn't solve the problem. We know the sex of the dogs we have as pets and yet they're "it".
Quoting unenlightened
No words can be adequate for such a tragedy, assuming of course that she wanted the baby.
Quoting Benkei Please read my reply to unenlightened. Also, don't forget that animals, despite your exemplary humanity, don't have the same rights as we humans do. Would you petition for the death penalty if someone tortured your beloved pet to death in a horrific manner? Even if you did, would anyone take you seriously?
Quoting praxis
Yes, but this "intuition" has to be reconciled with our other "intuition" that baby's only deserve an "it" when we refer to them.
To tell you the truth, what I feel is critical to this discussion is the fact that mothers who want their babies assign personhood ergo, conferring the right to life to fetuses, from the moment of conception or the time they discover they're pregnant which is quite early, much before they become viable and are thus qualify for abortion.
I doon't know how accurate this information is but I've heard of parents who want children talk to their fetuses, make them listen to music, etc. What does this tell you? Is personhood in re fetuses just a matter of whether you want children or not??
Quoting NOS4A2
Words betray our thoughts.
So you’re pro life and the state deciding wether or not women are allowed to abort a pregnancy?
I think that is the case. But from the moment the thing in the uterus can be called a fetus it entails the entitlement to Fetal rights.
My point is that a few generations ago this was a commonplace occurrence. At that time, and all previous times, one could not afford for 'no words' to be 'adequate'. The way we think and the way we feel has been changed by modern medicine.
So, for example, the unbaptised dead were not admitted to salvation and heaven, and this attitude survived well into the C, 20th, and affected the burial of the dead and the treatment of the living.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home
Bear in mind that these institutions are the bastions of anti-abortion.
I am opposed to abortion but do not think the state should decide.
TMF!
'personhood' is indeed a non sequitur to those who want to justify abortion (I'm a moderate independent/am ok with certain exceptions/endangerment of the mother, etc.). Where possible. I advocate the adoption-option.
Anyway back to the non sequitur argument “All A is C; all B is A; therefore, all B is C.”:
All existence requires time
Human beings exist
Human beings require time for their existence
So the thinking there is 'personhood' is irrelevant and a non sequitur because logically, the process that's involved in the creation of a being (verb), requires time for its own existence. (In other words, it doesn't matter where you are along in the process...)
But of course, this whole argument has more to do with emotions than logic :wink:
They also may betray our confusion, ignorance or lack of understanding of language, its meaning and use. Or, they may apply in some context, and not in others. The use of the word "it" may be suggestive in some ways in some cases, but not in others.
Quoting TheMadFool
There's that annoying word "rights" again. Do you refer to legal rights, or non-legal rights? Sadly, dogs don't have the right to vote (worse yet, cats don't have the right to vote). I'm uncertain whether this is ethically significant, though. Are you addressing the legal rights of a foetus, or some other "rights"?
Exactly my position on metaphysics.
And ships and nations are often referred to as "she," yet neither have personhood nor vaginas. We call hurricanes things like "Katrina," but I don't know if I'd call the hurricane a she, although I might now that I've been forced to think about it. When grandpa dies, we don't look upon the corpse during the viewing and say "It looks so peaceful," but we say "he" despite grandpa having no rights or personhood. If I see your body walk by the window, I will say I saw "it," not "him" because for some reason your body has no gender, but gender belongs to your being, and that is different from your body somehow. So complicated. What does all this mean? Probably nothing metaphysical, but just how we communicate.
I'm pro choice because I don't think a sperm attached to an egg is a person, but I do believe a nine month old fetus that is just finding its way out of the birth canal is (as opposed to who and her). That's at least how I go about determining personhood from not, as opposed to looking at how we talk.
If no harm is done through abortion then why should it be considered immoral? And no I do not believe that “denying someone life” is a form of harm or else everyone who is not having babies 24/7 would be harming others in some way which just sounds ridiculous to me.
I believe that as long as a nervous system hasn’t developed abortion should be indisputably alright. Afterwards it is almost indisputably wrong. Especially considering that in most cases it is done because the family can not afford to raise the child.
So, the issue was never about whether a fetus is a person or not. It was only a matter of whether a woman wanted children or not. There is no objective sense in which a fetus could be a person; a fetus' personhood depends on nothing substantive but on the whims and fancies of women.
Quoting unenlightened
Well, from what I gather losing children mothers' wanted is relevant to the abortion debate only to the extent that it shows women are, at best confused, at worst being whimsical as regards the personhood status of fetuses. Read below:
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
That's exactly the problem. It's not necessarily the case that this situation - referring to babies with "it" - is a state of confusion. It could reflect an intuition/insight that people have on the personhood of fetuses. Personally, I prefer not to call babies "it" but I find it unlikely that pro-choicers can find a good enough reason not to.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
I haven't heard of non-legal rights so, I guess we're talking about legal ones. What is this right to life people talk about? I mean rights in that same sense for fetuses. Quoting 3017amen
Au contraire, I feel personhood is the heart of the issue; after all pro-choicers have to prove that abortion isn't murder and the immorality of murder is based on the concept of personhood.
As for emotions, you're right, women seem to be assessing the issue emotionally rather than rationally - those who want children and are thus emotionally invested think of fetuses as persons and those who don't want children lack the emotions to think of fetuses as persons.
Quoting Daniel
Interesting question but manslaughter involves committing an unlawful act that led to death, negligence in the performance of a duty, or an intent to harm all of which a fetus is incapable of.
Quoting Hanover
Maybe I'm reading too much into it but I have this nagging feeling that the way we use words [may] reflect our intuitions regarding the subject/issue we use them in.
Quoting khaled
Explain this then:
Quoting khaled
Please examine pain more carefully.
Quoting khaled
Life, as far as this discussion is concerned, requires fertilization - the union of sperm and egg. From that point on, personhood matters and the specter of murder looms over the heads of pro-choicers. When you say that you find it ridiculous that people should engage in the procreative act 24/7 if they're not to deny life then you should know how equally, if not more, ridiculous it is to say that you should use Hydrogen and Oxygen to put out a fire because water is H2O. The fire-extinguishing property of water is acquired only after Hydrogen and Oxygen have combined and not before. Likewise, the question of personhood - the possibility of murder - arises only after fertilization has occurred.
Fuck me! If that's what you gather, stick to hunting.
:brow:
Yeah and giving freedom of choice to the mother is the aim of pro abortion:smile: .
only if it's not murder.
I think you might be reading too much into it. We use words to communicate to the people around us and it's doubtful everyone is clued into all the nuances that might be impregnated into every word choice. The point being, maybe I meant to use the term "impregnated" here for the double entendre or maybe I was oblivious for a fleeting moment that we were talking about aborting pregnancies and it was just a distracting word choice.
My guess is that it depends upon who's doing the talking and some might mean some things that others did not. I would assume there are languages out there that lack the personal pronoun altogether (as I'm told is the case for Japanese), but I don't think we can then say the Japanese don't fully recognize the difference between people and hats.
TMF!
For the sake of argument, if it is true that human beings require time for [to maintain] their own existence, and to get to point B (birth), there logically must be a point A (conception), then how does one "prove personhood"?
Last time we had a discussion about time I remember telling you that time could be unreal. Doesn't that make your point about there being, how did you put it now, "point of conception" moot?
An completely plausible explanation. Yet, I wonder...pro-choicers are, at the end of the day, making the exact same claim - the fetus is an "it" just as a piece of nail you get rid off with a manicure is an "it" - albeit in different words.
No, because its logically necessary that our existence starts at conception. In other words, contingent, time dependent beings require a sense of time (for them to exist), regardless of whether its illusionary.
And so I think I already have my answer: Personhood becomes moot, no?
I don't know what you mean by that? It's all greek to me.
Anyway, I think you misunderstood me. Personhood is a real issue as is amply demonstrated by the heated debate between pro-choicers and pro-lifers. However, time doesn't [seem to] figure in this equation.
Correct...and that's my point. If logically it did figure into this thinking, it would (in principle) make abortion 'logically impossible' (loosely). And that's if the conclusion of ' human beings require time for [to maintain] their own existence" is sound. Make sense? ( In other words, 'personhood' becomes irrelevant because anywhere along/within the process of time it's still 'a person'.)
But the French insist upon assigning a gender to everything and they don't use a gender neutral pronoun, so am I to assume they think differently of trees than English speakers? This is all a matter of convention. I might be pro-choice and still refer to a male embryo as a he, even though I don't respect its personhood. The gender designations in English truly refer to genders, not to animate versus inanimate objects as far as I can tell. I would ask a child with a doll "what is her name?", not because I think the doll is a person, but because it has a gender of sorts. I call my dog "she" and I surely don't think it's a person.
Ah! I see what you're getting at but I don't think time is necessary to make sense of coming into being.
A fetus begins its journey in the plane of existence when sperm & egg unite into a zygote. Nowhere in the preceding sentence did I employ the concept of time.
Quoting Hanover
Then how do you explain:
:point:
I mean I understand your point - the usage of words are a matter of convention and don't reflect a point a view of those who utter/write them. Yet, as the quote above, from Wikipedia, clearly shows, people do care about people's choice of words i.e. they read intent into them. I was simply following the crowd. Erroneously perhaps.
TMF!
Not sure I'm following you there. Again, for the sake of 'logic', if time is required (logically necessary) for human existence, the personhood argument becomes irrelevant. Think of it as an existential argument.
(Your "journey" requires time. Time is necessary to make sense of Being.)
From the last discussion I had with you, I'm beginning to think time isn't an objective part of reality. Consider an object and suppose it appears red to you, blue to me, and yellow to someone else. From this fact alone - that the color of the object differs from person to person - I can draw the conclusion, on pain of contradiction, that color isn't an objective property of give object - objective properties don't change like that. Similarly, as the theory of relativity entails, my time is neither your time nor anyone else's i.e. it changes with perspective, or with what physicists call "frame of reference". Doesn't that indicate that time isn't an objective part of reality?
Word choice is obviously important, and in formal settings (politics, business, law), people are very careful how they phrase things. I would assume a pro-life person would be very careful to call a fetus a she and a pro-choice person would call it an it, but I'm not sure it would amount to a massive blunder for a pro-life person to call a fetus an "it," so much so that you could declare the pro-lifer as admitting the fetus really isn't a person.
I mean maybe pronoun choice is one piece of evidence you could look at in deciphering community views regarding fetuses, but it seems like a really small piece of information that wouldn't carry a whole lot of weight.
These word usage and syntax arguments have come up in other threads in other contexts, and it seems like they always break down to being just the peculiar way English is structured and it's hard to extrapolate much more from it. As noted, French is going to assign a gender to everything, Japanese isn't going to assign a gender to anything, and English is going to assign a gender to some things, but I really doubt that means the French, the Japanese, and the English all have profoundly different worldviews regarding what is male, female, animate, and inanimate.
They call it political correctness I believe.Quoting Hanover
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]The limits of my language are the limits of my world[/quote]
What do you think Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by that?
That an event that cannot be reduced to language didn't occur in any meaningful way. I don't think it means words carry pinpoint precision that cannot cause confusion due to their inherent ambiguity.
But, I could be wrong in interpreting Witt, and it's hard to know if I'm right or wrong, because, as far as I can tell, nobody ever really agrees over what he meant.
TMF!
You are referring to attributes of the object. We are parsing the existence of the physical object itself, the fetus.
In either case, the distinction there is that you are highlighting manifestations of time. Meaning, the manifestation of time is demonstrated by being, whether it has a color and whether it exists or not. Using strict definitions of Being, we know time is logically necessary for its existence. The manifestations of color, presumably also requires time for its existence. Time is essential to either property of existence. There is no escape, is there?
From memory, I think in our discussion about time, we concluded that time itself wasn't an illusion, it was only the concept of change presenting the illusion and paradox. Like time zones, time travel, relativity, mathematics, etc..
Japanese have plenty of personal pronouns, or none, depending on how your linguistic theories define the terms. All the Japanese pronouns are structurally identical to Japanese nouns, so you could say there's no need for the word-class, but there are functional equivalents to pronouns in English.
For example, there are two third person singular pronouns in Japanese: "kare" ("he") and "kanojo" ("she"). I'm not entirely sure, but I think their both derived from nouns for boyfriend ("kareshi") and "girlfriend" ("kanojo" - identical). There's no third person neuter pronoun that I'm aware of, and Japanese has a tendency to use proper names or nouns where we'd use pronouns, so the pronouns are quite a bit rarer than they would be in English (also because you can generally drop the subject of a sentence).
Japanese pronouns are a nightmare to learn, since you need to be able to properly judge your social standing as well as the formality of the current situation. For example, a boy talking to his friends might use "watashi" for himself ("I"), but it'd probably sound feminine (he'd be expected to use "boku"), but if he'd talk to a stranger on the street "watashi" would be gender neutral (and "boku" would be a social faux pas). I don't speak Japanese; I just looked into it at university to see a different system (and I like to watch anime).
None of that impacts your point. Languages encode different things differently, and what's not encoded can still be expressed. So the question remains how language relates to cognition. And that's a huge question. A one-to-one comparision between word-classes is often not going to be useful, because it tends to rais questions that are irrelevant to the topic (like "does Japanese have pronouns?"), and simultaneously narrows down the question too much.
I'm German. We have grammatical gender in German. The definite article "the" splits in three: "der" ( the - masculine), "die" (the - feminine), "das" (the - neuter). The German word for "girl" is "Mädchen", and the noun is neuter. There's a grammatical reason for this. The -chen suffix is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neuter. I'm perfectly fine with this. I don't even register a problem when speaking. "Das Mädchen" (grammatically neuter) refers to a girl (conceptually feminine). There's no conflict at all in my mind. However:
Rules of grammar would dictate for consistency that I use the neuter personal pronoun when refering to a grammatically neuter antecedant. I refuse. It feels outdated to me, and I'm uncomfortable using "es" ("it") for a girl. The notional antecedant overrides the grammatical antecedant for me. I've gotten into trouble for this in school, but not reliably.
So why am I completely comfortable with a gender neutral article, but not with a gender neutral personal pronoun? That's a cognitive question about the relationship between formal grammar and language in use. Saying that grammatical gender (wherever it's encoded) is a 1:1 correspondence to notional gender is clearly wrong. But saying that grammatical gender is irrelevant to notional gender is also clearly wrong. That's a difficult question even within one language, and it becomes even more difficult to answer once you compare languages.
It's an interesting topic, though.
Or...that my words reflect my worldview.
All I can say is we don't see eye to eye on this issue. First, we should agree on time being relative - a well established fact, entailed by Einstein's work, as the GPS on your phone will attest to. Now consider another concept that's relative - motion. Right now I'm in my chair typing this text on my keyboard. I'm at rest with respect to my chair but with respect to the sun, both my chair and I are in motion, hurtling through space. That I'm in motion/rest is not something absolute and objective, it's a matter of perspective ergo, not objective. Doesn't this mean that time too, being a relative concept, is not objective?
What do you have on Nikola Tesla? What do you have on Elon Musk? How many rockets have you sent into space? What does Musk have on extra-terrestrial life forms who may possess intelligence on different orders of magnitude than our own?
In fact, what do you have on a $3.99 calculator from Staples? Can you compute numbers faster than it? It is evidently absurdly flawed to found such ethical arguments on these metrics.
And if that is not enough, you must produce your case as to why it is ethical to kill a ten year old chimp.
Your example seemingly wants to speak to dualism. And your latter question speaks to metaphysics, the nature of time itself.
Succinctly, I would say you are parcing subjective time, which is an experience. And Objective time meaning it's determinable and measured.
I'm talking about change viz personhood. Your argument, is really not germane.
Perhaps let's try to start from the beginning, refute the statement: Human beings require time for [to maintain] their own existence. (Would it make a difference if we replace time with change from the forgoing statement?) Human beings require change for their existence.
True, false or something else? You seem to be saying it's false because time is an illusion. What follows then is that personhood must also be an illusion? Even so, personhood similarly becomes irrelevant, and abortion and procreation an illusion too. Hence making you yourself an illusion because you don't exist in time.
Pragmatically, politically, or even philosophically, I'm not convinced that square's the circle of personhood.
(I happen to believe that human beings require change for their existence. Personhood then becomes a non-issue.)
Actual numbers or this is meaningless.
Quoting TheMadFool
I don’t understand what you’re getting at
Quoting TheMadFool
I cannot for the life of me see how these two examples relate in any way. All I’m trying to say is that “denial of life” is not a valid objection to abortion since if it were it would be an objection to every second spent not having children
Quoting TheMadFool
Again, it would need to be established that a fetus is a person for this to be an issue. I think the inability to experience pain, or to think combined with a high likelihood a fetus is not even conscious disqualifies it from being considered a person
I get your point. But if pro-lifers should be having sex 24/7 as you seem to be implying, pro-choicers should be trying to enforce a moratorium on sex. After all, if the issue of abortion begins with intercourse for pro-lifers, in all fairness, the same should apply to pro-choicers. Since, pro-choicers are not seeking a ban on sex, it follows that the abortion issue has nothing to do with the act of intercourse itself but what follows from it viz. the chance occurrence of impregnation.
So I've been convinced to be pro-choice recently. The above quote shows Hegel would have taken this stance too. I think before birth only the subconscious mind exists, and it hasn't had material to do anything with yet. The first real experience of a child is birth
Fashionable Nonsense OR I'm an idiot.
It is true that the Church still condemns abortion as at least 2nd degree murder, but pro-choice Catholics claim this is not infallible and that Rome is being overly scrupulous about the whole matter
TMF happy Saturday!
You and I both can appreciate the concepts of eternity, timelessness, mathematics, Platonic ideals, abstracts, etc.. Unfortunately, our particular 'existence' relates to temporal time.
For example, relativity has taught us that in principle, at the speed of light time stops. The concept of time stopping is what is known as the concept of timelessness or eternity. In cosmology, the theory that creation requires a force existing outside of time, that creates temporal time, is a logical consequence in trying to rationalize creation ex nihilo.
However, in our context, the act of creating another human being (human's procreating) in our world of temporal time, that analogy or concept of timelessness would not be germane. We are time-dependent beings. Even whether time/change in itself is illusionary, it still doesn't preclude our requirement for the dependence on same.
And so if the dependence on temporal time, and change, is required for the existence of human beings, how does personhood affect the process of procreation? In other words, in what part of the process does a person become a person?
Right! Doesn't that imply that time isn't real? I mean what's the difference between time stopping and time not being their. After all, time stopping means elapsed time = 0 which, put differently, means time is no longer real. 0 dogs = No dogs, right? 0 seconds [elapsed] = No time.
I'm not following that, are you trying to imply that personhood is not real?
Suppose, only for the sake of argument though :wink: , that I'm a person and also consider that I'm travelling at the speed of light. Time would come to a stop but would I cease to be a person or would you say that a person is moving at the speed of light?
How is that germane to personhood?
First, time isn't real - as you said it's value reduces to zero at light or a faster speed which essentially means time no longer exists. Ergo, I don't think it sensible to attach anything that has to do with reality to something that isn't real.
Secondly, even if time were real, it's not something that has causal power over reality. I consider time and space, in conjunction, to be the passive, causally inert, backdrop against which all phenomena occur.
To be fair though I remember physicist Sean M. Carroll claim that if time were to stop, nothing would happen and I guess that includes becoming a person.
Does this mean that a person is not real? Meaning if I have sex, and create a person, that that person is not really real.
I'm not following that... ?
Of course your child is real. Where does time figure in all of this though?
In our context, the act of creating another human being (human's procreating) in our world of temporal time, we in effect become time-dependent beings. Even whether time/change in itself is illusionary, it still doesn't preclude our requirement for the dependence on same.
And so if the dependence on temporal time, and change, is required for the existence of human beings, how does personhood affect the process of procreation? In other words, in what part of the process does a person become a person?
This is the point of contention between us. I don't think we're time-dependent because time isn't real. Light travels at the, well, speed of light. For it, according to relativity, time doesn't exist. We, physical beings incapable of speeds of that magnitude, experience time. I'll give you that. Nevertheless, this is as problematic as someone claiming to see a ghost and others not being able to corroborate this claim. At the very least, it raises doubts regarding the existence of ghosts. Are they real or not? Is time real or not?
Are you suggesting somehow that a person during the procreation process is a ghost?
I'm saying that something that can be perceived by some and not by others is of doubtful reality.
Thanks I'll check it out when I get time, no pun intended. In the mean-time :smile: , my gut tells me that it's worthy of a completely different thread title.
Accordingly, when you get time, pun intended, you may want to consider the irrelevance of the OP and the personhood argument :smile:
I was just working on a hunch. I felt, like everybody does it seems, that language reflects, is a window to, our innermost thoughts, our beliefs, standpoints on the various issues that concern us. Was I wrong?
I would say TMF, you were 'wrong' to conflate the illusion of time with the personhood argument.
Ok. I went back over your first post. You seem to be saying that personhood is irrelevant to the abortion issue because a person is a time-dependent entity. If I'm anywhere near the correct reading of your view on the matter, you seem to be implying that not enough time elapses in a pregnancy for a fetus to become a person. If that's what you mean then it's precisely what all the hullabaloo is about in the abortion controversy. When does a fetus become a person? That's exactly what the use of "it' to refer to babies is about. If babies who've exited the mother's womb are "it", the word "it" connoting an inanimate object or a non-human ergo, non-person then, fetuses, being less developed than birthed babies, must surely be non-persons and being non-persons it should be ok to have abortions.
I never said this I said that “denial of life” is an argument that would lead to this. Since if it were a valid argument one would be “denying life” every second they’re not having sex. There are other pro life arguments.
Quoting TheMadFool
But I still have no clue how what I said leads to this. Why should pro choicers enforce this?
If "one would be denying life every second they're not having sex" then that implies, if you don't want to deny life then, you should have sex round the clock.
Quoting khaled
If pro-lifers need to have sex continuously because they can't deny life then pro-choicers, because they can deny life, must abstain from sex.
Yes, that would be correct.
Quoting TheMadFool
No. The logic behind time-dependent Beings make personhood irrelevant because to get to point B (birth), you must have a point A (conception). As soon as conception begins, the clock starts (from beginning to end), and ends whenever the end of one's life occurs.
Metaphorically, you could say that there are different seasons to one's life. When fall begins, if one were to stop time say, halfway through, would you still have fall? And if you did, you would have half-fall. Or if you planted a seed, and at some point the seed stopped growing, would nomenclature (plant-hood) make a difference to its identity as a plant?
Personhood is irrelevant in the sense there never is a person or irrelevant in the sense that there always was a person?
That there was always a person. Because we're time-dependent, it's just an aspect of "person-hood " as it were.
Can =/= must. I think you might not be understanding what I’m saying.
The pro life argument of “Abortion is a denial of life which is wrong” is bad because: If it were valid then said pro lifer must have as many children as feasible in order not to be “denying lives” which is bad per their argument. This doesn’t lead to pro choicers having to abstain from having children. Because there is no hypocrisy in saying that “The denying life argument is dumb” and then having kids.
Not for old white men in legislative chambers who do not care to provide any support for the poor or for preschool care or head start programs.
The best solution for abortion is ready access to sex education and pregnancy prevention methods.
The next best solution is early detection and early termination of unwanted pregnancy, modern serum pregnancy test are accurate within the first 14 days and pharmacologic termination is available.
There still will remain fetal defects and deformities, genetic diseases, and threats to maternal health.
The investment of time, emotion, money and resources in raising a child is not a responsibility to be taken lightly.
I think it is forcing someone to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term that is criminal and not good for society, the individual or the child. If privacy and autonomy mean anything they mean control over ones own body and reproductive choices.
If "can =/= must" then, on what grounds are you making the claim that just because not having sex is a denial of life that pro-lifers must engage in sex 24/7? After all, pro-lifers too can give life (i.e. not deny life) by making love continuously just as pro-choicers can deny life by not abstaining from scoodlypooping.
You say that there's no hypocrisy in saying that "The denying life argument is dumb" and then having kids. Let's see. To believe that the denying life argument is dumb implies that you find it acceptable that people deny life. How does one deny life? Two methods are available: 1) abortion and 2) sexual abstention. Since the pro-choicer doesn't mind people denying life, it implies that he accepts both methods mentioned above as a means of denying life. Which is better? Abortion or abstention. Considering there's a raging controversy about abortion with even pro-choicers not completely sure whether abortion amounts to the criminal act of murder, the best method of denying life seems to be 2) sexual abstention. Ergo, to believe that "the denying life argument is dumb" and then having kids is a clear-cut case of hypocrisy. After all, a pro-choicer knows sexual abstention is the best, in the sense least controversial, method available for denying life and if they still engage in sex and bear children then that's saying something and doing the opposite - the very definition of hypocrisy I believe.
Because they say they don’t want to deny life. And since not having sex IS denying life, they must have sex all the time.
Quoting TheMadFool
Quoting TheMadFool
Dude. Wtf? Seriously? “Since the pro choicer doesn’t mind denying life, it implies that he must deny life all the time”. Please rethink that statement. That’s like saying “Since I don’t hate chocolate I must eat chocolate 24/7”
I don’t want to come off as rude but this is super basic reasoning. Are you trolling me?
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:lol: