Science is also a faith, with its own set of unprovable assumptions about the world.
Our faith may be more practical than that of religious fundamentalists, but when you start tossing around words like "ill-founded" and pretending that your faith in science is not a faith and therefore superior, your arguments fall upon deaf ears.
If you don't know off the top of your head what some of the assumptions of science are, your faith is more blind (and therefore more dangerous) than that of the fundamentalists.
Keep pointing out what hypocrites these cheap bastards are.
There is no excuse for not paying for your software, music, movies, etc. There are numerous affordable, legal alternatives. To do anything else is immoral and illegal. Get over it.
Especially on the internet. Don't even bother to try. The world is too interconnected now, and there is no going back.
Learn to live with this reality. Your life will be easier.
Start by not doing things that will get you in trouble. Follow up by not doing things that are embarrassing, or not getting embarrassed in the first place. Remember - 95% of men admit to being chronic masturbators. Coincidentally, five percent have been scientifically determined to be chronic liars.
Half of them can't even READ the laptop because they have no schooling. In reality, these laptop projects are not going to the poorest of the poor. They are going to countries that are one or two steps ahead, with better infrastructure and political, health and education systems. While it is nice to help people in these countries, there are people even in greater need.
We have tried providing people around the world with the basics - and it has worked. The fraction of people living in abject poverty has steadily fallen for the last century. Counter examples exist, almost always due to political instability (which the laptops are not going to end).
Many of the children (and most of the girls) do not even have a chance to go in many places. I think learning to read might be a bit more useful than receiving a laptop that you can't even use because you can't read, and your body is wracked by the pains of hunger and disease.
Refusing to acknowledge trade-offs is the height of political naivete. If you have $100, you can't have both the health care for four and the laptop. You have to choose. You can't get away with just saying "both", because now you are spending $200 (and could have health care for eight or two laptops!). In reality, you have a set amount of money, and need to choose what is best.
I doubt someone who is suffering from malaria or starving in Somolia is lying there thinking "God, if I only had a laptop". You have to start with basics first. All else is window dressing.
Actually and following this logic, every day hundreds of thousands of human beings die of natural causes since (in the 100% natural process) often a fertilized egg will not take hold in the wall of the uterus. Amongst other things, the likellyhood that a fertilized egg will or not take hold in the uterus wall of a woman is very dependant on the moment of conception with relation to the period of a woman.
We are all going to die someday. That has no bearing on our rights today.
To illustrate just how illogical the rule of extending to just fertilized eggs the protections offered to human adults, consider that people which knowingly have sex at the wrong part of a woman's cycle could be accused of murder (since they concieved a human knowing that said human would die).
??? At no point does having sex create a blastocyst that is sure to die. Even in such a non-existent scenario, it could only be considered murder if the parent's DELIBERATELY caused the blastocyst not to implant (ie, various forms of abortion). It is not murder if someone dies naturally.
cells, but AIs, space aliens, animals, euthanasia, and any other situation where this question has or could occur.
Although i have to admit that the potential of becoming a sencient entity should be a consideration when deciding whether or not to extend to a being the same protections that adult humans have, placing the border of being protected in that way at the point of conception is an arbitrary choice
And wherever you draw the line is even more arbitrary. The only two bright lines in the whole business are conception and birth, and waiting to grant basic rights birth is even more of a ridiculous choice than conception. Five minutes before birth, it is "choice", five minutes after, murder? Even though nothing has changed concerning the fetus except its position and its connection to the mother, neither of which is relevant to rights.
which has absolutelly no consideration to the rights of everybody else (especially the parents) nor to the amount of harm done by having the border there.
We do not deny one person rights because they may be inconvenient for someone else. Anyway, ALL of the fetus's rights beat anyone else's sub-sub-sub minor rights hand's down.
Following pure logic, the rule of "potential to become a sencient being" can just as easilly aplly to sperm or unfertilized eggs as it can to a fertilized egg
I note you dropped my qualifiers. I usually use either "significant" or "high". The chance of an individual sperm or egg becoming a human are sufficiently small as to disregard them. It is the same principle that says I cannot shoot a gun at my neighbor's house (which has a significant chance of hurting him) but I can drive to work (where there is a non-zero but vanishingly small chance I hurt him). The chances of a just-fertilized blastocyst is about 1/4. The chance of an egg is around 1/20000. No need to worry about slippery slopes - you have three orders of magnitude to work with. Also, note that there are QUALITATIVE differences as well. A blastocyst is a human. An egg is not.
If the only criteria of protection is "potential to become a sencient being", then my PC should be protected since it has the potential of becoming an AI (with the right sort of programming).
You again dropped another of my qualifiers. That is a bad habit you have. Note my word "unique". While I doubt your CPU is AI-capable, CPUs would not have rights until they were different from other CPUs. Mostly likely, this means that they would not have rights until the AI programs were first run. Identical, AI-capable computers just coming out of the factory would not have rights. After the programs were run, they would be exposed to different imputs and their minds would diverge, creating the uniqueness that is necessary for rights.
me correct my statement in my second response:
Using [only]"potential for.
Do what YOU like. Take advantage of YOUR specialties. No one place is better than the other. Each place has advantages and disadvantages, and housing prices will cancel out any native net difference. Yes, San Fran has much nicer weather and more cultural opportunities than my mid-size town. It also requires 50% higher salary to put a roof over your head.
I was speaking within the US. Obviously, our the substantial barriers we set up to immigration are what help us maintain our wealth differential.
Problems such as imperfect information and barriers to movement are now largely irrelevant in this market. Information and people move quite easily within the US labor market, and it generally gets better over time.
every place being equal. People will move (and change housing/resource prices) until the average person is indifferent to living in any two places between which substantial barriers do not exist for moving.
In the end, it all cancels out. Your best bet is to move to a place YOU like, taking advantage of your differences from the "average" person. Do you like eating at exotic restaurants and seeing theatre regularly? Lean towards the metropolis. Are you a meat-and-potato type who likes hiking? Go for the small town. Want to raise a family, but still be close to the big city? Move to the suburbs. This really isn't difficult.
How about a woman that has a high chance of miscarriage (say 1 in 10), should she not be allowed to become pregnant in the first place since she is likelly to kill at least 4 living human beings before giving birth to a baby?
Sure. It is fair to assume that most would rather have a 1/10 shot at life than a zero percent chance.
How about women that go horseback-riding when pregnant (an activity which apparently increases the risk of a misscarriage and thus qualifies as killing a living human) - should it be forbidden? Should pregnant women be mandated by law to stay at the hospital for the whole length of the pregnancy so as to avoid that they do activities or consume products which might increase the risk of a misscarriage (and thus the death of a living human)?
We already have such laws for children after they are born. The same principles regarding abuse and neglect should apply to pregnancy.
Using the threshold of "being a living human" as the frontier between what needs to be protected or not would entitle any fertilized egg, even one which does not take hold in the wall of the uterus (and thus never turns into a pregnancy) to protection.
Yes. Implantation is irrelvant; just one arbitrary point on a path that signifies no important change in the fetus or its status.
To me, giving protection to a living cell containing 23 pairs of chromossomes which can develop into a baby (even if the chromossomes are damaged in such a way that the resulting human has no higher brain functions) but not to a primate (chimp) which has the inteligence of a 7 year-old human, is a very partial and arbitrary choice.
Actually, chimps are more like 2 or 3 year olds, not seven year olds (it depends on the test). You bring up a good point, however. If you want to be logically consistent, adults dogs are about as smart as eighteen-month-old babies. Therefore, under what I believe to be your logic, they should have the same rights. Can you imagine such a world? It makes no sense at all. Therefore, the idea that one's CURRENT abilities are the only meaningful ones seems to contradict common sense. Either we would have to give full rights of citizenship to any upper mammal born in the US, or permit infantacide.
I don't quite see the moral imperative of protecting a brainless unicelular organism that happens to have the right set of chromossomes to turn into a human... unless of course you believe that the human soul is create on conception, but then you have to believe in souls, which brings us back to religion (again).
It has nothing to do with souls. As I pointed out above, CURRENT abilities cannot be the only ones that matter. In addition to the animal-or-infantacide problem, one could also argue that if only CURRENT abilities matter, you have no rights when you are sleeping, unconcious, or otherwise temporarily impaired. Again, this conclusion is silly - the fact that you WILL be a sentient concious being in the future matters, even if you are not one at the moment.
Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that potential matters. I believe that all unique entities with a reasonable opportunity to be sentient in the future should have basic rights and be protected from destruction. This applies not only to abortion and stem cells, but AIs, space aliens, animals, euthanasia, and any other situation where this question has or could occur.
Note the word "high". A sperm or eggs chances are infinitesimal. An embryos chances are one in a few. You can quibble about where the line should be, but fortunately, you have several orders of magnitude to work with. Even if the obvious quantitative change is not enough for you, there is a qualitative one as well. Clearly, neither sperm nor egg is a living human being. A blastocyst/embryo/fetus most definitely is.
The word "freethinker" is a word of profound arrogance. Its use implies those that agree with you are "freethinkers", and those that disagree are just slaves to their own stupidity and the control of evil puppet-masters.
As an atheist, who hangs out with atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers daily (physics department), and who visits in atheist and agnostic newsgroups on a regular basis, I have to say that you are very wrong. There are not a substantial number of such people. I personally only know of one such person in real life.
Hmmm...I spent years in a science department and rarely remember having such discussions (we had a lot more during undergrad). To the extent that I do know people's opinions, there is not much of a correlation between education level, income, or IQ and political persuasion (either in my person experience or according to poll data). I know several pro-life PhDs.
Perhaps "not religious" to you means "doesn't go to church often". It means more than that to me, though not necessarily that one is strong atheist
It is their beliefs that would matter, not the number of times they go to church. Many people go out of a sense of participation and civics more than the religion itself. Also, large numbers of people (almost a third) vaguely define themselves as Christian yet rarely enter a church. These people are not irrelevant to the debate, as they are both numerous and the swing block.
Secondly a religious argument is not much better than an argument with no justification at all. Faith is a belief in something without justification.
I am not sure how one justifies such beliefs. How do you justify the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative? You do understand that EVERYTHING you believe to be true is ultimately based on things you cannot prove.
So if I murder a homosexual, and then I make a religious argument at my trial that the Bible commanded me to stone the homosexual, then that is what you call a legitimate point of view as far as morals are concerned?
They can be just as illegimate as well. What I am saying is that it is irrelevant that it is religious. It doesn't matter if the justification came from Jesus, Kant, the guy's grandmother, or right out of his own musings.
If you cannot somehow judge the philosophy of Jesus to be good, then you shouldn't be following it. "Because it's a religion" doesn't cut the mustard.
I am not a Christian, though I do feel that the New Testament is one of the more profound religious fairy tales out there.
I don't have a set line.
Then let's make you set one. I am going to set one for you if you do not. How about your age, plus one. Good? Then you have no rights, and I am coming over with a shot-gun tonight. Hmmmm....wanna move the line back a bit?
Facetiousness aside, you DO have a line. There is some point (perhaps even after birth, and not necessarily defined by age) where you feel killing a human being is unacceptable, and I am sure you have some justification as to why.
But if somebody thought hard about it and concluded that it's murder to kill a single cell, then they aren't very good at thinking.
And if you think that a embryo is just "a single cell", then I could say the same about you.
For the time being, it is defended rationally. Philosophers, ethicists, scientists, and the general public seem fairly convinced that.../i>
The normal split in the polls is about 40% pro-life and 50% pro-choice, with the rest undecided. there are plenty of people of all flavors on both sides, including "philosophers, ethicists, scientists". You are talking to one, actually. And of course, the majority isn't always right. Also, the pro-life position has been gaining for the last decade, especially among younger people. I think this probably has to do with the increased availability of contraception - there are simply far less legitimate excuses for unwanted pregnancies than there were thirty years ago in the Roe V Wade era.
a living, breathing human has more rights than a microscopic thing with no thoughts or sentience.
We regularly assign differing rights to people based on age. This is not a problem. The question is not whether born persons have MORE rights, but rather whether the fetus has any rights at all. The current law denies them any rights whatsoever, even less than your pet dog (who is at least protected from inhumane torture).
the reason rights are accorded have everything to do with consciousness and sentience, and nothing to do wiht DNA
I agree 100%. However, it is not as simple as "If and only if sentient, then rights", which I believe is your current argument. For example, tonight, while you are sleeping, you could hardly be defined as "sentient". Rather, you are just a big lump of cells that will happen to (probably) be sentient in the morning. Yet I dare say that you believe that you will still have rights. Same is true when you are unconcious, or even more radically, for an AI during a power failure. Does an intelligent, sentient being lose its rights during a temporary shut-down? I don't think so. Something about the fact that this non-sentient condition is temporary seems to make a difference.
Wow you must have attended an abstinence only sex-ed program. No, a blastocyst will not survive inside of a vagina.
I was being facetious.
Why not? By all means go into the horrors that are supposedly justified by my reasoning.
The German and Japanese "experiments" on POW's would be a nice starter. You can find numerous variations from throughout history.
I'd like ot show you why you are wrong, but I can't really debate you if you are refusing to provide actual arguments or even a single example of such a horror. But I really want you to realize why you are wrong, so let me guess, you would have said something like "OMG THAT MEANS YOU CAN KILL DEATHROW PRISONERS BEKUZ THEY WILL DIE NE WAYZ!! BY YOUR LOGIC!! WTF!!! LMAO!"
Yes, using your logic, we could justify such a horror. Thankfully society avoids such an argument and we have done no such thing.
Killing blastocysts is not a horror, because they aren't conscious, they aren't sentient, and they aren't alive in any morally meaningful sense of the word.
Of course they are not concious or sentient. They ARE alive, by any definition of the word. Being alive is not a sufficient criteria for having rights, however. Indeed, the vast majority of living creatures have no or incredibly few rights.
Once again, to fill that definition, you can resort to reason, which dictates that according rights has something to do with an agents consciousness, sentience, or ability to feel pain or pleasure.
I agree. "Sentience" is what matters. By "sentience", I mean a sufficent level of intelligence to earn rights. Quibbling about where that line lies is another debate.
Or, you could resort to a baseless religious teaching, which states some mystical point at which a tiny collection of cells is for miraculous reasons just as important as an actual human, with thoughts, emotions, and experiences.
this is why i specifically said what we needed was a "morally meaningful definition of life." Once our rational discourse has provided that definition for us -ie, what does it take to be human in a way that means they should be accorded rights- then the solution to this debate DOES lie with science, since science identifies identities that meet or fail to meet that definition.
The problem is that the hard part is getting the "definition" you speak of - people defend everything from all abortion being wrong to permitting infanticide. You are right that once we have agreement on that point, we need science to settle the matter - but that is trivial. There is no relevant disagreement about the nature or abilities of fetuses.
So far, no one has properly defended a view of life beings at conception on rational grounds, though religious conviction does make this point appear more meaningful than it really is.
Now who decides that? How is that decided "scientifically"? I could make the opposite claim - no one has properly defended the deliberate destruction of living human beings that occur during abortions and stem-cell research. Do you not see that both your statement and mine are opinion, and outside the realm of science?
the blastocysts in question had no potential for life
Heck, they were CREATED because of their "potential for life". Put them in a vagina (or other proper medium, not invented yet) and watch them grow.
Firstly, they could not survive without scientists.
And five year olds, paraplegics, and the mentally retarded could not survive without their respective guardians.
Secondly, they were going to be destroyed anyways.
I won't even go into the horrors that have been justified with that argument.
The point was that the bible doesn't decide what christians believe -the church does.
You don't spend much time around Christians, do you. Which "THE church" are we talking about?
1) there are huge numbers of christians who don't even read the bible -they get their beliefs entirely from the church
Again, you must not spend much time around Christians.
As you fail to realize that there are a substantial body of people who are both NOT religious and DO believe X. You are still falling for the "If they believe X, they must be religious. Therefore, the argument must be religious." fallacy I mentioned before. You are making a second mistake as well - assuming that a religious argument is inferior to a secular one in a moral debate. When religion takes on science in matters of fact, religion gets its ass handed to it repeatedly. When religion is used to address moral or philosophical questions, it is just as legitimate as a point of view as any other philosophical system. If one person uses the philosophy of Kant, while the second uses the philosophy of Jesus to decide this moral debate, why is one person's opinion more valid than the next? Why would either's be considered worse than that of the common man, who just pulls the answer out of his butt without much thought at all?
You have a line beyond which you consider killing a fetus/baby murder. I don't know where it is, but you must have one. Why did you put it there? What reasoning did you use? Odds are that most Jesus freaks have thought about it as much or more than you, so you can't claim that as your high ground.
when the debate is a moral question means your thinking is clouded. This is elementary philosophy - "is" and "ought" don't mix! Evidence is always of the "is" type. Yet we cannot logically go from "is" to "ought" via any form of evidence or science. There isn't really any significant debate about what a fetus is - only what we ought to do about it.
To clarify your arguments, you should not use the term "life", which is political rhetoric and lacks clarity. Indeed, in doing so, you are playing into your opponent's hands - "life" obviously, and according to accepted scientific defintions, begins at conception. "Personhood" is a more subtle substitution. You cannot argue that a three-week-old fetus is anything other than a living human being - but you could argue that it should not be considered a legal human. Note the "should" in my previous sentence. It is not a statement than can be proven with "evidence".
I think you do not even understand the heart of the debate. No rational person would argue that a blastocyst has the level of sentience that is at the heart of the concept of "personhood". Rather, they would be arguing that the high potential of this organism to attain that ability is sufficient for certain basic protections. Note that again, science cannot help us with this debate.
You are right about the Bible - there is little concerning homosexuality. Unfortunately, that little bit is extremely clear on the matter. The same is not true concerning abortion. The only line that I can think of (and the one most often cited) is the "I knew thee in the womb" line, which doesn't imply that "I knew thee from conception", and therefore does not settle the matter.
And everything I said about stem cells could be applied to abortion. You are making the same false assumptions as the other folks here - that everyone who opposes stem-cells is religious, and that because many of those opponents are relgious, their argument must be religious.
Please explain, explicitly, how the belief that personhood begins at conception is more "religious" per se than the belief that it begins during the third trimester, when their is substantial brain activity (which is more or less the current law).
Don't say "lots of religious people believe the former" - that is irrelevant. Lots of religious people believe the sky is blue - that doesn't change the fact that it is.
There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.
Do your homework and quit assuming. This is a battle between people who belief personhood begins at conception vs people who believe it begins at first brain wave, birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord, etc. None of these positions is necessarily any more "religious" than the other, and more importantly, none is any more "scientific" as well. "Personhood" is a moral concept and outside of the scope of science. Science can tell us that a blastocyst is alive and a human (according to the accepted definitions), but it cannot tell us if this is sufficient for the granting of rights.
This debate has nothing to do with science OR religion, let alone a conflict between them.
The founders explicitly stated that any such interpretation was nonsense - which it is. Your interpretation of that clause essentially allows this line to supercede the entire rest of the document, which explicitly spells out the specific, enumerated powers that the government would have to achieve the "general welfare", "common defense", etc.
How can you seriously suggest an interpretation that is both renders the document contradictory and is refuted by the very people who wrote it?
I already have the headquarters of the world's largest chemical company in my backyard (I am not joking - I can see it from my window). It's plants are less than a mile away.
Of course, it is in my backyard because I am employed at its subsidiary and prefer to live close to work.
It is just cheaper to add a new gas or coal plant and update the grid. As long as this is true (and it will not be forever) people are going to choose the dirty way. PV costs several times what dinofuel does. This isn't what you want to hear but it is the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
sued, and at most, I have heard of a couple of dozen odd-ball cases like this, it is safe to presume that most of the other 99.99% are legit.
Hell, RIAA could pay some college kid twenty bucks an hour to document infringers in his or her dorm, and catch them by the dozen.
Science is also a faith, with its own set of unprovable assumptions about the world.
Our faith may be more practical than that of religious fundamentalists, but when you start tossing around words like "ill-founded" and pretending that your faith in science is not a faith and therefore superior, your arguments fall upon deaf ears.
If you don't know off the top of your head what some of the assumptions of science are, your faith is more blind (and therefore more dangerous) than that of the fundamentalists.
Keep pointing out what hypocrites these cheap bastards are.
There is no excuse for not paying for your software, music, movies, etc. There are numerous affordable, legal alternatives. To do anything else is immoral and illegal. Get over it.
Especially on the internet. Don't even bother to try. The world is too interconnected now, and there is no going back.
Learn to live with this reality. Your life will be easier.
Start by not doing things that will get you in trouble. Follow up by not doing things that are embarrassing, or not getting embarrassed in the first place. Remember - 95% of men admit to being chronic masturbators. Coincidentally, five percent have been scientifically determined to be chronic liars.
Half of them can't even READ the laptop because they have no schooling. In reality, these laptop projects are not going to the poorest of the poor. They are going to countries that are one or two steps ahead, with better infrastructure and political, health and education systems. While it is nice to help people in these countries, there are people even in greater need.
We have tried providing people around the world with the basics - and it has worked. The fraction of people living in abject poverty has steadily fallen for the last century. Counter examples exist, almost always due to political instability (which the laptops are not going to end).
Many of the children (and most of the girls) do not even have a chance to go in many places. I think learning to read might be a bit more useful than receiving a laptop that you can't even use because you can't read, and your body is wracked by the pains of hunger and disease.
Refusing to acknowledge trade-offs is the height of political naivete. If you have $100, you can't have both the health care for four and the laptop. You have to choose. You can't get away with just saying "both", because now you are spending $200 (and could have health care for eight or two laptops!). In reality, you have a set amount of money, and need to choose what is best.
I doubt someone who is suffering from malaria or starving in Somolia is lying there thinking "God, if I only had a laptop". You have to start with basics first. All else is window dressing.
There are literally billions of people without access to clean water, a secure food supply, basic medicine, reasonable security, etc.
A $100 dollars for a laptop could provide medical care for a family of four for a year in many third-world countries. Which would you rather have?
Actually and following this logic, every day hundreds of thousands of human beings die of natural causes since (in the 100% natural process) often a fertilized egg will not take hold in the wall of the uterus. Amongst other things, the likellyhood that a fertilized egg will or not take hold in the uterus wall of a woman is very dependant on the moment of conception with relation to the period of a woman.
We are all going to die someday. That has no bearing on our rights today.
To illustrate just how illogical the rule of extending to just fertilized eggs the protections offered to human adults, consider that people which knowingly have sex at the wrong part of a woman's cycle could be accused of murder (since they concieved a human knowing that said human would die).
??? At no point does having sex create a blastocyst that is sure to die. Even in such a non-existent scenario, it could only be considered murder if the parent's DELIBERATELY caused the blastocyst not to implant (ie, various forms of abortion). It is not murder if someone dies naturally. cells, but AIs, space aliens, animals, euthanasia, and any other situation where this question has or could occur.
Although i have to admit that the potential of becoming a sencient entity should be a consideration when deciding whether or not to extend to a being the same protections that adult humans have, placing the border of being protected in that way at the point of conception is an arbitrary choice
And wherever you draw the line is even more arbitrary. The only two bright lines in the whole business are conception and birth, and waiting to grant basic rights birth is even more of a ridiculous choice than conception. Five minutes before birth, it is "choice", five minutes after, murder? Even though nothing has changed concerning the fetus except its position and its connection to the mother, neither of which is relevant to rights.
which has absolutelly no consideration to the rights of everybody else (especially the parents) nor to the amount of harm done by having the border there.
We do not deny one person rights because they may be inconvenient for someone else. Anyway, ALL of the fetus's rights beat anyone else's sub-sub-sub minor rights hand's down.
Following pure logic, the rule of "potential to become a sencient being" can just as easilly aplly to sperm or unfertilized eggs as it can to a fertilized egg
I note you dropped my qualifiers. I usually use either "significant" or "high". The chance of an individual sperm or egg becoming a human are sufficiently small as to disregard them. It is the same principle that says I cannot shoot a gun at my neighbor's house (which has a significant chance of hurting him) but I can drive to work (where there is a non-zero but vanishingly small chance I hurt him). The chances of a just-fertilized blastocyst is about 1/4. The chance of an egg is around 1/20000. No need to worry about slippery slopes - you have three orders of magnitude to work with. Also, note that there are QUALITATIVE differences as well. A blastocyst is a human. An egg is not.
If the only criteria of protection is "potential to become a sencient being", then my PC should be protected since it has the potential of becoming an AI (with the right sort of programming).
You again dropped another of my qualifiers. That is a bad habit you have. Note my word "unique". While I doubt your CPU is AI-capable, CPUs would not have rights until they were different from other CPUs. Mostly likely, this means that they would not have rights until the AI programs were first run. Identical, AI-capable computers just coming out of the factory would not have rights. After the programs were run, they would be exposed to different imputs and their minds would diverge, creating the uniqueness that is necessary for rights.
me correct my statement in my second response: Using [only]"potential for.
Do what YOU like. Take advantage of YOUR specialties. No one place is better than the other. Each place has advantages and disadvantages, and housing prices will cancel out any native net difference. Yes, San Fran has much nicer weather and more cultural opportunities than my mid-size town. It also requires 50% higher salary to put a roof over your head.
I was speaking within the US. Obviously, our the substantial barriers we set up to immigration are what help us maintain our wealth differential.
Problems such as imperfect information and barriers to movement are now largely irrelevant in this market. Information and people move quite easily within the US labor market, and it generally gets better over time.
every place being equal. People will move (and change housing/resource prices) until the average person is indifferent to living in any two places between which substantial barriers do not exist for moving.
In the end, it all cancels out. Your best bet is to move to a place YOU like, taking advantage of your differences from the "average" person. Do you like eating at exotic restaurants and seeing theatre regularly? Lean towards the metropolis. Are you a meat-and-potato type who likes hiking? Go for the small town. Want to raise a family, but still be close to the big city? Move to the suburbs. This really isn't difficult.
How about a woman that has a high chance of miscarriage (say 1 in 10), should she not be allowed to become pregnant in the first place since she is likelly to kill at least 4 living human beings before giving birth to a baby?
... unless of course you believe that the human soul is create on conception, but then you have to believe in souls, which brings us back to religion (again).
Sure. It is fair to assume that most would rather have a 1/10 shot at life than a zero percent chance.
How about women that go horseback-riding when pregnant (an activity which apparently increases the risk of a misscarriage and thus qualifies as killing a living human) - should it be forbidden? Should pregnant women be mandated by law to stay at the hospital for the whole length of the pregnancy so as to avoid that they do activities or consume products which might increase the risk of a misscarriage (and thus the death of a living human)?
We already have such laws for children after they are born. The same principles regarding abuse and neglect should apply to pregnancy.
Using the threshold of "being a living human" as the frontier between what needs to be protected or not would entitle any fertilized egg, even one which does not take hold in the wall of the uterus (and thus never turns into a pregnancy) to protection.
Yes. Implantation is irrelvant; just one arbitrary point on a path that signifies no important change in the fetus or its status.
To me, giving protection to a living cell containing 23 pairs of chromossomes which can develop into a baby (even if the chromossomes are damaged in such a way that the resulting human has no higher brain functions) but not to a primate (chimp) which has the inteligence of a 7 year-old human, is a very partial and arbitrary choice.
Actually, chimps are more like 2 or 3 year olds, not seven year olds (it depends on the test). You bring up a good point, however. If you want to be logically consistent, adults dogs are about as smart as eighteen-month-old babies. Therefore, under what I believe to be your logic, they should have the same rights. Can you imagine such a world? It makes no sense at all. Therefore, the idea that one's CURRENT abilities are the only meaningful ones seems to contradict common sense. Either we would have to give full rights of citizenship to any upper mammal born in the US, or permit infantacide.
I don't quite see the moral imperative of protecting a brainless unicelular organism that happens to have the right set of chromossomes to turn into a human
It has nothing to do with souls. As I pointed out above, CURRENT abilities cannot be the only ones that matter. In addition to the animal-or-infantacide problem, one could also argue that if only CURRENT abilities matter, you have no rights when you are sleeping, unconcious, or otherwise temporarily impaired. Again, this conclusion is silly - the fact that you WILL be a sentient concious being in the future matters, even if you are not one at the moment.
Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that potential matters. I believe that all unique entities with a reasonable opportunity to be sentient in the future should have basic rights and be protected from destruction. This applies not only to abortion and stem cells, but AIs, space aliens, animals, euthanasia, and any other situation where this question has or could occur.
Note the word "high". A sperm or eggs chances are infinitesimal. An embryos chances are one in a few. You can quibble about where the line should be, but fortunately, you have several orders of magnitude to work with. Even if the obvious quantitative change is not enough for you, there is a qualitative one as well. Clearly, neither sperm nor egg is a living human being. A blastocyst/embryo/fetus most definitely is.
The word "freethinker" is a word of profound arrogance. Its use implies those that agree with you are "freethinkers", and those that disagree are just slaves to their own stupidity and the control of evil puppet-masters. As an atheist, who hangs out with atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers daily (physics department), and who visits in atheist and agnostic newsgroups on a regular basis, I have to say that you are very wrong. There are not a substantial number of such people. I personally only know of one such person in real life.
Hmmm...I spent years in a science department and rarely remember having such discussions (we had a lot more during undergrad). To the extent that I do know people's opinions, there is not much of a correlation between education level, income, or IQ and political persuasion (either in my person experience or according to poll data). I know several pro-life PhDs.
Perhaps "not religious" to you means "doesn't go to church often". It means more than that to me, though not necessarily that one is strong atheist
It is their beliefs that would matter, not the number of times they go to church. Many people go out of a sense of participation and civics more than the religion itself. Also, large numbers of people (almost a third) vaguely define themselves as Christian yet rarely enter a church. These people are not irrelevant to the debate, as they are both numerous and the swing block.
Secondly a religious argument is not much better than an argument with no justification at all. Faith is a belief in something without justification.
I am not sure how one justifies such beliefs. How do you justify the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative? You do understand that EVERYTHING you believe to be true is ultimately based on things you cannot prove.
So if I murder a homosexual, and then I make a religious argument at my trial that the Bible commanded me to stone the homosexual, then that is what you call a legitimate point of view as far as morals are concerned?
They can be just as illegimate as well. What I am saying is that it is irrelevant that it is religious. It doesn't matter if the justification came from Jesus, Kant, the guy's grandmother, or right out of his own musings.
If you cannot somehow judge the philosophy of Jesus to be good, then you shouldn't be following it. "Because it's a religion" doesn't cut the mustard.
I am not a Christian, though I do feel that the New Testament is one of the more profound religious fairy tales out there.
I don't have a set line.
Then let's make you set one. I am going to set one for you if you do not. How about your age, plus one. Good? Then you have no rights, and I am coming over with a shot-gun tonight. Hmmmm....wanna move the line back a bit?
Facetiousness aside, you DO have a line. There is some point (perhaps even after birth, and not necessarily defined by age) where you feel killing a human being is unacceptable, and I am sure you have some justification as to why.
But if somebody thought hard about it and concluded that it's murder to kill a single cell, then they aren't very good at thinking.
And if you think that a embryo is just "a single cell", then I could say the same about you.
For the time being, it is defended rationally. Philosophers, ethicists, scientists, and the general public seem fairly convinced that.../i>
The normal split in the polls is about 40% pro-life and 50% pro-choice, with the rest undecided. there are plenty of people of all flavors on both sides, including "philosophers, ethicists, scientists". You are talking to one, actually. And of course, the majority isn't always right. Also, the pro-life position has been gaining for the last decade, especially among younger people. I think this probably has to do with the increased availability of contraception - there are simply far less legitimate excuses for unwanted pregnancies than there were thirty years ago in the Roe V Wade era.
a living, breathing human has more rights than a microscopic thing with no thoughts or sentience.
We regularly assign differing rights to people based on age. This is not a problem. The question is not whether born persons have MORE rights, but rather whether the fetus has any rights at all. The current law denies them any rights whatsoever, even less than your pet dog (who is at least protected from inhumane torture).
the reason rights are accorded have everything to do with consciousness and sentience, and nothing to do wiht DNA
I agree 100%. However, it is not as simple as "If and only if sentient, then rights", which I believe is your current argument. For example, tonight, while you are sleeping, you could hardly be defined as "sentient". Rather, you are just a big lump of cells that will happen to (probably) be sentient in the morning. Yet I dare say that you believe that you will still have rights. Same is true when you are unconcious, or even more radically, for an AI during a power failure. Does an intelligent, sentient being lose its rights during a temporary shut-down? I don't think so. Something about the fact that this non-sentient condition is temporary seems to make a difference.
Wow you must have attended an abstinence only sex-ed program. No, a blastocyst will not survive inside of a vagina.
I was being facetious.
Why not? By all means go into the horrors that are supposedly justified by my reasoning.
The German and Japanese "experiments" on POW's would be a nice starter. You can find numerous variations from throughout history.
I'd like ot show you why you are wrong, but I can't really debate you if you are refusing to provide actual arguments or even a single example of such a horror. But I really want you to realize why you are wrong, so let me guess, you would have said something like "OMG THAT MEANS YOU CAN KILL DEATHROW PRISONERS BEKUZ THEY WILL DIE NE WAYZ!! BY YOUR LOGIC!! WTF!!! LMAO!"
Yes, using your logic, we could justify such a horror. Thankfully society avoids such an argument and we have done no such thing.
Killing blastocysts is not a horror, because they aren't conscious, they aren't sentient, and they aren't alive in any morally meaningful sense of the word.
Of course they are not concious or sentient. They ARE alive, by any definition of the word. Being alive is not a sufficient criteria for having rights, however. Indeed, the vast majority of living creatures have no or incredibly few rights.
Once again, to fill that definition, you can resort to reason, which dictates that according rights has something to do with an agents consciousness, sentience, or ability to feel pain or pleasure.
I agree. "Sentience" is what matters. By "sentience", I mean a sufficent level of intelligence to earn rights. Quibbling about where that line lies is another debate.
Or, you could resort to a baseless religious teaching, which states some mystical point at which a tiny collection of cells is for miraculous reasons just as important as an actual human, with thoughts, emotions, and experiences.
Again, it does not need to be AS import
this is why i specifically said what we needed was a "morally meaningful definition of life." Once our rational discourse has provided that definition for us -ie, what does it take to be human in a way that means they should be accorded rights- then the solution to this debate DOES lie with science, since science identifies identities that meet or fail to meet that definition.
The problem is that the hard part is getting the "definition" you speak of - people defend everything from all abortion being wrong to permitting infanticide. You are right that once we have agreement on that point, we need science to settle the matter - but that is trivial. There is no relevant disagreement about the nature or abilities of fetuses.
So far, no one has properly defended a view of life beings at conception on rational grounds, though religious conviction does make this point appear more meaningful than it really is.
Now who decides that? How is that decided "scientifically"? I could make the opposite claim - no one has properly defended the deliberate destruction of living human beings that occur during abortions and stem-cell research. Do you not see that both your statement and mine are opinion, and outside the realm of science?
the blastocysts in question had no potential for life
Heck, they were CREATED because of their "potential for life". Put them in a vagina (or other proper medium, not invented yet) and watch them grow. Firstly, they could not survive without scientists.
And five year olds, paraplegics, and the mentally retarded could not survive without their respective guardians.
Secondly, they were going to be destroyed anyways.
I won't even go into the horrors that have been justified with that argument.
The point was that the bible doesn't decide what christians believe -the church does.
You don't spend much time around Christians, do you. Which "THE church" are we talking about?
1) there are huge numbers of christians who don't even read the bible -they get their beliefs entirely from the church
Again, you must not spend much time around Christians.
or even feel.
It is a question of whether their high potential to do so if not deliberately prevented is sufficient cause for granting them protected status.
As you fail to realize that there are a substantial body of people who are both NOT religious and DO believe X. You are still falling for the "If they believe X, they must be religious. Therefore, the argument must be religious." fallacy I mentioned before. You are making a second mistake as well - assuming that a religious argument is inferior to a secular one in a moral debate. When religion takes on science in matters of fact, religion gets its ass handed to it repeatedly. When religion is used to address moral or philosophical questions, it is just as legitimate as a point of view as any other philosophical system. If one person uses the philosophy of Kant, while the second uses the philosophy of Jesus to decide this moral debate, why is one person's opinion more valid than the next? Why would either's be considered worse than that of the common man, who just pulls the answer out of his butt without much thought at all?
You have a line beyond which you consider killing a fetus/baby murder. I don't know where it is, but you must have one. Why did you put it there? What reasoning did you use? Odds are that most Jesus freaks have thought about it as much or more than you, so you can't claim that as your high ground.
when the debate is a moral question means your thinking is clouded. This is elementary philosophy - "is" and "ought" don't mix! Evidence is always of the "is" type. Yet we cannot logically go from "is" to "ought" via any form of evidence or science. There isn't really any significant debate about what a fetus is - only what we ought to do about it.
To clarify your arguments, you should not use the term "life", which is political rhetoric and lacks clarity. Indeed, in doing so, you are playing into your opponent's hands - "life" obviously, and according to accepted scientific defintions, begins at conception. "Personhood" is a more subtle substitution. You cannot argue that a three-week-old fetus is anything other than a living human being - but you could argue that it should not be considered a legal human. Note the "should" in my previous sentence. It is not a statement than can be proven with "evidence".
I think you do not even understand the heart of the debate. No rational person would argue that a blastocyst has the level of sentience that is at the heart of the concept of "personhood". Rather, they would be arguing that the high potential of this organism to attain that ability is sufficient for certain basic protections. Note that again, science cannot help us with this debate.
You are right about the Bible - there is little concerning homosexuality. Unfortunately, that little bit is extremely clear on the matter. The same is not true concerning abortion. The only line that I can think of (and the one most often cited) is the "I knew thee in the womb" line, which doesn't imply that "I knew thee from conception", and therefore does not settle the matter.
And everything I said about stem cells could be applied to abortion. You are making the same false assumptions as the other folks here - that everyone who opposes stem-cells is religious, and that because many of those opponents are relgious, their argument must be religious.
Please explain, explicitly, how the belief that personhood begins at conception is more "religious" per se than the belief that it begins during the third trimester, when their is substantial brain activity (which is more or less the current law). Don't say "lots of religious people believe the former" - that is irrelevant. Lots of religious people believe the sky is blue - that doesn't change the fact that it is.
There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.
Do your homework and quit assuming. This is a battle between people who belief personhood begins at conception vs people who believe it begins at first brain wave, birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord, etc. None of these positions is necessarily any more "religious" than the other, and more importantly, none is any more "scientific" as well. "Personhood" is a moral concept and outside of the scope of science. Science can tell us that a blastocyst is alive and a human (according to the accepted definitions), but it cannot tell us if this is sufficient for the granting of rights.
This debate has nothing to do with science OR religion, let alone a conflict between them.
The founders explicitly stated that any such interpretation was nonsense - which it is. Your interpretation of that clause essentially allows this line to supercede the entire rest of the document, which explicitly spells out the specific, enumerated powers that the government would have to achieve the "general welfare", "common defense", etc.
How can you seriously suggest an interpretation that is both renders the document contradictory and is refuted by the very people who wrote it?
I already have the headquarters of the world's largest chemical company in my backyard (I am not joking - I can see it from my window). It's plants are less than a mile away.
Of course, it is in my backyard because I am employed at its subsidiary and prefer to live close to work.
It is just cheaper to add a new gas or coal plant and update the grid. As long as this is true (and it will not be forever) people are going to choose the dirty way. PV costs several times what dinofuel does. This isn't what you want to hear but it is the truth.