If it's the mothers' desires, yes.

But it would mean the end of the species.

It's neither right nor wrong. It's morally neutral. We've established from the trolley problem that five zygotes deserve less moral consideration than one baby. And I'll go so far as to say that one million zygotes deserve less moral consideration than one baby. Each individual zygote deserves negligible moral consideration, and certainly when compared to the moral consideration of a woman being forced to carry to term and birth a child.

Is it morally permissible to kill all zygotes then?

Develop into human beings. Interesting.

But also, why does it matter? Why is it wrong to kill something that develops into a human being but not something that develops into a fly?

I don’t care about flies and am at constant war with them. It’s wrong to kill a human being when he doesn’t deserve it. Flies deserve it in virtue of their very nature.

As I said, in the scenario under consideration these are living zygotes growing inside an artificial womb. When we have to choose between doing nothing and letting one baby die or doing something that causes five zygotes to die, what should we do? We should do the thing that causes five zygotes to die.

Fine, we should kill zygotes if and only if no mother is present and doing so will stop a train from running over babies. Now, absent those conditions, is it right or wrong to kill zygotes?

And? It's not the biological stuff that's morally relevant. Ants are biological. Flies are biological. So what?

Flies don’t develop into human beings.

We're talking about whether or not it is wrong to kill zygotes. The manner in which the zygotes are killed is presumably irrelevant.

Your deflection is telling.

If they are out of the womb they are already dead. Convenient.

There are 46 DNA molecules, each tightly coiled around proteins, contained within cytoplasm and a cell membrane.

All of which are biological.

We can assume, for the sake of argument, that we are technologically advanced and have developed artificial wombs within which the zygotes in question are growing.

Isn’t that convenient. Remove the one act under discussion from the argument entirely.

Recall that it is the abortionist who must justify the act of killing. These thought-experiments are excuse-making for killing. We’ll need to come up with some better ones.

You said "this biology ... is present from the very beginning ... of every human being’s life." Except it's not. The genetics is present but the morphology and physiology aren't.

You believe there are just two sets of genes swimming around in there?

Then the moral dilemma concerns whether to kill a baby or an adult. We're concerned with whether to kill a baby or a zygote. So for the sake of argument we can assume that the zygote is not growing inside a woman but an artificial womb.

To kill a zygote you abort it. Go give abortions.

OK, construct a trolley-car type scenario (or any scenario really) where you refuse to sacrifice zygotes to save actual persons.

Try it with the human zygotes still in their mother, where they are generally found. For some reason you removed the mother entirely.

This is false. There's more to biology than genetics – there's morphology and physiology – and more than the stuff already contained within a zygote is required for it to grow into a baby (e.g. nutrients from the mother).

This is a misrepresentation. I never said nor implied biology was equal to or less than genetics.

Words have meanings/usages - and your inconsistent statements render your arguments meaningless. Just to give a contrast, I disagree with @Bob Ross but his position is clearly articulated and understandable. I'll give you the last word if you want.

And you think corpses are food. Articulation is one thing, bad ideas are another.

That's because you haven't read the transcript of that call. That's the going rate, and you're in good company, but it's wrong. It's been misconstrued that he is pressuring the governor to magically come up with votes, not that he wants to find the illegal votes he's been speaking about the whole call.

I doubt that if she asked a governor to find illegal voting and contested an election you would call it evil.

The second statement clearly contradicts the first. The second statement says that there IS a measurable property that appears (and may disappear) in any human being - namely the capacity to speak a language.

And again, you do not make any distinction between the terms "person/personhood", "human", or "human being" - so you cannot define your way out of this contradiction.

I don't know any way to make this any clearer.

The capacity for human beings to acquire a language at some point of their lives is measurable and apparent. Humans are aware of and can understand language at some point in their lives. This seems to me a fact and is observable, at least so long as they are allowed to live. No other species can do this. All of this is because humans have the biology for language. This biology, and all material required to develop it, is present from the very beginning to the very end of every human being’s life—the biological-continuity of identity—none of which comes and goes. And this is just one characteristic of human beings. No such thing can be said of “personhood” or any other account of psychological-continuity.

Yes, I thought I made it clear that “human”, “person”, “human being”, “member of the human species”, are different words for the same kind of entity. I can point to a member of the human species and also call him a “human” or a “person”. In any case I see no contradiction to define my way out of.

By the way “meat” is flesh as food, in English. If human and canine corpses are “meat” as you claim, would you eat them? If you meant “flesh”, do humans lack flesh? If you meant “bug food”, are human beings immune to bug bites?

He contested an election, wanted the governor to find illegal votes, led a protest. If Biden or Kamala did that he’d be a hero.

What's corrupt about it? Lmao. The american people don't have a right to know about the anti-democratic bullshit the presidential nominee got up to?

One candidate’s administration is going after their political opponent with the DOJ and abusing the law in order to influence an election. That’s anti-democratic.

How many federal employees does it take to remove a log?

The most damning thing from the trove of evidence corruptly released just weeks before the election was that Trump sipped Diet Coke. What a Hitler.

Donald Trump Allegedly Craved His Favorite Soda Amid Capitol Riot

It's really hard to follow what you're saying since you keep changing your terminology.
You have repeatedly stated that you do not see any difference between being a person and being a human being - so I was using your terminology. I'm assuming here that when you say "human being" then this entails being a member of the human species.

That’s right. Thank you. It’s the easiest assumption to make.

You're all over the map here contradicting yourself. Is there a distinction between personhood (being a person) and being a human being (i.e. being a member of the human species?) Yes or no?

I haven’t contradicted myself, or at least you have not shown it. I already said, no, I don’t think so.

And to answer your question, I consider a brain dead body on life support to be a hunk of meat.

Would you eat it?

I'll try one more time. What are the characteristics that describe a human person / human being?

Humans have the capacity to speak a language at some point in their lives.

Do you consider a brain dead individual on life support to be a member of the human species?

Is he some other species? I’d love to hear that argument.

Still circling. You have not yet defined the characteristics that define a human person.

Now it’s a human person. First it was a human being, then it was a human animal, next it’s a human person.

A severed limb is not an animal by virtue of it being a part of an animal, which for some reason you never quoted nor addressed before accusing me of being circular, but I can also add that animals typically metabolize, have the capacity to reproduce at some point in their lives, breathe oxygen, and so on. A severed limb cannot.

This is still circular logic. What makes one collection of cells and protoplasm a member of the human species? It is not merely the presence of a particular set of genes/chromosomes - there must be something else.

It is an animal. Severed limbs are not animals. Gametes are not animals. Those are parts of animals. Being a human animal is all that is required to be a member of the human species. The theory of identity at work is “animalism”.

You are saying (or at least it appears that way) that a zygote is a human being because it turns into a human being. But unless you can give some definition/explanation of how to identify a human being this reasoning is circular and vacuous. And as you said elsewhere

I’m saying that a zygote is the earliest stages of a human being’s life. It doesn’t turn into something else. We can identify him as a human being simply because he has human parents. On top of that there is zero evidence that it is some other species, alien, or life form.

Does your reasoning rely on some distinction between “person” & “human being”?

I don’t distinguish the two, personally.

Your normative is teleprompters, celebrities, and slick marketing. Let’s hope it goes the way of the dodo bird.

And it is a living thing.

It isn’t. It does not have any means of reproducing, is not predisposed to functioning on its own, has no metabolism, etc. etc. etc. Given the diversity of life, "organism" is a tricky word to pin down, but an organ doesn't have a single quality of an organism.

If twin A is the same individual as the zygote and if twin B is the same individual as the zygote then twin A is the same individual as twin B.

Twin A is not the same individual as twin B.

Therefore twin A is not the same individual as the zygote and/or twin B is not the same individual as the zygote.

If twin A was the same individual as the zygote and if twin B was the same individual as the zygote then twin A was the same individual as twin B.

Twin A was the same individual as twin B.

Therefore twin A was the same individual as the zygote and/or twin B was the same individual as the zygote.

A placenta is a living thing.

A placenta is an organ of a living thing.

The zygote grew into them, but they are not the same thing, as proven by the fact that each twin is not the same thing as the other.

As it stands you're saying that A is the same individual as C, that B is the same individual as C, but that A is not the same individual as B. That's a contradiction.

They were the same thing at an earlier stage in their development. It is no contradiction if C splits into A and B.

This is such an ambiguous question. Glass used to be sand, but sand isn't glass. Butterflies used to be caterpillars, but caterpillars aren't butterflies. My house used to be a pile of bricks, but that pile of bricks wasn't my house.

Your reasoning that "A used to be B, therefore A and B are the same individual" is fallacious. Identity doesn't work that way.

A used to be A, is my reasoning. It’s a continuum. A doesn’t switch identities at some arbitrary point. You’re the one positing B.

What do you think a living organism is?

Basically any living thing.

Yes, but importantly each twin is not the same individual as the other and so they cannot both be the same individual as the zygote. Therefore either just one of them is the same individual as the zygote (special pleading) or neither is.

The fact that they can "trace their history and existence" to the zygote does not entail that they and the zygote are the same individual.

Sure it does. The facts indicate that they were both the same zygote.

A eukaryotic cell containing 24 distinct chromosomes.

And no human being was every a eukaryotic cell containing 24 distinct chromosomes?

A placenta isn't a living organism. It's an organ. But yes, an individual zygote can split into two individuals. It's why identical twins are identical, or mirror images of each other. In any case, both can trace their history and existence to the one zygote.

Will you state that no human being was ever a zygote? The zygote is just the brief beginnings of a process that does not end until death. The zygote is alive, belongs to the human species, and is an organism. Therefor it is a human being. If not, then what is it?

Uh oh, here's another one:

I’d say that the embryo and the placenta are each their own thing, albeit connected by the umbilical cord. I wouldn’t consider any of these three things to individually be “the human”, and nor would I consider all three of them to collectively be “the human”.

But we can even drop consideration of “the human” here and just consider the embryo. A zygote develops into a blastocyst, and then some of its cells develop into a placenta and some into an embryo.

To say that the placenta is part of the embryo rather than that the embryo is part of the placenta is special pleading.

These arguments are becoming increasingly convoluted. I'm having trouble understanding them.

Both human zygotes and human embryos are phases or stages of a human being's life. They are not their own entities, but the same entity as it continues to grow over time. All adults were teenagers. All teenagers were infants. All infants were neonates. All neonates were fetuses. All fetuses were zygotes. There is just no way around it.

I appreciate the explainer and I apologize for the confusion.

But you're speaking as if placentas, hearts, and lungs were disembodied, as if zygotes develop into them. Placentas, hearts, and lungs, as intimated, are parts of human beings.

I understand your assertion, I just don't follow your reasoning. "All placentas and hearts and lungs were zygotes," therefor, "That a human was zygote does not entail that a zygote is a human".

I've read it again carefully and I don't follow it.

Your reasoning is "Parts of X were A, therefor A isn't X." Flawed doesn't even begin to explain it.

Placentas and hearts were zygotes? I don't follow. The fact zygotes develop human organs seems to me to suggest that they are human, not something else.

All human being were zygotes. That is irrefutable.

I’m sure you can figure that out. But if you go watch one, or look in the mirror, you’ll notice they’re not placentas and hearts.

To be fair it is typical American political pandering. Kamala headquarters noticed they are failing with that demographic, historically so, so their propaganda reflects it. Trump does it with women, the working class, etc.

What does it mean to be a member of the human species?

It means you’re a certain kind of animal, a great ape, and a member of the last extant species of man.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

Kamala introduces racist policies, forgivable loans so long as you have a certain skin-color. Media silent.