But it isn't really worth more, and even those who claim it is only SAY that in the abstract because it's easy to condemn people for it in the abstract when you don't have to envision making choices yourself. But put them in a situation between saving a child in a fire or saving a vat fully of even an infinite number of embryos, and they'll save the child. Everytime. And if they claim they woudln't, chances are they're lying to somebody: perhaps even themselves. Because if they would really save the vat over the child, that certainly seems like a remarkable failure understand what morality is supposed to be all about. And deep down, I bet they know it, too.
"yes, brings up a few problems doesn't it. Like, if we base rights (in law) on intelligence (which is basically what you are proposing) we would be setting up a pretty good legal precedent to strip stupid people of their rights."
Why do people bring up this ridiculous straw man. We aren't basing anything on "intelligence" LEVELS, we are basing it on the capacity to have ANY intelligence AT ALL. It isn't a question of degree of intelligence, but rather the mere possesion of ANY mental capacity whatsoever. If something has no brain, and has never had a brain, then it is insanity to talk about violating its rights. It no more has the capacity to have rights than does a block of wood.
Trying to make it out that this view is tantamount to saying its okay to execute people with down syndrome is simply dishonest.
I'm betting though, that if faced with the choice of saving nearly an infinite amount of fertilized embryos in a vat, and saving a single human child, you'd save the child. We all would. Not even under duress, but even in the abstract. So while its easy to claim that all genetically human materials are equally valuable, I very much doubt that the actual claim would hold up when placed into a direct choice in the real world.
If anything, that quote supports the idea that we DON'T care about the baby. The situation describes the killing of the baby in any case (born prematurely = dead baby in those times)... and the punishment is a fine to the husband for potential progengy lost, NOT eye for an eye. It's only when we start talking about harms to the mother that we start eye for an eye. So in fact the Bible seems to suggest that killing a fetus is NOT the capital crime that killing a person is.
"In the Psalms David writes "Even in the womb You knew me..." This implies that even in the womb the child is human and alive."
Two problems with that, of course. First of all, its not clear when in the womb we're talking about. If we go by what we know of the common understandings of biology at the time of David, then we're still talking about much later in development.
Second of all, the Bible also says that God knows you even before you're in the womb, which makes the knowing a lot less immediate and more metaphysical. God knows you in that he is timeless.
"Not really, no. Individuality is a pychological concept, not a religious one. I'm not arguing that we aren't individuals, just that our individuallity is not what makes grants us rights or makes us special (in the religious sense). Religiously, community is the keyword, rather than individuality."
But then what defines what is or isn't human? That still doesn't really answer the question of what or where this concept of special human beings is based on. How do we know it when we see it, given that we can see any number of different things?
It certainly seems to me that, in light of things like cloning from normal cells, cloning in general, and so forth, that your choice of the embryo is as arbitrary as choosing to believe that every cell in my body is a dormant human being. It certainly isn't based on any conclusive proof text, because none exists that discribes or was even aware of the exact status and makeup of an embryo. The best the Bible does is say that God knows you even in the womb (too vauge to be helpful, since at the time it was usually after quickening was considered when the baby was really there and active), which is doubly unhelpful because the Bible also says God knows you before you were even concieved of.
So it seems we are left again with our own judgements in play.
It also seems a bit frightening that a concept of morality would be based purely on the unexplained commands of a being only some claim to know and report the commands of, rather than compassion or empathy or something more directly relevant to the beings themselves that need the protection and concern and so on. Command morality is essentially abitrary and without underlying value: the commands could reverse tommorow at God's say so. Morality has always seemed to me to have to be a lot more stable and inherent than that. Rape has to be wrong, rather than wrong sometimes, but okay when God tells you that you can have the virgins of the people you conquered (who are probably not that willing to sleep with and marry you after you've just killed every man, woman and child in their family, including dashing any infants on the rocks).
"This is an excellent line of questions. The confusion is the fault of Christianity for not making this clearer. Mainstream Christianity, unlike mainstream Islam, for instance, does not make the claim that its holy text is the literal Word of God. Indeed, within Christian circles when we refer to the "Word of God" we are talking about Jesus Christ, not the bible. The bible makes this clear, but too many fundamentalists confuse the claim by assuming the bible to be a work of perfection and thus the literal Word of God. This is, historically, not a Christian claim. "
Part of this is right, part wrong. What's wrong is when you claim a particular view for Christianity or even "mainstream" christianity. The reality is that there is no solid agreement amongst Christians on this issue. I certainly, certainly agree that the idea that the Bible is the one and only thing necessary to understand Christianity is both historically recent and ultimately a pretty silly view (certainly the early church got along fine without the Bible, and even those who first compiled it never intended or believed it to be the last or only word on things: heck many important Christian traditions not mentioned in the Bible were in fact older components of the religion than most of the NT itself!) But many many Christians here in the US, far too many to simply be dismissed as splinter groups of extremists, DO believe in the literal perfection of the Bible as the Word of God.
"Well, to be clear, that clump of cells is, by all scientific estimations I've read, a form of human life. Just not a terribly advanced one. It is easily distinguishable from a cancerous lump or a damaged liver healing itself."
Whether or not it is distinguishable isn't really the issue. The issue is that in terms of functional capacity, it isn't really different in relavant ways.
And even more importantly, there is a greater understanding to be had here. We are on the cusp of being able to create new life from single cells. That means every cell in the great colony of cells in your body could be induced to begin to grow like an embryo, if given the right signals to begin doing so (just like zygotes require certain environmental signals to continue THEIR development, without which they will simply not develop into a human being). Every cell is as complete in relevant ways as a fertizlized egg: it has all the DNA it needs, it has the instructions for what to do, it just needs to carry out the process in the right environment in the right way.
Zygotes and early embryos are interesting to in that they can later develop into any number of fetuses: or no fetuses but without themselves dying. That seems to speak against them themselves being any particular one individual to come. The majority of fertilized zygotes, in fact, it seems do NOT develop into valiable fetuses of any sort.
The reality is that a zygote is essentially more like an recipe for how to construct a human being rather than the being itself, with almost none of the ingredients yet present. Even at the early embryonic stages, only the very very first instructions have been carried out, and the recipe is very very far from producing anything like the end product. Preventing the recipe from getting any farther is no more destroying an end product than simply not transmitting the recipe to the kitchen in the first place.
"What you've done is base your reasoning on an emotional plea rather than a logical framework. "
This is where I think you run off the trolley track. Moral arguments ARE always in part emotional pleas, not strictly logical frameworks.
What I see happening is that religious people DO have emotional pleas for why zygotes are people (because they presumably have tiny souls in them or something) but they know that rational people are not going to buy those arguments because they don't accept the basic assumptions. So they try to strip out the underlying core of the their argument and pretend that they are being strictly rational. But that's a misunderstanding of what rationality is in relation to morality. Rationality is how one reasons, not one's premises. And for any moral argument to make sense, it must have some sort of meta-ethic of value at base.
The result is that we get tortured arguments about embryo's being "human" that rely on the most empty, literal idea of what it means to be human (genetically), that somehow manages to bypass and forget the whole point of why we accord humans beings, and not rocks and spiders, all sorts of rights and protections. It's not because of their genetic makeup. It's because of the sorts of beings they are and the sort of capacities they have that are directly relevant to the ability to harm them in ways we all can empathize with and agree are wrong. Our moral sense was developed over thousands of years of experience with human beings: getting along with each other, working out that others feel and care just as we do, understanding that our feelings to not have wrong done to us are felt by others, and working out the prejeduces that kept us from appreciating that things like race, age, intelligence, sex, and so forth, did not diminish those ideas. However, through it all, we were dealing with fellow beings that were at least like us in that they could think and feel at all, or at least had at one point been able to do so and thus have expectations for their treatment.
At no point during this development of morality until very recently did anyone even know that zygotes existed. Most people believed that life began at the "quickening" (when the baby is first felt to move, though we now know this to be non-important as a stage of development). So none of our intuitions and concerns were developed with such beings in mind.
Thus, extending moral protections to them requires a heck of a lot more than simply treating morality as a set of rules with no underlying purpose or meaning, seeing that we accord humans rights, and then expanding the definition of human to include zygotes. To do that is to sneak past without doing any of the homework necessary to explain WHY zygotes deserve or even need rights. Moral arguments need to be able to work without rhetorical slight: we need to be able to explain why this or that being needs protections against death or harm even if we don't have definitional shortcuts.
And the "religious idea" that a human "comes into being" actually has no good support in the reality of human reproduction. At no point does something not alive become alive. At no point is there a being in reality that is the same as the human person. Zygotes and embryos, for instance, are not persons, not in any functional way. They are about as different from human persons as any thing CAN be and still be alive. Deer and spiders and fish are far far far more like a human person than a zygote is, and the idea that we would accord full human rights to something that is more akin to a nerveless tumor BEFORE we would consider giving ANY rights to feeling, thinking animals is bizarre. To me, any conclusion that does that has clearly missed the entire point of morality. Any position that is okay with causing pain to creatures that can feel pain and suffer, but is against preventing the dissolution or destruction or even just the prevention of further development of a nerveless, non-feeling abstract entity to the point where they'd cau
To be historically fair, the Nazis really didn't advance the cause of understanding much to begin with. Their experiments were mostly in cruelty, and the things we learned are stuff like "if we make one of a pair of twins drink bleach, will the other one get sick or feel it any way" and the answer was "no, but you sure are an evil asshole." Most of the stuff they did experiment on that was useful can now be obtained in ways that do no violate ethics.
Suffice to say, the claim about scientists wanting to be free from ethics is simply a flat-out red-herring. What scientists and many others want to be free from are the warped, twisted ethics of the religious right. We have our own, far more sensible and human code of ethics, thanks: one that doesn't involve thinking that the Holocaust was bad simply because it wasn't conducted directly by Jesus, as the GOOD one to come will be.
Pain is an example of a moral capacity, not the only one.
"I think the development of consciousness is a continuous spectrum. You can't just pick an abstract point and say it's ok to end the life."
Well, in fact, yes you have to pick a point. Not abstractly, but for reasons.
However, that's irrelevant in regards to stem cells. There is no debate about the matter: stem cells do not have any sort of consciousness.
"Abortion is what really irritates me. People want to enjoy sex without having to worry about the consequences."
Is sounds like you just want to punish people who have sex you don't like. Abortion rates in countries with wide access to real birth control and sex education are much much lower than here in the US. If what we cared about was preventing abortion, then real sex education and contraception is clearly effective.
"I think it's pretty disgusting that so many would rather kill the fetus than spend 9 months incubating it and giving it up for adoption."
"yes there is a point when a being comes into existence. it is when two gametes combine and form a whole. how do you not understand that?"
Because it doesn't make any sense. When two gametes combine, they form a cell. A cell is not a person.
"i didn't avoid the question, i already said that it's never ok to kill a human."
You seem to define "human" purely by genetics, rather than by function. That makes no moral sense whatsoever.
"The fact that you care about the non-feeling one over the feeling one " again WHEN THE FUCK DID I SAY ANYTHING ABOUT A SLUG OR ANY OTHER ORGANISM YOU BRAINDEAD IDIOT?"
You seem completely unfamiliar with the concept of using examples in arguments. You need not have said anything about it for me to use it as an example. A slug has considerably more moral capacity than a human zygote, which has no nervous system whatosever. A human zygote is functionally equivalent to a skin cell.
"the fact that you can see it's wrong to kill a slug but not a human is a tell-tale sign that something has gone drastically wrong in your reasoning."
nope. You are saying that it's wrong to kill a cell with no nervous system. That's a pretty bizarre view. Simply calling the cell "human" is not an argument. We don't kill humans because of moral reasons that apply to people, not cells.
"no i am using genetics simply to point out when an organism is created from it's parents, not basing it on genetics, only using them as proof of the living organism's uniqueness from its parents and therefore a unique existence."
So it's okay to kill clones then? Or one of a pair of twins? Genetic uniqueness is as irrelevant as genetics itself.
"just because you say you didn't exist doesn't somehow mean you didn't."
But I didn't. Zygotes have no nervous systems. The idea that something without a nervous system is a person whose interests we should protect is absurd.
"what was that mass of cells before it had a brain?"
It was a mass of cells.
"a skin cell is A FUCKING PART OF YOU, and as a part is not considered the whole."
Saying fuck doesn't make lousy arguments stronger. Skin cells are no more or less part of me than any other cell: you can remove one and keep it alive: you can even, with current technology, grow it into a new person! I exist because of a particular conglomeration and functioning of billions of cells, not because of any one of them.
"a zygote does not have parts, it IS THE WHOLE."
The whole what? It's just some cells. Why is it wrong to kill cells? You kill millions of cells all the time. It's only "the whole" in an abstract sense of looking forwards in how it might develop under the right conditions. But it hasn't developed yet.
"i'm not saying a zygote is a human because it is a whole cell containing 46 chromosomes. i'm saying it's human because if you trace the origins of a human the zygote is the farthest you can go with it still being that human being."
Except its not that human being in any functional sense whatsoever. An ant is more like a human being than a zygote. A zygote is almost as different from a human being as something can possibly be and still be alive.
"another made up argument.. WHEN THE FUCK did i say anything about pain?"
It was an example. Perhaps if you stopped thinking that fuck is an argument, you'd realize the purpose of explames in argumentation.
"either killing is wrong or it isn't."
You're right. It's okay to kill cells, no matter what genetic code they have. It's wrong to kill things that have functioning nervous systems, feelings, concerns, awareness, etc.
Zygotes clearly unequivocally do not have any of those things. Saying we should protect them is pure madness.
"and how is intelligence different from "functional capacity". are you saying it's okay to just randomly kill a rabbit, or a dog?"
Nope. Such creatures have, at the very least SOME capacity to feel pain and care about th
"i'm saying it's not okay to kill humans, and the earliest point you can call something a human is when they first come into existence."
There is no point at which a human "comes into existence," when something non-genetically human becomes genetically human, when something not alive becomes alive. Reality isn't so discrete. So you are going to have to determine whether a PARTICULAR sort of thing that happens to have human genes is the sort of being its okay to kill or not. What sort of characteristics must it have to qualify? You can't avoid the question.
"holy fucking shit when did i say anything about slugs?"
You didn't: I pointed out that you seem to demand that we give more moral attention to something that does not even have the ability to feel or care or think and never has done: a slug has more capacity than a zygote. The fact that you care about the non-feeling one over the feeling one is a tell-tale sign that something has gone drastically wrong in your reasoning.
"you can't just make up a point at which killing something is okay you psychopathic sicko."
You're wrong. You are doing so, just as much as I am, and just as much as everyone must.
"i wasn't basing it on genetics"
Of course you were: your whole concept of what it means to be a human being is purely genetic, rather than having to do with any of the qualities ABOUT human beings that makes us think that we should respect their rights.
"but at the point when a human first exists."
I would say that I didn't exist until I at least had a brain. Nothing prior to that has any capacity to be "me." Individual cells without some sort of functional order are merely protoplasm with genetic code in them. They aren't people. They don't have feelings. Caring about whether they live or die is insane. They don't care. They never have. And by the time they are anything that can care, the original cells won't even be around anymore: they just started off the process that LED to the new being.
My skin cells are not separate people (even though they could be induced to grow into separate people under the right conditions, at which point we could say under your confused definition that they "began to exist" the second they formed). When I walk down the street, they die in the millions.
"if it's okay to kill something because you arbitrarily decide it's more stupid than you are, why hasn't someone killed you yet? i really hope someone fucking slits your throat you sick fuck"
It has nothing to do with intelligence: it has to do with functional capacity relevant to the moral rights we are thinking about. If something is cannot feel, then talking it being wrong to causing it pain is nonsensical. We have moral prohibtions against killing people for some very specific reasons relevant to what it means to BE a person and how killing them destroys that. Those reasons do not apply to clumps of cells with no nervous systems, no matter what their genetic makeup.
It came up when a Bush official gave an interview when he declared that there was no such thing as reality and that they decided what was true because they define history for the rest of us.
"What about it? She was brain dead -- she didn't care about anything."
Again, our legal system has a well-established recognition of the rights of people to have their wishes carried out as per their property and their medical care even when they are incapacitated and can't care about anything. If they were overridden, then sure, SHE wouldn't have cared. But OTHER people seeing this would have to then take all sorts of extreme measures to make sure they have some backup plan for dealing with their wills or medical directives being routinely violated or ignored.
"Her parents were, IMO, acting out of false hope. Her husband was, IMO, acting for selfish gain. Therefore, I conclude that it was impossible to know what her real wishes were."
Maybe in Mongolia "IMO" is a legal standard. Not in America. What about the other witnesses testifying about her state of mind? What about all the medical testimony? Did you sit in court listening to all this stuff, and reading ALL of the evidence and testimony? Even if you had, you STILL wouldn't legally be in a position to decide, but given that I bet you did not, you are being especially silly in concluding this or that.
"And if there is plausible evidence that the spouse is lying?"
It's nice that YOU think so, but here in America, we have this thing called the court system that rules on issues like this. That way, the people that decide whether someone is lying or not have to go through a process to find that out, hear all the evidence yea or nea, and rule on it. Third-parties who hear some rumor or get only part of the story are not exactly the right people to decide whether something is credible or not.
And regardless, its a misrepresentation to say that Michael simply decided. He gave up his authority to do so in order for the court to adjudicate the matter. And he was not even the only person to testify about her wishes.
"Decisions, IMO, should be based on truth. If the truth cannot be decided, then life should be favored over death. Again, IMO."
But the truth WAS decided in the way we legally rule on truth in his country. In a court. With no errors that any other courts, even her parents could point out.
Now you might think that the court ruled wrongly. You might also think that Michael Jackson should have been convicted. But that is not how our legal system works. "What some random guy on teh intrawebs thinks" is not how we decide legal matters in this country.
"Even if it were true that there is a single point where the fetus becomes conscious (which is probably not true), the burden of proof is on you."
Ok. The burden is trivially easy to prove when there is no nervous system in the first place. And even after there is, there's copious evidence that a fetus cannot feel pain until very late in its development.
Of course, most abortions at that point are because the fetus is brain-dead anyway. It always boggles my mind that people don't think about WHY partial-birth abortions involve collapsing the skull by vacuuming out fluid. Are doctors being pointlessly cruel? No: they do it in those cases because in those cases the fetus' head has swollen to many many times the normal size, crushing the brain, and delivering it normally is with such a huge hydrocephalitic head (which can be bigger that adult heads) physically impossible unless you do a C-section. So this brain dead baby is either coming out of the vagina somehow, or through surgery. Somehow, which hole in the body a brain-dead, unable to survive more than a few days, baby comes out is not really something I'd think we'd have to have a huge debate over. But apparently, for know-nothing Congress-critters, it is.
"For the record, the husband spent the money earmarked for her care from a lawsuit."
Her spent it on defending her rights in court further, as he saw it (and didn't spend it on himself, and even turned down millions in "go-away, Delay needs a good photo-op" money). I don't see how that's wrong in any way. It was approved by the courts. If YOU think its somehow wrong, ok, but there was nothing legally unethical about it.
"Furthermore, the husband was seeing another woman that he wanted to marry. His motives certainly gave the appearance of being tainted."
Smears are smears. First of all, by the time the case hit the media, Michael had long long since ceased to have any legal power over her. The court finding was in effect, and the finding was that her medical directives would have been to be taken off life support. After that point, his opinion ceased to matter, legally.
Second of all, he was seeing another woman... on the advice and approval of Terry's parents, who, before they started squabbling over the money and Terry's treatment, had encouraged him to "move on" and "start seeing new people." And this "other woman" spent copious amounts of time with and caring for Terry's body herself. That sort of changes things, no? It wasn't like he was cheating on Terry on the sly. Everyone at the time agreed that she was gone, including her parents, and thought that he should move on. It was only when the issue of continuing to keep her alive came up tht suddenly he got charged with infidelity and Terry suddenly became the supposed next Awakenings candidate.
But it was about Terri. Whether you think there was enough evidence of her wishes, the fact remains that the person's wishes ARE what matters, and the courts thought enough evidence had been presented (not just by her husband, but by other witnesses as well) that her wishes were to be taken off.
People on the "keep her alive" side of the issue were essentially aruging that a bunch of politicians and third-parties can rush in an override the medical directives of individuals, or reverse _factual_ court findings if they don't agree with them.
It's worth noting that for most the case, Michael did not have legal standing to make any decisions at all: he willingly gave up claim to them in favor of letting the courts decide. Even if he had decided that he didn't want to take her off the tube, it wouldn't have mattered, because the court had ruled that her wishes were to be taken off. He was an advocate to make sure that happened, but it was a ruling of law, not his wishes, that mandated it.
First you have to prove that he's a scoundrel and that he lied. But the courts not only ruled, like it or not, that he was telling the truth, but he wasn't even the only person who testified as to her wishes to not be kept in that state. Her parents couldn't offer any credible rebuttal to that, and their experts failed to make their case.
Most of the allegations made against Michael turned out to be pretty silly. For instance, the "other woman" nosnense. It's particularly ironic that Terry's parents tried to use that against him seeing as THEY were the ones who encouraged him to start dating again and "move on" since at that point they admitted Terry was gone. It was only after it seemed like they might lose their little shrine that they started claiming she was still there and that Michael was cheating on her. But, in fact, his new partner spent more time with Terry than her own brother: who himself only showed up when the TV cameras did.
Every cell in my body is complete, human, and has 46 chromosomes, except for my few gametes.
In fact, with the right scientific techniques, any cell in my body could theoretically be used to create a new individuals. So, sorry, you are going to have to define some point at which killing something is okay, and you are going to have to do it based on a present functional capacity of some being, not its mere genetics.
And let me just say that if you've come to the conclusion that killing a zygote is evil but killing a slug is okay, then something has gone horribly wrong, and you need to start over again. You've missed the point of morality.
"As a person opposed to embryonic stem cell research, I can state unequivocally the reason for my opposition, and unless you're a sociopath, if you accept the premise, you would oppose it as well. I believe that the harvesting of stem cells involves the murder of a person."
I don't except the premise, and in fact I think the premise itself demonstrates a sociopathic failure to understand the whole point of morality. Stem cells and all embryonic cells are essentially recipes for creating persons. But they are in no way functioning in anything approaching the capacity of the beings for which we have all learned to respect and believe require rights and protections (regardless of what their underlying genetic substructure might be). The recipe hasn't been carried out yet, and almost none of the raw materials are even there, much less in place in the proper way. To say that stem cells are persons in the same sense that even the most brain damaged fetus is, is insulting and dehumanizing. It substitutes an extremely strained literal translation of a very particular definition of "human" for the actual experiences and moral reasoning we've developed as to why persons need rights and should not be killed or harmed.
Just consider how silly the claim that a clump of stem cells is a "person" given that it can separate into two, or three, or even four "persons" down the road in the execution of the genetic recipe. Or it can simply never grow into a person but can instead simply live and live as a clump of cells indefinately.
Sorry, but pointing out that someone is intolerant and small-minded and opposing their attempts to force their position on what others do when they don't have legitimate reasons isn't the same thing as being intolerant and small-minded. There's no paradox or hypocrisy there.
The rich pay most of the taxes because they earn most of the income. As long as the government has to run on money, ANY system of taxation is going to take more from those who have money than those who don't have any to take.
By the way: your writing-style is so confusing and all over the place that I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about or what position you are taking. I'm just commenting on the one tiny bit of your post I could actually make sense of.
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But it isn't really worth more, and even those who claim it is only SAY that in the abstract because it's easy to condemn people for it in the abstract when you don't have to envision making choices yourself. But put them in a situation between saving a child in a fire or saving a vat fully of even an infinite number of embryos, and they'll save the child. Everytime. And if they claim they woudln't, chances are they're lying to somebody: perhaps even themselves. Because if they would really save the vat over the child, that certainly seems like a remarkable failure understand what morality is supposed to be all about. And deep down, I bet they know it, too.
"yes, brings up a few problems doesn't it. Like, if we base rights (in law) on intelligence (which is basically what you are proposing) we would be setting up a pretty good legal precedent to strip stupid people of their rights."
Why do people bring up this ridiculous straw man. We aren't basing anything on "intelligence" LEVELS, we are basing it on the capacity to have ANY intelligence AT ALL. It isn't a question of degree of intelligence, but rather the mere possesion of ANY mental capacity whatsoever. If something has no brain, and has never had a brain, then it is insanity to talk about violating its rights. It no more has the capacity to have rights than does a block of wood.
Trying to make it out that this view is tantamount to saying its okay to execute people with down syndrome is simply dishonest.
I'm betting though, that if faced with the choice of saving nearly an infinite amount of fertilized embryos in a vat, and saving a single human child, you'd save the child. We all would. Not even under duress, but even in the abstract. So while its easy to claim that all genetically human materials are equally valuable, I very much doubt that the actual claim would hold up when placed into a direct choice in the real world.
If anything, that quote supports the idea that we DON'T care about the baby. The situation describes the killing of the baby in any case (born prematurely = dead baby in those times)... and the punishment is a fine to the husband for potential progengy lost, NOT eye for an eye. It's only when we start talking about harms to the mother that we start eye for an eye. So in fact the Bible seems to suggest that killing a fetus is NOT the capital crime that killing a person is.
"In the Psalms David writes "Even in the womb You knew me..." This implies that even in the womb the child is human and alive."
Two problems with that, of course. First of all, its not clear when in the womb we're talking about. If we go by what we know of the common understandings of biology at the time of David, then we're still talking about much later in development.
Second of all, the Bible also says that God knows you even before you're in the womb, which makes the knowing a lot less immediate and more metaphysical. God knows you in that he is timeless.
"Not really, no. Individuality is a pychological concept, not a religious one. I'm not arguing that we aren't individuals, just that our individuallity is not what makes grants us rights or makes us special (in the religious sense). Religiously, community is the keyword, rather than individuality."
But then what defines what is or isn't human? That still doesn't really answer the question of what or where this concept of special human beings is based on. How do we know it when we see it, given that we can see any number of different things?
It certainly seems to me that, in light of things like cloning from normal cells, cloning in general, and so forth, that your choice of the embryo is as arbitrary as choosing to believe that every cell in my body is a dormant human being. It certainly isn't based on any conclusive proof text, because none exists that discribes or was even aware of the exact status and makeup of an embryo. The best the Bible does is say that God knows you even in the womb (too vauge to be helpful, since at the time it was usually after quickening was considered when the baby was really there and active), which is doubly unhelpful because the Bible also says God knows you before you were even concieved of.
So it seems we are left again with our own judgements in play.
It also seems a bit frightening that a concept of morality would be based purely on the unexplained commands of a being only some claim to know and report the commands of, rather than compassion or empathy or something more directly relevant to the beings themselves that need the protection and concern and so on. Command morality is essentially abitrary and without underlying value: the commands could reverse tommorow at God's say so. Morality has always seemed to me to have to be a lot more stable and inherent than that. Rape has to be wrong, rather than wrong sometimes, but okay when God tells you that you can have the virgins of the people you conquered (who are probably not that willing to sleep with and marry you after you've just killed every man, woman and child in their family, including dashing any infants on the rocks).
"This is an excellent line of questions. The confusion is the fault of Christianity for not making this clearer. Mainstream Christianity, unlike mainstream Islam, for instance, does not make the claim that its holy text is the literal Word of God. Indeed, within Christian circles when we refer to the "Word of God" we are talking about Jesus Christ, not the bible. The bible makes this clear, but too many fundamentalists confuse the claim by assuming the bible to be a work of perfection and thus the literal Word of God. This is, historically, not a Christian claim. "
Part of this is right, part wrong. What's wrong is when you claim a particular view for Christianity or even "mainstream" christianity. The reality is that there is no solid agreement amongst Christians on this issue. I certainly, certainly agree that the idea that the Bible is the one and only thing necessary to understand Christianity is both historically recent and ultimately a pretty silly view (certainly the early church got along fine without the Bible, and even those who first compiled it never intended or believed it to be the last or only word on things: heck many important Christian traditions not mentioned in the Bible were in fact older components of the religion than most of the NT itself!) But many many Christians here in the US, far too many to simply be dismissed as splinter groups of extremists, DO believe in the literal perfection of the Bible as the Word of God.
"Well, to be clear, that clump of cells is, by all scientific estimations I've read, a form of human life. Just not a terribly advanced one. It is easily distinguishable from a cancerous lump or a damaged liver healing itself."
Whether or not it is distinguishable isn't really the issue. The issue is that in terms of functional capacity, it isn't really different in relavant ways.
And even more importantly, there is a greater understanding to be had here. We are on the cusp of being able to create new life from single cells. That means every cell in the great colony of cells in your body could be induced to begin to grow like an embryo, if given the right signals to begin doing so (just like zygotes require certain environmental signals to continue THEIR development, without which they will simply not develop into a human being). Every cell is as complete in relevant ways as a fertizlized egg: it has all the DNA it needs, it has the instructions for what to do, it just needs to carry out the process in the right environment in the right way.
Zygotes and early embryos are interesting to in that they can later develop into any number of fetuses: or no fetuses but without themselves dying. That seems to speak against them themselves being any particular one individual to come. The majority of fertilized zygotes, in fact, it seems do NOT develop into valiable fetuses of any sort.
The reality is that a zygote is essentially more like an recipe for how to construct a human being rather than the being itself, with almost none of the ingredients yet present. Even at the early embryonic stages, only the very very first instructions have been carried out, and the recipe is very very far from producing anything like the end product. Preventing the recipe from getting any farther is no more destroying an end product than simply not transmitting the recipe to the kitchen in the first place.
"What you've done is base your reasoning on an emotional plea rather than a logical framework. "
This is where I think you run off the trolley track. Moral arguments ARE always in part emotional pleas, not strictly logical frameworks.
What I see happening is that religious people DO have emotional pleas for why zygotes are people (because they presumably have tiny souls in them or something) but they know that rational people are not going to buy those arguments because they don't accept the basic assumptions. So they try to strip out the underlying core of the their argument and pretend that they are being strictly rational. But that's a misunderstanding of what rationality is in relation to morality. Rationality is how one reasons, not one's premises. And for any moral argument to make sense, it must have some sort of meta-ethic of value at base.
The result is that we get tortured arguments about embryo's being "human" that rely on the most empty, literal idea of what it means to be human (genetically), that somehow manages to bypass and forget the whole point of why we accord humans beings, and not rocks and spiders, all sorts of rights and protections. It's not because of their genetic makeup. It's because of the sorts of beings they are and the sort of capacities they have that are directly relevant to the ability to harm them in ways we all can empathize with and agree are wrong. Our moral sense was developed over thousands of years of experience with human beings: getting along with each other, working out that others feel and care just as we do, understanding that our feelings to not have wrong done to us are felt by others, and working out the prejeduces that kept us from appreciating that things like race, age, intelligence, sex, and so forth, did not diminish those ideas. However, through it all, we were dealing with fellow beings that were at least like us in that they could think and feel at all, or at least had at one point been able to do so and thus have expectations for their treatment.
At no point during this development of morality until very recently did anyone even know that zygotes existed. Most people believed that life began at the "quickening" (when the baby is first felt to move, though we now know this to be non-important as a stage of development). So none of our intuitions and concerns were developed with such beings in mind.
Thus, extending moral protections to them requires a heck of a lot more than simply treating morality as a set of rules with no underlying purpose or meaning, seeing that we accord humans rights, and then expanding the definition of human to include zygotes. To do that is to sneak past without doing any of the homework necessary to explain WHY zygotes deserve or even need rights. Moral arguments need to be able to work without rhetorical slight: we need to be able to explain why this or that being needs protections against death or harm even if we don't have definitional shortcuts.
And the "religious idea" that a human "comes into being" actually has no good support in the reality of human reproduction. At no point does something not alive become alive. At no point is there a being in reality that is the same as the human person. Zygotes and embryos, for instance, are not persons, not in any functional way. They are about as different from human persons as any thing CAN be and still be alive. Deer and spiders and fish are far far far more like a human person than a zygote is, and the idea that we would accord full human rights to something that is more akin to a nerveless tumor BEFORE we would consider giving ANY rights to feeling, thinking animals is bizarre. To me, any conclusion that does that has clearly missed the entire point of morality. Any position that is okay with causing pain to creatures that can feel pain and suffer, but is against preventing the dissolution or destruction or even just the prevention of further development of a nerveless, non-feeling abstract entity to the point where they'd cau
To be historically fair, the Nazis really didn't advance the cause of understanding much to begin with. Their experiments were mostly in cruelty, and the things we learned are stuff like "if we make one of a pair of twins drink bleach, will the other one get sick or feel it any way" and the answer was "no, but you sure are an evil asshole." Most of the stuff they did experiment on that was useful can now be obtained in ways that do no violate ethics.
Suffice to say, the claim about scientists wanting to be free from ethics is simply a flat-out red-herring. What scientists and many others want to be free from are the warped, twisted ethics of the religious right. We have our own, far more sensible and human code of ethics, thanks: one that doesn't involve thinking that the Holocaust was bad simply because it wasn't conducted directly by Jesus, as the GOOD one to come will be.
Pain is an example of a moral capacity, not the only one.
"I think the development of consciousness is a continuous spectrum. You can't just pick an abstract point and say it's ok to end the life."
Well, in fact, yes you have to pick a point. Not abstractly, but for reasons.
However, that's irrelevant in regards to stem cells. There is no debate about the matter: stem cells do not have any sort of consciousness.
"Abortion is what really irritates me. People want to enjoy sex without having to worry about the consequences."
Is sounds like you just want to punish people who have sex you don't like. Abortion rates in countries with wide access to real birth control and sex education are much much lower than here in the US. If what we cared about was preventing abortion, then real sex education and contraception is clearly effective.
"I think it's pretty disgusting that so many would rather kill the fetus than spend 9 months incubating it and giving it up for adoption."
Easier to say than to do.
If I except the premise that wallowing in the mud is flying, then pigs can fly. The premise is ridiculous.
I agree with your other conclusion.
"yes there is a point when a being comes into existence. it is when two gametes combine and form a whole. how do you not understand that?"
Because it doesn't make any sense. When two gametes combine, they form a cell. A cell is not a person.
"i didn't avoid the question, i already said that it's never ok to kill a human."
You seem to define "human" purely by genetics, rather than by function. That makes no moral sense whatsoever.
"The fact that you care about the non-feeling one over the feeling one "
again WHEN THE FUCK DID I SAY ANYTHING ABOUT A SLUG OR ANY OTHER ORGANISM YOU BRAINDEAD IDIOT?"
You seem completely unfamiliar with the concept of using examples in arguments. You need not have said anything about it for me to use it as an example. A slug has considerably more moral capacity than a human zygote, which has no nervous system whatosever. A human zygote is functionally equivalent to a skin cell.
"the fact that you can see it's wrong to kill a slug but not a human is a tell-tale sign that something has gone drastically wrong in your reasoning."
nope. You are saying that it's wrong to kill a cell with no nervous system. That's a pretty bizarre view. Simply calling the cell "human" is not an argument. We don't kill humans because of moral reasons that apply to people, not cells.
"no i am using genetics simply to point out when an organism is created from it's parents, not basing it on genetics, only using them as proof of the living organism's uniqueness from its parents and therefore a unique existence."
So it's okay to kill clones then? Or one of a pair of twins? Genetic uniqueness is as irrelevant as genetics itself.
"just because you say you didn't exist doesn't somehow mean you didn't."
But I didn't. Zygotes have no nervous systems. The idea that something without a nervous system is a person whose interests we should protect is absurd.
"what was that mass of cells before it had a brain?"
It was a mass of cells.
"a skin cell is A FUCKING PART OF YOU, and as a part is not considered the whole."
Saying fuck doesn't make lousy arguments stronger. Skin cells are no more or less part of me than any other cell: you can remove one and keep it alive: you can even, with current technology, grow it into a new person! I exist because of a particular conglomeration and functioning of billions of cells, not because of any one of them.
"a zygote does not have parts, it IS THE WHOLE."
The whole what? It's just some cells. Why is it wrong to kill cells? You kill millions of cells all the time. It's only "the whole" in an abstract sense of looking forwards in how it might develop under the right conditions. But it hasn't developed yet.
"i'm not saying a zygote is a human because it is a whole cell containing 46 chromosomes. i'm saying it's human because if you trace the origins of a human the zygote is the farthest you can go with it still being that human being."
Except its not that human being in any functional sense whatsoever. An ant is more like a human being than a zygote. A zygote is almost as different from a human being as something can possibly be and still be alive.
"another made up argument.. WHEN THE FUCK did i say anything about pain?"
It was an example. Perhaps if you stopped thinking that fuck is an argument, you'd realize the purpose of explames in argumentation.
"either killing is wrong or it isn't."
You're right. It's okay to kill cells, no matter what genetic code they have. It's wrong to kill things that have functioning nervous systems, feelings, concerns, awareness, etc.
Zygotes clearly unequivocally do not have any of those things. Saying we should protect them is pure madness.
"and how is intelligence different from "functional capacity". are you saying it's okay to just randomly kill a rabbit, or a dog?"
Nope. Such creatures have, at the very least SOME capacity to feel pain and care about th
"i'm saying it's not okay to kill humans, and the earliest point you can call something a human is when they first come into existence."
There is no point at which a human "comes into existence," when something non-genetically human becomes genetically human, when something not alive becomes alive. Reality isn't so discrete. So you are going to have to determine whether a PARTICULAR sort of thing that happens to have human genes is the sort of being its okay to kill or not. What sort of characteristics must it have to qualify? You can't avoid the question.
"holy fucking shit when did i say anything about slugs?"
You didn't: I pointed out that you seem to demand that we give more moral attention to something that does not even have the ability to feel or care or think and never has done: a slug has more capacity than a zygote. The fact that you care about the non-feeling one over the feeling one is a tell-tale sign that something has gone drastically wrong in your reasoning.
"you can't just make up a point at which killing something is okay you psychopathic sicko."
You're wrong. You are doing so, just as much as I am, and just as much as everyone must.
"i wasn't basing it on genetics"
Of course you were: your whole concept of what it means to be a human being is purely genetic, rather than having to do with any of the qualities ABOUT human beings that makes us think that we should respect their rights.
"but at the point when a human first exists."
I would say that I didn't exist until I at least had a brain. Nothing prior to that has any capacity to be "me." Individual cells without some sort of functional order are merely protoplasm with genetic code in them. They aren't people. They don't have feelings. Caring about whether they live or die is insane. They don't care. They never have. And by the time they are anything that can care, the original cells won't even be around anymore: they just started off the process that LED to the new being.
My skin cells are not separate people (even though they could be induced to grow into separate people under the right conditions, at which point we could say under your confused definition that they "began to exist" the second they formed). When I walk down the street, they die in the millions.
"if it's okay to kill something because you arbitrarily decide it's more stupid than you are, why hasn't someone killed you yet? i really hope someone fucking slits your throat you sick fuck"
It has nothing to do with intelligence: it has to do with functional capacity relevant to the moral rights we are thinking about. If something is cannot feel, then talking it being wrong to causing it pain is nonsensical. We have moral prohibtions against killing people for some very specific reasons relevant to what it means to BE a person and how killing them destroys that. Those reasons do not apply to clumps of cells with no nervous systems, no matter what their genetic makeup.
It came up when a Bush official gave an interview when he declared that there was no such thing as reality and that they decided what was true because they define history for the rest of us.
"What about it? She was brain dead -- she didn't care about anything."
Again, our legal system has a well-established recognition of the rights of people to have their wishes carried out as per their property and their medical care even when they are incapacitated and can't care about anything. If they were overridden, then sure, SHE wouldn't have cared. But OTHER people seeing this would have to then take all sorts of extreme measures to make sure they have some backup plan for dealing with their wills or medical directives being routinely violated or ignored.
"Her parents were, IMO, acting out of false hope. Her husband was, IMO, acting for selfish gain. Therefore, I conclude that it was impossible to know what her real wishes were."
Maybe in Mongolia "IMO" is a legal standard. Not in America. What about the other witnesses testifying about her state of mind? What about all the medical testimony? Did you sit in court listening to all this stuff, and reading ALL of the evidence and testimony? Even if you had, you STILL wouldn't legally be in a position to decide, but given that I bet you did not, you are being especially silly in concluding this or that.
"And if there is plausible evidence that the spouse is lying?"
It's nice that YOU think so, but here in America, we have this thing called the court system that rules on issues like this. That way, the people that decide whether someone is lying or not have to go through a process to find that out, hear all the evidence yea or nea, and rule on it. Third-parties who hear some rumor or get only part of the story are not exactly the right people to decide whether something is credible or not.
And regardless, its a misrepresentation to say that Michael simply decided. He gave up his authority to do so in order for the court to adjudicate the matter. And he was not even the only person to testify about her wishes.
"Decisions, IMO, should be based on truth. If the truth cannot be decided, then life should be favored over death. Again, IMO."
But the truth WAS decided in the way we legally rule on truth in his country. In a court. With no errors that any other courts, even her parents could point out.
Now you might think that the court ruled wrongly. You might also think that Michael Jackson should have been convicted. But that is not how our legal system works. "What some random guy on teh intrawebs thinks" is not how we decide legal matters in this country.
"Even if it were true that there is a single point where the fetus becomes conscious (which is probably not true), the burden of proof is on you."
Ok. The burden is trivially easy to prove when there is no nervous system in the first place. And even after there is, there's copious evidence that a fetus cannot feel pain until very late in its development.
Of course, most abortions at that point are because the fetus is brain-dead anyway. It always boggles my mind that people don't think about WHY partial-birth abortions involve collapsing the skull by vacuuming out fluid. Are doctors being pointlessly cruel? No: they do it in those cases because in those cases the fetus' head has swollen to many many times the normal size, crushing the brain, and delivering it normally is with such a huge hydrocephalitic head (which can be bigger that adult heads) physically impossible unless you do a C-section. So this brain dead baby is either coming out of the vagina somehow, or through surgery. Somehow, which hole in the body a brain-dead, unable to survive more than a few days, baby comes out is not really something I'd think we'd have to have a huge debate over. But apparently, for know-nothing Congress-critters, it is.
"For the record, the husband spent the money earmarked for her care from a lawsuit."
Her spent it on defending her rights in court further, as he saw it (and didn't spend it on himself, and even turned down millions in "go-away, Delay needs a good photo-op" money). I don't see how that's wrong in any way. It was approved by the courts. If YOU think its somehow wrong, ok, but there was nothing legally unethical about it.
"Furthermore, the husband was seeing another woman that he wanted to marry. His motives certainly gave the appearance of being tainted."
Smears are smears. First of all, by the time the case hit the media, Michael had long long since ceased to have any legal power over her. The court finding was in effect, and the finding was that her medical directives would have been to be taken off life support. After that point, his opinion ceased to matter, legally.
Second of all, he was seeing another woman... on the advice and approval of Terry's parents, who, before they started squabbling over the money and Terry's treatment, had encouraged him to "move on" and "start seeing new people." And this "other woman" spent copious amounts of time with and caring for Terry's body herself. That sort of changes things, no? It wasn't like he was cheating on Terry on the sly. Everyone at the time agreed that she was gone, including her parents, and thought that he should move on. It was only when the issue of continuing to keep her alive came up tht suddenly he got charged with infidelity and Terry suddenly became the supposed next Awakenings candidate.
But it was about Terri. Whether you think there was enough evidence of her wishes, the fact remains that the person's wishes ARE what matters, and the courts thought enough evidence had been presented (not just by her husband, but by other witnesses as well) that her wishes were to be taken off.
People on the "keep her alive" side of the issue were essentially aruging that a bunch of politicians and third-parties can rush in an override the medical directives of individuals, or reverse _factual_ court findings if they don't agree with them.
It's worth noting that for most the case, Michael did not have legal standing to make any decisions at all: he willingly gave up claim to them in favor of letting the courts decide. Even if he had decided that he didn't want to take her off the tube, it wouldn't have mattered, because the court had ruled that her wishes were to be taken off. He was an advocate to make sure that happened, but it was a ruling of law, not his wishes, that mandated it.
First you have to prove that he's a scoundrel and that he lied. But the courts not only ruled, like it or not, that he was telling the truth, but he wasn't even the only person who testified as to her wishes to not be kept in that state. Her parents couldn't offer any credible rebuttal to that, and their experts failed to make their case.
Most of the allegations made against Michael turned out to be pretty silly. For instance, the "other woman" nosnense. It's particularly ironic that Terry's parents tried to use that against him seeing as THEY were the ones who encouraged him to start dating again and "move on" since at that point they admitted Terry was gone. It was only after it seemed like they might lose their little shrine that they started claiming she was still there and that Michael was cheating on her. But, in fact, his new partner spent more time with Terry than her own brother: who himself only showed up when the TV cameras did.
Every cell in my body is complete, human, and has 46 chromosomes, except for my few gametes.
In fact, with the right scientific techniques, any cell in my body could theoretically be used to create a new individuals. So, sorry, you are going to have to define some point at which killing something is okay, and you are going to have to do it based on a present functional capacity of some being, not its mere genetics.
And let me just say that if you've come to the conclusion that killing a zygote is evil but killing a slug is okay, then something has gone horribly wrong, and you need to start over again. You've missed the point of morality.
"As a person opposed to embryonic stem cell research, I can state unequivocally the reason for my opposition, and unless you're a sociopath, if you accept the premise, you would oppose it as well. I believe that the harvesting of stem cells involves the murder of a person."
I don't except the premise, and in fact I think the premise itself demonstrates a sociopathic failure to understand the whole point of morality. Stem cells and all embryonic cells are essentially recipes for creating persons. But they are in no way functioning in anything approaching the capacity of the beings for which we have all learned to respect and believe require rights and protections (regardless of what their underlying genetic substructure might be). The recipe hasn't been carried out yet, and almost none of the raw materials are even there, much less in place in the proper way. To say that stem cells are persons in the same sense that even the most brain damaged fetus is, is insulting and dehumanizing. It substitutes an extremely strained literal translation of a very particular definition of "human" for the actual experiences and moral reasoning we've developed as to why persons need rights and should not be killed or harmed.
Just consider how silly the claim that a clump of stem cells is a "person" given that it can separate into two, or three, or even four "persons" down the road in the execution of the genetic recipe. Or it can simply never grow into a person but can instead simply live and live as a clump of cells indefinately.
Sorry, but pointing out that someone is intolerant and small-minded and opposing their attempts to force their position on what others do when they don't have legitimate reasons isn't the same thing as being intolerant and small-minded. There's no paradox or hypocrisy there.
The rich pay most of the taxes because they earn most of the income. As long as the government has to run on money, ANY system of taxation is going to take more from those who have money than those who don't have any to take.
By the way: your writing-style is so confusing and all over the place that I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about or what position you are taking. I'm just commenting on the one tiny bit of your post I could actually make sense of.