jimmyjack said:
People have a right to live.
FutureIncoming said:
Not according to Nature. Only according to people. Do you understand the difference between the Objective and the Subjective?
jimmyjack said:
Are you joking? It is nature that provides life.
I am not joking at all. Yes, Nature provides life freely --and Nature exterminates it just as freely. A Global Warming episode about 250 million years ago, possibly triggered by a combination of giant meteor impact in what is now Antarctica, and massive lava outflows in what is now Siberia
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/13/MNGPRAB3QC1.DTL
http://www.nineplanets.org/mercury.html (read about the Caloris Basin and "weird terrain" to see how a big-enough impact on one side of a planet can mess up the other side) killed 90% of all marine species and 70% of all land species on Earth. A "Right to Life", however, is generally accepted as meaning something like, "it may not be freely exterminated". Well, since Nature pays no attention to that definition, it logically follows that
there is indeed no such thing as a Right to Life in Nature. And therefore no human nor human fetus was given a Right to Life by Nature, a statement that answers this:
jimmyjack said:
Show me where it says a foetus does not have a right to live.
See above.
jimmyjack said:
What proof do you have that a foetus is not a person?
This has already been answered several times, but you have apparently been stupidly ignoring it. Why don't you try reading instead of ignoring?
FutureIncoming said:
A person is defined by having certain mental abilities, and that fact is not one whit diminished if there is a lack of physical ablities such as hearing or speech or sight. Since a human fetus does not have person-class mental abilities, it cannot possibly qualify as a person, as explained here:
FutureIncoming said:
Fact: The English language allows nonhumans to qualify as people. The word is even generic enough that the physical nature of a person is irrelevant. Fiction has introduced persons having "bodies" ranging from ectoplasm to subatomic particles to electricity to gaseous to liquid to jelly to solid to electronic/mechanical, to various combinations thereof (a cyborg can be a person).
Logic: Because of the wide range of possible types of persons, it is impossible to associate personhood with a fixed set of physical characteristics. Thus it is mental characteristics that distinguish persons from non-persons.
Fact: An unborn human is inherently unable to exhibit any of the mental characteristics that serve to identify persons.
Logical conclusion: Although abortion kills an unborn human, {{it doesn't matter since it is not a person}}.
ALSO:
FutureIncoming said:
isn't it obvious that you have to be able to understand the "Right to Life" principle before you can act in accordance with it? And isn't it equally factual that unborn humans don't have the brainpower to understand any such thing? {{This is exactly what I meant by saying that persons must have brainpower.}} So, if they {{nonpersons}} cannot apply it, why should it be applied to them?”
You have still failed to offer any facts or logic which invalidates that. If you could possibly succeed at it,
and thereby offer a rationale that a human fetus might be a person, I expect you would have done so already. But instead offering any Objective facts or logic, all you have done is stupidly ask the same questions over and over again, even after the questions have been answered. That is not debating; that is blathering.
FutureIncoming said:
So, why don't you tell us, using facts and logic instead of opinion, why a fetus needs to have a right to life?
jimmyjack said:
For the same reason you need a right to life.
FutureIncoming said:
You are grasping at straws. Try again. Your statement could be applied to spiders, weeds, lice, rats, etc., as well as to fetuses, yet I doubt you would be willing to actually apply your statement to spiders, weeds, lice, rats, etc (that they need a right to life for the same reason you or I do). And so you have failed to indicate why human fetuses specifically need a right to life, while all other equivalently mindless organisms don't. Do remember that humans claimed a right to life for themselves because they could. But no spider nor weed nor louse nor rat nor fetus can... So, for those who can claim a right to life, to hand it out to a human fetus that cannot claim it for itself, is to exhibit unexplained favoritism over other organisms that cannot claim right-to-life for themselves, such as spiders, weeds, lice, rats, etc. Would you care to explain that favoritism in Objective terms, such that prejudice or hypocrisy are not involved?
jimmyjack said:
You where: a foetus, you where never: a spider.
Irrelevant and actually somewhat
wrong. What I am now, a person, is not what my originally mindless animal body once was, a non-person. No person of any sort
is his or her or its body. Your statement is irrelevant because it wrongly assumes that the person is the body. REMEMBER:
FutureIncoming said:
it is impossible to associate personhood with a fixed set of physical characteristics. Thus it is mental characteristics that distinguish persons from non-persons.
And remember this, too: You and I and every other human walking the Earth is here
in spite of all abortions ever performed, and the biosphere is staggering because of the sheer numbers of humans. Once upon a time abortion was frowned-upon because there was a need to do everything possible to perpetuate the species, but those days have passed. and indeed times have changed so much that abortion is now a useful tool
for perpetuating most of humanity, by preventing a Malthusian Catastrophe that would wipe out 99% of us....
jimmyjack said:
Foetuses are what we are;
RIDICULOUSLY FALSE. Do you have an attached umbilical cord, and do you float in amniotic fluid?
jimmyjack said:
we are not spiders or weeds.
My, my, an actually true statement from jimmyjack. What of it? Just because we are human and spiders and weeds are not,
that is your excuse for claiming that spiders and weeds don't deserve a Right to Life? Tsk, tsk! REMEMBER:
FutureIncoming said:
Would you care to explain that favoritism in Objective terms, such that prejudice or hypocrisy are not involved?
You are failing to do what I asked. That's why I called your feeble effort "grasping at straws".
jimmyjack said:
You said we invented a right to life for ourselves,
True!
jimmyjack said:
Tsk, tsk. Repeating such a totally obvious falsehood just makes you look stupid. Are you
ever going to stop doing that to yourself?
jimmyjack said:
“Ourselves” include: the old, the young, the healthy, the ill, the unborn, the clever, the blind...
NOT QUITE. "Ourselves" include persons. "Self" is another word for "person", don't you know? And so, to have a "self" is to have person-class brainpower. So while, "ourselves" does include the old, the young (to a limit), the healthy, the ill, the clever, and the blind --but unborn fetuses are still excluded.
jimmyjack said:
We are not: other species, such as weeds, spiders...
That's true, but it still doesn't explain why mindless human fetuses need a right to life while those equally mindless other species don't.
