Really? Are you saying that if an average human person interacted with some alien organism long enough, the human couldn't decide whether or not that other organism was a person, based on things we already know?
My point is that we do not, currently, right now this very day, have an accepted mainstream science which does study alian biology and psychology.
Hypothetical possabilities of "
if" are irrelivent because such knowledge is not actualy posessed TODAY.
Worse, it is irrelevant to the Challenge. Define person, so that we would thereby have a Generic Rule for identifying one whereever and whenever we might happen to meet one.
Your sig showes the word "
person" in quotations, which means you imply the legal term "
person" because the only time people debate with "
person" in quotations in an abortion thread is when they are discussing law.
If you now mean the generic "
person", we can go from there.
Here is the non-legal definition of "
person" I choose:
A person is defined by philosophers as a being who is in possession of a range of psychological capacities that are regarded as both necessary and sufficient to fulfill the requirements of personhood. These are, in general, that it is capable of reasoning, that it is self-conscious, and that it has an identity that persists through time. The English philosopher John Locke defined a person as "a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it"
Source.
Everything ells falls in line from here.
For the sake of the challenge I assume the Abrahamic God.
God fits this definition.
I think it's obvious that animals do not meet this criteria in toto, functioning more on instinct than higher thought, with exception.
Since for the sake of the challenge the Abrahamic God is assumed to exist, consciences is assumed to originate with God and descend down into the flesh, instead of consciences originating in the flesh. Therefore, a ZEF is either a small piece of God, so aborting a ZEF is a literal direct physical assault on God, or the ZEF has a soul/person of it's own which can not yet express itself through the ZEF, but is a person non the less.
The above, however, must also apply to ordinary animals, in that they are at least extensions of God if not persons of their own, so the Hindus and Buddhists have it right when they stop everything to save a few earthworms.
Given that, abortion can be likened to stepping on a spider in that neither should be performed.
You know, the more I hang around DP the more Buddhists get credit for all kinds of stuff. Gota love em.