Presuming you’re talking about abortions, I maintain that abortions aren’t killing anybody. So any explanations aren’t justifications of murder, it’s an attempt to explain why the person is just flat wrong about their perception of reality.
You could tell somebody that eating a cake is murder. (No, really, nobody can stop you.) If that person then tried to explain to you that no, eating a cake isn’t murder, that person isn’t trying to justify murder.
Exacty. I’ve been consistently pointing out that personhood is a social construct that we as a society undertake to define via arbitrarily chosen characteristics, rather than an objective scientific fact.
Uh, no, there’s nothing nonsensical about recognizing that how we as a society choose to define personhood is not objective.
…then you understand the difference between a social consensus, such as the consensus we as a society have arrived at concerning the arbitrary definition of what we choose to consider “personhood”, and an objective scientific fact.
Correct. There isn’t.
I mean, maybe you’re choosing to interpret the term “objective” in some other sense, and that’s fine too. But if you mean “objective” in the sense of factual, impersonal, non-human-determined reality, as in “of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind”, then the social construct of “personhood” does not qualify.
In the sense of factual, impersonal, non-human-determined reality, words have definitions. It is an objective fact that in standard english the word “red” refers to a color. Absent the context the arrangement of lines and curves forming “red” has no objective meaning, but if the context is included in the analysis then objective statements can be made about the lines and curves’ meaning within the context.
In this discussion the context of standard english is assumed, and thus the term “person” can, and does, have objective meaning.
There is just disagreement about whether certain things meet the criteria, and much of that disagreement is based on people arguing from a conclusion and bending whatever they need to to reach the conclusion they’re arguing from.
Human words have no definitions outside of human-determined reality. Or are you referring to the magical theory of True Names?
Depending on context, even when it refers to a color, it can refer to significantly different colors. “Red” hair is objectively not the same color as a “red” stop sign.
It also refers to a political position. In fact, it refers to two different political positions, which claim to be opposed to each other.
With many political causes, you have a tiny minority who truly feel it in their bones and guts that something is right/wrong, and then you have the majority who only intellectually sense that something is so.
So, as you point out, most pro-lifers don’t go around bombing clinics (or hold funerals for miscarriages) because a fetus doesn’t feel the same, on a visceral level, to them, as a born person. It’s similar to how many people believe or claim climate change is going to destroy the planet, but don’t actually do anything violent or drastic to stop that impending doom. Brain knowledge vs. visceral feeling.
I’m referring to the magical theory of we’re talking about an english word. This is not magic and claiming that there are no objective facts about things in context is false.
Snip. Yes. Context matters. And contexts do in fact exist.
Yep. It demonstrates pretty clearly that they don’t in fact believe that fetuses are people, no matter what they are willing to claim for the sake of argument.
They believe, but don’t feel - or believe, but the costs of acting on it are too great. Even if you’re someone who does truly viscerally feel that abortion is murder, the fact that you’ll face life imprisonment or execution for bombing a clinic is still a deterrent.
I don’t believe that there’s a cognitive separation between your actual beliefs and how you feel about the things you actually believe. If you ever find that your reactions do not align with how you cognitively think your beliefs would lead you to react, it’s time to reassess.
And there’s certainly a sliding scale of reactions, but the vast majority of them don’t rise to even the least sort of reaction I’d expect if, say, actual babies were being killed at the rate abortions are performed. So they clearly believe that abortions are not great, but they are not as bad as, say, bashing in a baby’s head with a rock.