Well, someone who actually has a degree in epistemology (or philosophy at least) should probably comment, and I don't have one, but one problem with your statement is that by most standards, rules of mathematics and logic are basically the only things that can be proven (deductively.) So, for example, by your standards, it would seem that your existence can never be anything but an article of faith for me, since I can never deductively prove that you exist. My intro class in college defined knowledge simply as "justified belief." For me, this is a more satisfying definition. Then at least I have a chance at knowing that you exist, so long as we can tackle the problematic term "justified." So I can say that in all likelihood I do know that you exist. Also, you have defined "fact" purely in terms of what is deductable. This would seem to consider the various theorems of mathematics as facts, while the empirical laws of science become only matters of faith. I don't think this gets at the essence of what I mean by "fact" and "faith", but I suppose it might for you. People devote lifetimes to investigating what the words "fact" and "faith" should mean, and I would be wary of trusting a 3 line definition of them:-)
This is a very valid point when we are evaluating changes to copyright law for the future. Maybe we should gut copyright law so that future works won't be protected, or at least keep copyright holders from expanding their powers. The millennia of thought and consideration our culture has put into "theft" may very well not apply to copying words and ideas. But this is different from copying already copyrighted things. Society made a contract with the people and companies that already hold copyrights in the form of laws. Surely whether or not we as a society honor this contract on past copyrighted works is a different issue than whether we extend this contract to future works. This is a distinction that seems to often be ignored on slashdot postings I have read.
how does this affect his families liability
on
Enron's Kenneth Lay Dies
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Does anyone know how this affects his families liability concerning the Enron fraud? I haven't really followed the story very closely, mostly reading only the headlines, but I seem to remember he has already paid a lot of fines? Or maybe he just lost so much money due to the stock crash. In any case, does anyone know if the inheritors of his estate are now liable to any damages he might have done to the shareholders or employees of Enron? And can the courts take fines out of his estate before his inheritors (his wife, I guess?) take it?
You're saying that if the Taiwanese people want Taiwan to be a state then - existentialy - it should be a state.
This is close to what I was saying. I have a particular ethical framework. As part of that ethical framework, I believe more or less that a people should be able to govern themselves. This ethical framework is complex. However, it is motivated by observation, and scientific observation in general. Similarly, I try to make the type of belief I have in God motivated by observation, including scientific observation. I think this make my beliefs more fragile than yours are. For example, the personhood of fetuses, and of those near death as well (the severely brain damaged, say), makes me question on some level whether a person exists at all. I don't think you have this problem, since for you personhood is only a matter of will. But on the other hand, I think that my concept of personhood can be made richer by scientific inquiry in a way that yours cannot be. As an analogy, I can't "prove" that an electron exists, precisely. Sure, I can use experiments confirm that electrons work as a theoretical device, and I don't have any idea how to theoretically talk about the physics of an atom without using the theoretical device of an electron, so I think that an electron has reality, but we don't fully understand whatever our theoretical electron refers to. Our intellect forces us to somehow understand the world less completely than God could. But the concept of an electron is certainly strongly motivated by experiment. I can never imagine personhood being as cleanly motivated by observation as electron-ness is, but I want for my concept of personhood to have a kind of relevance to my experience that I think can only be provided if my experience is allowed to have relevance to my concept of personhood. So with Taiwan, I start with the belief that a people should be allowed self determination. This belief could be shaken or defeated by the right experiences. For example, as a most extreme example, if I could be shown that all such self determined people ultimately destroyed themselves due to their self determination, I would have to think long and hard about whether I thought people should be self determined. Then, based on this belief, we can observe that the Taiwanese people don't want to be part of China, etc. However, my reasoning is different than what you describe.
As for existentialism- eventually in my life, I need to read more about it. I am still to a certain degree stuck in the enlightenment:-). So I don't understand it very well.
The trouble is, you just went for "the Taiwanese people want to be Taiwanese" without explaining why you cared about that.
That's true. I went a little bit into why I thought this was true in my first paragraph. Ultimately, we get back to why I think you and I have such important value. This is for me a matter of faith, and I don't think its a faith that is only a matter of will. But as much as possible, I try to think about every aspect of my beliefs. For me, saying that it is just a matter of will feels too much like a cop-out.
I appreciate your comments about the current number of abortions given, etc. Let me just make two comments. The first is on the Supreme Court decisions. This has to do with the legality of abortions. This is a matter of law, and is based on this right to privacy which is read from the Constitution but not explicitly mentioned, and in general I just don't understand it very well. The second is on "partial birth abortions." The only person I know who I could consider getting such a late term abortion was a woman who had been trying very, very hard to get pregnant, and finally did get pregnant. Shortly into the pregnancy, tests showed the baby would be born with only a brain stem. She decided to carry the child to term. Then, in the 7th term, she got high blood pressure (I think), or whatever pregnant women sometimes get, and had to remain bed ridden for the next 3 months, with nothing to
Proof: is Taiwan part of China?...
Before I get really wordy, I want to point out that I don't want to prove personhood with science, precisely. I just want the personhood status motivated by science. So for example, I can't use science to prove that you and I have moral worth. However, within a particular ethical framework of thought that is not provable by science, I can use science to motivate the judgement that you and I are equally persons, and thus must have equal moral worth.
Disclaimer: I don't know that much about the specifics of the Taiwan-China issue!:-) But presumably, we can approach this in two ways. We can say that the political reality determines whether Taiwan is part of China. In this case, we might say that it is an open issue, since China doesn't have the political power to really take Taiwan, but the US doesn't have the political power to make China recognize Taiwan either. Then the Chinese-hood of Taiwan is somehow a social construction, and it would seem to me that "God" (Nature, whatever) probably doesn't think of Taiwan as part of China, or not part of China. Then it seems to me if I am part of Taiwan, and don't want to be part of China, I have to frame that argument in terms of Taiwanese political will. I might argue that not becoming completely part of China isn't in the Taiwanese interests, which are presumably complex. The other way to come at this is to say essentially that God has an opinion on whether Taiwan should be part of China. This, incidentally, is my inclination. Taiwan doesn't want to be part of China (as far as I am aware), and since I believe that Taiwan is the Taiwanese people, and to "really" be part of China only happens because the people want to be part of China. Now, my argument as a person in Taiwan who does not want to be part of China is subtly, but importantly, different. I argue that the reality is that Taiwan is NOT part of China. The Taiwanese people must then use their political will to make the social construct on the map reflect the reality that Taiwan is not part of China, and therefore deserves to be recognized by China.
Sorry to be so long winded, but the whole point of this is that my belief is that arguments about the personhood of the fetus should be of the latter type. God has an opinion on the personhood of a fetus, and we must use our political will to make political reality reflect God's opinion. I don't know how to gauge God's opinion if personhood is not objective, or at least heavily motivated by objective observation. This motivation will probably be complex. But if, as you describe, personhood is not objective at all, then I don't know how to go about this. The argument over abortion would seem to me to become like the first argument for the China-hood of Taiwan, where instead of using the military might and will of China and the US to determine whether Taiwan is part of China, we use votes and political will of the US population to determine the personhood of fetuses.
My problem was that you jumped straight to utility - economically.
Sorry, it's best if you forget my comment about ownership. I was trying to make a comment similar to my Taiwan-China comment earlier, but did a poor job of it. I have no idea how we should gauge "utility" of considering a fetus a person or not a person. This is part of the reason I want so badly to be able to motivate personhood with observation.
EVERYTIME we've said "no" (I'm leaving out questiosn like "is the rock human?" because no one would seriously ask that)...
The problem is that I think people have asked that. Ancient gods can be seen as nature regarded as people. As I understand the religious history, one "innovation" of the Hebrews was that you didn't need to sacrifice your first born child to a god (Baal?) anymore, I guess to get good crops, or whatever. Human beings can be superstitious, and this can cause a lot of suffering. People anthropomorphize everything. Hell, I just threw my old c
You write 2 posts ago:
I've not only accounted for the possibility that it's not a part of objective reality: I'm depending on it.
I assume:
1) A is objective if and only if A reflects an external reality, or something we must all agree on about external reality.
Then you claim:
2) Personhood is not objective.
3) Then I conclude that according to you, personhood is not part of external reality. Then why talk about personhood at all? Let me say something about my background- In philosophy of science, which is my background (I took classes as an undergrad, and its a bit of a hobby for me), a standard position is that scientific concepts (for example, the property of being a particle) don't necessary reflect external reality, but rather the language we must use to try to describe the world. Then we use these theories only because they are useful in that we are able to make predictions with them. If personhood is not part of external reality, then the only reason I can see to use it is because it is useful in some way; after all, I don't see how it can be true. Maybe you have another reason for using it that I simply can't imagine. If you do, I would be very much interested in hearing it. So then I conclude:
4) Personhood is not part of external reality, so the only reason that we use it is for its utility.
5) If all we use personhood for is its utility, then we necessarily have to be terribly logical in the way apply it. As long as we use it in a useful way, that would seem to be all that matters. Ultimately, this doesn't seem to me to be coherent way to approach things, since usefulness is for me not enough to determine something as important as personhood.
As to a natural criteria for personhood that does not include a fertilized egg (the term "fetus" is much more vague), I propose one such criterion is that a person should be complex enough such that we cannot completely understand its activities purely in terms of cellular activity. In fact, I might guess that persons cannot be understood as being mechanical at all in a clock-work sense, although I understand that the jury is still out as to whether or not we can be seen as functioning like a clock. But it took thousands of years to determine that tribe or race affiliation didn't affect whether you were a person or not. We have had, what, 50 years to be able to think intelligently about at what stage in gestation a fertilized egg becomes a person. I don't think we completely understand what it means to be a person, so I don't think we know how to draw a line that says "personhood begins here." This is heavy stuff, and I think we simply don't have all the answers yet. So I can't draw the line. But I can say that a fertilized egg, or a blastula is on the not-a-person side of it, because people are not simply cells. And I can say that all the mentally retarded kids I have met are certainly people in that they have emotions and are capable of moral action in so far as they can conceive the consequences of their actions, they are just less smart (I am much less sure about psychopaths, assuming they exist, but that is a different issue.)
My background is in physics (not just a hobby.) 100 years ago, there were a lot of arguments about how the hydrogen atom could exist. If we consider it as a miniature proton ball orbited by a miniature electron ball, the acceleration of the electron would basically cause the atom to cease to exist very quickly. It turns out were were completely, totally wrong about the nature of the electron, wrong in so fundamental a way that we couldn't even talk about an electron in some physical situations. It turns out that we can't even talk about the electron having an exact position, momentum, or acceleration when it is "orbiting" a proton, so the question of how the hydrogen atom could exist despite the acceleration of the electron was meaningless. My feeling is that personhood is the same way. Biology is showing the frayed edges of where our current notion of "person" doesn't even make sens
I've not only accounted for the possibility that it's not a part of objective reality: I'm depending on it.
You are right- I did misunderstand you, sorry. I believe that our notion of personhood should at least be motivated by scientific discovery, and that Nature will make some definitions of personhood more coherent and true than others. If personhood is simply a social construct, then I think your reasoning is even less valid. We don't need to draw an exact line of personhood if that makes the concept less useful to us. We shouldn't even be asking if a fetus is a person. We should be asking how much it benefits society for us to consider a fetus a person, or to not be a person. I personally don't know how to intelligently evaluate that. That is why I look to Nature to motivate whether a fetus is a person or not. This is different from, say, ownership. For me, ownership is a means to help people, who are ends. So my problem with communism isn't that it abolishes ownership, but that it seems to result in tyranny which harms people. But if people are the ends, then I don't know how to evaluate what is a person or not based what on ends its produces.
We called Jews sub-human before...
Again, my consideration of Jews as being perfectly human is motivated by observation. I believe that Nature has an opinion on whether or not a Jew is as much a person as I am, and that this opinion of Nature reflects the opinion of God. So, I believe that we now consider Jews to be persons equal to non-Jews is moral progress. If personhood is simply an invention of Man, then I don't think we can consider this to be moral progress, which I think is absurd, and I have theological problems with personhood being an opinion of God, but not reflected in Nature.
True, but circular. If the embryo/fetus is not considerd a person, I don't have a case...
Except that even if a fetus is a person, then with pregnancy, Nature has put the woman in a relatively unique position with pregnancy. This may be a good enough reason to medically regulate abortion, but this is still medical regulation of a fundamentally different sort than that you have talked about, and limits the womens rights in fundamentally different way than mens rights are limited, even if limiting those rights is justified.
There are two general kinds of crisis pregnancy centers.
I'm not sure what you mean by these centers. I have heard of some centers that i guess might be called crises pregnancy centers. I wasn't thinking about those sorts of centers. My perception of those centers is that their primary function seems to be to convince women of the truth of abortion as those who run it see that truth, namely that abortion is always something to be avoided, even after one has an unwanted pregnancy. I don't know a lot about them though. But in any case, I was referring not just to making pregnancy easier for women, but making being a single mother easier. Heck, making being parents a little easier in general. Children are very expensive and time consuming throughout their entire lives. I wish we spent a little more political energy addressing their needs instead of, say, the estate tax, homosexual marriage, or flag burning.
I enjoy your perspective on the women you know who have gotten abortions- the women I know who have gotten abortions, or who have entertained getting an abortion, have done so in the context of medical reasons, not because it was an unwanted pregnancy. So this surely affects our different perspectives on the issue. But let me say one more thing about this notion of personhood verses homo-sapien-hood. Even though the Biblical account has God giving Adam life with a single breath, in Nature birth and death both seem to me to be processes, not events. So it is not clear to me that a line should be drawn in the sand to say "personhood begins here!" We cannot draw such a line to define what is alive. Is a virus alive? A prion? The Earth as a whole? Simply because we do not know how to draw such a line does not mean that a virus and a prion and the Earth must be alive. It just means we don't understand what it means to be "alive" as well as we should. I see personhood in the same way. All that a fertilized egg seems to have in common with you and I is that we are both comprised of cells with human DNA, and that we are both part of a natural process that certainly involves the existence of a human being. If that is enough for personhood, then, for example, there seems to be no interesting or good reason why we are persons, but animals are not. More seriously, it would seem to imply that I believe that there is more to it, and as a scientists my beliefs tell me that we should be able to see that difference, or at least see something that motivates me believe in that difference. Society must always have its members near the fringes of humanity. Sociopaths (assuming true psychopathy exists) probably fall into this category, as do children born with only brain stems, adults who are nearly brain dead, etc, and finally the fetus, or perhaps even the embryo, after some period of gestation. I simply think that how we deal with each one of those cases must be more complex than saying "well, they have an element of personhood, or at least human DNA, so we must logically treat them as fully living human beings." In many cases this is probably the right conclusion, but the reasoning is wrong.:
1. All human beings are equal (we're all "persons")
2. Develop some criteria for distinguishing between a member of the species homo sapien, and a "person".
You of course left out one possibility- that personhood is only a construct created to make sense of the world, in which case we don't necessarily need to be completely logical in determining what is a person and what is not, since we are reduced to using the concept of "personhood" only for its utility, not its Truth. I don't think either of us believe this to be true, but it must be considered as a possibility.
One more thing on the medical regulation- as I understand it the government does regulate medicine, but typically with the goal of protecting or informing the patient, which is not the case with abortion if you do not believe the embryo/fetus to be a person.
I disagree. I've known many women myself who've gotten abortions, and I know dozens more who've testified that they get abortions - above and beyond all else - because they don't feel like they hvae a choice.
I guess one more one more thing! I would be quite happy to give women more money for child care so that they feel like they can have the child. I agree them feeling like the cannot afford to have a child is not acceptable. Unfortunately, the corporate interests with, eg, the religious right, and other prolife groups seem to find themselves align, only seem to support issues like this when they don't cost the government any money. So I don't think you can blame just the prochoicers for women not feeling like they have enough money to raise a child. Politically this is a completely separate issue, which I tend to think is a real failure of imagination on the part of the US public.
You mean like assisted suicide? We just let the medical community self-regulate on that? How about euthanasia?
Assisted suicide and euthanasia are important issues in their own right, but let's admit that their are important differences between them and abortion. Even if we assume that a fetus is a complete human being, then abortion is about whether a woman can have a procedure done to her own body that also directly affects another person's body. This is a completely different issue than assisted suicide or euthanasia, which is about whether we want to allow people to end their own lives, either through their own actions, or by proxy. But frankly, I don't terribly like the idea of the State involved with that decision, either.
Not to be rude, but this is silly. A fingernail is not a person. An embryo is. I don't take offense, but I think you are drastically oversimplifying the issue. I believe that we are more than simply a clump of cells, or a bunch of atoms, or a bunch of subatomic particles, both in a metaphysical sense, but also in a physical sense. We exhibity behavior that I think ultimately cannot be most satisfactorily understood as the simply the behavior of a clump of cells. We are something more. We love, think, hope, and dream, among other things. But I am a scientist, and I expect our humanity to be associated with something observable in Nature, at least as a general rule. A fertilized egg (let's talk about a fertilized egg, since it is a less ambiguous term than "embryo" or "fetus") does not exhibit any of these properties. It is only a cell, and it will divide, and that is it. A muscle cell in the lab also divides, and also has a genetic code. I certainly don't consider the muscle cell to be a person because it does not do these things that I associate with a human being, such as dream, love, etc. Similarly, if we found some entity that was certainly NOT human life, a robot or an alien say, that exhibited these properties, then I would presumably have to extend everything important about the concept "human being" so that it applied to the new entity as well. In my view, a fertilized egg is most correctly understood as part of a natural process that includes then existence of a human being.
Go and read anything from the "feminists for life"... Freedom is a complicated concept. For me, it means something along the lines of being allowed to do what God intends you to do. I don't think that as a general rule, God thinks using abortion as birth control is a good thing to do. However, freedom also means the government staying out of people's lives, and letting them decide what God intends for them to do. The US has a history of this liberal interpretation of what "freedom" means, within limits of course. Women don't necessarily gain freedom in an absolute sense by having abortions, but by being allowed to have abortions they do gain freedom in the liberal political sense I mentioned above. I think you are right, though, in that we don't want women feeling coerced to have abortions.
Our current abortion law is like telling mothers of infants they are free to kill their children and then expecting them to do this if they can not afford to feed them.
Again, I think this just misconstrues the country's attitude towards abortion. I think the truth in what you are saying is that many womens-rights organizations want to ignore the cost of allowing abortions. They don't seem to want to admit that abortions are by default bad things, and in a best case scenario only the best of several bad options. But again, I claim that you seem to want to similarly ignore that making abortions illegal impedes womens rights or freedom, in the liberal political sense I mentioned earlier.
But at heart abortion is just that - the expectation that women abort their unborn rather than become a burden on their boyfriend or on society.
One more thing on this characterization of abortion- practically speaking, I think the "cost"
1. No abortion law would force a woman to do anything with her body. It would simply restrict doctors from performing abortions.
I thought that the medical community typically self regulated what sorts of medical procedures it performs, perhaps with the exception of new and experimental procedures whose risks are not well understood. Many types of abortions certainly don't fall under the category of experimental. But my knowledge of this is limited. But in any case, what if Jehova's witnesses hypothetically wanted to pass a law that denied blood transfusions? Would you be so anxious to make these subtle distinctions about whether such a law is forcing a person to act upon their body, or simply routinely outlawing types of surgical procedures. What if they wanted to pass a law that allowed blood transfusions only when your life was in immediate danger? Would that make it OK? I know for me, it would not, and similarly if my wife is pregnant, and her health or life is in my estimation in any danger due to her pregnancy, I want the State the heck out of the decision. I would presumably feel the same way if I were a woman.
2. It's not like pregancy is some weird procedure that incapacitates a woman. I'm not saying it's easy. But it's not like your life just stops when you're pregnant. (How do I know? My wife is pretty far along right now, that's how I know.) Well, congratulations:-). But I wonder if your wife would be so quick to write off the difficulties of pregnancy;-) (I am a man also, BTW.) Also, talk to her about it after has given birth. I have spoken to, I think, my mother about it, and she has told me that in a way, for her birth was a very scary thing because her body was completely out of her control. The child does to some degree take over the womans body slowly, but more completely, over the 9 months, to the point that during child birth itself, the child completely takes control. This is biologically natural, but it doesn't change the nature of what it is- the child co-opting the mother's body for its own benefit.
Only if she wants to. Once the 9-months are up...
What I was trying to say with that last statement, and probably should have just said, is that the nature of child birth pretty much favors the man who doesn't want to have a child over the woman. In principle, the very hypothetical situation you describe can occur, and genetic testing evens the playing field a lot, so to speak, but as a practical matter, it is easier for a man to keep an unwanted pregnancy from affecting his life than a woman, if for no other reason that over the course of the pregnancy he can physically separate himself from the reality of the child in a way that the mother cannot.
It comes to this: if a man and a woman have consensual sex they are taking risks...
I was specifically trying to adress your comment that allowing abortion is in some sense as much, or nearly as much, anti-feminist as outlawing abortion, which I think is simply not accurate. This is God's, or Nature's fault, but there is an inherent unequalness in pregnancy, and it tends to favor the man.
Once there is a pregnancy, there is another human life. The primary objective of good gov't (according to Jefferson) is to protect human life.
The problem with the statement is that we mean something a heck of a lot more sophisticated and complicated when we refer to human life. Muscle sheets grown for medical research are in some sense human life. So, perhaps, are human ears grown on the back of mice. Or a hypothetical human heart grown in vitro. So when we refer to the opinions on abortion of the geniuses of the past, secular and religious, their wisdom is not as topical as we would like it to be, because they could not imagine the sorts of issues we are dealing with now. While a fertilize egg is certainly human life, I have never heard a convincing argument for why it is a human individual, or at least deserves to be tre
Which is the worse double standard- to give Alice 9 months to end the pregnancy, or to allow the state, and another individual (presmably we are accepting that the baby is another individual), complete control over her body for 9 months? If you decide to donate your kidney to somebody, you can pull out at any time. Ditto for giving bone marrow or blood. So the State forcing a woman to allow another person to co-opt her body for nine months is pretty extreme, even if that person needs her body to stay alive. And while parents must both support the child after it is born, neither by law has to, for example, donate a kidney to him or her even if not doing so means that the child will die. In fact, I can't think of a single law that requires us to do or not do anything at all to our bodies for any reason what so ever, except for laws against abortion, and also laws preventing suicide. Even after we die, our bodies are our own. The state can possess and sell your posessions if you don't have an heir, but it can't sell your body. In your post, you seem to refer to the father as simply giving money to take care of the child. Presumably, then, the mother would be raising it? So the father has to send a check, while the mother's life is consumed by care of the child- that seems like a pretty bad double standard to me, and if we are assuming neither parent wants the child, then it is one that benefits the father.
I appreciate your comments and perspective. I still think, though, we fundamentally run into the problem of motivating what collections of matter, or cells, or whatever, God considers a part of our community. But then, if either one of us had a really good answer to all this, we would be authoring a best selling book that transformed the political landscape, not conversing on slashdot:-). I suppose ultimately it comes down to whether the personhood of the embryo is extending human rights in the tradition of abolishing slavery, or superstitiously keeping lifesaving medication from sick people in the tradition of preventing the study of dead bodies. Too bad the stake are so high, and we as a society have had so comparitively little time to think about it. Ah well, either way I guess God forgives, right:-).
Not really, no. Individuality is a pychological concept, not a religious one.
But how can you talk about taking the embryo's life if it is not an individual. How does and embryo that is not an individual have a life to take? I don't talk about taking the "life" of my arm when it is cut off because I don't consider that arm to have a life of its own. It shares in my life, which has not been taken. Or the lab-grown muscle fibers I referred to earlier, when they are destroyed, we don't think of taking the lives of those cells. They are not "equal in God's eyes" to you and I. I would say that at whatever point in its development the embryo becomes equal in God's eyes to you and I, the only coherent way I can think about that is to correspond to when the embryo becomes an individual, is granted a soul, whatever language you want to use. Now the meaning of "individual" can be very sophisticated, but I don't understand why you claim that individuality is not a religious concept. The Bible acknowledges that Isaac to be different from Abraham:-). Now if you mean that being human in God's eyes does not depend on you somehow exhibiting some set of phenomena that constitutes "individuality", that's fine, but again, we come back to the problem of motivating when something becomes a person, with a life to lose, in God's eyes. How is this even possible if we can't count on God to give us observable clues that something is human. Because, for better or for worse, we are starting to create things which don't have a clear "human-ness" status.
In the case of an embryo, I think the "Is it a human" line has clearly been crossed.
Again, by human, I assume you mean of course a human individual. You seemingly still haven't given your motivation for this, which is what I am really interested in. Certainly we have to decide on a case-by-case basis what is a person, and what is not. But don't we need some motivation in each case? Our feelings clearly aren't up to the task, all by themselves, at least. When I sell my old car I've had for ten years, if I look at it just right, I would swear its giving me a sad look goodbye. Clearly its not though. I just have a tendency to anthropomorphize. How do you know you are not just anthropomorphizing the embryo? I have a good Catholic friend whose reponse would be that she just likes to "play it safe" then, and assume that personhood beings at conception, which seems to be the standard reply, but this has never been satisfying for me, since really that reponse means "play it safe with the embryo". We can also "play it safe" with the woman's right to her own body, or with the needs of the diseased and come up with a very different answer.
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.
I won't argue with your third sentence. But your first sentence doesn't necessarily seem to me to follow from the third, if by "human life" you mean a distinct, living human being in the eyes of God. Modern science is full of examples that are hard to classify as either an individual human life, or not. If I were to take a cell of yours, and clone it into a fully grown human being, I think we would both agree that is clearly a distinct, new person. But what if I simply use your cells to grow sheets of muscle for scientific testing. I think we would probably both agree that this not a distinct human being in the eyes of God. It's not at all clear to me whether growing those cells into a blastula is more like the fully grown clone, or the sheets of muscle. The only distinction I have the imagination to see is that in some sense God intends for the blastula to eventually grown into a person as part of the larger process of human reproduction, unlike the sheets of muscle. But if we take this approach, then I don't see where we draw the line. If it is not the physical structure of the blastula which gives it personhood, but its part in the process of human reproduction, I don't see why we can, eg, use a condom, which also interferes with the reproductive process. For me, this is problematic. I would be interested in your perspective.
. 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. Your premise that the Bible is silent on the topic is incorrect.
I've heard this quote before, and its never been clear to me that this comes out against abortion. To use an example that might be a little flippant, I can imagine that I just lost a hand of poker to God, who is omniscient. I might tell him "even before i shuffled the cards You knew my hand." But this doesn't imply that the hand in any way existed before the cards were shuffled and dealt. And even if knew in this case means that David was a person in the womb, it doesn't put a trimester on it. Perhaps God only knew David in the 3rd, or 2nd and 3rd trimester of pregnancy. And even if God knew David his entire time in the womb, the egg is fertilized outside the womb, so this still doesn't imply that a fertilized egg is a person. Of course you never claimed in your post that a fertilized egg is a person, btw. To my eyes, it looks like this passage is not supposed to address abortion at all.
Do you really think that if we got rid of religion, we would get rid of superstition? Pseudoscience is everywhere. What about all those "health products" in stores that have no scientific research to back their effectiveness. Or the fear of getting AIDS from toilet seats in the 80s. Or the illusion of racial superiority. Or the attitude that if only you can buy the right thing, you will be happy. From my point of view, all these things are pseudoscientific and superstitious, and quite secular. Superstition is part of human nature. Religion, particularly religion as it is practiced by the common person, tends to involve lots of superstition. But anything practiced by the common person tends to involve a lot of superstition.
Ever since some of us started looking into nature people have said, "you know, that's God's work, you shouldn't really been looking at it."
Many believe, among them Alfred North Whitehead whose quote I am (hopefully) paraphrasing from memory, that Christianity encouraged scientific research because it claims that a world made by God could be both rational, allowing us to use mathematics and reason to understand it, but also contingent, requiring us to observe the world to know about it. Historically, the Church persecuted Galileo, but that was due mostly to political considerations at the time, namely the recent Reformation, and perhaps also to the personal relationship between Galileo and the pope.
I remember reading an article on this (pharmacists refusing to prescribe drugs that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting on the uterus wall, and the the personhood of those fertiliized egg.) As I recall, the claims were that: 1) there is no way to medically determine whether a woman is pregnant until the egg implants on the uterus wall; 2) as many as 50% of fertilized eggs may not result in a birth. I'm not sure how you reconcile (1) and knowledge of (2). I can't find the article though.
Ah, a positivist mathematician- I'd heard of them, but never communicated with one:-P. Although I remember reading in college that Gauss thought mathematics to be a sort of semi-empirical science. But most mathematicians I have met are, deep down, really Platonists, I think.
There is nothing in logic nor mathematics that cannot be argued with. That stopped being the case after people realized that not everything had been covered and prescribed by Aristotle and friends.
But once these assumptions are made, it is impossible to argue with. You have to accept that a triangle in a euclidean space, as defined in a high school text book say, has 180 degrees. Now maybe that statement is tautological, but reasoning is still involved in making the connection between your axioms and your conclusions. A person whose ability to think has been impaired, by a brain injury say, might still argue with you. So argument is still possible, just unreasonable. And I would still say this reasoning is not justified by empirical observation. Anyway, that is all getting really tangential:-).
What you describe as a process to come up with with a concept of "soul" that can connect with scientific research is very much how I would imagine one would have to come up with a concept of "I" that can connect with scientific research. And then when this idea of "I" starts to connect with ethics, society, religion, etc, then somewhere in there we start talking about the soul instead of "I". But if I underestand you I guess you would happily define "I" in the same way that I define, say, what my computer is. I have sort of an idea of what constitutes my computer, but if I exchange, say, my CPU for another one, I don't think that it is a particularly interesting question as to whether it is the "same" computer. My concept of my computer's uniqueness doesn't extend that far. I do think, though, if you could exchange my brain with another, nearly identical brain (is the quantum structure of the brain important??), whether that would be the same me is a terribly interesting question. And I would like any sort of scientific concept of "I" to have something interesting to say about that question. So I imagine that difference prevents a simple, operational definition of my concept of "I" as you describe. Anyway, I find your perspective interesting.
Using Kant as a source is problematic because he assumed the existence of God, of souls and a wide variety of other stuff on no other grounds but his own disposition. Again, I'm no philosopher, but I always thought the whole point of Kant was that we can never know if God or "I" exists. All that we can know (or argue that) is these sorts of concepts are necessary for us to even have a dialogue about pure or practical reason. Now Kant wasn't completely right on everything, of course, but I still think his criticism of Descartes' "I think therefore I am" argument as being faulty because we have no way to know that "I" exists as a continuous entity through time is pretty convincing.
While causation can be problematic in some instances, it is quite difficult to argue against causation without leaving the domain of reasonable discourse. I don't claim that it isn't reasonable to believe in causation isn't reasonable. But this isn't the same as saying whether or not causation is metaphysical. Many rules of logic and mathematics can't be argued with either. I still don't consider these things to be empirically justified (although I guess some people do, so you might.)
By procedural definition I mean an operational definition (that's the correct term, I guess): a definition that allows you to know a soul when you see one, and tell it apart from things which are not souls. That is, a definition which introduces a concept you can work with non-vacuously.
I'm personally not sure this is a very natural way to talk about all scientific concepts. What about a quantum wave function? I don't know how much you know about quantum physics, but in case you don't know, you will never see a quantum wave function. It is, in principle, impossible. In fact, we can think of the quantum wave function as, by definition, describing what happens to the physical system between observations. Yet as a practical matter, to do quantum physics, you have to talk about it as if it exists, and a fair number of physicists, I think, would say they believe it exists in some sense.
There is no need for "I" to be metaphysical. Being metaphisical rarely provided any information on anything.
I suppose that I am no longer at all convinced that there is a clear dividing line between what is and what is not metaphysical. Einstein saw the theoretical physicist essentially as a sort of metaphysician. At the very least if you want scientific knowledge to affect your life after you walk outside of your laboratory, then to grapple with science you basically have to also grapple with metaphysics and ethics.
One more thing- as I recall, wasn't "I" and the soul essentially one and the same for Descartes. Now he may have ultimately been wrong, but didn't he forever link the ideas of soul and "I" in the Western mind, at least? Most people mean a more or less Cartesian soul when they refer to a "soul." So if you believe we can come up with some sort of non-metaphysical notion of "I", I don't see why we can't do the same with the notion of "soul". I should have just written that in the first place, I suppose, but my thinking was too fuzzy.
I'm no philosopher. I can only go on my memory of "Critique of Pure Reason", which I read about 10 years ago, and which I probably misunderstood quite a bit. But I do remember Kant talking about "I" as that which refers to whatever defines me as being me, continuous through time, and he thought it was inherently metaphysical. Of course my belief that there is some "I" that exists continually through time is presumably motivated by a particular systematic set of observable phnomena, but the notion of a "soul" can be similarly motivated. However, I am not going to directly observe "I" any more than I can directly observe, say, causation. And while "I" is clearly a useful construct in society, it is not at all clear to me (though this is not my field) that "I" is going to turn out to be particularly motivated by nature. Consider, for example, Terri Schiavo. Part of the whole problem is that in this particular case, it is not at all clear that the term "I" could be applied to Schiavo after suffering such brain trauma. Was that still Terri laying there in bed. Or had the "I" that was Terri gone? Or perhaps whether or not it was Terri is not even a reasonable question, because in this case, nature doesn't really admit "I" as concept or description that makes sense.
I don't really know what a "procedural definition" is. Is it related to instrumentalism, where, to quote wikipedia, "the concepts of our scientific theories are merely instruments whose worth is not by whether the concepts and theories are true or false (or correctly depict reality), but by how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena?" If you believe in "I" in that sense, then I really don't know to what extent "I" remains metaphysical. However, it seems to me you gut a lot of what people mean by "I". Honestly, I'm not even sure how to think that way.
You may not have an immortal soul in the western Christian tradition since Descartes, but if you are going to say that you don't believe you have a soul, you should probably leave the word "I" out of your statement. Whatever a "soul" is, exactly, it must be intimately connected with whatever you mean by the phrase "I", and vice versa.
I think your have good instincts on the subject, but asked the wrong question. I think the English language itself makes it harder to think about the issue, because it makes it harder to talk about it. You ask "why should she be killed when..." You are making the presumptiont that she was alive. To me, she clearly wasn't alive in the sense the usually use the word. Her brain was gone. But she wasn't really dead either, in the usual use of the word. We usually talk about life and death as boolean states- but they are really opposite ends of a continuum. Most of us don't even really have the vocabularly to even talk about it in that way. Possibly it also make it harder in that many Christians think of the soul as in some sense physically leaving the body at true "death", so it seems like you should be able to talk about the moment that happens as the moment of death. I think the question you really have to ask is whether we should have allowed her to finish the process of dying. And also, in what sense do we want the government involved in that decision.
But isn't in one sense the entire stucture of the US government is set up to keep exactly this from happening? And the 2nd amendment lets us be armed just in case. And of course our current reading of this amendment, right or wrong, costs us many lives each year due to easier access to guns, so this kind of attitude is anything but free or easy. So I would say that the US takes your kind of argument very, very seriously, and the only reason we don't think it will happen is because we think we have safeguards in place. We have clearly marked where the slippery slope will end, so to speak. It's not clear to me at all that we have these safeguards for these microchips. Of course there is no government conspiracy, but government doesn't need a conspiracy to become too powerful.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, someone who actually has a degree in epistemology (or philosophy at least) should probably comment, and I don't have one, but one problem with your statement is that by most standards, rules of mathematics and logic are basically the only things that can be proven (deductively.) So, for example, by your standards, it would seem that your existence can never be anything but an article of faith for me, since I can never deductively prove that you exist. My intro class in college defined knowledge simply as "justified belief." For me, this is a more satisfying definition. Then at least I have a chance at knowing that you exist, so long as we can tackle the problematic term "justified." So I can say that in all likelihood I do know that you exist. Also, you have defined "fact" purely in terms of what is deductable. This would seem to consider the various theorems of mathematics as facts, while the empirical laws of science become only matters of faith. I don't think this gets at the essence of what I mean by "fact" and "faith", but I suppose it might for you. People devote lifetimes to investigating what the words "fact" and "faith" should mean, and I would be wary of trusting a 3 line definition of them :-)
This is a very valid point when we are evaluating changes to copyright law for the future. Maybe we should gut copyright law so that future works won't be protected, or at least keep copyright holders from expanding their powers. The millennia of thought and consideration our culture has put into "theft" may very well not apply to copying words and ideas. But this is different from copying already copyrighted things. Society made a contract with the people and companies that already hold copyrights in the form of laws. Surely whether or not we as a society honor this contract on past copyrighted works is a different issue than whether we extend this contract to future works. This is a distinction that seems to often be ignored on slashdot postings I have read.
Does anyone know how this affects his families liability concerning the Enron fraud? I haven't really followed the story very closely, mostly reading only the headlines, but I seem to remember he has already paid a lot of fines? Or maybe he just lost so much money due to the stock crash. In any case, does anyone know if the inheritors of his estate are now liable to any damages he might have done to the shareholders or employees of Enron? And can the courts take fines out of his estate before his inheritors (his wife, I guess?) take it?
You're saying that if the Taiwanese people want Taiwan to be a state then - existentialy - it should be a state.
:-). So I don't understand it very well.
This is close to what I was saying. I have a particular ethical framework. As part of that ethical framework, I believe more or less that a people should be able to govern themselves. This ethical framework is complex. However, it is motivated by observation, and scientific observation in general. Similarly, I try to make the type of belief I have in God motivated by observation, including scientific observation. I think this make my beliefs more fragile than yours are. For example, the personhood of fetuses, and of those near death as well (the severely brain damaged, say), makes me question on some level whether a person exists at all. I don't think you have this problem, since for you personhood is only a matter of will. But on the other hand, I think that my concept of personhood can be made richer by scientific inquiry in a way that yours cannot be. As an analogy, I can't "prove" that an electron exists, precisely. Sure, I can use experiments confirm that electrons work as a theoretical device, and I don't have any idea how to theoretically talk about the physics of an atom without using the theoretical device of an electron, so I think that an electron has reality, but we don't fully understand whatever our theoretical electron refers to. Our intellect forces us to somehow understand the world less completely than God could. But the concept of an electron is certainly strongly motivated by experiment. I can never imagine personhood being as cleanly motivated by observation as electron-ness is, but I want for my concept of personhood to have a kind of relevance to my experience that I think can only be provided if my experience is allowed to have relevance to my concept of personhood. So with Taiwan, I start with the belief that a people should be allowed self determination. This belief could be shaken or defeated by the right experiences. For example, as a most extreme example, if I could be shown that all such self determined people ultimately destroyed themselves due to their self determination, I would have to think long and hard about whether I thought people should be self determined. Then, based on this belief, we can observe that the Taiwanese people don't want to be part of China, etc. However, my reasoning is different than what you describe.
As for existentialism- eventually in my life, I need to read more about it. I am still to a certain degree stuck in the enlightenment
The trouble is, you just went for "the Taiwanese people want to be Taiwanese" without explaining why you cared about that.
That's true. I went a little bit into why I thought this was true in my first paragraph. Ultimately, we get back to why I think you and I have such important value. This is for me a matter of faith, and I don't think its a faith that is only a matter of will. But as much as possible, I try to think about every aspect of my beliefs. For me, saying that it is just a matter of will feels too much like a cop-out.
I appreciate your comments about the current number of abortions given, etc. Let me just make two comments. The first is on the Supreme Court decisions. This has to do with the legality of abortions. This is a matter of law, and is based on this right to privacy which is read from the Constitution but not explicitly mentioned, and in general I just don't understand it very well. The second is on "partial birth abortions." The only person I know who I could consider getting such a late term abortion was a woman who had been trying very, very hard to get pregnant, and finally did get pregnant. Shortly into the pregnancy, tests showed the baby would be born with only a brain stem. She decided to carry the child to term. Then, in the 7th term, she got high blood pressure (I think), or whatever pregnant women sometimes get, and had to remain bed ridden for the next 3 months, with nothing to
Proof: is Taiwan part of China?...
:-) But presumably, we can approach this in two ways. We can say that the political reality determines whether Taiwan is part of China. In this case, we might say that it is an open issue, since China doesn't have the political power to really take Taiwan, but the US doesn't have the political power to make China recognize Taiwan either. Then the Chinese-hood of Taiwan is somehow a social construction, and it would seem to me that "God" (Nature, whatever) probably doesn't think of Taiwan as part of China, or not part of China. Then it seems to me if I am part of Taiwan, and don't want to be part of China, I have to frame that argument in terms of Taiwanese political will. I might argue that not becoming completely part of China isn't in the Taiwanese interests, which are presumably complex. The other way to come at this is to say essentially that God has an opinion on whether Taiwan should be part of China. This, incidentally, is my inclination. Taiwan doesn't want to be part of China (as far as I am aware), and since I believe that Taiwan is the Taiwanese people, and to "really" be part of China only happens because the people want to be part of China. Now, my argument as a person in Taiwan who does not want to be part of China is subtly, but importantly, different. I argue that the reality is that Taiwan is NOT part of China. The Taiwanese people must then use their political will to make the social construct on the map reflect the reality that Taiwan is not part of China, and therefore deserves to be recognized by China.
Before I get really wordy, I want to point out that I don't want to prove personhood with science, precisely. I just want the personhood status motivated by science. So for example, I can't use science to prove that you and I have moral worth. However, within a particular ethical framework of thought that is not provable by science, I can use science to motivate the judgement that you and I are equally persons, and thus must have equal moral worth.
Disclaimer: I don't know that much about the specifics of the Taiwan-China issue!
Sorry to be so long winded, but the whole point of this is that my belief is that arguments about the personhood of the fetus should be of the latter type. God has an opinion on the personhood of a fetus, and we must use our political will to make political reality reflect God's opinion. I don't know how to gauge God's opinion if personhood is not objective, or at least heavily motivated by objective observation. This motivation will probably be complex. But if, as you describe, personhood is not objective at all, then I don't know how to go about this. The argument over abortion would seem to me to become like the first argument for the China-hood of Taiwan, where instead of using the military might and will of China and the US to determine whether Taiwan is part of China, we use votes and political will of the US population to determine the personhood of fetuses.
My problem was that you jumped straight to utility - economically.
Sorry, it's best if you forget my comment about ownership. I was trying to make a comment similar to my Taiwan-China comment earlier, but did a poor job of it. I have no idea how we should gauge "utility" of considering a fetus a person or not a person. This is part of the reason I want so badly to be able to motivate personhood with observation.
EVERYTIME we've said "no" (I'm leaving out questiosn like "is the rock human?" because no one would seriously ask that)...
The problem is that I think people have asked that. Ancient gods can be seen as nature regarded as people. As I understand the religious history, one "innovation" of the Hebrews was that you didn't need to sacrifice your first born child to a god (Baal?) anymore, I guess to get good crops, or whatever. Human beings can be superstitious, and this can cause a lot of suffering. People anthropomorphize everything. Hell, I just threw my old c
You write 2 posts ago: I've not only accounted for the possibility that it's not a part of objective reality: I'm depending on it.
I assume:
1) A is objective if and only if A reflects an external reality, or something we must all agree on about external reality.
Then you claim:
2) Personhood is not objective.
3) Then I conclude that according to you, personhood is not part of external reality. Then why talk about personhood at all? Let me say something about my background- In philosophy of science, which is my background (I took classes as an undergrad, and its a bit of a hobby for me), a standard position is that scientific concepts (for example, the property of being a particle) don't necessary reflect external reality, but rather the language we must use to try to describe the world. Then we use these theories only because they are useful in that we are able to make predictions with them. If personhood is not part of external reality, then the only reason I can see to use it is because it is useful in some way; after all, I don't see how it can be true. Maybe you have another reason for using it that I simply can't imagine. If you do, I would be very much interested in hearing it. So then I conclude:
4) Personhood is not part of external reality, so the only reason that we use it is for its utility.
5) If all we use personhood for is its utility, then we necessarily have to be terribly logical in the way apply it. As long as we use it in a useful way, that would seem to be all that matters. Ultimately, this doesn't seem to me to be coherent way to approach things, since usefulness is for me not enough to determine something as important as personhood.
As to a natural criteria for personhood that does not include a fertilized egg (the term "fetus" is much more vague), I propose one such criterion is that a person should be complex enough such that we cannot completely understand its activities purely in terms of cellular activity. In fact, I might guess that persons cannot be understood as being mechanical at all in a clock-work sense, although I understand that the jury is still out as to whether or not we can be seen as functioning like a clock. But it took thousands of years to determine that tribe or race affiliation didn't affect whether you were a person or not. We have had, what, 50 years to be able to think intelligently about at what stage in gestation a fertilized egg becomes a person. I don't think we completely understand what it means to be a person, so I don't think we know how to draw a line that says "personhood begins here." This is heavy stuff, and I think we simply don't have all the answers yet. So I can't draw the line. But I can say that a fertilized egg, or a blastula is on the not-a-person side of it, because people are not simply cells. And I can say that all the mentally retarded kids I have met are certainly people in that they have emotions and are capable of moral action in so far as they can conceive the consequences of their actions, they are just less smart (I am much less sure about psychopaths, assuming they exist, but that is a different issue.)
My background is in physics (not just a hobby.) 100 years ago, there were a lot of arguments about how the hydrogen atom could exist. If we consider it as a miniature proton ball orbited by a miniature electron ball, the acceleration of the electron would basically cause the atom to cease to exist very quickly. It turns out were were completely, totally wrong about the nature of the electron, wrong in so fundamental a way that we couldn't even talk about an electron in some physical situations. It turns out that we can't even talk about the electron having an exact position, momentum, or acceleration when it is "orbiting" a proton, so the question of how the hydrogen atom could exist despite the acceleration of the electron was meaningless. My feeling is that personhood is the same way. Biology is showing the frayed edges of where our current notion of "person" doesn't even make sens
I've not only accounted for the possibility that it's not a part of objective reality: I'm depending on it.
You are right- I did misunderstand you, sorry. I believe that our notion of personhood should at least be motivated by scientific discovery, and that Nature will make some definitions of personhood more coherent and true than others. If personhood is simply a social construct, then I think your reasoning is even less valid. We don't need to draw an exact line of personhood if that makes the concept less useful to us. We shouldn't even be asking if a fetus is a person. We should be asking how much it benefits society for us to consider a fetus a person, or to not be a person. I personally don't know how to intelligently evaluate that. That is why I look to Nature to motivate whether a fetus is a person or not. This is different from, say, ownership. For me, ownership is a means to help people, who are ends. So my problem with communism isn't that it abolishes ownership, but that it seems to result in tyranny which harms people. But if people are the ends, then I don't know how to evaluate what is a person or not based what on ends its produces.
We called Jews sub-human before...
Again, my consideration of Jews as being perfectly human is motivated by observation. I believe that Nature has an opinion on whether or not a Jew is as much a person as I am, and that this opinion of Nature reflects the opinion of God. So, I believe that we now consider Jews to be persons equal to non-Jews is moral progress. If personhood is simply an invention of Man, then I don't think we can consider this to be moral progress, which I think is absurd, and I have theological problems with personhood being an opinion of God, but not reflected in Nature.
True, but circular. If the embryo/fetus is not considerd a person, I don't have a case...
Except that even if a fetus is a person, then with pregnancy, Nature has put the woman in a relatively unique position with pregnancy. This may be a good enough reason to medically regulate abortion, but this is still medical regulation of a fundamentally different sort than that you have talked about, and limits the womens rights in fundamentally different way than mens rights are limited, even if limiting those rights is justified.
There are two general kinds of crisis pregnancy centers.
I'm not sure what you mean by these centers. I have heard of some centers that i guess might be called crises pregnancy centers. I wasn't thinking about those sorts of centers. My perception of those centers is that their primary function seems to be to convince women of the truth of abortion as those who run it see that truth, namely that abortion is always something to be avoided, even after one has an unwanted pregnancy. I don't know a lot about them though. But in any case, I was referring not just to making pregnancy easier for women, but making being a single mother easier. Heck, making being parents a little easier in general. Children are very expensive and time consuming throughout their entire lives. I wish we spent a little more political energy addressing their needs instead of, say, the estate tax, homosexual marriage, or flag burning.
I enjoy your perspective on the women you know who have gotten abortions- the women I know who have gotten abortions, or who have entertained getting an abortion, have done so in the context of medical reasons, not because it was an unwanted pregnancy. So this surely affects our different perspectives on the issue. But let me say one more thing about this notion of personhood verses homo-sapien-hood. Even though the Biblical account has God giving Adam life with a single breath, in Nature birth and death both seem to me to be processes, not events. So it is not clear to me that a line should be drawn in the sand to say "personhood begins here!" We cannot draw such a line to define what is alive. Is a virus alive? A prion? The Earth as a whole? Simply because we do not know how to draw such a line does not mean that a virus and a prion and the Earth must be alive. It just means we don't understand what it means to be "alive" as well as we should. I see personhood in the same way. All that a fertilized egg seems to have in common with you and I is that we are both comprised of cells with human DNA, and that we are both part of a natural process that certainly involves the existence of a human being. If that is enough for personhood, then, for example, there seems to be no interesting or good reason why we are persons, but animals are not. More seriously, it would seem to imply that I believe that there is more to it, and as a scientists my beliefs tell me that we should be able to see that difference, or at least see something that motivates me believe in that difference. Society must always have its members near the fringes of humanity. Sociopaths (assuming true psychopathy exists) probably fall into this category, as do children born with only brain stems, adults who are nearly brain dead, etc, and finally the fetus, or perhaps even the embryo, after some period of gestation. I simply think that how we deal with each one of those cases must be more complex than saying "well, they have an element of personhood, or at least human DNA, so we must logically treat them as fully living human beings." In many cases this is probably the right conclusion, but the reasoning is wrong.:
1. All human beings are equal (we're all "persons")
2. Develop some criteria for distinguishing between a member of the species homo sapien, and a "person".
You of course left out one possibility- that personhood is only a construct created to make sense of the world, in which case we don't necessarily need to be completely logical in determining what is a person and what is not, since we are reduced to using the concept of "personhood" only for its utility, not its Truth. I don't think either of us believe this to be true, but it must be considered as a possibility.
One more thing on the medical regulation- as I understand it the government does regulate medicine, but typically with the goal of protecting or informing the patient, which is not the case with abortion if you do not believe the embryo/fetus to be a person.
I disagree. I've known many women myself who've gotten abortions, and I know dozens more who've testified that they get abortions - above and beyond all else - because they don't feel like they hvae a choice.
I guess one more one more thing! I would be quite happy to give women more money for child care so that they feel like they can have the child. I agree them feeling like the cannot afford to have a child is not acceptable. Unfortunately, the corporate interests with, eg, the religious right, and other prolife groups seem to find themselves align, only seem to support issues like this when they don't cost the government any money. So I don't think you can blame just the prochoicers for women not feeling like they have enough money to raise a child. Politically this is a completely separate issue, which I tend to think is a real failure of imagination on the part of the US public.
You mean like assisted suicide? We just let the medical community self-regulate on that? How about euthanasia?
Assisted suicide and euthanasia are important issues in their own right, but let's admit that their are important differences between them and abortion. Even if we assume that a fetus is a complete human being, then abortion is about whether a woman can have a procedure done to her own body that also directly affects another person's body. This is a completely different issue than assisted suicide or euthanasia, which is about whether we want to allow people to end their own lives, either through their own actions, or by proxy. But frankly, I don't terribly like the idea of the State involved with that decision, either.
Not to be rude, but this is silly. A fingernail is not a person. An embryo is.
I don't take offense, but I think you are drastically oversimplifying the issue. I believe that we are more than simply a clump of cells, or a bunch of atoms, or a bunch of subatomic particles, both in a metaphysical sense, but also in a physical sense. We exhibity behavior that I think ultimately cannot be most satisfactorily understood as the simply the behavior of a clump of cells. We are something more. We love, think, hope, and dream, among other things. But I am a scientist, and I expect our humanity to be associated with something observable in Nature, at least as a general rule. A fertilized egg (let's talk about a fertilized egg, since it is a less ambiguous term than "embryo" or "fetus") does not exhibit any of these properties. It is only a cell, and it will divide, and that is it. A muscle cell in the lab also divides, and also has a genetic code. I certainly don't consider the muscle cell to be a person because it does not do these things that I associate with a human being, such as dream, love, etc. Similarly, if we found some entity that was certainly NOT human life, a robot or an alien say, that exhibited these properties, then I would presumably have to extend everything important about the concept "human being" so that it applied to the new entity as well. In my view, a fertilized egg is most correctly understood as part of a natural process that includes then existence of a human being.
Go and read anything from the "feminists for life"...
Freedom is a complicated concept. For me, it means something along the lines of being allowed to do what God intends you to do. I don't think that as a general rule, God thinks using abortion as birth control is a good thing to do. However, freedom also means the government staying out of people's lives, and letting them decide what God intends for them to do. The US has a history of this liberal interpretation of what "freedom" means, within limits of course. Women don't necessarily gain freedom in an absolute sense by having abortions, but by being allowed to have abortions they do gain freedom in the liberal political sense I mentioned above. I think you are right, though, in that we don't want women feeling coerced to have abortions.
Our current abortion law is like telling mothers of infants they are free to kill their children and then expecting them to do this if they can not afford to feed them.
Again, I think this just misconstrues the country's attitude towards abortion. I think the truth in what you are saying is that many womens-rights organizations want to ignore the cost of allowing abortions. They don't seem to want to admit that abortions are by default bad things, and in a best case scenario only the best of several bad options. But again, I claim that you seem to want to similarly ignore that making abortions illegal impedes womens rights or freedom, in the liberal political sense I mentioned earlier.
But at heart abortion is just that - the expectation that women abort their unborn rather than become a burden on their boyfriend or on society.
One more thing on this characterization of abortion- practically speaking, I think the "cost"
1. No abortion law would force a woman to do anything with her body. It would simply restrict doctors from performing abortions.
:-). But I wonder if your wife would be so quick to write off the difficulties of pregnancy ;-) (I am a man also, BTW.) Also, talk to her about it after has given birth. I have spoken to, I think, my mother about it, and she has told me that in a way, for her birth was a very scary thing because her body was completely out of her control. The child does to some degree take over the womans body slowly, but more completely, over the 9 months, to the point that during child birth itself, the child completely takes control. This is biologically natural, but it doesn't change the nature of what it is- the child co-opting the mother's body for its own benefit.
I thought that the medical community typically self regulated what sorts of medical procedures it performs, perhaps with the exception of new and experimental procedures whose risks are not well understood. Many types of abortions certainly don't fall under the category of experimental. But my knowledge of this is limited. But in any case, what if Jehova's witnesses hypothetically wanted to pass a law that denied blood transfusions? Would you be so anxious to make these subtle distinctions about whether such a law is forcing a person to act upon their body, or simply routinely outlawing types of surgical procedures. What if they wanted to pass a law that allowed blood transfusions only when your life was in immediate danger? Would that make it OK? I know for me, it would not, and similarly if my wife is pregnant, and her health or life is in my estimation in any danger due to her pregnancy, I want the State the heck out of the decision. I would presumably feel the same way if I were a woman.
2. It's not like pregancy is some weird procedure that incapacitates a woman. I'm not saying it's easy. But it's not like your life just stops when you're pregnant. (How do I know? My wife is pretty far along right now, that's how I know.)
Well, congratulations
Only if she wants to. Once the 9-months are up...
What I was trying to say with that last statement, and probably should have just said, is that the nature of child birth pretty much favors the man who doesn't want to have a child over the woman. In principle, the very hypothetical situation you describe can occur, and genetic testing evens the playing field a lot, so to speak, but as a practical matter, it is easier for a man to keep an unwanted pregnancy from affecting his life than a woman, if for no other reason that over the course of the pregnancy he can physically separate himself from the reality of the child in a way that the mother cannot.
It comes to this: if a man and a woman have consensual sex they are taking risks...
I was specifically trying to adress your comment that allowing abortion is in some sense as much, or nearly as much, anti-feminist as outlawing abortion, which I think is simply not accurate. This is God's, or Nature's fault, but there is an inherent unequalness in pregnancy, and it tends to favor the man.
Once there is a pregnancy, there is another human life. The primary objective of good gov't (according to Jefferson) is to protect human life.
The problem with the statement is that we mean something a heck of a lot more sophisticated and complicated when we refer to human life. Muscle sheets grown for medical research are in some sense human life. So, perhaps, are human ears grown on the back of mice. Or a hypothetical human heart grown in vitro. So when we refer to the opinions on abortion of the geniuses of the past, secular and religious, their wisdom is not as topical as we would like it to be, because they could not imagine the sorts of issues we are dealing with now. While a fertilize egg is certainly human life, I have never heard a convincing argument for why it is a human individual, or at least deserves to be tre
Which is the worse double standard- to give Alice 9 months to end the pregnancy, or to allow the state, and another individual (presmably we are accepting that the baby is another individual), complete control over her body for 9 months? If you decide to donate your kidney to somebody, you can pull out at any time. Ditto for giving bone marrow or blood. So the State forcing a woman to allow another person to co-opt her body for nine months is pretty extreme, even if that person needs her body to stay alive. And while parents must both support the child after it is born, neither by law has to, for example, donate a kidney to him or her even if not doing so means that the child will die. In fact, I can't think of a single law that requires us to do or not do anything at all to our bodies for any reason what so ever, except for laws against abortion, and also laws preventing suicide. Even after we die, our bodies are our own. The state can possess and sell your posessions if you don't have an heir, but it can't sell your body. In your post, you seem to refer to the father as simply giving money to take care of the child. Presumably, then, the mother would be raising it? So the father has to send a check, while the mother's life is consumed by care of the child- that seems like a pretty bad double standard to me, and if we are assuming neither parent wants the child, then it is one that benefits the father.
I appreciate your comments and perspective. I still think, though, we fundamentally run into the problem of motivating what collections of matter, or cells, or whatever, God considers a part of our community. But then, if either one of us had a really good answer to all this, we would be authoring a best selling book that transformed the political landscape, not conversing on slashdot :-). I suppose ultimately it comes down to whether the personhood of the embryo is extending human rights in the tradition of abolishing slavery, or superstitiously keeping lifesaving medication from sick people in the tradition of preventing the study of dead bodies. Too bad the stake are so high, and we as a society have had so comparitively little time to think about it. Ah well, either way I guess God forgives, right :-).
Not really, no. Individuality is a pychological concept, not a religious one.
:-). Now if you mean that being human in God's eyes does not depend on you somehow exhibiting some set of phenomena that constitutes "individuality", that's fine, but again, we come back to the problem of motivating when something becomes a person, with a life to lose, in God's eyes. How is this even possible if we can't count on God to give us observable clues that something is human. Because, for better or for worse, we are starting to create things which don't have a clear "human-ness" status.
But how can you talk about taking the embryo's life if it is not an individual. How does and embryo that is not an individual have a life to take? I don't talk about taking the "life" of my arm when it is cut off because I don't consider that arm to have a life of its own. It shares in my life, which has not been taken. Or the lab-grown muscle fibers I referred to earlier, when they are destroyed, we don't think of taking the lives of those cells. They are not "equal in God's eyes" to you and I. I would say that at whatever point in its development the embryo becomes equal in God's eyes to you and I, the only coherent way I can think about that is to correspond to when the embryo becomes an individual, is granted a soul, whatever language you want to use. Now the meaning of "individual" can be very sophisticated, but I don't understand why you claim that individuality is not a religious concept. The Bible acknowledges that Isaac to be different from Abraham
In the case of an embryo, I think the "Is it a human" line has clearly been crossed.
Again, by human, I assume you mean of course a human individual. You seemingly still haven't given your motivation for this, which is what I am really interested in. Certainly we have to decide on a case-by-case basis what is a person, and what is not. But don't we need some motivation in each case? Our feelings clearly aren't up to the task, all by themselves, at least. When I sell my old car I've had for ten years, if I look at it just right, I would swear its giving me a sad look goodbye. Clearly its not though. I just have a tendency to anthropomorphize. How do you know you are not just anthropomorphizing the embryo? I have a good Catholic friend whose reponse would be that she just likes to "play it safe" then, and assume that personhood beings at conception, which seems to be the standard reply, but this has never been satisfying for me, since really that reponse means "play it safe with the embryo". We can also "play it safe" with the woman's right to her own body, or with the needs of the diseased and come up with a very different answer.
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.
I won't argue with your third sentence. But your first sentence doesn't necessarily seem to me to follow from the third, if by "human life" you mean a distinct, living human being in the eyes of God. Modern science is full of examples that are hard to classify as either an individual human life, or not. If I were to take a cell of yours, and clone it into a fully grown human being, I think we would both agree that is clearly a distinct, new person. But what if I simply use your cells to grow sheets of muscle for scientific testing. I think we would probably both agree that this not a distinct human being in the eyes of God. It's not at all clear to me whether growing those cells into a blastula is more like the fully grown clone, or the sheets of muscle. The only distinction I have the imagination to see is that in some sense God intends for the blastula to eventually grown into a person as part of the larger process of human reproduction, unlike the sheets of muscle. But if we take this approach, then I don't see where we draw the line. If it is not the physical structure of the blastula which gives it personhood, but its part in the process of human reproduction, I don't see why we can, eg, use a condom, which also interferes with the reproductive process. For me, this is problematic. I would be interested in your perspective.
. 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. Your premise that the Bible is silent on the topic is incorrect.
I've heard this quote before, and its never been clear to me that this comes out against abortion. To use an example that might be a little flippant, I can imagine that I just lost a hand of poker to God, who is omniscient. I might tell him "even before i shuffled the cards You knew my hand." But this doesn't imply that the hand in any way existed before the cards were shuffled and dealt. And even if knew in this case means that David was a person in the womb, it doesn't put a trimester on it. Perhaps God only knew David in the 3rd, or 2nd and 3rd trimester of pregnancy. And even if God knew David his entire time in the womb, the egg is fertilized outside the womb, so this still doesn't imply that a fertilized egg is a person. Of course you never claimed in your post that a fertilized egg is a person, btw. To my eyes, it looks like this passage is not supposed to address abortion at all.
Do you really think that if we got rid of religion, we would get rid of superstition? Pseudoscience is everywhere. What about all those "health products" in stores that have no scientific research to back their effectiveness. Or the fear of getting AIDS from toilet seats in the 80s. Or the illusion of racial superiority. Or the attitude that if only you can buy the right thing, you will be happy. From my point of view, all these things are pseudoscientific and superstitious, and quite secular. Superstition is part of human nature. Religion, particularly religion as it is practiced by the common person, tends to involve lots of superstition. But anything practiced by the common person tends to involve a lot of superstition.
Ever since some of us started looking into nature people have said, "you know, that's God's work, you shouldn't really been looking at it."
Many believe, among them Alfred North Whitehead whose quote I am (hopefully) paraphrasing from memory, that Christianity encouraged scientific research because it claims that a world made by God could be both rational, allowing us to use mathematics and reason to understand it, but also contingent, requiring us to observe the world to know about it. Historically, the Church persecuted Galileo, but that was due mostly to political considerations at the time, namely the recent Reformation, and perhaps also to the personal relationship between Galileo and the pope.
I remember reading an article on this (pharmacists refusing to prescribe drugs that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting on the uterus wall, and the the personhood of those fertiliized egg.) As I recall, the claims were that: 1) there is no way to medically determine whether a woman is pregnant until the egg implants on the uterus wall; 2) as many as 50% of fertilized eggs may not result in a birth. I'm not sure how you reconcile (1) and knowledge of (2). I can't find the article though.
Ah, a positivist mathematician- I'd heard of them, but never communicated with one :-P. Although I remember reading in college that Gauss thought mathematics to be a sort of semi-empirical science. But most mathematicians I have met are, deep down, really Platonists, I think.
:-).
There is nothing in logic nor mathematics that cannot be argued with. That stopped being the case after people realized that not everything had been covered and prescribed by Aristotle and friends.
But once these assumptions are made, it is impossible to argue with. You have to accept that a triangle in a euclidean space, as defined in a high school text book say, has 180 degrees. Now maybe that statement is tautological, but reasoning is still involved in making the connection between your axioms and your conclusions. A person whose ability to think has been impaired, by a brain injury say, might still argue with you. So argument is still possible, just unreasonable. And I would still say this reasoning is not justified by empirical observation. Anyway, that is all getting really tangential
What you describe as a process to come up with with a concept of "soul" that can connect with scientific research is very much how I would imagine one would have to come up with a concept of "I" that can connect with scientific research. And then when this idea of "I" starts to connect with ethics, society, religion, etc, then somewhere in there we start talking about the soul instead of "I". But if I underestand you I guess you would happily define "I" in the same way that I define, say, what my computer is. I have sort of an idea of what constitutes my computer, but if I exchange, say, my CPU for another one, I don't think that it is a particularly interesting question as to whether it is the "same" computer. My concept of my computer's uniqueness doesn't extend that far. I do think, though, if you could exchange my brain with another, nearly identical brain (is the quantum structure of the brain important??), whether that would be the same me is a terribly interesting question. And I would like any sort of scientific concept of "I" to have something interesting to say about that question. So I imagine that difference prevents a simple, operational definition of my concept of "I" as you describe. Anyway, I find your perspective interesting.
Using Kant as a source is problematic because he assumed the existence of God, of souls and a wide variety of other stuff on no other grounds but his own disposition.
Again, I'm no philosopher, but I always thought the whole point of Kant was that we can never know if God or "I" exists. All that we can know (or argue that) is these sorts of concepts are necessary for us to even have a dialogue about pure or practical reason. Now Kant wasn't completely right on everything, of course, but I still think his criticism of Descartes' "I think therefore I am" argument as being faulty because we have no way to know that "I" exists as a continuous entity through time is pretty convincing.
While causation can be problematic in some instances, it is quite difficult to argue against causation without leaving the domain of reasonable discourse.
I don't claim that it isn't reasonable to believe in causation isn't reasonable. But this isn't the same as saying whether or not causation is metaphysical. Many rules of logic and mathematics can't be argued with either. I still don't consider these things to be empirically justified (although I guess some people do, so you might.)
By procedural definition I mean an operational definition (that's the correct term, I guess): a definition that allows you to know a soul when you see one, and tell it apart from things which are not souls. That is, a definition which introduces a concept you can work with non-vacuously.
I'm personally not sure this is a very natural way to talk about all scientific concepts. What about a quantum wave function? I don't know how much you know about quantum physics, but in case you don't know, you will never see a quantum wave function. It is, in principle, impossible. In fact, we can think of the quantum wave function as, by definition, describing what happens to the physical system between observations. Yet as a practical matter, to do quantum physics, you have to talk about it as if it exists, and a fair number of physicists, I think, would say they believe it exists in some sense.
There is no need for "I" to be metaphysical. Being metaphisical rarely provided any information on anything.
I suppose that I am no longer at all convinced that there is a clear dividing line between what is and what is not metaphysical. Einstein saw the theoretical physicist essentially as a sort of metaphysician. At the very least if you want scientific knowledge to affect your life after you walk outside of your laboratory, then to grapple with science you basically have to also grapple with metaphysics and ethics.
One more thing- as I recall, wasn't "I" and the soul essentially one and the same for Descartes. Now he may have ultimately been wrong, but didn't he forever link the ideas of soul and "I" in the Western mind, at least? Most people mean a more or less Cartesian soul when they refer to a "soul." So if you believe we can come up with some sort of non-metaphysical notion of "I", I don't see why we can't do the same with the notion of "soul". I should have just written that in the first place, I suppose, but my thinking was too fuzzy.
I'm no philosopher. I can only go on my memory of "Critique of Pure Reason", which I read about 10 years ago, and which I probably misunderstood quite a bit. But I do remember Kant talking about "I" as that which refers to whatever defines me as being me, continuous through time, and he thought it was inherently metaphysical. Of course my belief that there is some "I" that exists continually through time is presumably motivated by a particular systematic set of observable phnomena, but the notion of a "soul" can be similarly motivated. However, I am not going to directly observe "I" any more than I can directly observe, say, causation. And while "I" is clearly a useful construct in society, it is not at all clear to me (though this is not my field) that "I" is going to turn out to be particularly motivated by nature. Consider, for example, Terri Schiavo. Part of the whole problem is that in this particular case, it is not at all clear that the term "I" could be applied to Schiavo after suffering such brain trauma. Was that still Terri laying there in bed. Or had the "I" that was Terri gone? Or perhaps whether or not it was Terri is not even a reasonable question, because in this case, nature doesn't really admit "I" as concept or description that makes sense.
I don't really know what a "procedural definition" is. Is it related to instrumentalism, where, to quote wikipedia, "the concepts of our scientific theories are merely instruments whose worth is not by whether the concepts and theories are true or false (or correctly depict reality), but by how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena?" If you believe in "I" in that sense, then I really don't know to what extent "I" remains metaphysical. However, it seems to me you gut a lot of what people mean by "I". Honestly, I'm not even sure how to think that way.
You may not have an immortal soul in the western Christian tradition since Descartes, but if you are going to say that you don't believe you have a soul, you should probably leave the word "I" out of your statement. Whatever a "soul" is, exactly, it must be intimately connected with whatever you mean by the phrase "I", and vice versa.
I think your have good instincts on the subject, but asked the wrong question. I think the English language itself makes it harder to think about the issue, because it makes it harder to talk about it. You ask "why should she be killed when..." You are making the presumptiont that she was alive. To me, she clearly wasn't alive in the sense the usually use the word. Her brain was gone. But she wasn't really dead either, in the usual use of the word. We usually talk about life and death as boolean states- but they are really opposite ends of a continuum. Most of us don't even really have the vocabularly to even talk about it in that way. Possibly it also make it harder in that many Christians think of the soul as in some sense physically leaving the body at true "death", so it seems like you should be able to talk about the moment that happens as the moment of death. I think the question you really have to ask is whether we should have allowed her to finish the process of dying. And also, in what sense do we want the government involved in that decision.
Oh, don't worry about all that. We can trust our President not to abuse his power. He's a methodist, you know. (*SIGH*)
But isn't in one sense the entire stucture of the US government is set up to keep exactly this from happening? And the 2nd amendment lets us be armed just in case. And of course our current reading of this amendment, right or wrong, costs us many lives each year due to easier access to guns, so this kind of attitude is anything but free or easy. So I would say that the US takes your kind of argument very, very seriously, and the only reason we don't think it will happen is because we think we have safeguards in place. We have clearly marked where the slippery slope will end, so to speak. It's not clear to me at all that we have these safeguards for these microchips. Of course there is no government conspiracy, but government doesn't need a conspiracy to become too powerful.