When does human life begin?

[bernie14]

Yes, yes, one side is defending human rights and the other are smug, narrow minded primitives

 

[Birdjaguar]

No, one side says government knows best and the other says individuals know best.

 

[Arwon]

But that means the debate will never be settled.

It is quite settled in lots of places, and globally the broad trend has been progress towards fuller access. It's relatively rare to see countries backslide like the United States, and around 50 countries have liberalised their laws in the last 25 years.

Currently, something like two thirds of reproductive age women in the world live under laws where abortion is broadly available, either without providing a reason, or reasons which include broad socio-economic grounds.

 

[Narz]

There is no specific moment when you go from no personhood to personhood, it doesn't work like that. And that's the problem. The law expects exact definitions, but here one does not exist.

Even if a specific moment existed where you could point and say: "Ha! There it is! At this exact millisecond personhood has been formed!", surely this would be different for every single person on the planet anyway.

The law is forced to approximate here and specify a point in time that's clearly defined in legal terms and specifies a change from non-personhood to personhood. But that's not what actually happens in real life

Same thing w age of consent, age one can drive or drink alcohol or join the military.

Whenever fetus has ability to feel pain is a good line to start drawing restrictions (barring medical necessity of course)

 

[RobAnybody]

The accusation of 'virtue signalling' is an attempt at deflection (or dismissal). In practical outcomes, it's the same as someone saying "I don't want to" or "I don't care". It's just more wordy and intended to appeal to an audience as well. The phrasing on disagreeing with the proposed changes will depend on the person's moral framework, but whether it's poc hoc rationalisation or a legitimate criticism will depend on factors unique to the situation.

I found this interesting because I've read several of your posts as criticizing people for "talking the talk but not walking the walk" or simply pointing out "bad" behavior while not upping their own game. [forgive me for paraphrasing your points into a couple tiny soundbites].

I honestly thought this was your way of pointing out people were simply "virtue signalling" without actually using that term. Have I misunderstood your point when saying people should "step up" to support their causes instead of just complaining about "bad" people, or am I simply not understanding how you are using the term "virtue signalling"?

 

[El_Machinae]

I don't use the term 'virtue signalling', because I don't know what it means. Er, I don't accuse people of it, because it's not a useful term for me.

The part you quoted is trying to unpack why other people use the term 'virtue signalling'. When I criticize people for "talking the talk but not walking the walk", my motivation is get them to act on their beliefs, not to shut them up nor to imply that I don't actually care about their concerns. Whereas, when I see people sling the accusation, those are the two motives I most commonly assume. But, in practical outcomes, responding with "that's virtue signalling" is the same as "I don't want to" which is the same as saying "I don't sufficiently value that outcome", because it's only the outcome that matters.

I have very short anecdote. I pointed out in a public gathering that I don't eat beef, because it causes too much damage. A lady pointed out that I had a leather belt. "You didn't say that to me because you care about animals or the planet or because you respect my concerns. You just wanted me to not have a belt."

The sole goal was to get me to either have less or to shut up. My goal was to be mimicked not to maximize my personal sacrifice. If I am already giving up beef, getting someone to eat less beef has way more benefit than me not having a belt.

Edit: forgot this was about abortion. Here's why we need more efforts on abortion - the actual conflict is a political conflict (or violence, if politics fails). Money is 'commodified legal power'. That's what it is. You have that, and you have your vote. We all believe in advocacy, but it's power that matters. You're not a better advocate than the experts on your side. And, if you don't believe in utilizing the instruments of power then prepare to lose to those that do.

 

[Gorbles]

I can see a trend, hope it's spotted by others, see that it isn't & be sad about it, all without any moral superiority.

I can goto Spain, attempt to speak Spanish, do it badly, someone can notice and correct my errors and help me improve all without making themselves 'superior'. Being right isn't superior & being wrong isn't inferior. Anyone who speaks one must assume imagines they have some nuance to add to the conversation. Why be defensive about it?

You teach your kid everyday right? Doesn't make you superior.

Not everyone w an opinion or idea about improving society is moral grandstanding.

But, theoretically, I can teach my kid to be morally superior. To indulge in it. Taught behaviour, all around, right? It's not necessarily innate.

Regardless, I don't think any form of sad involves "", so y'know, I just wasn't buying your claim up to this point. But the point you're making now is far more interesting, because I don't think you get it. Being right isn't superior and being wrong isn't inferior. But people make discussions into a game where this is the case. That's the entire point. Calling me "defensive" about it is about as useful as calling you the same. It's a label. Probably better saved for the "woke" thread, that one; people and labels.

The point is with regards to abortion and thus personhood is it is associated with a moral standing by default. For good and for bad, for valid reasons and less valid reasons. Morality factors heavily into the discussion even when it shouldn't, and none of us are immune to it. Not everyone with an opinion about improving society is grandstanding, but everyone who disagrees with that opinion tends to call it grandstanding. That's the point.

Edit: forgot this was about abortion.

Ehhh, personhood. Abortion's the other one. But we're all falling into the mess in both threads, so I don't even know why I'm pointing it out. Probably because I'm already typing a reply to someone else

 

[Narz]

Regardless, I don't think any form of sad involves "", so y'know, I just wasn't buying your claim up to this point

When you're sad & feel alone in your ideas and then you read something that resonates with you it can elict a strong feeling of approval.

I don't even remember who/for what I used that smilie with.

 

[Narz]

The point is with regards to abortion and thus personhood is it is associated with a moral standing by default

Personhood/sentience etc. can be seperated from morality. Like automobile safety the ultimate goal is morality but you can try to look at it purely mechanically (what are the aspects that make a human human and add the morality in afterwards).

 

[miaasma]

human life absolutely begins once your first wonder gets sniped by an AI one turn from completion

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Once artificial wombs ae developed it might make abortion always illegal.

And if something goes wrong? Artificial wombs don't guarantee that everything will work out perfectly. They just guarantee that a woman won't have to go through the process of gestation and childbirth herself, and of course artificial wombs don't engage in risky behaviors like smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or other activities that could endanger the fetus if an accident were to occur.

This put me immediately in mind of C.J. Cherry's novel Cyteen. The main storyline is that a 120-year-old woman, considered a genius by her peers - who were also extremely intelligent people - was murdered. She had been working on genetic and psycho-social projects that would take generations to run, and her expertise was still needed.

So it was decided to clone her - something she herself had planned for. The idea is that you don't just clone the physical body - you raise the cloned infant in an environment both physical and social that is as close as possible to how the original person was raised, even down to the type of people around them and replicating the major life events they went through - the good with the bad. The result was as near a perfect physical and psychological replicate of Dr. Ariane Emory as possible, though this novel takes her story up to the age of 18.

Artificial wombs are used in this setting. In fact, it's considered unusual and extremely eccentric for women not to use them.

In the case of Ariane Emory... here's a brief excerpt:

This one was going to tie up nine tanks for three weeks, and six for six weeks, before they made a final selection and voided the last backups.

Reseune was taking no chances.

Reseune is the place where all this is happening. It's a community of scientists working on an incredible variety of projects and experiments, on a planet that's partially terraformed (the native atmosphere is deadly and will give you cancer if you breathe any of it).

The idea here is that to be sure of getting the best and healthiest replicate, they started with 9 artificial wombs. After 3 weeks they would examine them and void (abort) any with defects or that were merely not as good as they would prefer. After another six weeks they would examine the remaining fetuses and void three more. At a later stage of gestation, when there were only three candidates left, they would choose the closest match that was the most viable and void the others. Thus the choices are winnowed from 9 to 1 and that fetus would hopefully emerge from the artificial womb after 9 months as a healthy baby that was as close a match to the original person as possible.

I tend towards the view hat the most reasonable cutoff for when the state has some interest in regulating abortion is once the fetus develops the capacity to suffer. Since suffering is subjective and hard to measure, the best proxy is probably once it has the nerve connections that allow it to sense physical pain. That is around 20 to 22 weeks.

Uh-huh. Terribly concerned for the suffering of a fetus even though nobody really knows when or how that happens, but couldn't care less about the suffering of a baby that's born with defects or other issues, or at the other end of life and the suffering of Alzheimers victims and people with terminal illnesses who might prefer not to suffer.

There should never be exceptions for rape or incest. Those imply that the purpose of the abortion ban is not to protect innocent life but only to punish girls or women for having consensual sex.

WHAT?!

In what universe is rape consensual?

Are you seriously telling us that you think it's okay to force a woman, teenager, or even a child to continue a pregnancy that happened due to rape/incest (the two are usually the same, since few people willingly commit incest nowadays)?

SERIOUSLY?

What if the unborn child is found to have a genetic disorder, such as Batten's disease, which will be degenerative and fatal within 5 to 7 years? Should an abortion be allowed? If the State says no, who should pay the additional cost of caring for such a doomed child?

The state, of course, since it's forcing the birth of the child.


I was going to say something about Alzheimers, but holy crap. It's a hideous disease that kills twice. First it kills the mind, and then it kills the body. If the victim is lucky, there are only months between these stages, rather than years or decades. My grandmother was lucky, and suffered less than a year. My dad had 12 years of it.

This is why I really want the government to change the MAiD laws to allow for advance arrangements. Because of cancer on my mother's side and what happened to my grandmother and dad, I'm at risk for both these things. I want to decide for myself what constitutes an acceptable quality of life. Neither my grandmother or dad were able to decide that for themselves, and their deaths were agonizing. It's been nearly 25 years since my grandmother's death and just 3 years since my dad died.

 

[CKS]

Are you seriously telling us that you think it's okay to force a woman, teenager, or even a child to continue a pregnancy that happened due to rape/incest (the two are usually the same, since few people willingly commit incest nowadays)?

If one believes that a fertilized egg is a person with all the rights of people who are born (and more rights than the woman in whose body it is), then it is inconsistent to allow for exceptions for rape. The "child" is not the rapist, and "executing" it for the crime of someone else is horrific.

If someone professes to be against all abortions except in the case of rape, they are telling us that the reason they are anti-abortion is not because they believe the fertilized egg is a person but because they want to punish women for getting pregnant when they don't want to be.

This isn't a statement that women who are raped should be forced to give birth, but a statement that anti-abortion people are inconsistent, and their arguments about abortion rights are not rational.

 

[El_Machinae]

Rape triggers the violinist argument. It has a set of dilemmas that are different from consensual sex or even consensual fertilization. On this front, there will be scales of 'pro-life' just like there are scales of 'pro-choice'.

We will always have policies that have 'innocent collateral'. The universe doesn't allow us to have perfect morality, nevermind perfect laws. I'm not sure that being swayed by the violinist argument makes someone 'irrational', because it intersects with too many other dilemmas.

This is confounded with the heritage of it being 'acceptable' to extinguish the offspring of immoral people and any dissonance about the fates of the dead innocent.

 

[Gorbles]

When you're sad & feel alone in your ideas and then you read something that resonates with you it can elict a strong feeling of approval.

I don't even remember who/for what I used that smilie with.

You're right, I should've completely ignored any feelings of happy or sad from the start. Your post was complete approval of El_Mac's argument and how you thought people would've already "learned that lesson by now". It was indulgent. It was you being morally superior.

Now, the actual fun is whether or not it was appropriate. But my thing is, as it regularly is, is pointing out how often we're complicit in behaviour we think only other people engage in. It's not really hypocrisy, I don't always use the word. More like a subconscious bias. Rationalisation.

Personhood/sentience etc. can be seperated from morality. Like automobile safety the ultimate goal is morality but you can try to look at it purely mechanically (what are the aspects that make a human human and add the morality in afterwards).

Eh. The fact that it technically can doesn't mean it regularly is.

If we wanted to divorce (legal) personhood and / or sentience from morality entirely we (generally) wouldn't place special value on a human life. We wouldn't rate so many things on IQ. And so on, and so forth. There are so many things wrapped up in what makes a person a person (and what makes any creature sentient) that we'll be unpacking those biases for a long time yet.

 

[Narz]

You're right, I should've completely ignored any feelings of happy or sad from the start. Your post was complete approval of El_Mac's argument and how you thought people would've already "learned that lesson by now". It was indulgent. It was you being morally superior.

No. I wish the left would learn so they could win.

I don't feel morally superior when potential allies are busy infighting. I'd rather be on a winning team that doesn't alienate so many.

I We wouldn't rate so many things on IQ. And so on, and so forth.

We can measure IQ without pretending it makes one person worth more than another.

Ideally we can acknowledge and celebrate people's merits without thinking they're better than us & acknowledge their limitations without castigating them.

 

[Gorbles]

No. I wish the left would learn so they could win.

I don't feel morally superior when potential allies are busy infighting. I'd rather be on a winning team that doesn't alienate so many.

I too wish for a great many things that would cause the change I'd like to see in society. But I disagree on the learning required, because to me, it's more than just "the left" that needs to learn, and to see it frequently characterised as such does come across as moral grandstanding. It implies you, or the general ideological group you associate with, has somehow got its own problems sorted out.

Everyone and every group has problems to deal with. The impact is measured by the progress towards any goal made regardless of that conflict. Conflict comes and goes all the time, right?

We can measure IQ without pretending it makes one person worth more than another.

Ideally we can acknowledge and celebrate people's merits without thinking they're better than us & acknowledge their limitations without castigating them.

No, IQ is literally designed to segregate people by a rather simplistic and reductive view of intelligence. But that's for another thread. I'm the one who brought it up, so that's my mistake.

The point is we associate things with morality on a very basic level. If someone does a stupid thing a bunch of times, we assume they're inherently stupid. If someone does a smart thing a bunch of times, guess what we assume? The problem with that is it's quantified on what we see of that person. Which is something I struggle with online with a bunch of people I've generally only ever known through digital interactions. But that's my point - it's very difficult not to do, to the extent that we all do it. When it comes to personhood, we've already talked about stuff like dementia and whatnot in this thread, which merely proves the point. We're trying to litigate "personhood" based on something like brain activity, or some other biological function (which, technically, you could simulate with a machine. Ethical quandaries aside, this kinda begs the question of what we're even trying to define in the first place).

It all comes back to "right" and "wrong", because the topic of the thread is personhood. How a person qualifies as a person. Morality is baked-in.

If we were truly able to jettison morality and all these other pesky grey areas, it'd be a very done-and-dusted topic, in my opinion. The "pro-life" movement is by-and-large excessively funded by both conservative and theological interests. Conflict of Church and state indicates undue influence on legislation that is too flawed to support. Rejected. Personhood is defined by the social apparatus of the state, and an unborn child requires the birth parent in order to survive. Regardless of whether or not both parent and (unborn) child are determined to be a person, logistically, this puts the birth parent at a higher priority. Again - voiding morality for the moment. Priority wins. It's icky, because it kinda makes it about what a person's "worth", but that seems to be how personhood works in most countries anyhow.

(this is assuming no proposal involves changing the state apparatus to provide full support to all involved parties, because a lot of the situation we're stuck in is because of a prioritisation of resources)

Seems simple enough, but I'm sure people will find a way to disagree. Pretty much all pro-life arguments are founded on the emotive (and moral) appeal of killing a person (while ignoring or dismissing any threat to the birth parent, but that's an aside).

 

[Birdjaguar]

The nature of personhood is primarily culture based. Each culture and sub culture decides who is a person and when. It is flexible and changes over time and from place to place. There is no universal definition of personhood or its application.

 

[Narz]

I too wish for a great many things that would cause the change I'd like to see in society. But I disagree on the learning required, because to me, it's more than just "the left" that needs to learn, and to see it frequently characterised as such does come across as moral grandstanding. It implies you, or the general ideological group you associate with, has somehow got its own problems sorted out.

One can have an opinion on another or a group or society without any implications of having ones own problems sorted.

I've never made any claims to have my own life figured out.

Everyone and every group has problems to deal with. The impact is measured by the progress towards any goal made regardless of that conflict. Conflict comes and goes all the time, right?

How is this related to what I said.

No, IQ is literally designed to segregate people by a rather simplistic and reductive view of intelligence.

Agreed.

The point is we associate things with morality on a very basic level. If someone does a stupid thing a bunch of times, we assume they're inherently stupid. If someone does a smart thing a bunch of times, guess what we assume? The problem with that is it's quantified on what we see of that person. Which is something I struggle with online with a bunch of people I've generally only ever known through digital interactions. But that's my point - it's very difficult not to do, to the extent that we all do it. When it comes to personhood, we've already talked about stuff like dementia and whatnot in this thread, which merely proves the point. We're trying to litigate "personhood" based on something like brain activity, or some other biological function (which, technically, you could simulate with a machine. Ethical quandaries aside, this kinda begs the question of what we're even trying to define in the first place).

It all comes back to "right" and "wrong", because the topic of the thread is personhood. How a person qualifies as a person. Morality is baked-in.

If we were truly able to jettison morality and all these other pesky grey areas, it'd be a very done-and-dusted topic, in my opinion. The "pro-life" movement is by-and-large excessively funded by both conservative and theological interests. Conflict of Church and state indicates undue influence on legislation that is too flawed to support. Rejected. Personhood is defined by the social apparatus of the state, and an unborn child requires the birth parent in order to survive. Regardless of whether or not both parent and (unborn) child are determined to be a person, logistically, this puts the birth parent at a higher priority. Again - voiding morality for the moment. Priority wins. It's icky, because it kinda makes it about what a person's "worth", but that seems to be how personhood works in most countries anyhow.

(this is assuming no proposal involves changing the state apparatus to provide full support to all involved parties, because a lot of the situation we're stuck in is because of a prioritisation of resources)

Seems simple enough, but I'm sure people will find a way to disagree. Pretty much all pro-life arguments are founded on the emotive (and moral) appeal of killing a person (while ignoring or dismissing any threat to the birth parent, but that's an aside).

Mostly agree w all that.

Can use mammalian life as a less hot button way to discuss instead of personhood.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

If one believes that a fertilized egg is a person with all the rights of people who are born (and more rights than the woman in whose body it is), then it is inconsistent to allow for exceptions for rape. The "child" is not the rapist, and "executing" it for the crime of someone else is horrific.

If someone professes to be against all abortions except in the case of rape, they are telling us that the reason they are anti-abortion is not because they believe the fertilized egg is a person but because they want to punish women for getting pregnant when they don't want to be.

This isn't a statement that women who are raped should be forced to give birth, but a statement that anti-abortion people are inconsistent, and their arguments about abortion rights are not rational.

I addressed @MagisterCultuum and would prefer him to reply, thank you. I want a simple, nonconvoluted reason why he thinks it's okay to force a woman or child to give birth if they were impregnated by a rapist or were the victim of incest (very few of these women would be engaging in "consensual rape" or even "consensual incest" unless it's cousins. That's still allowed, though society tends to raise its eyebrows on such things these days.

 

[Gorbles]

One can have an opinion on another or a group or society without any implications of having ones own problems sorted.

I've never made any claims to have my own life figured out.

Sure you can, but that isn't what happened. The implication was a lesson learned, vs. people who hadn't. That said, if you're dead set on insisting you didn't mean to come across as being superior, I'd really hope that's an insight into all the other times other people seem to be doing the same. Very rarely does the person doing it think they're being superior. Those cases are the obvious exceptions that are often pretty easy to ignore.

How is this related to what I said.

You were talking about the left fighting with itself, but don't worry about it, it's best for another thread.