Are you suggesting that a person that is dependent on another human to survive is thereby no longer a human being---or never was? — Bob Ross
To me it’s no weirder to say that a skin cell is a human than it is to say a fertilized egg is a human. — praxis
I'll again point out that the interests and preferences of the person carrying are much more apparent than those of the zygot or cyst or foetus. We do not need an agreed definition of personhood in order to understand that while the mother can tell us what she wants, the conceptus' needs are only ever inferred. They are not of equal standing. — Banno
What are these "same reasons"?
Because I would say that it is wrong to kill other humans because it is wrong to kill humans with thoughts and feelings and wants. Embryos and (early stage) foetuses don't have thoughts or feelings or wants. They are more like the brain dead living on life support.
a) "X is a human" means "X has human DNA"
b) It is never acceptable to kill a human
c) Therefore, it is never acceptable to kill something with human DNA
So it's not exactly the case that we ought not kill them because they are a person, but that they are a person and we ought not kill them because they have thoughts and feelings and wants and so on. — Michael
She doesn’t deserve to be killed. — NOS4A2
Here it is: it is wrong to kill an innocent human being. A fetus is an innocent human being. Therefore, it is wrong to kill a fetus. Which premise would you disagree with? — NOS4A2
So it's not that entity X with attributes a, d, l, and q ought not be killed. It's that if entity X has the attributes that satisify what a person is then entity X should not be killed.
I do follow what you're saying, and maybe we're not saying anything terribly different, but you seem to be saying that "Person" is shorthand for saying "entity X with attributes a, d, l, and q," so we needn't elevate the term "Person" to mean something more or different. My view though is that entity Y with attributes a, d, l, and c and not q might also be a "Person," so it serves an important function to place entities X and Y into the "Person" catagorization because in our moral universe, People have special rights. — Hanover
What you are thinking, is that somehow a dog's cell can just become a dog---that's not how that works. — Bob Ross
The differences are, as far as I can tell, you place moral value on what human beings can do, while I place moral value on what a human being is. Is that fair? — NOS4A2
Yes. As related to my reply to Hanover above, what a human is depends on how we use the word "human", and how we use the word "human" is a contingent fact about the English language, open to change. If we use the word "human" to refer to anything with human DNA then embryos are human. If we use the word "human" only to refer to sufficiently developed organisms with human DNA then embryos are not human. It is a mistake to commit to some kind of essentialist view of being human such that we can be wrong in (not) using the word "human" to refer to embryos.
And whether or not it is morally acceptable to kill an embryo does not depend on whether or not it is conventional in the English language for the word "human" to refer also to embryos.
We need to look to more concrete facts. These concrete facts are biological, neurological, and psychological. Simply having human DNA is not sufficient biological grounds to entail that the thing "deserves" to live. Whereas being able to think and feel and so on is sufficient biological, neurological, and psychological grounds.
I use the term "human being" in the sense that it is a member of species homo sapiens, whether it is developed or not. A fetus is not of some other species. If a human lifecycle begins at conception, then we are speaking of human life and no other. This is an existentialist and "animalist" view rather than an essentialist view. — NOS4A2
And to be a member of the species homo sapiens is to have the appropriate ("human") DNA? So when you say that it is wrong to kill a foetus because it is human you are simply saying that it is wrong to kill a foetus because it has human DNA.
I fail to see how you get from "the foetus has human DNA" to "therefore it is wrong to kill a foetus".
If I grant your view, then every single cell in my body is its own human being. Do you see how absurd that is? — Bob Ross
The seed is not a plant — Bob Ross
This paper re-examines the question of whether quirks of early human foetal development tell against the view (conceptionism) that we are human beings at conception. A zygote is capable of splitting to give rise to identical twins. Since the zygote cannot be identical with either human being it will become, it cannot already be a human being. Parallel concerns can be raised about chimeras in which two embryos fuse. I argue first that there are just two ways of dealing with cases of fission and fusion and both seem to be available to the conceptionist. One is the Replacement View according to which objects cease to exist when they fission or fuse. The other is the Multiple Occupancy View - both twins may be present already in the zygote and both persist in a chimera. So, is the conceptionist position tenable after all? I argue that it is not. A zygote gives rise not only to a human being but also to a placenta - it cannot already be both a human being and a placenta. Neither approach to fission and fusion can help the conceptionist with this problem. But worse is in store. Both fission and fusion can occur before and after the development of the inner cell mass of the blastocyst - the entity which becomes the embryo proper. The idea that we become human beings with the arrival of the inner cell mass leads to bizarre results however we choose to accommodate fission and fusion.
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