SSlightning said:
So then, if the golden rule only be applied to those who understand it it is perfectly logical to assume that killing a 2 month old is not murder, since they have no more intelligence then that of an animal.
Well, not quite. A normally developing two-year-old human is in a "gray area" regarding "where do you draw the line" between humans and animals. It does have significant (more than animal-level) Free Will and advanced empathy; it does not yet have much in the way of symbol-abstraction ability. Also you are ignoring the tradition that as long as young humans are unable to be even minimally self-reliant, they are not granted much in the way of rights, and are often treated legally like property. So, whose 2-year-old do you think you can kill? Your own? Certainly not someone else's; there are laws against wanton destruction of other people's property! (You are not allowed to shoot your neighbor's dog.) Note that I personally would raise only a minor objection to your killing your own 2-year-old. I would object based on the above facts about "gray area", but not-object because you are thereby deleting worthless genes from the gene pool, with
you declaring your own genes worthless, by halting their propagation to future generations! Obviously if this sort of worthlessness weeds itself out of the gene pool, then the rest of the human race benefits thereby (everyone else won't be killing their own 2-year-olds).
SSlightning said:
So your saying it is ok by you that if you were a fetus that you are to be killed for the vanity of the mother?
Of course it is OK. I exist
in spite of all abortions ever done; if I didn't exist I wouldn't be able to answer that question either way, right? You are failing to understand that there is no way to tell in advance what political leanings a given fetus will acquire if it is allowed to be born and grow up. I suppose that if there was such a way, humanity would be doomed to an everlasting dictatorship, by the simple expedient of aborting all possible political opponents in the womb. But since there isn't any such way, your question is moot. It is like saying that abortion kills potential Einstiens without acknowledging the equal possibility that it also kills potential Hitlers. It balances out.
SSlightning said:
Is a fetus classified as a homo sapien or not? If not then what is it classifed as? Does it somehow evolve from one creature to another? Because if that's true you got me, its not human, thus it's nothing more then an animal.
"Homo sapiens" is a name for the human species, and all modern humans are members of that species, from the zygote stage onward.
That fact does not make the human zygote, or blastocyst, or embryo, or fetus, anything other than a purely animal organism. It has
none of the mental traits that distinguish the generic individual person from the generic individual animal. Look at the logic regarding "person", when non-humans are allowed to be persons, in more detail:
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1. The English language allows for both specific and generic designations.
2. Any language tends to evolve, depending mostly on what percentage of its speaking population embraces a particular linguistic change.
3. The word "person" in English has traditionally been synonymous with the word "human", such that even dictionaries note it.
4. Recent widespread linguistic usage of "person" (in decades of science fiction) has carried the word to a widely accepted and more generic level, such that it can also be applied as a designator of non-human organisms which are equivalent in certain respects to humans.
5. The word "person" has NEVER acquired any meaning which allows it to be applied as a designator of ordinary animals.
6. Logically, we now need to know exactly how the word "person" can designate humans and human-equivalent non-human organisms, but never animals.
7. Once #6 has been accomplished, to specify a dividing line between persons and animals, and recognizing the biological fact that the human body is 100% an animal body, logic inexoribly concludes that the normal and complete process of human biological growth starts out on the pure-animal side of the dividing line, and ends up on the person-qualifying side of the dividing line.
8. In other words, #7 is saying that there will be no way humans below a certain developmental stage, depending on #6, can continue to be assigned the traditional designation of "person".
9. Therefore no one, in this era of the English language, can aribitrarily confer "personhood" upon all humans.
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More on this below.
SSlightning said:
My arguement is that the fact that it is homosapien means it has the right to live.
But that statement is
not a fact, as explained in text that you quoted in Msg #968, shortly after you wrote the above sentence. Your mere claim that your statement is factual does not make it factual. Let's see the supporting evidence for your claim!
SSlightning said:
On what grounds can you say that the decisions of today will be the same as that of the futures? You dont know, I dont know, no one does because it is impossible to see into the future. The fact that a fetus will become human will be just as applicable in the future as it is today.
I did not say the precise thing that you are talking about. I specifically indicated that if the "background data", behind a decision, was the same in the future as today, then the same decision should result. As an example, suppose a geology scan shows that there is no sign of an oil deposit beneath a certain piece of landscape. On the basis of that data the oil company might decide not to drill for oil, right? And if in the future another geology scan is made, and the same result comes back, do you think that the decision about drilling would be the same or different?
SO: with respect to the thing that I was
actually talking about, that thing was the definition of "person". If the definition of "person" today is limited to humans, as you have been prejudicially promoting, then of course unborn humans would qualify as persons under that definition. But in the long-long-term Incoming Future, when potential interactions with non-human intelligences of one sort or another cannot be denied,
that definition of "person" will need to be modified to avoid conflicts. Well, if we can modify "person" in the future to accommodate non-human intelligences, then we can do it
now, right? Which means that this piece of background information becomes the same now as it would be in the future --and also means that the enumerated logic earlier in this message applies
now, just as much as it would apply in the future.
FutureIncoming said:
"Right To Life" is a political thing that humans have arbitrarily claimed for themselves, in spite of Natural Fact. And, because it is political and arbitrary, it can be applied and withheld politically and arbitrarily. As indeed it is, since unborn humans are not granted Right To Life, while born humans are granted it. Nor do the unborn need to have it, since they totally lack the brainpower to appreciate it. On what rational, logical, and/or objective grounds can you say otherwise?
SSlightning said:
In essence your argueing for agreeing with the laws here, not that abortion is a right?
WRONG. I am saying that the laws are correct in granting abortion as a right, because that agrees with the Natural Fact that that there is no such thing as a "Right to Life".
SSlightning said:
based on this statement you would be arguing for life if the law said it was the right thing.
FALSE. I would be arguing that a law prohibiting abortion is a stupid one that does not agree with Natural Fact. Just like a law (actually attempted!) that tried to set the mathematical constant "pi" equal to exactly 3 was a stupid proposal that did not agree with Natural Fact. The
political "right to life" was created solely for the purpose of encouraging people to get along with each other. Thus the stuff I wrote earlier about Ethics applies, including the fact that unborn humans are strictly and only and totally uncompromisingly selfish in their purely-animal-level parasitic activities. Into the category of "generic non-persons" they fit, perfectly.
SSlightning said:
Easy, the fact that the fetus will become homo sapien.
A fetus can be a member of the species homo sapiens already, but that fact means nothing. Consider a proven-to-be-brain-dead human on life-support. Fully "homo sapiens" is the species of that totally
animal living body. It
measurably has no chance of recovering its "person"ality. Your criteria for "right to life" would forbid "pulling the plug", in spite of the fact that nobody would benefit from keeping that mindless body on life-support (except the doctors, of course, but their self-interest/conflict-of-interest spoils any "keep the plug in" statements they might make).