Running into a burning building puts your life at risk.
I would not risk my life for embryos.
I’ve got a report of a lot of threadshitting in this thing. But my main issue is that it doesn’t truly belong in Great Debates.
I may be guilty of snark, but no mistake was made, be quite sure.
We have in fact been over a similar scenario before in GD, so you’re not making any new pro-choice argument here. You might as well ask if I would let a hundred kittens burn to death to save a two-year-old child, and I for one *would *do so in a heartbeat; it doesn’t therefore follow that I would argue that it’s right to kill kittens for trivial purposes.
Of course we don’t beat about the bush so much where kittens are concerned. When we introduce a kitten to the rain-barrel for the first and last time, we’re not arguing futilely about our right not to let a kitten share our living space when we’re unwilling for it to do so; we admit candidly that we don’t want the trouble of looking after another cat.
Nope - I wouldn’t - while there may be cost involved - those embryos can (generally) be recreated and are not worth the risk to “save” - especially if one assumes that ‘saving them’ requires facilities that may not be available to properly ‘store’ them in.
If its a matter of grabbing a cooler on the way out the door - sure.
I don’t see too many people arguing that a kitten is a person. Do you?
The thing about an analogy is that it doesn’t have to agree at all points - indeed, one can argue for a kitten’s right to life, or at any rate not to be killed frivolously or needlessly, without ever having to assert that it’s a person.
When come back, bring debate.
Its always fun to watch pro-lifers twist and turn themselves into something resembling a point.
Look, everyone knows embryos aren’t as human as a living, breathing human. Save the human, ditch the embryos, make your political point not on the charred corpse of a child, ok?
When responding to question, bring answer. Whining about supposed “gotchas” whenever you see a question that you don’t want to answer is just a distraction I think I’m just going to ignore in this thread from now on, because some seem to want to actually discuss the question being asked instead of blowing it all out of proportion and shooting at the distorted target created. Kittens and criminals are not part of the OP, so don’t bother me with them, please.
I wouldn’t dash into the burning building to save any embryos/fetuses. I don’t think I’d even consider it. I’m almost certain I’d not consider it if the building was burning as badly as described in the OP which obviously limits my safe time. I might do so if I saw a dog trapped.
Re: Look, everyone knows embryos aren’t as human as a living, breathing human
I mean, they’re clearly as human as you or me. The only debate is how much of the attributes of personhood they have, and how much moral consideration they deserve.
Do you believe that an embryo is a person?
Yes, but what if you save the little girl but then get in a car accident on the way to the hospital? Would you shoot the little girl and kill the little girl in this situation? It might be easier to just save the embryos to avoid having to face such a tough moral dilemma.
They are definitely human embryos, and you are pretty much correct as to what is being debated here. Simply stating “An embryo is a person!” raises many more questions than it answers, in my opinion.
Good point.
Thought experiments are interesting, and this one definitely illustrates something. However, it does not illuminate the personhood question. As with any experiment, you have to carefully evaluate whether it actually answers the original question, and in this case, the answer is “no”.
Is this a fallacy that there’s a name for? That is, providing facts that seem to corroborate a claim, when in fact, they don’t?
Anyway, thanks for the ride, everyone. I didn’t catch the error here. I wonder whether I might have, were it not consistent with my beliefs?
That’s what we’re debating in the other thread. Clearly, there’s a legal issue here regarding whether embryos are given the same or nearly the same rights as a child, regardless what we call it.
We could argue various semantics for what we mean by “personhood” but that wouldn’t really matter except in a discussion, for clarity. However, we have to have a legal answer: it matters.
Don’t fight the hypothetical.
This might surprise some folks but I know many, many pro-lifers who probably look harder at when personhood occurs than pro choicers. Many of them sincerely want a reason to make it ok in their own hearts. Like myself many of them have accepted that we don’t have the ability to make that determination. Again, like myself many of them have reached a moral compromise of sorts where they feel if an embryo is not viable or capable of feeling pain or has sufficient brain development for rudimentary thought then they can accept that at that point it is clearly a moral issue and they have no real need to fight that battle.
Once the baby has reached a certain stage in development then we feel that it deserves our protection as a citizen and I doubt very many of us will compromise on that.What if instead of a girl and 5 embryos, what if the choice is between two women, one pregnant, one not. You don’t know either of them personally or have any other reason to choose one or the other, you just know one is knocked up, the other not. Is there any value to someone who thinks conception doesn’t = personhood in picking the pregnant woman to save over the other? Does it make a difference how far the pregnant woman is along? What if both were pregnant but one was carrying twins?
I realize you’re just explaining them, not defending them. But I’d add that I’d respect their POV more if they felt that the kids were still innocent and worthy of protection and aid for some years after they were born.
There’s a Southern Baptist church across the road from the entrance to my neighborhood, and since it’s January (Roe v. Wade anniversary month) they’ve got the usual array of crosses out front.
Funny, I don’t remember seeing any crosses out front in early December, when the anniversary of the Newtown massacre came around. Why do I have the feeling that to people like that, the sacredness of guns, while somewhere below that of ‘unborn babies,’ is well above that of born children.
One of these years, I’m gonna stick a sign near their crosses saying something like “Human Life Is Sacred From Conception To Birth.” Wonder how many of them would notice the slam embedded in that comment.
Do you really believe that they don’t believe the kids are worthy of protection after they are born or are you just making some lame attempt to introduce gun laws into this debate? Certainly you can comprehend that a church, just like almost every other human being, condemns killing any innocent people randomly. They are protesting the legalized killing (in their mind) of unborn children.