FutureIncoming said:
I'm waiting for a pro-lifer to successfully take up this challenge: "Define "person" to be Universally accurate, regardless of physical nature, to distinguish people from mere animals, anywhere.
For example, if God exists, is non-biological, and is a person, then God is a person because {--put definitive criteria here--}. After that, please explain how unborn humans are so different from mere animals that they should be classed as persons, too.
SSlightning said:
A person is anything that is or can become a homo sapien based upon scientific fact. Unborn children are going to become homo sapiens, while animals will not.
My, what prejudice! The Universe is a mighty big place. Just the parts that we can see (a small fraction of its entirety) has something like 100billion galaxies,
each with at least 10billion stars like the Sun. Have you some reason to think that humans, on this puny Earth, are the only entities, in all of the mind-bogglingly vast Universe, with a high level of intelligence? If you think it
possible, even if only to a small degree, that we are not alone in the Universe, then why shouldn't those other intelligences be granted "person" status? Here is some Historical Fact that you need to know! In the days of tribal humanity, it was common for an individual tribe to call itself "The People", and equally common for that tribe to call all others "enemies and not-People". We know this because of anthropologists conducting interviews of surviving tribes in remote places. Well, any psychologist will tell you that hatred is always caused by fear. (From this we can conclude that Hitler was a 'fraidy cat.) And so, as xenophobia (the fear of something different) led to hatred, the result was an extremely bloody History for humanity, that caused conflict after conflict for thousands and thousands of years. Not something for us humans to be proud of, I think. Today there is some hope, in that millions of us manage to live alongside each other, mostly in peace and mostly in non-fear, in spite of many differences (see New York City for an example of that). I count that as progress, with more to be done (there are still 'fraidy-cat hate-mongers aplenty in the world). Is there some reason for that progress to stop, when the whole human species finally becomes a "tribe" that calls itself "The People"? Don't you realize that out there in the wide Universe, any
"they" that exists will have a History, also? Do you think for a moment that
their Historical definition of "People" is going to automatically include humans? It is to laugh! So, in the distant Incoming Future when humans spread across the Universe,
and they do that, also, should we have a planet-destroying war with them,
just because you think whatever-it-is that distinguishes humans from ordinary animals is somehow superior to whatever-it-is that distinguishes them from ordinary animals? Or would you rather pay attention to the Boy Scout Motto, and "Be Prepared"? That is, make the definition of "person" wide enough
now, to accommodate non-human intelligences -- and hope they are wise enough to do the same.
In another vein altogether, since you might decide to claim that it is impossible for other intelligences to exist in the Universe (despite lack of any evidence to support such a claim), there is the little matter of Artificial Intelligence.
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Consider the research being devoted to Artificial Intelligence (or "AI"). If it succeeds, then a human-level mind will come into existence as a result of technological hardware/software progress. It will come about as a direct result of studies of the human brain and how it operates.
Can you say that no matter what we learn in all the millenia of the Incoming Future, that we will never, ever, be able to learn enough about how the human brain is put together, and how it operates, to be able to construct an artificial equivalent? If you cannot honestly and with evidence say that thing, then
when it happens, there will be a distinct
equivalence between
pieces of such a technology, compared to the whole Artificial Intelligence, and the body of a fetus, compared to an independent human being. That is, the manufacturing of pieces of an AI is essential for the AI to exist, just as the reproduction of cells in a fetus is essential for an independent human being to exist. Now remember that future manufacturing will be more and more automated. This leads us to an interesting absurdity, in that if opponents of abortion require every fetus to be allowed to automatically grow a mind, then logically they should
also require Artifical Intelligences to be automatically manufactured just as soon as technically possible! The two notions really are that equivalent, and so to declare the mandatory production of AIs to be absurd is also to declare the anti-abortion stand to likewise be absurd. More specifically: Minds cannot be required to come into existence just because some of their fundamental hardware happens to exist.
So, no matter what the age of a fetus, as long as its brainpower is animal-level, there is
no requirement that it must continue to grow. (That would be like stating, "A Potential Must Be Fulfilled!" when anyone who makes that statement has the potential to fall down a staircase and break his or her neck.)
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Your definition of "person" would exclude Artificial Intelligences who could very well be far smarter and more capable than you. Why would you do that? Xenophobia? Tsk, tsk!
