Scylla, you keep claiming that statements that would work equally well against any side of this argument only work against one side. And here we’ve got another example.
“I don’t really see how [your argument] applies”, you appear to be claiming, equals “you are not able to argue your stance”.
Turn it around. I don’t really see how your consent argument applies; in fact, I deny that it does apply. Does that mean that you’re not able to argue your stance?
I have argued my stance up, down, and sideways. If you’re unable or unwilling to see it, that’s on your end, not mine.
– by the way, quite a while ago in this thread we had this discussion:
I referred back to this discussion again in post #154.
I’m still waiting for you to gladly concede my point. Or are you going to claim that somehow the uniqueness of each egg and sperm has now become inapplicable?
I thought you were making a ridiculous argument deliberately to be difficult, and felt that I could safely ignore it and move on.
I had not considered the possibility that you were being sincere.
The argument that a sperm egg is a unique human life is ridiculous for the same reason that calling a box of parts enough to build half a car “a car” is ridiculous.
So there’s your answer. Will you give me mine or should I go read the thread again and consider the dodging and weaving a complete answer.
I was making, as I have also elsewhere in this thread, the clear and coherent argument that there is no bright line of “personhood” at the moment of conception. You were attempting to counter that by claiming that at the moment of conception there is a unique individual, and that before that moment there is no unique individual. I pointed out that each egg and sperm is a unique individual. You said that egg and sperm are not unique. I say that yes they are.
Now you have picked up your goalpost and moved it out of the field, and say that “unique” is not only not relevant, but ridiculous; although you were the one who staked your claim on “unique” in the first place. Of course it’s ridiculous to call an egg or a sperm a person; that’s the whole point. It is my opinion, and that of many others, that it’s equally ridiculous to call a zygote or a blastula a “person”; but those of us in this thread who hold that position didn’t tackle your argument by calling it “ridiculous” and refusing to deal with it, but by countering it.
You appear to be dealing with all counterarguments by simply declaring them either ridiculous or not relevant. If this thread is really supposed to be about what is a good argument and what is a bad one: the argument that only the specific items you choose to allow can be considered either relevant or serious and that therefore you can ignore what opponents are saying is a very bad argument indeed.
Dude. If I buy a car from you, and you ship me a box of parts enough to build an entire car, you have not shipped me a car.
The “uniqueness” argument fails on several fronts:
A cancerous lesion comprises a mutation in my DNA, and is every bit as much a unique human life as a fertilized egg.
Identical twins have very nearly identical DNA strands; as far as I can tell, we don’t know yet whether, at the moment of splitting, the DNA is identical. If it is, that raises the possibility that a person carrying identical twins may abort one of them but not both of them. That’s some weird shit.
Cloning technology is probably good enough now that we could clone humans. If “unique DNA” is our bright line, then I may in good conscience murder you once your clone is alive.
Just as a box of parts isn’t a car, a blastocyte isn’t a person. But we’ve already been through that.
The “fertilized egg” bright line is just as arbitrary as any other.
When we’re talking about fertilized eggs, we’re 100% not talking about unique human beings.
Right. But when you combine the egg and the sperm it is put together.
Your playing semantics. A cancer cannot grow into a person. A fertilized egg can.
More, besides the point stuff.
There are 3 billion base pairs in human dna. Are you suggesting that it can be done without a single transcription error? Are you truly filtering this far down into technicalities and semantics.
I’ve always thought that a great conversation or debate happens when somebody puts out an idea, the other person understands the idea, considers it and weighs it as an idea, and then responds, furthering the idea.
I think bad conversation and debate happens when someone puts out an idea, and instead of accepting the idea, and responding to it, the person tries to pick it apart semantically, pretend they don’t understand it, or find some technicality that is besides the point or extreme conditions where it it may not apply in order to invalidate the idea of even considering it.
This is what I call “bad debate.” You know what I am saying. You understand it. You are a smart guy.
You get that a sperm is “half a box of car parts” and the egg is the other half. You put them together and you now have a new human life that given the proper environment will develop into a full fledged human being. You know that human being is “unique” in every meaningful sense of the world. Sure, you could have a clone or a twin, or some incredible piece of luck that makes the same DNA pattern twice, but you do understand what I mean.
You also know that women create millions or billions of eggs and so do men with sperm. You know that these are just pieces, halves of their DNA. You know that these things are less than a hair clipping and are not and never are capable of becoming persons by themselves. You know that at the moment of conception the ‘box of parts’ from the male in the form of a single DNA strand combines with of the female and assembles together into a unique human chromosome that has never existed (barring sci-fi.). You also know that given the proper environment and barring happenstance this fertilized egg will naturally develop over 9 months into a baby.
You know all this when I say ‘moment of conception’ creates a unique human being.
I know you get all this. Why play semantics and technicalities and try to obfuscate something that everybody knows?
I think we could argue in good faith about what value this unique human life has, and whether it is a person, and what protections or rights it is entitled to, if any.
Playing denial and semantics and little technicalities in order to avoid engaging the idea being brought up is not good debate, imo.
In the current state of human affairs, the world in which we live in, the one where we only pay lip service to the sanctity and value of human life, it would be the mother or no one at all. Hence my pro choice stance, as previously discussed.
In a truly moral world it would be no one or everyone. We would recoil from the horror of abortion the same way we would recoil from the horror of the killing of a toddler or any other human being
You think it’s a good debate only when everybody accepts your ideas?
That explains a lot right there. I don’t think that’s a debate at all.
– you don’t seem to be considering the possiblity that people might understand the idea, consider it and weigh it as an idea, and then refuse to accept it because upon considering and weighing it they conclude that it’s not well founded, and they therefore disagree with it.
It’s also entirely “natural” for it to do no such thing. Quite a lot of them don’t, even with deliberate abortion not included in the long list of reasons why they don’t.
For it to so develop requires it to succeed in implanting in a hospitable uterus, which very often doesn’t happen; and then for the mother’s body to actively cooperate in building it from a blastula all the way to a full or near full term embryo, which requires not only a great deal of hormonal work but also the supplying of nearly every atom in that body, and which also often doesn’t happen.
You’re not only not shipping the entire car; you’re not shipping the entire box of parts, or anywhere near the entire box of parts. What you’re doing is claiming that the design for the car is the same thing as the car.
From this and your previous post, it seems like you are itching to have a discussion about how religion and particularly Catholicism fits into this. Ok.
There are some things that you can do or fail to do as a Catholic that get you unofficially excommunicated. I am in that group, so I have no authority to speak on behalf of Catholics, but I was raised one.
Stating weird rules and dogma that you may have heard out of context is about as meaningful as quoting the leash laws on alligators from Napoleonic code in La as en example of the US justice system.
So, let’s take a look at this issue in context through the lens of Catholicism:
-God is the ultimate authority and perfect, and loves us.
-Man is fallible and imperfect
-The Bible is inspired by God
-God founded the Catholic Church when he told Peter he was a rock upon which he would build (Peter being first Pope)
-The Bible and the Church teach man how to live as God wishes
You are supposed to take the teachings of the BIble and of the Church, knowing that they are filtered through imperfect man, study them, seek to understand them and be inspired by them to live as good a life as you can. If you are having trouble with this you can consult more teachings, a member of the clergy, a Catholic support group, or pray directly for divine inspiration on what you should do.
Most of what the Bible and the Catholic Church has to say about fornication and masturbation and birth control comes from a very few passages, and an interpretation that was probably not the point of the passage.
For example, the whole “be fruitful and multiply’ thing I kind of read like when your Dad said “have a good time.” You understood that this not carte Blanche to go on a drug and alcohol fueled ten day debauche. There are implied limits.
Similarly, God is primarily pissed at Onan spilling his seed, because he was wasting cum. It was because he had a duty to his dead brother and his family that he was welching on.
Having read the Bible, and the teachings of the Catholic Church and having prayed on it back in the day for sincere understanding (when I was religious young teenager) this is what I came up with:
-God wants you to think of and treat your body as an instrument of will, not as a toy.
-Sex has a purpose and a use. It supports the bond between a man and a woman of marriage, the purpose of which is to fill each other’s lives and raise children.
-like anything else that is empty fun, if you are wanking or having sex to another purpose you are basically just wasting time instead of fulfilling life’s greater purposes. (Paul basically had to say this outright to the Corinthians who basically liked to take long breaks from doing God’s work to lounge around have orgies and circle jerks and whatnot.)
-these are pretty much failings that everybody is going to have at some point or from time to time, and usually fall into the category of minor type venial sins.
-enjoying a good wank or a playful fuck with some birth control does not mean you are going to hell, but it is something to pay attention to, just like if you start to drink too much. Getting a bit tipsy is not such a terrible thing, but if it becomes a habit and it becomes the point of your life that is a major problem.
-Abortion is taking a human life and is a big bad thing.
That right there is my sincere understanding of the Catholic viewpoint, having been raised one and having prayed to God for understanding do his teachings through the BiBle and the Catholic Church.
That was about 30 years ago, and I haven’t really checked in with God or the Church for any updates since. (Been busy wanking and enjoying irresponsible post vasectomy fun sex)
You keep saying it’s semantics, and accusing me of bad debate.
No. I’m rejecting your bright line, your definitions.
I’ve proposed an alternative: we treat actual people as actual people. I proposed that we go by ideas of personhood that I linked to earlier.
The advantage of my approach is that it doesn’t lead to absurdities. Your approach leads to absurdities.
You know what’s really bad debate? When people demonstrate that your argument is absurd, and you respond by chastising them for bad debate. That’s bad debate, Scylla. You can do better than that.
That is not the idea I was putting out. You are using accept in a different way than I was an excuse to reject my idea. Bad debate.
[Quote{-- you don’t seem to be considering the possiblity that people might understand the idea, consider it and weigh it as an idea, and then refuse to accept it because upon considering and weighing it they conclude that it’s not well founded, and they therefore disagree with it.[/quote]
No. That is fine. So far you have not done that.
Had you accepted my idea to think it through and understand what I am saying, you would understand that every living thing dies. This thread is about killing those things, not when they die on their own.
That’s not abortion. That’s jus death. You do understand that difference, yes.
So it needs to exist in a hospitable environment, take in nutrients, excrete waste, grow and build on itself, like every other living animal. You also replace every atom of your living body periodically and you get these atoms from other animals. So yes this is stunningly irrelevant.
No. What you have is a complete organism in the very early part of its lifecycle. The design of a car does not put itself together. Again, you know this.
You are again playing games to deny the idea, rather than to accept and debate the idea before. It is a waste of time. If I ignore or don’t respond to posts, this is why.
These are two different things. You can argue the validity of my bright line, but if you wish to reject definitions in order to avoid debating the ideas they represent, that is bad debate.
[quote{I’ve proposed an alternative: we treat actual people as actual people. I proposed that we go by ideas of personhood that I linked to earlier.
The advantage of my approach is that it doesn’t lead to absurdities. Your approach leads to absurdities.[/quote]
Define “actual person” I will show you how it leads to absurdities. It’s a childish game, but I could play it, too.
Not at all. I reject your definition because it leads to absurdities.
Look: I could define “human” as “anyone who goes by the name ‘Left Hand of Dorkness’ on a messageboard.” That would lead to the absurd result that most folks lack human rights, and the best way to approach my argument would be to point out how my shitty definition of “human” leads to stupid results.
Biological definitions of “human” used in discussions of “human rights” tend to lead to similarly stupid results.
I did. Do you need me to supply the link a third time?
It’s not, “conditional”, it’s nonsensical (right back acha!).
In the world we live, we make the necessary difficult decisions and you admit to the fact that pro-choice is the position that is the least harmful and preserves the autonomy of an individual to make these difficult decisions.
In a perfectly moral world, calories would not count either, among all the various horrors visited upon humanity in this one.
Look, the problem of reducing abortions is a technological one. It’s feasible that in our lifetimes a technology will come into existence that would prevent unwanted pregnancies with near 100% certainty. We are well on the way there now. Guess who will continue to stand in the way of such public policy? So if you want to appeal to a more humanist approach to absolute moral values, I suggest you’re barking up the wrong tree, in the wrong forest.
The fact that you disagree with me does not cancel out the fact that I have weighed and considered your arguments and find them faulty. I’ve even given my reasoning, multiple times in this thread, and relevant to multiple arguments. I’m not going to type all those posts out again.
Neither does a zygote. The mother assembles the blastula into an embryo, the embryo into a fetus, and the fetus into something ready to be born. The zygote’s information and feedback is necessary to the process, yes; but a zygote can no more assemble itself without a cooperative mother than a car can assemble itself without a factory.
I was responding there to your claim that the progression from zygote all the way to full term born child is a natural process. The fact that the process is natural is what’s irrelevant; partly because the progression from egg and sperm to zygote is equally “natural” and therefore it creates no bright line; and partly because lots of things are natural; including very many things which humans interfere with and prevent as a matter of course. ‘But it’s natural’ is not a good argument. I could even say that it’s “stunningly irrelevant”.
Right back atcha.
I’m not arguing with you any longer; you’re clearly not interested in any genuine debate. I’m pointing out flaws in your statements to others who are reading this thread; which undoubtedly includes people not posting. I’m not guaranteeing to keep this up forever, or to bother addressing all such flaws.
(oh, and while we’re at it: ‘everybody knows that’ is also a very bad argument. Saying ‘everybody must agree with me about this’ when people are obviously disagreeing with you about that doesn’t come over anywhere near as effectively as you appear to think it does.)
No. It did a nice job of explaining the timeline of how a fertilized egg develops. It did not actually crack the definition of personhood. It simply describes it.
It worked backwards, and hence missed the essential nut. Like if I describe a car has having 4 wheels, steering wheel, brakes, etc… I am describing car not defining it.
You are mistaken. Morality is a system for how to live properly in the world. It can be applied at the individual all the way up to the societal level. Changing the value of a calorie is physics not morality.
My stance on abortion is that of an individual regarding a society that does not conform to its most basic values. These values have consequences. If society fails consistently to implement them when the negative consequences are low, how could one insist they be implemented when the consequences are high? Therefore, I as a person seeking to have a coherent moral philosophy should work towards insisting that the values be followed when the good to come from them is large and the consequences small. In other words, it’s pointless to be sweeping the basement floor while it is still flooding.
Oh, it seems that you and I are incredibly close if-not in perfect agreement as to what the correct attitude and view is. We even seemed to have arrived there in largely the same way.