No, the fetus has NEVER shown sentience, while the brain damaged person has, that’s the difference. You’re not saying that a eight-week old fetus is sentient are you?
Secondly the brain damaged “Adult” was already self-aware, is already a person. Not a “future” person, but a real honest to goodness, no longer attached to it’s mother for nutrition PERSON.
I’m sorry but I can’t give a “proto” human, the same rights I would a living, breathing on his own person; even if through fate, that person can no longer claim the “protection” of sentience.
That’s the reason why we don’t as a society, even when it may be the best thing, just pull the plug on coma patients…their former sentience grants them protection.
A protection that is also sometimes abused, against the family’s wishes and resources.
By strangers, who only seem concerned with their mission and not any collaterial damage they may cause to the people who actually have to live with the results of that inference.
actually, this comes from the extrinsic value of that person.
if brain-death is induced on a person with no family, no friends, indeed no one that values his contribution to society, he might as well be left to die. then, of course, we have to prosecute the person who induced brain-death for murder, since the person had intrinsic value (to himself) before that happened.
so it seems to me (and i haven’t been part of any “why is murder illegal?” debates) that a person’s life is valuable as far as it is valuable to that person, and valuable to others. regardless of whether or not he is a person, his life has value to society or to himself.
in the case of a fetus, society does not gain the right to value that life, in my opinion, until the fetus is born. as long as it is inside the mother, relying on her body to survive, it is a medical decision on her part what to do with it. if she does not wish to support it, she should not have to. it has been said that a fetus, left to its own devices is extremely likely to become a person. this is simply not true, as a fetus without its host mother would die very quickly.
indeed, a newborn baby can hardly be said to have value in and of itself. it has no language, has never contributed anything to society, and exists only in mere potential. the reason, to me, that killing a newborn is wrong whereas killing a fetus is not, is that the child is no longer a part of the mother, and no longer under her sole jurisdiction. society gains the right to value the child, and certainly adoption is a less gruesome way to rid yourself of an unwanted child that has already been birthed than infanticide.
But you cannot say that. You have no knowledge of whether an embryo or fetus is going to be brain-dead. More importantly, your original definition of a person makes no mention of brain activity and so the situation of a brain-dead baby and a healthy baby are equivalent. (Which you agreed with.)
Your definition makes no distinction between things with or without sentience but some conjoined fetuses are single systems with one set of dna, one circulatory system etc. How is that fetus more than one person by your definition? (I personally make a distinction between a human life(fetus) and a human being(person/sentience) but you can’t make a distinction that way).
This is dipping into deep philosophical waters here so don’t expect a concrete or even well supported answer.
I think that the sentience is the part of the mind which develops the mind and that the mind in its entirety is every piece of information in the brain, information that guides or influences the sentience or that the sentience can drawn upon in order to ‘decide’. Someone who has never been sentient will never have developed the mind. If it is even possible for the ‘spark’ to return then yes, you would have a mind during that period, because everything that is in your brain and the source from which your sentience will return still exists.
By their definition of mind the cessation of brain activity would destroy the mind, but I don’t believe the mind can be both restartable and purely a group of processes unless knowledge etc. is not part of the mind. If I were to accept their definition of mind then I would replace all my previous mentions of a mind for that which contains memories, the reasons for actions or decisions, the outcomes of all the subconscious processes of the brain and the general structure of how those aspects interact.
Without those things I am nothing and a person lacking them is mentally the same as a dead person and so is a fetus. Once something has been sentient it has those things and by my thoughts it now has a mind and thus has mental faculties which can be lost.
In some sense my view of the mind is influenced by computer science - a fetus is an empty system and a sentient person has processes running, things being read and written to the hard drive and stuff in ram. The person who temporarily has no brain activity still has what’s been written to disk and so can continue more or less where he left off.
That mass of tissue contains the essence of the rational sentient being he is, it has all that is required to bring back that sentience and thereby continue the mental processes of that sentient being. A non-sentient fetus has zero mentality be it active or inactive, but the person formed in that brain has lots and therefore has something important he can lose.
Generally I try to worry about the rights of things that presently exist as opposed to those that don’t yet exist.
Again, you betray your own misthinking with that “he.” It isn’t just that there is a “he” who is not currently aware of his interests, like in the coma patient. There has not yet even been a “he” to have formed any interests, future or otherwise. And if no “he” ever comes to be, no interests have been harmed.
Unless sentience, and some meaningfully measurable form of it, isn’t heavily involved in personhood, then we might as well not crush rocks for fear that they might be sentient persons who just don’t like to speak to humans.
No one said it didn’t apply, and there is no “current sentient rule.” The rule is that a being qua sentience must first have come to exist before we can legitimately talk about what is in or is not in its interests. You can’t violate the rights of someone that doesn’t exist yet, and if you could, you would violate them just as much by not impregnating every woman you see as you would by having abortions.
Indeed, if there was some right not to be aborted based on the idea of future interests, then we would be duty bound to have many more children than we want, because children would be like metaphysical prisoners waiting to be released from jail.
You missed the important point: future sentience is valuable in the adult patient because there is an adult patient around to value it. Not to mention a whole host of interconnections with other people whom this person has invested their plans and expectations with. There isn’t any such person to have done any of these things in the case of the fetus (though, note that I think that later term fetuses do have an awareness worth protecting to some degree, just as I think the same of all things with that level of awareness).
Deucalion, I’m having a hard time following your logic. Let me start by saying that I never said a brain-dead baby and a healthy baby are equivalent. In fact, quite the contrary: I have conceded that there is an intrinsic difference between those with brain activity and those without. I simply have not conceded that this difference marks the boundary between “personhood” and “non-personhood.”
Second, no I cannot say with certainty that a fetus will gain sentience. I can also not say with certainty that your life will not end as a result of you being struck by a meteorite in the next second. That lack of certainty does not justify my taking your life or that of a fetus.
I have actually identified where sentience is critical. A distinct human being’s potential for sentience marks the start of a person who posseses rights. The end of brain activity, permanent brain death, marks the end.
And let me ask you: How has my definition led you to believe that conjoined twins must be classified as a single person? Sorry, I just don’t get your point.
Fine. Then you allow for circumstances where the lack of sentience does not preclude “personhood” or rights. So have I.
We just appear to hold different axioms. Yours seem a bit arbitrary, frankly, since sentience can flicker on and off. And I can honestly say I don’t understand your belief that a mass of tissue that has no brain activity is a “mind.” It is a mind in the same sense that any matter can one day be a mind, given the proper circumstances. It sure ain’t one at the moment.
No, once something has become sentient, the most you can say for certain is that it once had those things. Most sentient beings that have ever existed have lost their sentience at some point. All of them certainly will.
Aaaaarrrrggghhh! I can’t f@#$ing stand it! That’s twice today that a lengthy response of mine was eaten by the hamsters. I need to take a break. Honest to God, that is infuriating.
That sounds good as a bromide, but you’re not talking about a “little” responsibility. Forcing someone to undergo the discomfort of pregnancy, the risks and pains of birth, as well as the economic hassle, because they were on the wrong side of a 1% contraceptive failure rates strikes me as excessive. Even postulating a contraceptive with a failure rate of 0.01% means there will be thousands of women with unwanted pregnancies in a nation the size of the United States.
So, in the name of forcing responsibility on the stupid, are you willing to punish the responsible but unlucky?
Besides, I doubt anyone but the very naive is “surprised” that pregnancy can result from sex, but even if this was a common attitude, forcing a continued pregnancy on someone in order to teach them a lesson when a simple remedy exists is preposterous.
Since you mentioned “Abortion as a means of birth control??” with apparant mock-shock, I’ll think you may have a mental image of a loose woman getting frequent abortions to remove the results of her own responsibility. To combat this, I propose the following: every woman can get two abortions in her lifetime, no questions asked. This should cover the vast majority of women who never get an abortion, or who might get only one or two in their lives. If you want to punish the stupid women (though your reasons for doing so escape me), this is one way to do so without trodding too roughly on the rights of other women. We can debate the number of “free” abortions (personally, I prefer the number not have a limit, though I understand many would set it at zero) and leave the simplistic crap out of it.
Thanks for the answer, which I think demonstrates that you’re not arguing with a closed mind, however…
I think you’re begging the question; the point that conception is this fundamental watershed is, I think, the conclusion at which you’re trying to arrive; as such, you can’t use it in support of an argument toward that conclusion.
in any case, I think that if you were to pick a point where potential to develop into a human being undergoes some kind of serious change, I’d have picked implantation in the right position on the uterine wall - I don’t have any figures (although maybe I can find some), but I think it is probably true to say that a significant percentage of fertilised ova simply fail to implant.
Considering that roughly one half of all zygotes fail to implant in the uterus without any outside intervention of any kind, I hardly think you can say it’s ‘certain’ that a fertilized egg will become a person.
Me: “The problem is that your definition also covers the permanently brain-dead; such a baby does have a future: it will be born and then die if it is not fed (intravenously) and the same thing can be said of a healthy baby.” You: “Yes, the healthy baby and the example you provide are indeed analogous in this regard. Interesting, eh?”
To me you are acknowledging that a brain-dead baby is a person under your (original) definition. Or at least that the brain-dead baby also has a future, since I suppose you could argue that it is not a human being. If your (original) definition does not make the two equivalent then you might want to explain why it doesn’t.
But again this is just semantics, it is irrelevant to the debate what the limits of personhood are if we use your definition, it only matters whether a pre-sentient or forever non-sentient fetus is as valuable as one that both has and will be or currently is, sentient.
That was not about a justification for abortion, I was just pointing out that you cannot assume that any given fetus is in fact outside of the set of human beings that have a future but will not have any future brain activity.
The problem arises where your original definition makes no mention of future sentience, and both the brain-dead baby (which you seem to have acknowledged to be a person) and the headless body are being kept “alive” to no real purpose with the only difference being that one is by artificial means. If the first is a person and the second not, then your (original) definition of a person rests upon the artifical manner of the life support as well but that becomes absurd when considering the possibility of an synthetic womb containing a viable fetus. But I see no reason to consider the first a person.
Throughout this post I have referred to your original definition: “any existing human being with a future is a person”. Your response about the headless body was the first time you have mentioned any statement or implication that future sentience is required. I noted the absence of this qualification in my first reply to you but you did not respond to it, but you did respond to the reason why the qualification is necessary: the brain-dead baby.
Feel free to use the updated definition but I’m not going to waste any more time on what ‘person’ means since it does not affect the argument.
These are my reasons for believing that my definition better accommodates the conjoined:
“A life” in this context refers to an individual life ie. an organism not just a single cell etc. I draw a distinction between a human life - the organism and a human being - the rational (generally) sentient being. From both your posts and the fact that such a distinction would conflict with the use of your definition I infer that you consider a human being to the same thing as a human life. A body with two brains and mutually depedent organs is a single organism, one individual life with two individual minds. If a human life == human being and there is no stipulation of a mental requirement (the original definition) for personhood, then some conjoined twins will only constitute one person. The point here was again to demonstrate that your definition would have made more sense with the requirement of future sentience.
When I say something thinks, I don’t mean that it is always thinking, likewise “sentience” was used in a general manner in my original post. I am perfectly happy to accept that a person does not exist when not thinking, but then I would say that the person exists once more if the mind is reactivated, in any case the mind of a non-sentient fetus does not exist.
I think the mind maketh the man but I don’t hold it as an axiom, but as a logical consequence of our nature.
It’s simple, a mind is more than just a thought process or consciousness, it is a mental system; a random set of matter is not a mental system. A stopped brain ceases being an inactive mind when that mental system can no longer work. The mind exists when a mental system exists in the brain, a fetus has no mental system so it has no mind and the mind is the key.
Well that’s generally true but you can’t even say that something which has been sentient has had those things: they probably don’t all exist immediately after the first instance of sentience.
But I think it holds when referring to something that is still, at least generally, sentient.
First, I’d like to say that I get a good laugh whenever I read any of The_Broken_Column’s posts. They are so ridiculous as to the point of being funny.
Now… I’d like to ask… why is killing wrong? The_Broken_Column, I ask you if you eat? Yes? No? Maybe? I would guess that the answer to that question is a startling Yes. Do you eat meat? Well… your killing some poor cow or lamb or chicken or dog or cat or whatever is the meat of your choice out there… Maybe your a vegetarian… then your killing some plant out there! You eat only berries? Then your killing some ‘future potential’ plant out there. You dont eat? Then your killing yourself!
Killing is very natural and essential to survival. No one can dispute this point. I hope no one can, because I believe it to be indisputable.
Now, why is it OK to kill a dog or a cat or your next door neighbour’s hamster and not your plumber, who bonks your wife so often? Why is it OK to kill, as long as it isnt human? Awww gosh that’s so selfish of us. isnt it? Why isnt killing a cow illegal? Why isnt killing a cow immoral? Why is pulling the weed out of your sidewalk an acceptable thing to do? You are killing in all instances!
Intellectually, I find nothing whatsoever, wrong with the idea of killing a fellow human being. Of course, I’m agasted at the idea for unknown reasons to me, from my upbringing. So I question my upbringing. Why was I, or you or anyone else for that matter - raised with the idea that killing a human being is wrong? Why is it ok for the little 5 year old kid across the road to tease legs off ants and why is it wrong for me to tease your left leg off with a chain saw? Maybe the idea of it being wrong to kill humans was ingrained into us to continue our survival? We are, after all, communal animals, and cannot live (well… some of us can) like hermits - all alone and stuff.
But then, have you ever thought that killing humans, in some instances is beneficial to the species? Wars have always been a good way of eradicating excess male population. Killing a serial murderer will prevent many more deaths. Beheading a tyrant will buy a time of peace for many people until the new head of state is corrupted by his power. So what’s this got to do with abortion? You argue that a fetus is a potential human being and that killing a potential human being is wrong. I can ask why? Why is killing a potential human being wrong, and eating a chicken egg OK?
I personally believe that abortion should be illegal for non-rape victims, but should be a government facilitized treatment for rape victims. The reason for my view is simple and very very cruel. Rape victims did not choose to get pregnant. They were forced to. However, non-rape victims, well… if they didnt want a kid, then they shoulda used a condom… or better yet - not have done the act in the first place. It’s a matter of responsibility for one’s actions more than anything else. Not pro-life, not pro-choice, not nothing. Just being a responsible ADULT. You fuck without contraceptives - you raise that kid. Simple as that. And I hope your not a non-adult doing the wild monkey dance and getting pregnant…
That’s all fine and dandy, except for the fact that contraceptives aren’t foolproof. Use a condom, you say. Well, out of every 100 women who use condoms for a year, 11 will wind up pregnant. Do those 11 qualify for abortions, since they were being responsible? What about the ones who decided 11% was too risky and went with other forms of birth control? I went through an expensive and rather excruciating procedure to obtain birth control that’s 99.7% effective so that I would be able to have a satisfying sex life with my husband without having children. Is that responsible enough for you? If I fall into that horrifically unlucky 0.3%, will you still say that I chose to get pregnant and should have been a responsible adult?
Well… yeah… I’d say you do qualify… you were responsible and didnt want the kid but the contraceptive company ripped you off! So you get to erase that baby! Although I’m contradicting myself on a certain level, huh? Anyway you get the general idea of what i’m talking about right…?
I certainly hope I don’t, since it sounds to me like you’re advocating using unwanted pregnancy as a punishment for what you perceive as irresponsibility.
Maybe I am? But punishment is not the right word in this instance I think. More of an ‘assuming responsibility’ of one’s actions after one has been irresponsible, and hence making up for one’s self?