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It seems like a lot of pro-lifers are against abortion because they think abortion leads to promiscuity. If they were really against abortion, they would support the morning-after pill in droves.
matisyahu on
i dont even like matisyahu and i dont know why i picked this username
I'd rather be aborted twice than be born an unwanted baby. If a baby is unwanted it is the parents duty to abort the living fuck out of the fetus.
It's true. I've heard from people who were in the foster system due to bad parents, and it is absolutely horrifying. "I'm permanently scarred in more than one way from my childhood, but I count myself luckier than most, really."
You're really confusing the idea of potential here. A sperm has 0% chance of becoming a human being. An egg has a 0% chance. Only a zygote has the ability to become a fully functioning human, and that is where I believe human life begins.
This is another arbitrary distinction, you just put the line somewhere else.
Aborting a fetus is not the same thing as killing a person in the same way that crushing an acorn is not the same thing as felling a tree.
Because, like I said, by themselves they have no potential to grow into human life. Only a zygote does. Lets not try to make a mechanical analogy because it doesn't apply. Machines don't build themselves.
The potential to make a human life is with every fertile man and woman. There is absolutely no functional difference between killing a zygote and using a condom. Either way you are destroying only the potential to become a human, not an actual human.
No it's not, because a fertile man cannot create a child. A fertile woman can't either. A fertile sperm can't either, and neither can a fertile egg. Only a zygote can.
You're really confusing the idea of potential here. A sperm has 0% chance of becoming a human being. An egg has a 0% chance. Only a zygote has the ability to become a fully functioning human, and that is where I believe human life begins.
Does a sperm, sitting near a zygote have a 0% chance of becoming a human being? Of course not. The sperm is going to swim toward the egg, fertilize it and make a human. You're welcome to try to argue that a sperm sitting near an egg cannot be considered an entity, but that's really just grasping at straws.
Equating something with what something can become is a fallacy. Acorns are not trees. If you steal $5 from someone's bank account, you are not charged based on the trillions possible from compound interest. If you think it's wrong to destroy a zygote but not use contraception, you must think there is something intrinsic about the zygote that has value. But you have made clear that only potential is there, and that is true in both cases.
And you're right, intrinsically, a newborn baby isn't much better than one about to be born. However there are very good practical reasons to disallow killing babies after they are born, such as emotional connections and adoptions. Allowing abortions does not mean you have to allow killing unwanted babies to be logically consistent.
Well that's bullshit. If you want to live in a world dictated by logical solutions without regard to moral emotions, then you could easily condition people to think babies are no more significant than what people consider zygotes, or killing a dog. You claim that emotional connection is a logical reason to keep the baby alive. Why? Emotions don't have anything to do with logic. In fact then it would be inconsistent, because now that you've established with me there is no intrinsic different between a newborn and a fetus, then I am assuming you're agreeing with me that they are human in all stages. So what would be wrong with killing a baby compared to a fetus in the logical consistency? Emotion would not factor into it. Historically societies have operated like this before. I point out the Spartans who were if nothing else, like their fellow countrymen, very logical people.
But I find the practice pretty barbaric to do to even a zygote. Using rubber is a completely different story.
The emotional aspect I'm referring to is other people's attachments to the baby. If a bunch of people get to see and interact with the baby, they are going to be quite upset if it's killed, and that's an important consideration. This is why it's generally considered worse to kill someone's beloved family pet than a stray animal.
Anyway I never said that people's emotions shouldn't be factored in when writing laws.
I know the reasoning seems kind of weird, but it really does make a lot more sense than asserting that a human's intrinsic worth goes from 0->full at some arbitrary point.
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I hate you; souls are a stupid concept to anyone who knows anything about biology (how many souls do identical twins have?) and irrelevant to the debate about abortion anyway; and prop 8 isn't about abortion. Prop 4 was related.
You've said before you were raised as a Jehovah's Witness. Don't the JW's have a unique perspective on souls and interpretation of scripture about souls? For one, the soul is mortal. Two, every living thing has a soul. Wait, they don't have souls but they are souls. Big difference. Is that all right?
For Jehovah's Witnesses having a soul is basically the same as being alive. Souls are life. If that makes sense.
No it's not, because a fertile man cannot create a child. A fertile woman can't either. A fertile sperm can't either, and neither can a fertile egg. Only a zygote can.
You're really confusing the idea of potential here. A sperm has 0% chance of becoming a human being. An egg has a 0% chance. Only a zygote has the ability to become a fully functioning human, and that is where I believe human life begins.
A zygote has the ability but no guarantee of becoming a newborn baby.
But, to be clear, you oppose the birth control pill?
I'd rather be aborted twice than be born an unwanted baby. If a baby is unwanted it is the parents duty to abort the living fuck out of the fetus.
It's true. I've heard from people who were in the foster system due to bad parents, and it is absolutely horrifying. "I'm permanently scarred in more than one way from my childhood, but I count myself luckier than most, really."
Also, the Third World.
The Pope needs to GTFO of Mexico and stay the fuck out. They need contraceptives, sexual education, and abortions more than this country does.
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Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
I hate you; souls are a stupid concept to anyone who knows anything about biology (how many souls do identical twins have?) and irrelevant to the debate about abortion anyway; and prop 8 isn't about abortion. Prop 4 was related.
Not quite. I'd imagine that everybody has different conceptions and understands different denotations when it comes to souls. Some take it to be this sort of little invisible person that controls our brain, and some may take it to be some sort of God-given spirit that is mystically in touch with the flesh of the body. (Side note - Cathlolic theology does not hold the soul as the whole of the person. This is what Aquinas says that happens at the end of days: we are joined again with our body.) Foucault famously said that "Souls are the prison of the body." However, everybody uses soul for the same function: that of individuation. Our soul is who we are. This does not have to be some essential character to which we must remain true or which drives our actions; it could cover the plethora of non-legal persons through which we exist in our lifetime. My soul is, for all intensive purposes, who I am.
That does not sound like such a stupid concept, biologically speaking, does it? That individuals are who they are? Twins might have a special sort of Being (hereafter, I shall refer to "Soul" as "Being," because it is the more accurate term for discourse of this manner and is closer to the matter at heart - the right to exist.) Indeed, animals and such could have souls. The common move here might be to say that meat is murder, etc, and we should never eat eggs. Perhaps this is true. However, what makes humans especially different is the ontological nature of their individuation: not only can they recognize themselves as such, but they can recognizes within that framework the concept of selfhood. Not only do I recognize that I am ME, but I recognize the copula -- that I AM me.
What is at stake in the abortion debate is existence. The right to be. Is the embryo in the mother a part of the mother, or is it a separate being?
Side note: I really like the way the discussion is framed because it gets at the very core of the issue. If you really do believe that a zygote has the same intrinsic value as a human being, voting on abortion alone actually makes a lot of sense, and it is actually pretty reasonable to also conclude that it should be disallowed in cases of rape or when the health of the mother is at risk. Because if you don't abort, well the mother might die, but it's worse if you abort because then the baby is sure to die.
Thinking that zygotes = people also means that you think doctors that perform abortions are mass-murderers, and to them it's actually morally good to kill these people and destroy their offices.
Furthermore, if you assume zygote = person, arguments based on women's rights make no sense.
So really the only way to address this is to topple the fallacy that a human life springs into existence all at once.
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What is at stake in the abortion debate is existence. The right to be. Is the embryo in the mother a part of the mother, or is it a separate being?
Irrelevant. If it is a separate being the mother would be the person who had the right to make any and all decisions about it. Not anyone else, not the government, and not people who feel she should be an incubator. It is still her body, the government does not have the right to take that away from her.
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Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
What is at stake in the abortion debate is existence. The right to be. Is the embryo in the mother a part of the mother, or is it a separate being?
Irrelevant. If it is a separate being the mother would be the person who had the right to make any and all decisions about it. Not anyone else, not the government, and not people who feel she should be an incubator. It is still her body, the government does not have the right to take that away from her.
The other side of that argument is that you are treating a being as mere biological property, a zoological archipelago territorialized out of eminent domain.
Until the people who are against abortion under any circumstances decide to adopt all these unwanted babies, I'll never take their argument seriously. If the young baby souls are so important, why lose interest when they're young children, teens, and then adults?
Sorry, but this is a goofy argument. Are you arguing that having possible hardship in life is the same thing as having no life at all?
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Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
Until the people who are against abortion under any circumstances decide to adopt all these unwanted babies, I'll never take their argument seriously. If the young baby souls are so important, why lose interest when they're young children, teens, and then adults?
Sorry, but this is a goofy argument. Are you arguing that having possible hardship in life is the same thing as having no life at all?
I'd argue it is better to not have a life. And 10 out of 10 zygotes have no strong preference either way (aborted vs. not aborted). Once you're already alive and sentient, I think the calculus changes, but when it's only a potential person, not a real person, I think you are doing them a favor to not allow them to come to term if their life would suck.
What is at stake in the abortion debate is existence. The right to be. Is the embryo in the mother a part of the mother, or is it a separate being?
Does a skin cell have a right to be?
To save a longwinded, hyper-abstract, abstruse, and unimportant argument, no.
How is the zygote different from the skin cell?
You know multiple answers to this question. But I guess I'll humor you.
Philosophically? A skin cell can only get its being from a zygote, whereas a zygote is not dependent on the being of a skin cell.
But a zygote could in fact owe its existence to a skin cell. Consider human cloning; a zygote's potentiality of development into a human being is not in and of itself unique to zygotes.
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Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
What is at stake in the abortion debate is existence. The right to be. Is the embryo in the mother a part of the mother, or is it a separate being?
Does a skin cell have a right to be?
To save a longwinded, hyper-abstract, abstruse, and unimportant argument, no.
How is the zygote different from the skin cell?
You know multiple answers to this question. But I guess I'll humor you.
Philosophically? A skin cell can only get its being from a zygote, whereas a zygote is not dependent on the being of a skin cell.
But a zygote could in fact owe its existence to a skin cell. Consider human cloning; a zygote's potentiality of development into a human being is not in and of itself unique to zygotes.
Cloning is a WHOLE 'nother batch of oysters, which would probably be outside the realm of this discussion.
Unless this thread is more about souls. Then, yeah, we can discuss cloning.
The other side of that argument is that you are treating a being as mere biological property, a zoological archipelago territorialized out of eminent domain.
Which could be applied to either side. Who gets to decided control of a woman's body. Her, or a bunch of people claiming to the be the advocate of an unwelcome parasite? Her body, her choice, her business. Why the hell is there another side to this argument? When did people get the idea they could force other people to do things with their bodies they do not want to do?
Until the people who are against abortion under any circumstances decide to adopt all these unwanted babies, I'll never take their argument seriously. If the young baby souls are so important, why lose interest when they're young children, teens, and then adults?
Sorry, but this is a goofy argument. Are you arguing that having possible hardship in life is the same thing as having no life at all?
I'd argue it is better to not have a life. And 10 out of 10 zygotes have no strong preference either way (aborted vs. not aborted). Once you're already alive and sentient, I think the calculus changes, but when it's only a potential person, not a real person, I think you are doing them a favor to not allow them to come to term if their life would suck.
All of this is irrelevant to the fact that there is no hypocrisy inherent in
a) Believing that abortion is wrong
while
b) Not adopting children (as many children as you can support? Where does that particular line of argument stop?)
The other side of that argument is that you are treating a being as mere biological property, a zoological archipelago territorialized out of eminent domain.
Which could be applied to either side. Who gets to decided control of a woman's body. Her, or a bunch of people claiming to the be the advocate of an unwelcome parasite? Her body, her choice, her business. Why the hell is there another side to this argument? When did people get the idea they could force other people to do things with their bodies they do not want to do?
But is it a parasite, or is it a person? If the latter, then you're still forcing someone to do something with his/her body: Not have it anymore, sucker! That is the core of this discussion.
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Until the people who are against abortion under any circumstances decide to adopt all these unwanted babies, I'll never take their argument seriously. If the young baby souls are so important, why lose interest when they're young children, teens, and then adults?
Sorry, but this is a goofy argument. Are you arguing that having possible hardship in life is the same thing as having no life at all?
I'd argue it is better to not have a life. And 10 out of 10 zygotes have no strong preference either way (aborted vs. not aborted). Once you're already alive and sentient, I think the calculus changes, but when it's only a potential person, not a real person, I think you are doing them a favor to not allow them to come to term if their life would suck.
All of this is irrelevant to the fact that there is no hypocrisy inherent in
a) Believing that abortion is wrong
while
b) Not adopting children (as many children as you can support? Where does that particular line of argument stop?)
I don't go so far as to say people need to personally adopt children, but I certainly say that anyone who is anti-abortion (to the extent of making it illegal) while refusing to support programs that improve the quality of life for those very same children they forced to come into existence is extremely hypocritical and unethical. If you want abortion legal, you better fucking be smiling while you are writing your tax check for education expenses.
But is it a parasite, or is it a person? If the latter, then you're still forcing someone to do something with his/her body: Not have it anymore, sucker! That is the core of this discussion.
It's status is irrelevant. You cannot force the mother to be an incubator. It is her body. Its life, its potential, is completely 100% irrelevant. Her body, her choice.
You want to argue it gets a vote in things well the mother would get to decide how the child votes.
Thats one for abortion, two for abortion. People who are neither the mother, nor the zygote do not get a say in things. Of course in the event of a tie, it still goes to the mother. It is her body and what she chooses to do with it is her business.
So how can you have an argument that does not violate the rights of a woman to choose what happens to her own body?
What is at stake in the abortion debate is existence. The right to be. Is the embryo in the mother a part of the mother, or is it a separate being?
Does a skin cell have a right to be?
To save a longwinded, hyper-abstract, abstruse, and unimportant argument, no.
How is the zygote different from the skin cell?
You know multiple answers to this question. But I guess I'll humor you.
Philosophically? A skin cell can only get its being from a zygote, whereas a zygote is not dependent on the being of a skin cell.
But a zygote could in fact owe its existence to a skin cell. Consider human cloning; a zygote's potentiality of development into a human being is not in and of itself unique to zygotes.
Cloning is a WHOLE 'nother batch of oysters, which would probably be outside the realm of this discussion.
Unless this thread is more about souls. Then, yeah, we can discuss cloning.
Well, no, I'm just attempting to discern the origination of the right to existence that the zygote of all cells exclusively possesses.
But we can take another tack. Do you believe that the birth control pill constitutes a violation of the notional right of a zygote to exist?
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I'm a little annoyed that abortion is seen as unconscionable while say, killing in self-defense or due to war is seen as completely copacetic. I would feel a bit more charitable to cries of "MURDER" if they were raised to you know, actual murders.
As far as I see it, humans have long decided killing is okay, it's just the circumstances that matter.
But is it a parasite, or is it a person? If the latter, then you're still forcing someone to do something with his/her body: Not have it anymore, sucker! That is the core of this discussion.
It's status is irrelevant. You cannot force the mother to be an incubator. It is her body. Its life, its potential, is completely 100% irrelevant. Her body, her choice.
This is up for argument in a number of ways; the mother being responsible for the pregnancy, mother-child bonds of responsibility, etc.
You want to argue it gets a vote in things well the mother would get to decide how the child votes.
Is this seriously part of your argument? I can see the other one--not saying I agree or disagree with it, necessarily, but it's reasonable---but by this argument, if a mother chooses to cut the throat of her one-year-old child, she should be considered blameless because "she gets to decide how the child votes". You can't really think this is how the law should work.
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I hate you; souls are a stupid concept to anyone who knows anything about biology (how many souls do identical twins have?) and irrelevant to the debate about abortion anyway; and prop 8 isn't about abortion. Prop 4 was related.
You've said before you were raised as a Jehovah's Witness. Don't the JW's have a unique perspective on souls and interpretation of scripture about souls? For one, the soul is mortal. Two, every living thing has a soul. Wait, they don't have souls but they are souls. Big difference. Is that all right?
I was also raised JW. They don't believe in souls period. (In any supernatural sense at least)
Do you believe that the birth control pill constitutes a violation of the notional right of a zygote to exist?
Not really, because it is not an act against a specific being. It is more of a...nihiliational force.
but it is, because one of the major ways the birth control pill operates is by thickening the endometrial wall of the uterus, specifically to prevent a viable zygote from attaching.
So the pill very much prevents zygotes that otherwise might develop to term from developing, conflicting with the notional right of a zygote to existence.
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Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
Do you believe that the birth control pill constitutes a violation of the notional right of a zygote to exist?
Not really, because it is not an act against a specific being. It is more of a...nihiliational force.
but it is, because one of the major ways the birth control pill operates is by thickening the endometrial wall of the uterus, specifically to prevent a viable zygote from attaching.
So the pill very much prevents zygotes that otherwise might develop to term from developing, conflicting with the notional right of a zygote to existence.
Perhaps that zygote has no right to exist, then. This is not to say that it ought be destroyed, but that it has no inherent right to life. It was not, to use a poetic phrasing, given life. If it developed into a fetus, then, yes, that baby...err...sorry...being should not be aborted. Thus, not all zygotes have right to life. Nothing can work in a binary function, but that does not make all things relative.
I hate you; souls are a stupid concept to anyone who knows anything about biology (how many souls do identical twins have?) and irrelevant to the debate about abortion anyway; and prop 8 isn't about abortion. Prop 4 was related.
Secular people, including many scientists, have a very different conception of a soul. Many don't use the term, and when they do they mean something like "consciousness"—the subjective experience of being alive. To us, the soul is an emergent property of the brain's physiology
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I hate you; souls are a stupid concept to anyone who knows anything about biology (how many souls do identical twins have?) and irrelevant to the debate about abortion anyway; and prop 8 isn't about abortion. Prop 4 was related.
Secular people, including many scientists, have a very different conception of a soul. Many don't use the term, and when they do they mean something like "consciousness"—the subjective experience of being alive. To us, the soul is an emergent property of the brain's physiology
Yes my Differential Psychology lecturer has this annoying habit of doing that when he means consciousness, mind, personality, all that stuff. I get his reference, and he's stated it's a metaphor, but I still think it's a term that only serves to confuse.
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I got sucked into an abortion debate with a co-worker today. He said the only thing he was really upset about with Obama winning was abortion, "because Obama voted for partial birth abortions".
I pointed out that it's a rare procedure, and forced him to admit that a woman should not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term at the risk of her own life. I then pointed out that Sarah Palin didn't even want women pregnant through rape to be able to obtain an abortion, but we got interrupted just before I launched into my "Sarah Palin is a crazy whore" rant.
I hate you; souls are a stupid concept to anyone who knows anything about biology (how many souls do identical twins have?) and irrelevant to the debate about abortion anyway; and prop 8 isn't about abortion. Prop 4 was related.
That does not sound like such a stupid concept, biologically speaking, does it? That individuals are who they are?
That's not a biological concept. That's just a tautology.
I think Cat was responding to the religious view of the soul (mistakenly attributing it to me). The problem is, biologically speaking, we know perfectly well what individual experience is and where it comes from.
Twins might have a special sort of Being (hereafter, I shall refer to "Soul" as "Being," because it is the more accurate term for discourse of this manner and is closer to the matter at heart - the right to exist.)
Here we run into the first problem of the religious conception of the soul. You have to invent out of thin air some special case to explain Twin Soul(s?). Whereas the secular idea of the soul/consciousness requires no such special case—souls are a product of brain complexity, and twins have two brains.
Indeed, animals and such could have souls. The common move here might be to say that meat is murder, etc, and we should never eat eggs. Perhaps this is true. However, what makes humans especially different is the ontological nature of their individuation: not only can they recognize themselves as such, but they can recognizes within that framework the concept of selfhood. Not only do I recognize that I am ME, but I recognize the copula -- that I AM me.
Gods, you read too much 19th century philosophy.
Podly, at what point in the evolution of primates did this "special difference" arise? Chimps can recognize themselves in the mirror—this leads me to conclude that they have a similar sort of consciousness that we do—but obviously you don't think they have souls in the same sense as humans. What about Neadertals? Slightly earlier hominids?
Since we evolved from earlier primates, do you believe that this special "ontological nature of our individuation" evolved as well? Or was it cast down from on high?
What is at stake in the abortion debate is existence. The right to be. Is the embryo in the mother a part of the mother, or is it a separate being?
This is where the divide between the religious and secular concepts of souls becomes really important. As I said, religious people tend to think of souls as discreet quanta—singular chunks of "existence" or "beings." I also think you can characterize souls in a "quantum" fashion, but with the caveat that they are emergent properties of biological patterns.
Like someone said: a car does not exist before all of its parts are assembled together; it emerges as you put the wheels on, etc—the structure gradually becomes more "car-like" before reaching a certain threshold. That threshold also happens to be a line in the sand: is a structure a "car" if it has no wheels? Just three wheels? What if it looks like a car from the outside but has no engine? These are all borderline cases. In fact, a structure's "car-ness" is wholly dependent on the functionality of its physical components.
Similarly, I don't think a soul can exist without a functional brain. Two reproductive cells have the potential to reproduce into an organism with a brain, and that developing brain has the potential to cause the emergent property we call a soul or consciousness.
But I fail to see why any rational person would think a sperm and egg united would have a consciousness.
Yes my Differential Psychology lecturer has this annoying habit of doing that when he means consciousness, mind, personality, all that stuff. I get his reference, and he's stated it's a metaphor, but I still think it's a term that only serves to confuse.
I want to take it back. I think it's a pretty useful term; it carries a moral weight that "consciousness" does not—and yet consciousness forms the basis of a lot of secular moral philosophy.
I don't want to give up the term "soul" to religious people. I don't think it has to be strictly religious term.
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Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
Since we evolved from earlier primates, do you believe that this special "ontological nature of our individuation" evolved as well? Or was it cast down from on high?
My own personal belief? That it was an act of God. But for discussion purposes, assume that I believe it is a result of evolution.
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited November 2008
They don't recognise themselves.
They see another monkey.
They'll go around the mirror and try to find where the monkey is.
They show absolutely no understanding whatsoever that the mirror is reflecting them and not some other monkey.
A cat will see a cat in a mirror too.
Another example of complexity: A child at a certain age, if you flap your arms and pat your head, drink some water and give it the water, it will overimitate you. That is, it will flap its arms, pat its head, drink the water. (Well as best as it can, since kids are clumsy) humans are naturally selected through evolution to think that the structure, actions, ideas, behaviors, etc, surrounding an action are just as important as the action.
If you do it to a monkey the monkey stares at you then drinks the water.
Qingu: To me morality is just an excuse for not challenging your prerational stereotypes and implicit automatic thoughts about an idea, concept, action, behavior, situation, person, etc. I do not take it as an excuse, it is not an unassailable platform to me, and I do and will call people on their morals and make them lay the logic of them out and explain them.
If they cannot I dismiss them.
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Posts
Good gravy!
It's true. I've heard from people who were in the foster system due to bad parents, and it is absolutely horrifying. "I'm permanently scarred in more than one way from my childhood, but I count myself luckier than most, really."
This is another arbitrary distinction, you just put the line somewhere else.
Aborting a fetus is not the same thing as killing a person in the same way that crushing an acorn is not the same thing as felling a tree.
Does a sperm, sitting near a zygote have a 0% chance of becoming a human being? Of course not. The sperm is going to swim toward the egg, fertilize it and make a human. You're welcome to try to argue that a sperm sitting near an egg cannot be considered an entity, but that's really just grasping at straws.
Equating something with what something can become is a fallacy. Acorns are not trees. If you steal $5 from someone's bank account, you are not charged based on the trillions possible from compound interest. If you think it's wrong to destroy a zygote but not use contraception, you must think there is something intrinsic about the zygote that has value. But you have made clear that only potential is there, and that is true in both cases.
The emotional aspect I'm referring to is other people's attachments to the baby. If a bunch of people get to see and interact with the baby, they are going to be quite upset if it's killed, and that's an important consideration. This is why it's generally considered worse to kill someone's beloved family pet than a stray animal.
Anyway I never said that people's emotions shouldn't be factored in when writing laws.
I know the reasoning seems kind of weird, but it really does make a lot more sense than asserting that a human's intrinsic worth goes from 0->full at some arbitrary point.
For Jehovah's Witnesses having a soul is basically the same as being alive. Souls are life. If that makes sense.
ETA: On the subject of souls, but not related to abortion, I would like to direct readers to this debate between a presbyterian and a catholic on the nature of souls.
A zygote has the ability but no guarantee of becoming a newborn baby.
But, to be clear, you oppose the birth control pill?
Also, the Third World.
The Pope needs to GTFO of Mexico and stay the fuck out. They need contraceptives, sexual education, and abortions more than this country does.
Not quite. I'd imagine that everybody has different conceptions and understands different denotations when it comes to souls. Some take it to be this sort of little invisible person that controls our brain, and some may take it to be some sort of God-given spirit that is mystically in touch with the flesh of the body. (Side note - Cathlolic theology does not hold the soul as the whole of the person. This is what Aquinas says that happens at the end of days: we are joined again with our body.) Foucault famously said that "Souls are the prison of the body." However, everybody uses soul for the same function: that of individuation. Our soul is who we are. This does not have to be some essential character to which we must remain true or which drives our actions; it could cover the plethora of non-legal persons through which we exist in our lifetime. My soul is, for all intensive purposes, who I am.
That does not sound like such a stupid concept, biologically speaking, does it? That individuals are who they are? Twins might have a special sort of Being (hereafter, I shall refer to "Soul" as "Being," because it is the more accurate term for discourse of this manner and is closer to the matter at heart - the right to exist.) Indeed, animals and such could have souls. The common move here might be to say that meat is murder, etc, and we should never eat eggs. Perhaps this is true. However, what makes humans especially different is the ontological nature of their individuation: not only can they recognize themselves as such, but they can recognizes within that framework the concept of selfhood. Not only do I recognize that I am ME, but I recognize the copula -- that I AM me.
What is at stake in the abortion debate is existence. The right to be. Is the embryo in the mother a part of the mother, or is it a separate being?
Thinking that zygotes = people also means that you think doctors that perform abortions are mass-murderers, and to them it's actually morally good to kill these people and destroy their offices.
Furthermore, if you assume zygote = person, arguments based on women's rights make no sense.
So really the only way to address this is to topple the fallacy that a human life springs into existence all at once.
Irrelevant. If it is a separate being the mother would be the person who had the right to make any and all decisions about it. Not anyone else, not the government, and not people who feel she should be an incubator. It is still her body, the government does not have the right to take that away from her.
The other side of that argument is that you are treating a being as mere biological property, a zoological archipelago territorialized out of eminent domain.
Does a skin cell have a right to be?
Sorry, but this is a goofy argument. Are you arguing that having possible hardship in life is the same thing as having no life at all?
To save a longwinded, hyper-abstract, abstruse, and unimportant argument, no.
How is the zygote different from the skin cell?
You know multiple answers to this question. But I guess I'll humor you.
Philosophically? A skin cell can only get its being from a zygote, whereas a zygote is not dependent on the being of a skin cell.
I'd argue it is better to not have a life. And 10 out of 10 zygotes have no strong preference either way (aborted vs. not aborted). Once you're already alive and sentient, I think the calculus changes, but when it's only a potential person, not a real person, I think you are doing them a favor to not allow them to come to term if their life would suck.
Cloning is a WHOLE 'nother batch of oysters, which would probably be outside the realm of this discussion.
Unless this thread is more about souls. Then, yeah, we can discuss cloning.
Which could be applied to either side. Who gets to decided control of a woman's body. Her, or a bunch of people claiming to the be the advocate of an unwelcome parasite? Her body, her choice, her business. Why the hell is there another side to this argument? When did people get the idea they could force other people to do things with their bodies they do not want to do?
All of this is irrelevant to the fact that there is no hypocrisy inherent in
a) Believing that abortion is wrong
while
b) Not adopting children (as many children as you can support? Where does that particular line of argument stop?)
But is it a parasite, or is it a person? If the latter, then you're still forcing someone to do something with his/her body: Not have it anymore, sucker! That is the core of this discussion.
I don't go so far as to say people need to personally adopt children, but I certainly say that anyone who is anti-abortion (to the extent of making it illegal) while refusing to support programs that improve the quality of life for those very same children they forced to come into existence is extremely hypocritical and unethical. If you want abortion legal, you better fucking be smiling while you are writing your tax check for education expenses.
It's status is irrelevant. You cannot force the mother to be an incubator. It is her body. Its life, its potential, is completely 100% irrelevant. Her body, her choice.
You want to argue it gets a vote in things well the mother would get to decide how the child votes.
Thats one for abortion, two for abortion. People who are neither the mother, nor the zygote do not get a say in things. Of course in the event of a tie, it still goes to the mother. It is her body and what she chooses to do with it is her business.
So how can you have an argument that does not violate the rights of a woman to choose what happens to her own body?
Well, no, I'm just attempting to discern the origination of the right to existence that the zygote of all cells exclusively possesses.
But we can take another tack. Do you believe that the birth control pill constitutes a violation of the notional right of a zygote to exist?
Yeah I take the unpopular stance here and I really don't think this should be an issue.
The human race needs to stop fucking propogating or we run out of resources and we all fucking die.
Now, we are not going to stop having sex, and birth control ain't 100%.
So I'm for it, because kids are not the hope for the future anymore. We've already fucked up their future after all, they wont be thanking us for it.
Not really, because it is not an act against a specific being. It is more of a...nihiliational force.
As far as I see it, humans have long decided killing is okay, it's just the circumstances that matter.
This is up for argument in a number of ways; the mother being responsible for the pregnancy, mother-child bonds of responsibility, etc.
Is this seriously part of your argument? I can see the other one--not saying I agree or disagree with it, necessarily, but it's reasonable---but by this argument, if a mother chooses to cut the throat of her one-year-old child, she should be considered blameless because "she gets to decide how the child votes". You can't really think this is how the law should work.
I was also raised JW. They don't believe in souls period. (In any supernatural sense at least)
but it is, because one of the major ways the birth control pill operates is by thickening the endometrial wall of the uterus, specifically to prevent a viable zygote from attaching.
So the pill very much prevents zygotes that otherwise might develop to term from developing, conflicting with the notional right of a zygote to existence.
Perhaps that zygote has no right to exist, then. This is not to say that it ought be destroyed, but that it has no inherent right to life. It was not, to use a poetic phrasing, given life. If it developed into a fetus, then, yes, that baby...err...sorry...being should not be aborted. Thus, not all zygotes have right to life. Nothing can work in a binary function, but that does not make all things relative.
Did you actually read my post, Cat?
Yes my Differential Psychology lecturer has this annoying habit of doing that when he means consciousness, mind, personality, all that stuff. I get his reference, and he's stated it's a metaphor, but I still think it's a term that only serves to confuse.
I pointed out that it's a rare procedure, and forced him to admit that a woman should not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term at the risk of her own life. I then pointed out that Sarah Palin didn't even want women pregnant through rape to be able to obtain an abortion, but we got interrupted just before I launched into my "Sarah Palin is a crazy whore" rant.
God I won't miss that woman.
I think Cat was responding to the religious view of the soul (mistakenly attributing it to me). The problem is, biologically speaking, we know perfectly well what individual experience is and where it comes from.
Here we run into the first problem of the religious conception of the soul. You have to invent out of thin air some special case to explain Twin Soul(s?). Whereas the secular idea of the soul/consciousness requires no such special case—souls are a product of brain complexity, and twins have two brains.
Gods, you read too much 19th century philosophy.
Podly, at what point in the evolution of primates did this "special difference" arise? Chimps can recognize themselves in the mirror—this leads me to conclude that they have a similar sort of consciousness that we do—but obviously you don't think they have souls in the same sense as humans. What about Neadertals? Slightly earlier hominids?
Since we evolved from earlier primates, do you believe that this special "ontological nature of our individuation" evolved as well? Or was it cast down from on high?
This is where the divide between the religious and secular concepts of souls becomes really important. As I said, religious people tend to think of souls as discreet quanta—singular chunks of "existence" or "beings." I also think you can characterize souls in a "quantum" fashion, but with the caveat that they are emergent properties of biological patterns.
Like someone said: a car does not exist before all of its parts are assembled together; it emerges as you put the wheels on, etc—the structure gradually becomes more "car-like" before reaching a certain threshold. That threshold also happens to be a line in the sand: is a structure a "car" if it has no wheels? Just three wheels? What if it looks like a car from the outside but has no engine? These are all borderline cases. In fact, a structure's "car-ness" is wholly dependent on the functionality of its physical components.
Similarly, I don't think a soul can exist without a functional brain. Two reproductive cells have the potential to reproduce into an organism with a brain, and that developing brain has the potential to cause the emergent property we call a soul or consciousness.
But I fail to see why any rational person would think a sperm and egg united would have a consciousness.
I don't want to give up the term "soul" to religious people. I don't think it has to be strictly religious term.
My own personal belief? That it was an act of God. But for discussion purposes, assume that I believe it is a result of evolution.
They see another monkey.
They'll go around the mirror and try to find where the monkey is.
They show absolutely no understanding whatsoever that the mirror is reflecting them and not some other monkey.
A cat will see a cat in a mirror too.
Another example of complexity: A child at a certain age, if you flap your arms and pat your head, drink some water and give it the water, it will overimitate you. That is, it will flap its arms, pat its head, drink the water. (Well as best as it can, since kids are clumsy) humans are naturally selected through evolution to think that the structure, actions, ideas, behaviors, etc, surrounding an action are just as important as the action.
If you do it to a monkey the monkey stares at you then drinks the water.
Qingu: To me morality is just an excuse for not challenging your prerational stereotypes and implicit automatic thoughts about an idea, concept, action, behavior, situation, person, etc. I do not take it as an excuse, it is not an unassailable platform to me, and I do and will call people on their morals and make them lay the logic of them out and explain them.
If they cannot I dismiss them.