The “special cases” that seem to be worrying you are quite easily handled by amending xtisme’s original proposal to refer to the potential for communicating rather than just the actuality. Babies are people because they can be expected to grow into people capable of communicating with the rest of us, and thus being part of our moral community. People alone on desert islands will be able to communicate as soon as anyone else for them to communicate with turns up. The blind, of course, have no problem with communication in the first place.
Did you know that blind cave crickets will sometimes cannabilize their own bodies due to the sparse nutritional environment of their subterranaean dwell? They usually will gnaw off a leg. (Apropos of that recent Steven King thread about the short story Survivor Type)
I don’t see the great debate in your question. I think the “human experience” by definition includes the experience of every human being, and a blind human is just that, an individual who is blind, and as a result has a unique experience. The same can be said for every other unique trait. The human experience of a twenty minute old quadriplegic, autistic, blind deaf and dumb midget may be extremely marginal and foreign to us “normal” people, but is human none the less.
It begs the question totally. The whole point of the thread is that SmashTheState kind of thinks that maybe blind people are not human. True, he is totally alone in this so far as I can tell (and I rather doubt he really believes it himself), but you can’t settle even an apparent disagreement just by saying that everyone agrees.
(What the hell do blind cave crickets have to do with anything?)
But that makes no sense (claiming that blind humans are not humans). They are a subset of humanity, and their shared trait, blindness, makes them very different from the rest of humanity. At best SmashTheState is arguing that blind humans are not common humans, which is a pointless argument.
So, is Mojo Jojo a human, then? How about the Talking Dog? (Don’t bother playing the “they’re fictional!” card - we should still be able to classify them.)
I would agree that the capability to communicate was probably what xtisme was basing his definition - but I would not agree that the potential for communicate was. Among other problems, that definition balances on the slippery slope of calling a freshly fertilized human egg a human - which would be spiffy for the anti-abortion arguers, but hardly constitutes a universally accepted definition. (Arguably, a single sperm would qualify as a human too, since clearly you need to add things to a zygote and fundamentally change it before it will start communicating, so having to add things would not disqualify.)
And also - would a dead human be a human? What about one that was too weak to speak and about to die (thus having no potential to communicate again) but for the moment was still alive and aware?
Not totally - I did include “until we learn something about it that definitely defines it as not being human.” However I will admit that it was exceptionally lazy. To do this correctly, I would have to make a comprehensive list of every single things that, if it was the case, would be enough to define something as “not human”. (Once you have this list, you can determine wheter anything is a human by simply going down the list, and if it isn’t disqualified, then the thing is a human. This would therefore be a complete definition.) Of course making this list could be tricky, since as noted above a dead human is still quite arguably a human, as is a human skeleton, to some degree, but the dismembered arm of a dead human isn’t a human itself. So figuring out the precise details of this could be tough.
Of course for this thread, it’s pretty much good enough to say, “whatever the set of disqualifying criteria are, being blind clearly isn’t among them”.
Well don’t complain to me about it. Tell SmashTheState.
Obviously they are not human in the sense that they are not members of the species homo sapiens. However, as I tried to explain upthread, I think it is pretty clear that this was not the sense of “human” that the OP had in mind. Clearly he (I assume it’s a “he”) really meant something more like “are they people?” or “are they sufficiently like the rest of us that we can understand how they think and should include them in our moral community?” (I don’t think it strains normal usage to use use “human” that way, but the word used without qualification is ambiguous.) In the latter sense I think, yes, there is a good case to made that Mojo Jojo or a talking dog are persons/humans (like the Space Aliens I mentioned earlier). (Mojo Pin too I guess. :p)
I am comfortable with calling a fertilized ovum human (maybe not a human, but that is a different issue I think). What is more, I think that would be widely accepted, except perhaps by people who think that the only possible way to justify the availability of abortion is to insist that an embryo is not human. That is a BAD argument for abortion choice. I happen to think that there much better (though more complex) arguments for it, but I have no intention of getting into them here. :eek:
But your argument against xtisme was (or seemed to be) that his definition required too many qualifications to deal with special cases, whereas yours was nice and pithy and clean. Now you seem to be saying that your real definition (if you or anyone ever had the time or energy to draw it up properly) would actually be something incredibly long winded and complicated and full of qualifications and special cases.
I readily concede they’re people - but I’m not convinced that SmashTheState meant to talk about “people”. He said “human”, I can, therefore, debate “human”, if I like. (Which I choose to do mostly because I consider it the more interesting question. )
(Though again I’m not sure that a (perhaps temporary?) lack of ability to communicate makes a person a non-person, either.)
Actually, the difference between “human” and “a human” is relevent, I think. A dismembered human arm is certainly human, but it isn’t a human. So clearly there are different definitions at play here (with the former definition probably being strictly based on genetic origin, I’m thinking).
The main difference was that his definition required exceptions that it wasn’t leaving room for, and mine had all required exceptions built into the definition in broad terms but left unspecified in detail. So, it’s kind of like he was saying pi is 3, and I was saying it’s between 2 and 7. I guess I’ll leave it to you which of us was more wrong.
Are minorities human? I guarantee you that minorities experience life differently than whites in this country. Coming froma country where I am not a minoroty and living here, life is experienced differently for me. Different degree but isn’t it a similar concept.
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