What do you mean by distinct?
EDIT: Or to put that another way; what makes one human distinct from another?
The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion
- Thread starter otago
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What do you mean by distinct?
EDIT: Or to put that another way; what makes one human distinct from another?
If there was a "natural morality" there would be no need for god to keep us moral....
GhostWriter16
Deity
Different set of DNA, or different bodies.
Which suggests conjoined twins are not distinct humans but different parts of a person with chimerism are distinct humans... want to reconsider?
The problem you're running into is that you're trying to create a specific definition of something that you feel is intuitively true. It's not going to work, because biology is more fuzzy than black & white thinking. We struggle to understand it, to make it fit concepts that we feel are 'common sense'.
It's not embarrassing. We've run into head-scratching puzzles when it comes to 'race' or to 'species' or to defining what a 'gene' is. Nature doesn't have to make sense, but we're going to try anyway.
This is why you'll see that we keep coming back to 'the brain' and 'the mind'. Both skin cells and embryos are potential people, and they're potential twins, and they're potential chimeras, and they're potential cancers. A baby with two heads is two people, a baby with 8 limbs is one person. A person formed of two fused embryos is one person, a pair of people formed from one embryo is still two people (no matter how co-joined they are, as long as there're two minds).
Like I said, the problem is that nature doesn't fit your intuitions. You cannot make a cohesive definition of a person AND capture what you want AND not have weird results. "Potential" is not the same as "is", and "natural" doesn't mean "morally correct".
The only real two choices are to either refuse to be rational on the topic and just go with "common sense intuitions" or be willing to change your viewpoint as you learn new facts. The worst thing to do is try to twist and bend the facts in order to defend the pre-concieved notions if those notions were originally generated with an incomplete understanding of the biology.
...which is what I'm trying to get at here GW.
GhostWriter16
Deity
Eh, I think I'm done. Maybe if I ever end up in a position of power I'll get back to this, but otherwise its more headache than its worth. To me, all human life is the same, and its common sense to me that a fetus is a distinct human life from its mother, attached, but with a completely different set of DNA. Chimerism keeps getting brought up but its extremely rare so I don't see why its relevant.
Even if you want to base it on the presence of a brain, that gives you one month, not five or six.
Sentience makes little sense to me. If you shoot a baby in the temple it won't feel a thing, but its still outright blatant murder. I honestly don't get why killing a nonsentient fetus would be any different from this.
The reality is that we can try to use convulted biological explanations as to why killing some fetuses is OK, or we can simply accept that killing innocent human life is wrong. I take the latter.
I don't see how you can possibly come to a "Rational" answer here. It is what it is.
Even if you want to base it on the presence of a brain, that gives you one month, not five or six.
Sentience makes little sense to me. If you shoot a baby in the temple it won't feel a thing, but its still outright blatant murder. I honestly don't get why killing a nonsentient fetus would be any different from this.
The reality is that we can try to use convulted biological explanations as to why killing some fetuses is OK, or we can simply accept that killing innocent human life is wrong. I take the latter.
I don't see how you can possibly come to a "Rational" answer here. It is what it is.
Zack
99% hot gas
Or you can ignore scientific biology and use your own moral biology?
Because killing a sentient organism is entirely different from killing a non-sentient organism. There're many travesties that can occur after specific shaping compared to before specific shaping.
Chimerism and cojoined twins keep coming up because people keep on claiming that the embryo is distinct. Yes, there're many things about a baby that's distinct, but the embryonic stage is not one of them any more than the zygote stage is. Who cares if it's rare? It's absolute evidence that the definition being used is incorrect.
GhostWriter16
Deity
I disagree with the premise. Killing an animal is OK, at least I believe it is.
The reality is my ethical proposition is that it is HUMAN life that should not be destroyed (Except as punishment for a crime or in self-defense) not SENTIENT life. They are very different ethical propositions, and lead to vastly different results. I don't really know what further can be said about it. You seem to think that a human being that has never been sentient can be killed, but if a person was in a coma and temporarily unable to feel anything, you wouldn't want them killed. I don't see how that works by pure logic. Why sentience? Why is sentience so important? A fetus will become sentient in its future, while a person in a coma might not actually ever become sentient again. Yet you can kill one and not the other. I don't get it.
The reality is my ethical proposition is that it is HUMAN life that should not be destroyed (Except as punishment for a crime or in self-defense) not SENTIENT life. They are very different ethical propositions, and lead to vastly different results. I don't really know what further can be said about it. You seem to think that a human being that has never been sentient can be killed, but if a person was in a coma and temporarily unable to feel anything, you wouldn't want them killed. I don't see how that works by pure logic. Why sentience? Why is sentience so important? A fetus will become sentient in its future, while a person in a coma might not actually ever become sentient again. Yet you can kill one and not the other. I don't get it.
Zack
99% hot gas
Yes, you do get it. The reasoning behind why it is okay to abort a fetus and not to kill an unconscious human being are completely separate from each other. It's the argument you use to defend your love of capital punishment while considering yourself pro-life ("I'm pro-life when it comes to fetuses, not necessarily for everything").
GhostWriter16
Deity
I didn't say that. I said its OK to kill an animal. I didn't exactly say for no reason.
Alright, we're done.
Berzerker
Deity
by the title i thought you were saying the only moral abortion is the one you would have consented to as a baby if you could have at the time, but Pat already dealt with the charge of hypocrisy
Zack
99% hot gas
"I lost an argument, so I'm announcing my dramatic departure from the thread in a huff instead of actually conceding, giving any ground, or acknowledging any fault in my argument."
GhostWriter16
Deity
No I'm fully capable of responding to it, but you didn't even present anything new to discuss.
"You know the difference" isn't an argument. Honestly, beyond "Women's rights, ha!" I really don't.
Zack
99% hot gas
If someone says, "how you can you claim to be 'pro-life' while supporting capital punishment?", you respond by saying "they're two completely different things."
You said "how come aborting a fetus is acceptable when killing an unconscious, fully-developed human being is not?", to which I responded, "they're two completely different things."
*Note: The quote marks do not necessarily indicate verbatim quotations, but instead paraphrase.
useless
Social Justice Rogue
Well you're not really for women's rights, given you want to bloody kill them if they have abortions
No it's not. Remember the whole tumour thing? You don't mind seeing human tumours get killed (which are certainly live and certainly human) which is why you had to start drawing on the whole 'distinctness' thing in the first place. To summarise:
GW: I believe embryos are constitute human life and so should not be killed.
Counterpoint: Tumours and the like are human life that you happy to see killed.
GW: Ok then; I say embryos constitute distinct human life and distinct human life should not be killed.
Counterpoint: Identical twins are distinct human lives that come from a single non-distinct embryo. Chimeras are distinct human lives that come from two distinct embryos.
GW: Ok then; I know say that something has to have distinct DNA or distinct bodies to be 'distinct'
Counterpoint: Conjoined twins do not have distinct bodies
GW: Now thing have got confusing so I repeat that human life should not be killed.
...which takes us right back to the start. If you are going to keep popping up in abortion threads to argue your opinion, you're going to need a firmer grasp on what your opinion actually is; at the moment it's non even self consistent (as outlined in more detail by El_Mac).
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