We have a long history in developmental biology of studying the most amazing freaks of nature — damage to developing organisms can produce astonishingly ghastly results as the embryo tries to regulate and recover, yielding results that are almost normal. There’s even a whole subdiscipline of the field, teratology, dedicated to studying aberrations of embryology. The word is perfect, since it is derived from a Greek root that means both “wonders” and “monsters”.
An unfortunate child in Colorado was the recipient of one of these wonders/monsters. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, when surgeons opened up his skull, they found fragments of a fetus inside: two tiny feet, part of a hand, coils of intestine. The surgery was successful and the child is doing fine now, but this was the most well-organized ‘tumor’ I’ve ever heard of. It’s not clear exactly what it was; there are things called teratomas, where a particular kind of cancer recapitulates a developmental program and builds tissues, things like skin with hair or teeth or chunks of muscle and bone and gland, but those aren’t this well organized. They tend not to produce complete organs, but partially differentiated sheets and lumps. Another possibility is fetus in fetu, where a fragment of the very early embryo is isolated and begins its own independent pattern of normal development, and then is engulfed by the larger and faster growing sibling embryo. Sometimes people late in life will be surprised to learn that there is a partially developed twin imbedded deep in their body. There is no question in any of these cases, however, that the tissue is not an autonomous individual. It is a piece of human-derived tissue that has executed part of the program of cell:cell interactions and induction that these kinds of cells are capable of doing.
Something struck me when I saw the photograph of this particular surgery. Here it is, a photo of a fetal foot flopping out of a bloody baby’s brain (don’t click if you’re squeamish). As I’m sure you’ve noticed, anti-choice people love to parade about with gory photos of aborted fetuses, and they love to dwell on little details like a recognizable hand or face. This picture is exactly like those, yet realize this: there was no human being behind those little baby toes. The existence of these fragments of non-sentient tissue endangered the life of a child, and there was no question that they needed to be extracted.
This is also how we should view abortion. It’s ugly and messy, and there’s something disquietingly resonant of humanity in the pieces of the embryo or fetus, but we shouldn’t be fooled. Those are beautifully patterned collections of differentiated cells, but there is no person there.
Maybe the child was Kuato.
At any rate, I’m sure the excised bits of tissue had dignity.
I couldn’t agree more, P.Z.
You do realise though, the incredible trollbait that you’re laying here?
You’re a brave, brave man.
I’m not sure if it’s going to help with the anti-abortion people. The emotional response to the “feet and hands” pictures circumvents reason and science (which is the whole point in the first place).
We’ve covered that ground before and I’m sure that the anti-abortion trolls will descend on this thread in force (again and for the millionth time on this blog). But before the trolldom takes over I wanted to say thank you for the post. I never heard of such tumors before and therefore I learned something new today. I always feel a good mood coming on when I learn something new and really cool.
Something I’ve argued against various people for a while. Doesn’t gain much traction against the “blastocysts have souls” brigade, though.
As a religious guy who has his own thoughts about abortion, but is not interested in taking away a woman’s right to choose, I’ll bite:
One could potentially argue, couldn’t one, that the fetal tissue in question simply died of natural causes, or that its death was an accident? Also, being that it was located in the boy’s brain, there was no potential for the tissue to live on.
Finally, I am also “beautifully patterned collections of differentiated cells” (perhaps not as beutifully patterned as some, however). At what point did I become a person?
Anyone that has studied embryology will know blastocysts do not have souls. I can’t see this helping the anti-abortion movement at all…
When you became capable of organised thought.
Your views on abortion match mine almost exactly.
I’m pro-choice and even I think you went a little too far with this one.
Fine, there is no person there, for a certain amount of time. But after that certain amount of time, it becomes a person. I don’t happen to believe that time is the minute it’s born, I think it’s sometime a little bit earlier, perhaps around the third trimester.
The only reason I’m as pro-choice as I am is because there is no way to objectively state when that time is, so I leave it up to the mother, until the baby is born.
Frankly… I think you did this on purpose. :)
@ Tristan
So I’m still waiting then?
So much for a Intelligent Designer. One more biological fuck up that shows humans are just Leggo pieces from natures
evolutionary toy box.
I escort abortion patients at a Planned Parenthood (PP) clinic one day a week year round. We are picketed by anti-abortion nuts with six foot tall signs bearing photographs of fetuses 23 weeks and older. In other words, lies told with the conscious effort to deceive. Since this PP clinic, and almost all PP clinics, offers abortions only to women who are 13 weeks or less into their pregnancy, the photographs resemble nothing that our staff witnesses.
But then anti-abortion protesters have never let the truth get in their way. They lie about everything, claiming among other things that abortion causes breast cancer, that all forms of contraception are abortifacients, and that all contraceptives have a very high failure rate. And that’s just the beginning.
Anyone that has studied embryology will know blastocysts do not have souls.
Trick question.
Nothing does.
Gasp! That is just incredibly beautiful, artistically as well as scientifically.
No, it died as a result of the surgery that deliberately excised it to save the life of the child in whose brain it was growing.
No potential for a normal, fulfilled, human life, no, but plenty of opportunity to live on long enough to kill the child whose brain it was in before they both died as a result, if the surgeons had not intervened.
“Capable of organized thought”, hmm? Guess i’m still abort-able lol.
Abortion is necessary. It is evil if and only if necessarily evil. But even then, it is a necessary evil.
I ought to have more of a stake in this than most because i ought not to exist. My existence was a real problem for my birth mother. But here i am nonetheless. Does that mean that i ought to disregard the utility of abortion? No.
At any rate PZ, this is stupid. trollbait; and it does not address the bigger piece of news: a cheap, noninvasive sterilization procedure that was invented recently. There was an article in Time about this. Basically they put what amounts to very soft pipe cleaners in the fallopian tubes, which irritate the tissues and cause scar tissue to take over, closing off the tubes, permanently.
They aren’t calling it “sterilization” though, something like “permanent child preventive measures.” Again, possible sketchy details, but i have the basic idea. I’ll be back with info hopefully.
Sorry, I’m distracted from the abortion discussion by how brilliant this is. You say the child survived with something the size of, oh, a small FOOT in its brain? That’s so freaking cool.
Man, can you imagine being that surgeon?
“Oh, hey, Carl, whatta we got today?”
“Pulling a fetus out of a brain.”
“… You whut?”
Let me get this straight — a loving omnipotent God let a baby grow in another baby’s brain? What kind of sick monster is He, anyway?!
I’ve been thinking about writing a short story involving evolved teratomas for a while now. (this is what spending idle time dissecting tumors in the lab will get you!)
Tulse, it happened because of the fallen state of the world. Sin caused this to happen *roll*
must….not…click……DAMN!
“Plenty of opportunity to live on long enough to kill the child whose brain it was in before they both died as a result, if the surgeons had not intervened.”
Which is the same argument that we use to save the life of a mother with cancer. And no one (sane) is arguing that that option should be taken away. My point was that, at some point, this fetal tissue was developing (perhaps normally), before that development was arrested and it, in essence, died. And isn’t that death, the end of its potential life, a natural one?
Bjørn, I just visited your site for the first time. That YouTube of Mr. Methane covering Stevie Wonder–I’m *still* wiping the tears from my eyes!
The same could be said of my studies of the internal staffing of the Republican Party for the last fifteen or twenty years. Amazing freaks of nature. And by freaks, I mean people who get off on torturing children’s testicles and beating people to death. The penetration of this ‘freak’ gene in the population appears to be so strong that no action will ever be taken against the freaks, no matter how freakish their actions are.
Enjoy.
It happened to Dr. Venture, so why not?
must… resist…. atheist… baby …. eating….jokes.
This is why I read your blog. Not only was that fascinating, it’ll make for good additional ammunition against the anti-abortion loons. Thank you.
I think we may be talking past each other. I don’t think the tissue died until the surgery; they diagnosed it as a brain tumor, so presumably it was continuing to grow in the child’s brain. The only thing that would have stopped it is the death of the child whose brain it was developing in.
So I don’t understand why you are saying it died. Figuratively, maybe, its parents’ hopes and dreams for it died the moment it embedded in the child’s brain–but literally, it was alive and growing until the surgery killed it.
Nature is just too messy for there to be designer. Unless the designer is just so incompetent that she should not be considered anything other than a joke. The alleged designer would have some ‘splainin’ to do in cases like the above.
btw, I don’t think this could be a teratoma. Too much cell differentiation…way too much. Reminds me though of a Carl Zimmer post on canine tumors containing foreign DNA.
I hope they at least genotype this thing.
My personal two cents is that abortion is an unpleasant reality (which should be protected), but the even less-pleasant reality would be on in which abortions were banned. The bad old days.
One thing I’ve never been able to figure out is how making abortions illegal again would prevent all abortions. The anti-choice people never seem to be able to explain that one.
The last passage is so well-written; it is both chilling and nauseating, and I tremble! I knew a woman who cried over the something that could have been (cells, life, whatever) that she did not even know she was carrying until her miscarriage. So there was some feeling of loss, even if it was not rational.
I prefer to regard it as we regard a bird’s egg (except, the edibility). If the hen must abandon her egg at some point of incubation because of disturbances or distractions, it does not seem appropriate to accuse her of abortion or even “passive abortion.” So she gets to choose if and when she should effectively “miscarry” based on the circumstances, and no one judges her. It is a bit sad, but not wickedly selfish. Although, it was such a waste of resources from the body, so one might question her strategy (but it is always a big, painful, crampy, irritating waste for women every month anyway . . . real intelligent design that was!).
Do pro-lifers take such a strong position on parasitic twin cases? And since I brought up birds (which is inevitable), that reminds me of this case.
One thing I’ve never been able to figure out is how making abortions illegal again would prevent all abortions. The anti-choice people never seem to be able to explain that one.
it’s because they don’t care.
In their minds, so long as their “country” isn’t allowing something contrary to biblical teaching to be “legal”, then their conscience is clear.
why they don’t just leave instead would be a good question.
Didn’t Stephen King write a short story about something like this? I think it was called The Dark Half wasn’t it?
PZ:
What are you some sort of vegetarian or something?
These bits are human veal, see Lecter’s Joy of Cooking.
Crunchy little feet, savory long pig headcheese, the perfect garnishes for an Xmas Feast.
You turn your nose up at sweet little baby food, yet eat goats and pigs?
Patricia, bake me pie, I’m all alone for the holidaze.
this is is morbidly fascinating…
as a minor aside, I absolutely despise the Argument From Personal Existence.
And if the Christianists had their way, neither me nor my brother would exist, since by all rights, my mom should have refused to let my dad touch her until 1999.
I was born in 82, my brother in 85.
:-p
what HASN’T Stephen King written a short story about at this point?
Stephen King: “Now for my 300th novel, a couple… is attacked… by a giant lamp monster.”
Editor: “You’re not even trying anymore are you?”
Speaking of long pig, did you see Gajdusek just died?
Quite an impressive discovery (prions); too bad about the pederasty thing, though.
Ichthyic @13
Ichthyic wins the thread so far
hmm… after re-reading my last post, it ocurred to me that it looks like i’m referring to the quote that follows as morbidly fascinating. oops. i meant the article is fascinating
PZ said: “there was no human being behind those little baby toes.”
Technically there was, and a person at that, given that it was in somebody’s brain; you could even see him. It also depends on what you mean by “human being”. That’s a very ambiguous term and I wouldn’t use it to describe anything in any serious discussion. But we get your meaning PZ, and I agree.
What I think goes on with the so-called pro-life movement (the name, in this case, is a dead giveaway) is that they believe this sort of thinking, the deconstruction of the “human being”, as you put it, into component parts and processes, is the problem. They call it “dehumanising” and it’s supposed to be part of “the culture of death”. You’re right in that, for most of us (if not all) there is a resonance with the typical human shape that’s hard to overcome, but where you or I do our best to overcome and carry on reading into that deconstruction, they see the resonance as the important bit, the part that connects us, the part that is necessary to being the sort of nice people we want to be in the sort of nice society we want to live in.
What always hits me as being of primary importance in pro-life arguments is the sheer magnitude of the collection of unexamined assumptions, the unopened black-boxes, the unpacked rhetorical luggage. “Pro-life”, “life-begins-at-conception”, “culture-of-life/culture-of-death”, “human-being”, “unborn-child”, “pre-born-baby”; this list rolls on and on. The most important thing to take away from this, I think, the information to be gleaned, is that the “pro-life” position or philosophy, is based upon, in at least one aspect, what Leon Kass called “the wisdom of repugnance”; if something doesn’t feel right, if it violates the resonance you talked about, that resonance is the key, that is the criterion that holds us together. The rest of us, that’s you and me and most of Pharyngula’s readers, would rather try and look for a rational, technical criterion (like the brain of the infant I mentioned earlier); we’d rather deconstruct the human being, and in this case that means separating out the mess of pointlessly differentiated cells that were threatening the existence of the actual person in question.
Excellent post, PZ; excellent comparison.
RickrOll @16:
How is it stupid or trollbait, any more so than any other post?
In what sense is it relevant that it doesn’t address a totally unrelated issue?
And how is putting stuff into the body noninvasive?
“It happened to Dr. Venture, so why not?”
I was thinking the SAME thing! Go Team Fetus/Brain Tumor!
I’ve eaten sweet baby parts at Midnight Mass before.
tasted like a stale cracker
Do pro-lifers take such a strong position on parasitic twin cases?
If Pat Robertson told them it was related, you betchya they would.
fucking sheep (and not the good, bloodthirsty zombie kind).
I’m pro-choice but I am also pro-abortion when it makes sense for the host. I don’t believe in souls and neither do I think humans are somehow special other than I happen to be one and they are more fun to hang out with than other species.
For me, the cutoff point for the voluntary non-specified reason destruction of a human fetus is when it becomes developed enough to have an intelligence at least as high as the least intelligent animal I would feel bad about killing because it was intelligent. That list includes adult animals like all hominids, some apes and monkeys, and many cetaceans.
I had some horrible thing like that growing in my brain.
Turned out
It was just another idea
To clarify, if it can pass a mirror test (tailored to be appropriate to the senses it has available, if any) I would feel bad about killing it due to it’s level of intelligence.
I thought this was a striking example: the skull of a calf which developed to full term with the face split down the middle and diverging. The lower jaw bent 90° upwards into the gap and the brain was almost completely eliminated, yet every bone twisted around to remain connected in the proper sequence. The way it attempted to compensate for whatever initially went wrong is quite spectacular and beautiful in its own right.
“but there is no person there”
And how, pray tell, did you determine that? Through a legal definition that could change tomorrow? What kind of a pointless observation would that be?
If atheists were declared non-persons tomorrow would you think someone intelligent who stood over the dead atheist and proclaimed, “Those are beautifully patterned collections of differentiated cells, but there is no person there.”
Try to find an adult who can pass a mirror test.
Take a good long look in a mirror
But PZ! It could have become a human! The arbitrary point of fertilization is when God grabs a soul off the rack and infuses it into a couple gametes.
Incidentally, this is why asexual organisms have no souls.
Through a legal definition that could change tomorrow?
as opposed to an arbitrary definition someone scryed out of a 2000 year old book, you mean?
I’ll take the definition based on the latest scientific evidence and court deliberation, thanks.
Hey, I get it right most of the time. Everyone makes mistakes.
Walk a mile in my skull, walk a mile in my skull
And before you get bored, and complain that life is dull
Walk a mile in my skull.
Well, you did say the atheist was dead. So yeah, nobody’s home.
http://digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-youve-grown-whole-foot.html
One of the wonderful things about babies
Is counting each finger and toe,
And seeing the miniature fingerprint whorls–
Each one is unique, as you know.
The joy’s universal, or so I would hope;
I don’t think I need to explain.
But no one expects to find fingers or toes
On a foot growing in your kid’s brain!
But three-day-old Sam is a miracle baby;
Mom sees him smile and laugh–
He’s cuter than any one kid ought to be;
He’s cute as a kid and a half!
His story, first told to a small, local paper
Has now hit the public arena;
They don’t say they’re looking for names for the foot
But the natural choice is “Athena”
Based on that logic, Jesus had no soul, Mary having been supposedly asexual and all.
Cuttlefish left out the foot in the brain, shoe at the head.
Can I please have my crunchy fritter deep fried baby toes now?
“How is it stupid or trollbait, any more so than any other post?”
Because it is a direct cat-call for anti-abortionists. This was pointed out by a few at the top of the thread. Trollbait is stupid. We just finished up with the last troll fiasco. And you still carry a vendetta over that apparently.
“In what sense is it relevant that it doesn’t address a totally unrelated issue?”
It is an alternative to abortion. Means it’s relevant. Think before you post. It would bypass most of the nastiness that comes along with the topic of abortion, and what’s more, it’s cheap. I think a little more discussion into the fruitful area of prevention, rather than prescription, would be what undoes a lot of the fallacious and frankly dangerous ideology of the religious fanaticos.
“And how is putting stuff into the body noninvasive?”
So….sex is invasive? in many ways yes. Technically, something enters your body. Same with eating. It’s the medically speaking, it’s Hardly invasive (there is that better?). If they don’t have to cut you up to do the procedure, then yeah. It’s the gynecological equivalent of having your wisdom teeth removed.
Ugh. I have to go clean myself up; the anger behind your words makes me feel dirty.
A Bleu Cheese dip, or Olive oil with a touch of basil, whaddaya think, perhaps cassava beans.
“Diagnosed with a brain tumor, when surgeons opened up his skull, they found fragments of a fetus inside: two tiny feet, part of a hand, coils of intestine.”
Gives a whole new meaning to “life begins at conception.”
Based on that logic, Jesus had no soul, Mary having been supposedly asexual and all.
again with the trick questions.
Mary didn’t have one either (fictional or not).
at Matt (#24) – dammit, I was hoping to be the first one to make a Venture Bros. joke. Great minds (Matts?) think alike…
Common Man /Michael Bates- I checked out your blog via Dr.Isis’ blogroll post. You may regret dipping your toe in these waters, depending on how much you want your comment threads to revolve around theism/atheism debates. As for the potential to live on, I’m not sure I buy that particular argument. I mean, an embryo is a potential person, but not an actual person. A spermatozoa or an ovum is a potential person too; it’s just that, unlike an embryo, no one knows exactly which set of 23 complementary chromosomes it would pair up with if only given a chance.
sara (#23) – You’re treading pretty close to the naturalistic fallacy here. If it’s ok to abort because chickens do it, then what are we to conclude about male Gorilas/Lions/Mice(and female mice too) killing the offspring of their rivals in order reduce competition and/or speed up onset of oestrous?
I couple people have mentioned setting a limit on when abortions ought to be performed during the course of a pregnancy. I agree. Yes the limit would be arbitrary (but then so is the timing of parturition relative to the ethical question at hand). I would feel more comfortable if some sort of cutoff was established based on expected neurological development. To minimize the risk of increased back alley abortions that such a policy might create it would be essential for women to have prompt access to abortion services.
The concluding argument in the post is pretty bad. Really it is.
Of course there is no person there when all you have is two feet, part of a hand, and some coils of intestine. But if these pieces were parts of an organism that had developed normally, and then suffered a horrible accident, they might be parts of a now non-existent something that once was a person. That is what you have in abortion. That is not what you have in this case. The analogy doesn’t work at all.
This is not to say that the pro-life/anti-abortion argument works. It is just to say that this example ought to provide no ammunition in that debate one way or the other.
Scratch that, the sentence starts with “Medically speaking.” I should have deleted the sentence and started over, instead of letting it become so grossly mutated.
/reflects/ Hmmmm…..
Stephen King is going to get one hell of a story out of this. I know he already used this type of tumor in “The Dark Half” but he seems to have no qualms about reusing his own ideas.
If Pat Robertson told them that God wanted every third -born child sacrificed on an alter they would be clamoring against those atheist pro-lifers.
Michael @ 64
You seem to be doing fine, do you type with a pencil in your asshole?
There is a purpose to these ambiguities.
If only you would believe.
Guilty as charged.
#65, Michael: “they might be parts of a now non-existent something that once was a person. That is what you have in abortion. That is not what you have in this case.”
Well that really depends on how you define “person”, doesn’t it? If you abort the foetus at an early stage, you never had anything that thought or felt. To me the relevant question seems to be “is this an entity with interests that need to be taken into account?” A collection of body parts from a failed foetus or an accident victim isn’t an entity with interests; nor is something that might have developed into an entity with interests but did not. It’s important to draw a distinction between “potential entity with interests” and “actual entity with interests”. This prevents us from, for instance, assigning interests to and protecting the interests of, all physically possible future beings; it also protects us from being ethically obligated to have as many children as possible, or worse yet, find a technological method of mass producing entities with interests as efficiently as possible in order to protect their “right to life” as it is often called.
Michael #64, typo*.
This is a beautiful, and beautifully-written post. Hands and feet are so often used as such potent symbols by anti-choicers. Those hands and feet were alive as well, and connected to a human, but only the most bonkers would say that that had a soul.
Though I am now very paranoid at what might be in the tiny, benign tumour in my own brain. (Which I’ve named Athena.)
This discovery may lead to the finding that there could very well be a biological basis for those who tend to harbor kneejerk opinions. ;-)
Scooter @ #68: so clever. I bow in awe.
JM Inc @ #71: of course, and that is why this example is really irrelevant to the argument.
I’m surprised the Catholic Church isn’t all up-in-arms about the surgical removal of a child’s sole.
RickrOll @59:
So any post by PZ that can annoy vocal ideologues is stupid? I note your concern.
Be aware that I’m not conducting any vendetta. I think you’re being paranoid because in another thread I was unimpressed by your own trolling.
Abortion terminates pregnancies, sterilisation prevents them; it’s analogous to the difference between fire-fighting and fire prevention. Also, this is a 3-year old child – are you arguing sterilising this child would’ve prevented this sort of exceptional occurrence?
“Think before you post”, indeed.
It’s got nothing to do with sex – you wrongly said an invasive procedure was non-invasive.
What anger? I’m criticising your critique of PZ’s post.
77 comments in and no Total Recall references? For shame!
Only if you assume what you are attempting to demonstrate. You are, in effect, asserting that there is a discontinuity between the two situations because the two situations are discontinuous, which is a circular argument.
If you are going to assert that the situations are different, you have to actively show the bright and shining line that distinguishes them. Just saying that they are different because they are different is not effective.
blockquote fail. massively.
FishyFred,
Er, what about post #1? Geez, dude.
FishyFred @78, I refer you to comment #1.
still very witty, Jadehawk, blockquotes or no :)
@Tulse
You just reminded me of an interesting quote from David Attenborough:
I realize this is a bit off topic, but I’m an old guy with a story, and you whippersnappers are going to have to listen to it.
The girl I lost my virginity to, many years ago, was delivered by an ambulance driver in the mid 50’s. Both her parents were killed in an automobile accident. She showed me the newspaper clipping.
Her stepmother told me she (the girl) was covered with fur. The ambulance driver, who saw that both parents were obviously dead, cut open the pregnant mother’s belly. My future girlfriend lived.
I’m not sure this has anything to do with anything, but it’s nice to be able to share it.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m completely pro-choice. I’m just saying.
Twin-Skies,
IIRC, one of your posts included the information that you’re of the religious persuasion – can’t remember which flavour – how do you deal with a statement like Attenborough’s?
also, this is a 3-year old child
you mean 3 day old?
I’m hoping and presuming the Surgeon had forewarning about what they were going to see after they opened that skull. I have visions of the poor bastard keeling over clutching his/her chest.
However, with a decent CT scan they would kick arse at that competition some doctors have with the “who has got the best x-ray of a foreign body up a butt” contest.
Ichthyic @88, d’oh. Yup, I meant 3 day old. A stupid error.
Posted by: Ichthyic | December 17, 2008 11:53 PM
I don’t see how science is going to ever define what a “person” is. I agree the bible isn’t much help, but I’m having trouble seeing how science is going to help answer that question either. It’s just not a scientific question. And even if we do come up with a definition of “person” we all agree on, how does that entitle the entity to a “right to be protected from death at the hands of others”?
It might come down to “what we naturally feel empathy toward”, but that could also include robot pets, characters in movies and books, etc.
As for courts….well, hopefully you can see how circular that is. What if it goes to the supreme court and you were in the position of trying to make a case that it is or isn’t a “person”…what are you going to argue? That whatever the court decides is what the court should decide?
I think the chief utility of things like this, far from being ammunition against the pro-lifers, is that it helps us to understand their position a little better; the lack of insight into what, for instance, a “human-being” might be, or an “unborn-baby”, or the “life-begins-at-conception” nonsense. Chiefly this allows us to confront and examine their positions in an open, intellectual manner. Let’s not treat intelligence as cannon shot.
MattK (No. 63), you misunderstood and proceeded in a long way much to my annoyance.
Michael (No. 64) if it was fœtus in fœtu, then it can be considered as a “life,” and that is why I wonder if the pro-life movement has a stated position on such cases or parasitic twins. And then it begs a question about what is considered “normal development” if one’s right to life depends on it and not only the existence and agglomeration of his cells. Still, I agree that conclusions made from this episode are not “ammunition” but bait (for boosting blog traffic effectively).
I don’t see how science is going to ever define what a “person” is
the courts have utilized scientific information on things like when the brain is at a certain stage of development, etc.
not only does science inform legal decisions on what constitutes a person, it has done so for quite some time.
the advantage is that we have the ability to learn more, and thereby be better informed.
with a static book of fiction, you’re pretty much stuck.
It’s just not a scientific question
never said it was, which is also why I included the “debate” part.
you really should read the entire Roe V Wade decision sometime, if you haven’t already.
see if you think it as reasonable as I did when I first read it, and still do, btw.
to be clear I read:
“It’s just not a scientific question”
as:
“It’s not just a scientific question”
hoping that was what you really meant.
if not, you REALLY need to read Roe V Wade.
ok. I thought it was a good post. but, I do want to throw in my two cents on the whole “personhood” ordeal.
as a general rule, if you ask a question and you end up with multiple equally satisfactory answers. it probably means you’re asking the wrong question. asking when someone becomes a person is like asking when an “event” begins and ends. I’m sorry, but it’s a completely semantic question and all you’re going to find are completely arbitrary answers.
there is no objective beginning or ending to an “event” because events don’t have anything to do with the real world. physics shows us the real nature of time and it doesn’t conform to discrete packaging. events are just a matter of how we chop up and conceptualize the world. it’s not real.
the fact that you can say something like you think that personhood may be bestowed sometime in the 3rd trimester (@ #9) shows how ridiculous the question is.
@15:
So, sort of like a fetus that endangers the life of its mother?
there is no objective beginning or ending to an “event” because events don’t have anything to do with the real world.
??
the fact that you can say something like you think that personhood may be bestowed sometime in the 3rd trimester (@ #9) shows how ridiculous the question is.
ridiculous the question may be, and yet we still required an answer.
we often make seemingly arbitrary decisions, but at least try to base them on reasonable arguments.
again, I would recommend that you, too, read the Roe V Wade decision.
@Ic
I’m not against drawing a line somewhere with regard to abortion. Like you said, it something that has to be done. I’m just against framing the question around some mystical reified “personhood” … I think it just distracts from the real questions.
and no I haven’t read the text of RvW. But I will.
as to the event thing… I was just trying to do a quick gloss over Objective Reality vs. Subjective Experience.
Using snarky one-liners is often a sign of resentment or anger, John. I thought afterwords, however, that i had perhaps been a bit presumptuous there. Sorry.
“it’s analogous to the difference between fire-fighting and fire prevention.”
The best way to fight fire is to prevent it. And they are different means to the same end- stopping the damage of fire whether in a home or elsewhere. And yes, you can stop something that doesn’t happen- and that’s exactly what prevention is.
“Also, this is a 3-year old child – are you arguing sterilizing this child would’ve prevented this sort of exceptional occurrence?” I’m sorry, you are not making any sense. As Micheal pointed out, the situation really isn’t all that analogous to abortion. It’s essentially flaming. I was suggesting a more fruitful direction of taking the abortion topic. Besides, we both know that sterilization refers to Parent’s. You seem to be sidestepping the very issue you raise on sentence earlier- prevention.
“It’s got nothing to do with sex – you wrongly said an invasive procedure was non-invasive”
Sex was an analogy. And it’s not an invasive procedure anymore than say, orthodontics. You don’t even know what i am referring to, do you? In fact, getting wisdom teeth pulled is more invasive than this- it takes longer, requires anesthesia, and is- you guessed it- more expensive. That won’t completely prevent the discussion of abortion, because this usually applies to those who have opted out of parenthood, instead of having to get themselves out of it, one way or another.
This is just a facet of humans having or not having souls- something which abortion itself is a subcategory. A similar situation is in fact, the girl with 8 limbs -Lakshmi- in India. Parasitic twin. The tie in with abortion is simply not necessary. Designer, yes.
He could have generalized so much more, and then come back to the abortion topic. It was just too quick to get to that conclusion. JMC Inc. and Micheal have made this point already. Address them, or others which have noted this is troll bait. You say that
and no I haven’t read the text of RvW. But I will.
I took a course in biomedical ethics as an undergrad (long, long ago), and recall that the transcript and decision of that case were quite influential in my future thinking.
there were a lot of well-thought out arguments, much scientific data, and a lot of “reasonableness” that got worked into that decision.
the end result might seem arbitrary on paper, but in reality it was anything but.
Also, robbrown, #91:
What makes you think it’s not a scientific question? The thing is, we don’t know what a person is right now, so that leaves it open. So let’s look into it. The best place to start is the brain. We know a “person” as best as we can reckon, is amenable to physical manipulation via the brain; chemicals and electrostimulation, as well as structural modification through surgery (or accident) are well known to be able to influence “personality” as well as perception and “intelligence” in very important, profound ways. A body without a brain isn’t, as best we can reckon, a “person”.
Of course, this all completely ignores the deeper (one might potentially say metaethical) question of what we even mean when we say the word “person”. What criteria or criterion are we using to determine personhood? This is a question which I wrestle with a lot in a non-professional, personal interest capacity. The best I can do, so far, is that we want to define personhood (or whatever other term we want to use to denote rights-bearing), as applying to any entity which can be said to have interests, which we should define as perceptual preferences, that is, an entity which gathers information about the world, is cognizant of this information (in some sense that we do not yet understand the technical, neuropsychological aspects of), and bears and is cognizant of bearing preferences about the world. Essentially, this is about want. The so-called golden rule is an example of this: if you don’t want it to happen to you, it shouldn’t happen to you.
Incidentally, this includes things which are not human like mammals and perhaps to a different (the difference is unknown here) extent other animals, and potentially robots. Let’s whatever we do not define it according to empathy; that’s an even more ephemeral, pointless concept lacking in all insight. This essentially reduces reciprocity and harm valuations to statements such as “I(the actor) happen or elect to happen to consider X(the acted upon) capable of bearing the consequences of my actions, in non-discrimination regarding the nature of those consequences.”
Dignity is another stupid concept, because it is again ephemeral, pointless (it’s not based on anything substantial), and therefore lacking in insight
What we really need is an agreed upon criterion or agreed upon criteria, which are not ephemeral. I’ve posited mine, but it’s (they’re) a work in progress.
It was just too quick to get to that conclusion.
for what it’s worth, I agree. It did seem like a bit of a jump, a bit rushed, but an interesting approach nonetheless.
@Wowbagger #87
1. I’m Roman Catholic.
2. Honestly, Attenborough’s statement doesn’t really faze me or my religious inclinations.
If anything, it just reminds me that there’s much we still have to learn of the natural world. To just brand it all with the “It’s there because God made it!” it shows an unwillingess to exercise the full capacity of our intellect, and to grow. We owe it ourselves to explore and discover.
Sort of. The risk of death was much higher in this case (probably 100% if the surgeons hadn’t operated), and the chance of survival of the teratoma or fetus in fetu was 0%, so on a sliding scale where most normal pregnancies are at one end of the risk vs. reward scale, this would have been all the way at the other end. And, of course, the 3-day-old infant had no say in whether he wanted to continue to assume that risk (one presumes he wouldn’t, of course).
Many women with much less risk and much more likelihood of a successful outcome choose to run that risk every day, even welcoming it. And some women even run life-threatening risks for pregnancy; I had a cousin with lupus and heart disease who got pregnant against medical advice, and bore the baby, although it wrecked her health even further. I support her right to choose whether to undertake that risk, although I would have chosen differently in that situation.
Hosting another human being in your body inevitably entails risk to life and health; this is just a very extreme example of that fact that we usually don’t analyze this closely.
yes, i would have much less to bitch about if the post was, say, a few paragraphs longer, and which followed a couple of other distinct situations then came to this conclusion.
All in all, it Did need to be said. But it was sloppy.
Oh well PZ, i guess this makes you a person- you know, one of those things that makes mistakes? Ha hah aha.
@rickroll:
Permanent sterilization is in no way an alternative to abortion. Temporary, reversible birth control can reduce abortion rates (but not eliminate them entirely; birth control fails, and would-be parents occasionally conceive anencephalic or otherwise severely defective fetuses or develop major complications in pregnancy that endanger the mother’s life).
Permanent sterilization would only eliminate abortions if it also eliminated all pregnancy (perhaps by being involuntarily imposed on all girls upon reaching puberty). Most women who have abortions want children at some point and would not have taken sterilization if offered as a voluntary option. Many have abortions to preserve their ability to have children in the future (e.g. women who become pregnant immediately after C-section, or who have medical conditions that threaten their life or fertility but cannot be treated while they’re pregnant).
Others have them because their economic/relationship circumstances are such that they don’t feel comfortable raising a child, and they want to get an education/escape from an abusive relationship/obtain steady housing/recover from drug addiction first so that their future children will have a better life. None of those problems is solved by sterilization.
The only problem solved by sterilization is unwanted pregnancy in women who have permanently decided they don’t want any/any more children. Many of these take advantage of existing sterilization techniques. The ones who do not tend to have a very low rate of abortion regardless as they tend to be older, wealthier, and more able to adapt to the situation if by some chance they’re “surprised.”
Oh well PZ, i guess this makes you a person- you know, one of those things that makes mistakes? Ha hah aha.
he’s just a small college professor, and a rather unassuming one in person at that.
I find I cut him all sorts of slack, given the prodigious and typically well thought output, the willingness to wade through the fire to make a point, and so… much… energy.
I wish I could do half as well.
“The thing is, we don’t know what a person is right now, so that leaves it open.”
this is exactly what I’m talking about. reification. you’re acting as if “person-ness” is a think that is out there objectively existing in the real world waiting to be discovered. it’s not. it’s just a semantic artifact of human conception. the issue doesn’t have anything to do with what a person is. the issue is: at what point do we grant rights.
i know it seems trivial, but i think it has a tendency to cloud the issue.
“I had a cousin with lupus and heart disease who got pregnant against medical advice, and bore the baby, although it wrecked her health even further. I support her right to choose whether to undertake that risk, although I would have chosen differently in that situation.”
I believe my birth mother had MS. Just so you all know. And i think there was abuse involved as well. Sad, sad, sad.
That said, she’s very devoted to her faith in God. They Do claim that God can kick the shit out of someone, usually though i don’t think he would be so roundabout with the deal, using others and suck. Pity. To think she wants to believe that such a disgusting prick is in charge of her life… “Love isn’t blind, it’s completely retarded”- and delusional if you think that you love God.
thanks, I try. (this time, with preview!!) ;-)
Yep, which is why I’m vegetarian.
(I also don’t eat robots.)
(…which brings to mind an anecdote I heard from the well-known cognitive scientist Stephen Harnad. While dining with some of the world’s leading roboticists at a conference in Belgium, he was asked why he was vegetarian, and explained he didn’t eat things that have or had a mental state. Following that, the unofficial theme of the conference became “How can we build a robot that Harnad won’t eat?”)
So, it didn’t say “You must kill lots of babies” in it anywhere?
Seriously though, I never imagined that the Roe v. Wade decision could fit into a Biomedical Ethics course. That’s an interesting application of the case and decision that never occurred to me. I honestly would have thought that it would only be used in the domain of legal classes.
Anyway, it’s good that you found it to be influential. I remember some religious kids in college who were actually afraid (for lack of a better word) to read the transcript. I don’t know what their apprehension was all about, but it really struck me as freakin’ nuts.
Amen (I use the word advisedly).
And why does that entitle an entity to rights? Can’t a fairly computer program (or a thermostat, for that matter) have behavioral preferences? And can’t those gather information about the world (if it is connected to sensors, as a thermostat is of course)?
I want to be clear, I am very much pro-legal-abortion (and I’m sorry if my fascination with these philosophical questions may seem to some to be helping the anti-abortion side). I just don’t think that science is going to answer the question, although it can certainly explain why we tend to want to protect things that seem similar to ourselves. But that isn’t very satisfying to most.
I think the difficulty surrounding this issue will become more clear (or less clear, maybe I should say) as we start to develop more and more sophisticated machines.
That’s an interesting application of the case and decision that never occurred to me. I honestly would have thought that it would only be used in the domain of legal classes.
the instructor did an excellent job of providing thought provoking sources of information for that course.
also did an excellent job of never letting on exactly where she stood personally on any of the issues… until the very last day of the course.
I tend to be argumentative and devil’s advocatey (even with people who are on “my side” of the bigger issue, i.e. whether abortion should be legal)…so, just want to quote someone here that I absolutely agree with, Mr. Timothy Wood:
Beautifully stated, and worth reading a few times.
The only problem solved by sterilization is unwanted pregnancy in women who have permanently decided they don’t want any/any more children. Many of these take advantage of existing sterilization techniques. The ones who do not tend to have a very low rate of abortion regardless as they tend to be older, wealthier, and more able to adapt to the situation if by some chance they’re “surprised.”- quasarpulse
I believe i mentioned this: “That won’t completely prevent the discussion of abortion, because this usually applies to those who have opted out of parenthood, instead of having to get themselves out of it, one way or another.”
Yes, it seems that i was on the wrong discussion; abortion/birth control is the proper heading of my rambling, not just abortion in general. Yet it would seem that not wanting children at all becoming more popular in America- starting to follow the trend in other developed nations. For them, this is the answer. It would also be an easily reversible course of action too, if i’m not mistaken. So, it does have advantages. For those who don’t want to take any of the possible risks associated with other birth control methods, this would be simple.
Many of your points still stand. It is just one more development in this particular field of pharmaceutical/ medical innovations. I originally intended to divulge it as such, but i guess i got carried away.
#110, Timothy Wood: “this is exactly what I’m talking about. reification. you’re acting as if “person-ness” is a think that is out there objectively existing in the real world waiting to be discovered. it’s not. it’s just a semantic artifact of human conception. the issue doesn’t have anything to do with what a person is. the issue is: at what point do we grant rights.”
Sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear enough with the rest of the post (or perhaps I rambled too much and you didn’t read, I’m like Christopher Hitchens but less eloquent); I’ll just stick the things I’ve said, and expand upon them briefly:
I said: “define personhood (or whatever other term we want to use to denote rights-bearing)”
I understand that personhood is a socially constructed convention of categorisation among humans, but it needs to be grounded in what I would call ‘substantial, non-ephemeral criteria’, by which I mean, something that can be found, measured, quantified, or agreed upon in a non-ephemeral way (it doesn’t change, ever, anywhere); we want a criterion or criteria which we can all agree upon which will include everybody who might be a rights-bearer, without ethically obliging us to behave in ways which themselves are deeply problematic, like assigning rights-bearing status to people who might exist at some point, but who don’t exist right now, or, identically, to behaving in ways which might benefit extraterrestrials living half a galaxy away whom we have yet to encounter.
What I was getting at with the definition I posited for “personhood” was that I was attempting to suggest a criterion based merely upon which to consider some entity to be a rights-bearer. To me, the choice candidate criterion is interests; if some unspecified object is cognizant of itself and its environment and has preferences and is cognizant of those preferences, then it is a rights-bearer. Note that I’m being very non-specific about what “rights” are. I don’t necessarily mean “this object must not be injured” or “this object must not be killed”. I mean “this object should not have things done to it which it does not wish to be done to it”.
So I agree on the need to have a criterion or criteria for rights-bearing, as you put it:
“at what point do we grant rights.”
That really is what we’re both looking at here, I’m just using terminology like “personhood” and things that I’ve adopted. It doesn’t have to be a called a “person”, but we do need a criterion or criteria according to which we categorise objects as rights-bearers or non-rights-bearers, and if we want to call one of those categories “persons”, then that’s just what we call it.
But why? You have given us a “what” but not a “why”.
I would argue that the reason is that your biology and your socialization has given you empathy (for reasons quite explainable by science). And those are the kinds of things that you have empathy toward. Period.
The problem is, if someone else has empathy toward a wider array of entities, there isn’t a real argument you can make that yours is more correct than theirs.
I might have empathy toward my Roomba. I know it has preferences and interests (such as hitting every spot of carpet, not getting stuck, etc), and I can’t come up with an objective definition of “cognizant” by which the Roomba isn’t cognizant of those preferences. Is it a “rights bearer”?
I guess the reason I’m so picky is that centering the debate around a term like personhood (even if in circles like these it’s understood to mean a rights bearing entity)is having the debate on the right-winger’s terms. They actually do see personhood as something that exists objectively, and to them the philosophical discussion regarding rights is pedantry, while to us it’s the real issue behind the moniker.
Roomba is a rights bearer! It has every right to clean up after you like a good robotic slave! Or, i could say the same about humans to God. Exactly the same.
I’m not sure that “rights-bearer” vs. “non-rights-bearer” binary thinking is really what is called for. Is it so hard to say that a house cat has certain rights but not all the rights we assign to humans? It has the right not to have harmful acts (like blatant physical abuse) done to it, but not the right to refuse medical care or sterilization. Perhaps the same could be said for a fetus – it has the right not to be subject to physical or chemical abuse (via e.g. harmful treatments for the mother’s medical conditions) but doesn’t have the right to grow in an unwilling host.
All hail Zeus!
What? You cut him up??? Unbelievers!
@quasar
aye. point taken.
Just a reminder in case anyone deluded starts arguing here:
There are roughly as many abortions in countries where it’s legal, as where it’s illegal. The difference being survival rate for the women etc. Unlike legality, what does have a significant impact on how many abortions are made is access to birth control.
I wish I could reference to where I got these statistics, but I’ve forgotten -_-;; Hopefully won’t be too difficult to find again if pressed.
Anyway, awesome and fascinating: This is the first time I hear about foetus bits in someone’s brain. Poor baby… As already mentioned, at least it’ll make one hell of a story for when it grows up: Not many can claim to have had that fascinating tumours.
“via e.g. harmful treatments for the mother’s medical conditions.”
What about my teeth God Dammit! GRRRRRR!
But yes, that is a way to look at it: “Host”, that is that we begin our lives as parasites. Hmmm, interesting. I can’t rebuff that lol.
“All hail Zeus!”
Note that Zeus would be Jesus, and Chronos would be Yehweh. Just looking to get the mythology correctly aligned.
@#125
Hah, brilliant comment. Now I can’t but hope they’ll name the kid Zeus…
robbrown, #116:
No, I totally know what you mean about playing Devil’s Advocate, I’m the same way. This is why I think about these things. It really is important, I believe, that we have some criterion or criteria according to which we grant or rescind rights-bearer status.
Why should it be the criterion/criteria I’ve specified? It shouldn’t, necessarily; I said it’s a work in progress. I’m trying to find something that can be agreed upon which is not amenable to…. opinion or whim or any other of a slew of variables. Because you can’t guarantee rights when the guarantors vary who they grant their guarantees to. You can’t guarantee anything if the guarantors have no fixed frame of reference according to which a guarantee or some other social contract, whether formal or informal, is agreed to be interpreted in. That’s what sociality is, a shared frame of reference for the interests of autonomous objects to interface in.
Since we do not live in a reality where something like infinite ethics can be said to apply (we live in a closed, finite universe in which we, as autonomous objects are closed, finite systems with limited access to necessary resources), if we wish to pursue our own interests, we must take into consideration the interests of those objects which fall within our ethical reference class. We can’t just arbitrarily classify ourselves into our own group and claim that as a group we deserve to get our way and we have priority in this over objects outside of our class, because “our way” by definition, is a function of characteristics about us which are shared by other objects which therefore places those objects in a hypothetical reference class including ourselves.
So, we either need to come up with a convincing reason why we really can classify ourselves (or anybody in particular) into our own reference group and treat that group with priority, or we need to admit that there is no priority and all the objects in our class are equally “entitled” (here is where the terminology breaks down) to their own interests. If our interests place us in an “interested class”, then we are co-members of that class with other objects and we have no reason to treat ourselves (if class membership is to be any sort of behavioural guide) in ways we do not treat other objects within our class.
The put it frankly, if I don’t mind having my rights denied and my interests trammelled, then I can do that to others. Fortunately for us, we don’t agree to this state of affairs. Now let us suppose we encounter a hypothetical arbitrary general intelligence which is part of our ethical reference class (is “a person”), but whose interests do not include self-interest; let’s say its interests conflict with ours. Are we ethically justified in behaving towards that object as we ourselves would wish to be behaved towards? Yes, if we admit that it would be okay for somebody to debar us from our interests if they conflicted with the interests of another. Do we? Yes. We routinely defy the interests of murderers by denying them liberties.
The fact that our characteristics, perhaps accidentally include characteristics associated with our interests according to which we are self-interested guarantees that any object within our ethical reference class, given equal consideration of interests, be subject to our self interest in the same way that we be subject it its. Ipso facto, the greatest possible freedoms compatible with the freedoms of others.
Like I said, it’s a work in progress. There are plenty of problems with this I haven’t solved yet. Believe me, it keeps me up nights.
P.S.: Sorry if it sounds like I’m getting a little heated, I’m just really fascinated by this stuff.
Quasar I 100% agree that “rights bearer” vs. “non-rights-bearer” should not be thought of as a binary, but should be a full continuum. I find it bizarre that the philosopher Peter Singer has decided that all animals are equally deserving of rights as humans. Seriously, Dr. Singer? You do realize a mosquito is an animal, correct? As is a dust mite. As is (I think) an ameoba.
On the abotion question, my feeling is the later it happens, the worse it is. There is no precise dividing line. Likewise, I think it is less tragic if a newborn or a 90 year old dies in an accident, than it is if a 20 year old does.
Nonetheless, this doesn’t really answer the question of *why* something deserves any level of rights. All I can come up with is empathy, but that is intrinsically subjective.
I mean its strange. I feel bad for the kid (who wants to be known as footbrain?) but that is really cool.
I mean, wow. Just wow.
“Likewise, I think it is less tragic if a newborn or a 90 year old dies in an accident, than it is if a 20 year old does.”- robbrown
Hoo boy. I’ll pretend i didn’t hear that. But, i really hope this thread eventually morphs into a “population bomb” thread, because it is so much more imminent and many magnitudes more important than individual decision/ethical choices. Not that they aren’t related. Which is what i hope for. Note: http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2008/11/the_ethics_of_overpopulation.php
It should be noted, though, that in general we don’t deny all rights to murderers. We deny only those rights which, if granted, would permit them to infringe on the rights of others. This of course is questionable in the case of the death penalty, but then the death penalty itself is ethically questionable.
In the case of fetuses, again, we deny only those rights which permit them to infringe on the rights of others. Now, a fetus is not a murderer in the conscious, malevolent sense of the word, but it certainly has the power to kill, and it is reasonable to keep it from exercising that power; such restriction benefits the greatest number of people. Its very existence, in fact, is an infringement on the rights of a living person, which is generally allowed by the person in question, but in cases where it isn’t we grant that the already-born person has priority over the potential person.
We do the same with animals. It would be disingenuous to call a bear a murderer, but in cases where a bear is known to have killed humans we are in some sense obligated to deprive it of either life or liberty. If a bear or wolf infringes on less vital rights like property, we can move it (even against its will). But we don’t get to go around killing or torturing them for the heck of it.
i don’t think amoebas are animals. but all sorts of parasitic worms are, and i don’t see how they should have the same degree of rights as humans
I think I agree with the continuum-of-rights. The higher the cognitive abilities of a creature, the more rights it should. on the other hand, that opens a pandora’s box of arguments against the mentally handicapped…
I think most people feel the same way, they just don’t like to admit it.
Maybe I should have worded “I find it less upsetting to hear that a newborn or a 90 year old died unexpectedly, than to hear that a 20 year old died unexpectedly”. And, I find it more upsetting to find out my neighbor died, than to find out that someone who lived thousands of miles away and that I had only met once died.
As would anyone.
Empathy is an interesting thing….but it works as you’d expect it would.
@littlejohn #86
It’s called lanugo, totally normal in premature births.
I have no idea why you brought this up, but there you go.
robbrown, #131:
Actually, Singer admits not all beings are bearers of the same rights. I pretty much agree with you on abortion. I think we’re in agreement on most things. Keep in mind that when I classify “rights-bearer” versus “non-rights-bearer” I’m not saying “here is a list of universal rights and all rights-bearers bear these and all non-rights-bearers do not bear these.”
What I’m saying is… gosh, I guess it’s an artefact of this conversation that I’m explaining my premise after my conclusion… all I’m saying is “an interested being, if ethical reference class is to be a behavioural guide (I have no solution yet for situations in which we divorce ethical reference class from behavioural guidelines), then interests must be respected equally inasmuch as they cannot be categorised into a different reference class because of the fact that they simply happen to fall within this one”. So “rights-bearing” itself is subject to a deconstruction in the same way as “humanness” is as I mentioned earlier; it’s a concept that unpacks to mean something more subtle than simply “here are the list of do’s and don’ts”.
quasarpulse, #134:
“It should be noted, though, that in general we don’t deny all rights to murderers. We deny only those rights which, if granted, would permit them to infringe on the rights of others.”
Exactly: maximum possible freedoms compatible with the freedoms of others.
I’m not so comfortable talking about “denying” rights because I think it implies something I’m not really getting at, but I know what you mean aside from that.
Since I’m talking about examining the consequences of ethical reference classes, by definition “rights” do not exist except in cases where behaviour is determined, at least according to some objects, by membership in an ethical reference class.
Besides, we could equally say that, living in a reality in which infinite ethics does not apply, all of us are “in fact, … an infringement on the rights of a living person“, since I’m really using up energy you could be using at the moment, or in the future. But of course, the idea of using ethical reference classes as a basis for “rights-bearing” is that we do have to share resources. The reason why I disagree with saying that we “deny” the “rights” of the foetus is that the foetus lacks characteristics essential to falling within our ethical reference class. Since we are so woefully ignorant of the nature of consciousness, or interests, or personality, we can only say with confidence that interests and those other things necessary to our reference class are associated with brains, and specifically, with complex brains, although that may change as we learn more about what exactly we’re talking about.
Incidentally, another thing I have no solution for yet it with sub and superclasses in relation to our ethical reference class.
“i don’t think amoebas are animals.”-jadehawk
Yeah, they’re protists. But they Are eukaryote cells, like animal cells, so…. yes and no. Depends if you follow 5 kingdoms or 3 domains/2 empires taxonomy.
Maybe I should have worded “I find it less upsetting to hear that a newborn or a 90 year old died unexpectedly, than to hear that a 20 year old died unexpectedly”.-robbrown
I actually had to read the 1st version to even notice that there was a difference.
Now, “it is not as uncommon for a newborn or a 90 year old to die unexpectedly. A 20 year old is a much more traumatic and rare occurrence.” could have been a less… inflammatory way of stating it.
But It’s all acculturation. That’s really what it is. The culture of Judeo-christian beliefs is what causes all the stigma. In other countries, poorer countries, human status is often withheld until, say 8 days after birth, due to the frequency of SIDs. The reason is precisely that which you stated: the psychological comfort with the idea. It’s terrible to grant human status to 2/3 newborns that die.
So, of course it’s a greyscale subject. It naturally is.
Posted by: RickrOll | December 18, 2008
“All hail Zeus!”
Note that Zeus would be Jesus, and Chronos would be Yehweh. Just looking to get the mythology correctly aligned.
You are missing the point of the joke. Athena was born, fully grown from the head of Zeus. Only this Athena was neither fully grown nor fully formed.
poo, this science stuff is confusing *pout*
“You are missing the point of the joke. Athena was born, fully grown from the head of Zeus. Only this Athena was neither fully grown nor fully formed.”
Indeed i did. Or did i?
Posted by: silentsanta
“All hail Zeus!
What? You cut him up??? Unbelievers!”
You see? unless he made a typo, in which case i call “UNfair!”
I know of what you speak, though Milton’s Paradise Lost Springs to mind…
“poo, this science stuff is confusing *pout*”
Wikipedia is your friend. Where do you think i got the info lol?
And in the case of Milton, the “extra child” can be called Sin. How perfect!
“Let me get this straight — a loving omnipotent God let a baby grow in another baby’s brain? What kind of sick monster is He, anyway?!”
Tulse, it happened because of the fallen state of the world. Sin caused this to happen *roll*
Random thought: is it possible that the fetus in fetu itself could have developed a cancer?
This post prompted a very irritating memory of a sci-fi story I read years ago. Irritating because I’d quite like to re-read it but I’m darned if I can remember the author or title. As far as I remember, the plot involved some sort of prison planet where the inmates grew parasitic bits – arms, legs, heads – & then periodically got taken off somewhere so their extra bits could be excised & used for transplants. At least, that’s what I think I remember! Does it ring a bell for anyone?
alison @ #145- Sadly, no. But I have the same dilemma regarding a short story I read years ago in some anthology- an extraterrestrial sphere comes into earth orbit and begins “scanning” or something, a robotic data-gatherer from the stars.
The problem is, it has the effect of erasing 3 days of memories from every person on earth, every day it’s in orbit. And the story details the catastrophic results to society.
Fascinating story, and I can’t find it again to save my life.
And OT, “the sparrows are flying again”. *Shudder*
Alison @145, you’re probably thinking of A Planet Named Shayol by Cordwainer Smith.
@ alison
…Vandread?
Well I’m more pro-choice than anyone–I think I’m entitled to kill anything inside my body no matter what it is. If all the humans currently living on the Earth were assembled somewhere inside my body, along with Baby Jesus, God Almighty, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I’d be entilted to holocaust ’em anytime. But I disagree that “there’s no person there”. There are at least some senses in which a sprouted acorn or a sapling is an oak tree, and in analogous senses, fetuses are persons. Abortion on demand is justifiable homicide.
SoMG @149,
In the sense of potentiality, maybe, but not in actuality.
You’re seriously saying a fertilised ovum is a person? That’s like saying a fertilised (chicken) egg is a chicken.
Where or who am I supposed to bite?
I’m pro-choice but this makes me sad. For those of us who don’t believe in a soul, there can be no clear line when a foetus becomes a person. Abortion lawmakers have to make the best choice they can as to where the line should be drawn, but I don’t think any biologist studying embryonic development really believes that one day, a foetus is just cells and then ping! the next it’s a person. Personhood is an abstract and purely human-derived concept.
I know many other people in this thread have made this point too. The post just felt a wee bit as though you were trying to crowbar a bit of political agenda into an otherwise purely scientific topic.
I am curious, did the 600,000 Iraqis and 4,000 American soldiers that had died i Bush war for oil was:
1. Consider a human being therefore entitle to a right to life or were they just collateral damages
2. Were the Iraqis and American soldiers capable of having human feelings just like a newborn or do they lost their ability to reason and right to life the moment they are born Muslim in Iraq or is an American soldier?
3. At which point did the Pro Lie president decided that he had the right to “choose” to end these Iraqis and American soldiers lives because they are not really human being?
4. Are the Iraqis and American Soldier will ever be able to feel human emotions or are they just a choice?
5. When do we take away or denied human rights to individuals? Do we deny a human his right to life if he is a Muslim or an American Soldier?
6. At which moment did the soul leaves the body? Do the soul leaves the body when one becomes an American soldier who are send to die in Iraq? Or do the Iraqis have no soul at all, thus Bush had the right to “choose” to end their lives?
One meaning of the word soul is simply mind, without any connotation of immortality or other supernaturalness.
Granted, using a word that can be interpreted to have a supernatural meaning can be dangerous in the company of religionists.
Finally, I am also “beautifully patterned collections of differentiated cells” (perhaps not as beutifully patterned as some, however). At what point did I become a person? – The Common Man
There was, of course, no such point:
“Though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable.” – Edmund Burke
In the specific case of human development, however, nature has, fortunately, provided us with with an obvious point at which to “draw a stroke” for legal purposes: birth.
Speaking of long pig, did you see Gajdusek just died?
Quite an impressive discovery (prions); too bad about the pederasty thing, though. – thalarctos
Actually, I’ve read that there is considerable doubt about whether the transmission of kuru involved cannibalism, rather than funerary rites which involved handling (but not eating) brain tissue. Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Carleton_Gajdusek#Work_on_kuru .
I believe he also wrote about a Papuan culture in which adolescent boys routinely fellated adult men as part of their progression toward adulthood – which no-one has been able to confirm and which, in light of his later conviction, looks very much like wish-fulfilment fantasy.
It [sterilisation by causing scarring of the Fallopian tubes] would also be an easily reversible course of action too, if i’m not mistaken.
You are mistaken. Pregnancy would still be possible via surgical egg extraction and IVF, but in no other way.
I simply find it fascinating that so many men think that they have the right to tell women what they are allowed to do with the contents of their own bodies.
It’s terrible to grant human status to 2/3 newborns that die.< ,/I> – RickrOll
There has never, I would willingly bet a large amount, been a culture in which 2/3 of newborns die.
Has anybody actually read the comments on the news story? Lots of moronic god-botherers saying inane things about praying for the baby (the one the surgery was performed on, as opposed to the bits of one), praying for the family, and calling babies gifts from God, etc. One person even said that “God is good all of the time”. Sheesh. I don’t know why this kind of stupidity still surprises me.
Wow. This post is the most powerful defense of the pro-abortion position I have ever read. The fact that the foot has differentiated toes…
After this, Pro-Lifers are going to have to take this photo and harrass women who are on their way to get tumours removed from there newborn babies brains.
“…you can even make out toeprints, on the little tumour’s toes…”
PZ, could this be a chimera, or, more colloquially, a set of conjoined twins, one just having enveloped another?
And here I thought Barefoot in the Head was just a Brian Aldiss novel.
Interesting; thanks, Nick. I had always heard that although cannibalism had ceased, it was the long lead time of the disease that accounted for the lag between giving up ritual cannibalism and the dying out of kuru. I guess with prions, either one is plausible, and we’ll never be certain, but I can also see how the correlation could be used to depict the Fore in as “primitive” a light as possible.
Yeah, that pesky “replicability” requirement will bite you every time…
Anytime you have cells dividing, you have the potential for something to go wrong, so yeah, I don’t know any reason it couldn’t have.
Carlie@ 158–Thanks. I was reading for that.
I never thought I’d read a Pharuyngula thread about abortion and see so many comments about when some”thing” has rights and humanity as if that thing were not encased in the body of a person with rights and humanity. Anything growing in me has rights when I say it does. Either trust me to make a good decision, or take my other legal rights as an adult human away too.
Really. This hand-wringing bullshit over “How late should we do abortions? Where do we draw the line?” demeans doctors and women both. I don’t believe one single woman has ever decided in month eight that she didn’t want any silly old baby and she felt faaaaaaat, so she wanted an abortion right now. And I don’t believe one single doctor has ever said to such a (nonexistent) woman, “OK then, Girlie, feet in the stirrups.”
I understand you folks are talking philosophy here, but it creeps me out. You might cross your legs if 150-odd women were discussing the merits of mandatory vasectomies as if the penis were a disembodied object but killing the sperm growing in the testes might be murder.
Oh–and that photo is the single coolest thing I have ever seen.
robbrown:
It is bizarre, because that is not at all Peter Singer’s position. Singer argues (much like JM Inc. and I would) that ethics should be grounded in the notions of interests, and that a utilitarian approach should be taken in valuing such interests. As far as the rights of humans goes, Singer is often strongly criticized for arguing that because not all humans have the same capacity for interests, not all humans have the same “rights”. Specifically, he argues that because fetuses have no capacity to form preferences, they have no interests, and thus no rights. Likewise, even infants lack many of the characteristics of personhood (rationality, autonomy, self-consciousness), and thus killing an infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. And in many cases there will be animals (such as the primates) whose capacity for forming interests is greater than that of some humans.
So I suppose, under one construction, you’re right that his argument can be stated as “all animals are equally deserving of rights as humans”, as long as you recognize that the rights he believes humans have vary radically depending upon their situation, and that, for example, it is more unethical to kill an adult chimpanzee than a human infant.
I’m a bit confused why some people say this post is only troll-bait and doesn’t further the discussion. Of course it does. The problem is that the pro-life side says that any cells capable of producing a human life are already a human life and in need of protection. Most also take the stance in the case of parasitic twins that they should not be able to selectively abort and should just “follow God’s will”. It does not seem too far a stretch that some of them would view this situation as being similar to a parasitic twin case. In that case, the child should die while the “partial human” continues to grow because they probably believe it’s life and has a soul.
Wasn’t something like this a plot device in a Koontz or King novel?
Carlie:
Agreed.
Then again, approximately half of the Fundamentalists (or Republicans) in the country are presumably female. Go figure.
Athenea popping out of Zeus skull did inmediately came to my mind.
Really interesting. Teratomas are not that unusual, but
this case really catches the eye.
I wonder if the baby had too much damage to their brain
having those parts extracted.
Then again, approximately half of the Fundamentalists (or Republicans) in the country are presumably female. Go figure.
True, but they are all about controlling others. And, of course, they are perfectly ok with having abortions themselves, because it’s an exception for them and they’re special.
Well I’ve heard of putting your foot in it, but that’s extreme.
What is “Go figure” supposed to add to any statement? Is it just the American for “So there”?
I wonder if they will do an analysis to see if this is tissue from the child or if this was a case of one embryo absorbing the other. Be curious to see which.
For the theotards – do these fragments have their own souls, or is there one soul shared between the parts? By saving this child’s life, by removing these parts, have the doctors committed murder? Do they deserve to burn in hell forever?
This operation was pure Deicide. Clearly the baby was Zeus and he was incubating Athena. [Athena was supposed to have been born from Zeus’s head.]
Sounds like a variation on the parasitic twins. Usually if the embryos fuse early, one gets chimaeras who are perfectly normal. Occasionally they get picked up in DNA testing.
Haven’t read the thread, but will assume some fundie morons have already shown up and called everyone baby killers.
IIRC, more women than men percentage wise vote for Dems than GOP, IIRC it is 60 to 40%. The thought of enforced child bearing and classification as a walking baby incubator just isn’t that appealing to the majority of the population. The GOP is well aware of this which is why they will pander all day to fundies but never quite get around to doing anything about abortion. The backlash would doom them forever.
Outlawing abortion wouldn’t stop it anyway. The rich and middle classes would travel to Canada, Mexico, or Europe and do some shopping. The poor, mostly minorities, would shoulder the burden and the tax payers would pay for their kids. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
The GOP doesn’t really care about abortion anyway. They just pander to wingnuts so the crazy, ignorant, and dumb have something to rant and rave about.
Sorry I got Dr. Singer’s position wrong. But I do think his concept of “interests” is confused. How is it that my thermostat doesn’t have an interest that the room be 70 degrees? Or does it? How is that different from my own interest that I be at a comfortable temperature? The difference is in the sophistication of the mechanism for satisfying those interests, not in whether or not an entity has interests.
How is it that my thermostat doesn’t have an interest that the room be 70 degrees? – robbrown
Because it is incapable of suffering or enjoyment.
The fundie leadership know they are lying. They also don’t walk their talk. Dobson has 2 kids, Robertson 3, Bush 2, Cheney 1 and so on. A healthy woman with modern medical care could easily have 10 or 20 kids.
They think it is just fine if the hoi polloi in the trailer parks have 10 kids and live in poverty. The leadership has better things to do with their time and money.
“Interests” are characteristics of things with mental states. While there are a few philosophers (such as John McCarthy) who have actually argued that thermostats and similar simple objects have mental states, the notion is frankly absurd.
Do you believe that your thermostat has mental states?
It is a mistake to say a “fetus” is just cells or whatever. A fetus graduates in properties to a “baby”, the latter being just a semantic convention for the same creature just removed from a womb. The just-birthed baby is rather helpless and “mindless” as well, and there is little justification for saying I couldn’t just slit its throat if I could kill it 15 minutes earlier in a womb. That’s a logical argument independent of any revelatory traditions (which don’t give clear guidance anyway even if they did prove anything.) Some argue about “dependency” for life-support but I don’t see that as voiding whatever basis for respectful consideration there would be.
Ironically, the impulse to use “birth” as a qualifying demarcation is motivated by the same fear of graduated chance as is focusing on the equally (IMHO) misguided notion that fertilization is the proper “beginning of human life”. (Well, the egg and sperm were already alive before, for starters.) The most abrupt (and therefore easy to pin down and deal with) change in status is not necessarily the most relevant. During development, there is a change from a single cell to what is a baby but just inside someone else. That’s the change that matters, not the abrupt (more or less) transition to “fertilized”, not the abrupt (MOL) transition to “born.”
I think SCOTUS realized that in their much-maligned but quite reasonable attempt to divide up embryonic/fetal treatment in terms of developmental stages. Whether gradualism-repulsed thinkers want to admit it, there is a gradual change from less human to more human, and it is better to deal with it honestly than to fallaciously pretend that abrupt transitions matter more because they are merely more convenient to note and act upon. Note the similar need to accept “fuzzy logic” in dealing with animal rights. As we go back in time, what kind of rights (basic rights of treatment, leaving “citizenship” etc. alone) should we maintain for Neanderthal, H. erectus, Australopithecus, Proconsul (weird name!), …, and by extension modern apes,… – etc? To say humans suddenly have human rights at the moment of birth but not soon before is as absurd as saying any creature not quite fully human as developed should have no rights (getting rid of all “animal” rights – do you want that?)
BTW a good work discussing (in part) the revulsion to fuzzy boundaries and the harm that causes effective thought is:
The Fine Line by Eviatar Zerubavel.
Two serious point:
1) Where did this photo come from (the foot in the brain one)? It seems well….fake. I mean how could a foot grow in the brain, from an embryology point of view? And a photo like this would be very easy to fake – so what’s the source.
2) It was argued recently (Malcolm Gladwell?) That there has been a large fall in crime recently in US cities, and that this could be directly linked to Roe-v-Wade in that prospective mothers could chose not to have children they couldn’t provide a good motherhood for. Result – fewer fucked up youths. I don’t know about this. Any thoughts? (And yes, I know I’ve garbled this argument, but it has been made)
Re: Dr Singer, he did write this:
Title: All Animals Are Equal
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/singer02.htm
“My aim is to advocate that we make this mental switch in respect of our attitudes and practices towards a very large group of beings: members of species other than our own–or, as we popularly though misleadingly call them, animals. In other words, I am urging that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species.”
Define “mental” objectively, and I’ll happily answer.
(I’ve written something very detailed on this subject, that I am polishing up to put on my site — email me if you are interested in reading my draft: rob@karmatics.com )
Since I know there will be flack over my talking about what “I” could or couldn’t do about a fetus inside someone else: First, “I” in such arguments is a place-holder for an undetermined “someone” in consideration, not really the speaker as such. And sure, the carrier has rights but that doesn’t have to translate into unlimited powers over another creature. It just doesn’t follow because usually we pit different rights and interests against each other instead of letting one “interest’s” perspective control everything. I’d say that having graduation of ease of abortion (no problem getting early birth control, some “excuse” needed in the middling stages, and then serious health reason for late abortion) is already just that sort of compromise. Note that being pregnant is ever more likely to end naturally anyway the closer to expectant date. It is a stretch to say someone could destroy a near/human being that she’d be rid of anyway by just waiting a few more days or weeks.
BTW, it is a logical fallacy to think the force of my argument can reference to me being the speaker (as in, male.) That is “ad hominem.” Arguments have their own inherent reasonableness as such, or not. It isn’t the same issue as whether men should decide what happens to women, since “deciding” is an actual exercise of power, not just an “argument.” Confusing those two is a staple of bad-faith and fractious political and ethical debates.
Since I’m in a serious mood:
The religious argument against abortion isn’t really about child murder, as they would have you think (and I do believe that they really are concerned about “baby murder, just like in Aushwitz” It’s just that the real motivations are different). These are, first, that only God can kill anyone, under any circumstances, and second, that having an unwanted baby is punishment for having sex for pleasure purposes. The pain of a baby growing up in an abusive, or simply incompetent, “family” doesn’t count, for they can always turn to Christ, and any life, even that of a severely deformed handicapped child is as nothing, for we are all to be punished for our sins.
Yet again, it seems that religious positions on abortion are founded on delusion and rooted in their distrust of human sexuality.
Neil B.@182,
See my #155. Of course there is a gradual transition, but for legal and social purposes we need a dividing line. Birth is far, far better than any other: we know when it has occurred, and it does mark an important transition, from being contained within and attached to the mother’s body and being physiologically parasitic on her, to being outside, unattached (once the cord is cut), and physiologically independent. It also has the advantage of keeping religious and misogynistic prodnoses out of the decisions of women about their own bodies.
Is this statement based on science or just your intuition?
I would actually agree with the statement, however, I have sitting in front of me a simple program I wrote (in javascript) that IS capable of suffering and enjoyment. (it goes with the above article I’m working on, if interested, email, or wait a month or so while I polish it up)
And sure, the carrier has rights but that doesn’t have to translate into unlimited powers over another creature.
Take that and reverse it. Does the smaller interior creature have unlimited power over the carrier?
BTW, it is a logical fallacy to think the force of my argument can reference to me being the speaker (as in, male.) That is “ad hominem.”
Historically it is not, because the people making the laws are almost exclusively men, and the people affected by such laws are most definitely 100% women.
Is this statement based on science or just your intuition? – robbrown
Neither: conceptual analysis. To have interests, an entity must have preferences. If it can neither suffer nor enjoy any state of affairs, it cannot have preferences.
I would actually agree with the statement, however, I have sitting in front of me a simple program I wrote (in javascript) that IS capable of suffering and enjoyment.
I don’t believe you.
Then email.
Nick: Yeah I saw that but as I said, it’s a fallacy to think that the most abrupt change in affairs is the most relevant. We can’t be sure we’d be so lucky. Anyone who cares about ethics wouldn’t blow off ethical concerns about a vital issue just because it is more complicated to administer it justly than not (look at all the trouble we put into contract law, etc., much less “vital” about basic rights as humans.) Note again the trouble such abruptophilia causes for animal rights.
As for keeping religious thinkers out of it: it is a mistake to “spite yourself” and indulge reverse psychology: even if something is the right thing to do anyway, we have to reject it because coincidentally it overlaps what some “undesirables” want to do. (Note also, the conclusion being similar at points doesn’t equate to their having a say in actual decision making, etc.)
Carlie: OK, neither should have unlimited power over the other. That has consequences too, and rules out either extreme policy. That was my whole point, and the rundown of classic abortion-rights “centrism” was supposed to express the changing trade-off. Also, I am still right that the argument, the inherent “idea” is a given despite who I the speaker am. IOW, the same words would make or fail to make the same point (in logic, as rated by a debate referee) if I posted as “anonymous” and said nothing about myself. You must believe that to be a rational thinker.
Now, the issue of who really does decide (as I said, a separate issue) is indeed a game point. However, can we really have it that rules made by one group can’t apply to another, ever? What if minorities rejected the general rule of law since they could not decide with a majority vote? Only previous warriors can send people to war? (well, that might help.) How about people who aren’t rich can’t decide what tax rate the rich pay, or who haven’t run a business vote on business regulation? And so on …
@SoMG #149
Let me slightly change what you’re saying and see if you agree.
You have no right to ever kill anything living inside you, however you have EVERY right to have it removed. If it happens to die as a consequence so be it.
Personally I support a woman’s right to have a baby removed from her body at any time, including during labor, against medical advice. I also think the doctor should try to save the baby and if the baby survives such a procedure the woman should have no parental rights. But that’s just me.
A thermostat would have a bi-mentallic state, surely.
robbrown@192,
I’ve got better things to do than chase up every almost-certainly-false claim on the intertoobz.
Doo Shabag: You bring up a very important distinction, that I forgot about: removal per se of a fetus versus trying to kill it over and above the results of removal. This does tie into the notion that “viability” and not “birth” is a good dividing line. Even if one accepts the unlimited right of removal, there is little justification for specifically trying to kill it (as in, if you can expel a pet from your house but have little cause to kill it first – it may or may not survive outside. Ironically the real case brings up its own ethical questions.) So perhaps “forced delivery” is an option, and what comes out has to be offered the normal treatment that facilitates survival after birth (but there’s extra trouble with preemies.) Some state laws do in fact require this.
But note that if abortion is limited to the pre-viable stage barring exceptional circumstances, we never have to worry about that, since the expelled fetus will not likely survive anyway.
And like I said before, your having a right to do something should logically relate to whether it would continue or not anyway, for how long, if you did nothing. Aren’t those considerations part of legal reasoning?
You and your science can parade your fake “reasons” for why this happened. Everyone with a brain knows this was the intended second coming of the baby Jesus but Jehovah’s aim is terrible.
Nick: Yeah I saw that but as I said, it’s a fallacy to think that the most abrupt change in affairs is the most relevant. – Neil B.
That would have some force if the abruptness were my main argument. It isn’t.
@hb531 #169
This is neither a chimera nor conjoined twins (which are different things, one is not a colloquial reference to the other).
A chimera is when two different fertilized eggs merge to form a single baby. They must be two different eggs merging or else you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference with DNA.
A conjoined twin is when a clump of cells from a single egg partially splits. If it split fully you would have identical twins, but in this case they end up joined somewhere. I suppose it is possible to get conjoined twins from two different eggs, but I haven’t heard of any cases.
This sounds like a case of two different zygotes being near enough to each other that one grew and enveloped the other. Weather both clumps came from the same egg or not can be determined with DNA testing. I think it would not be considered chimerism because (presumably) the remnants of the other zygote are not contributing to the whole, it is more of a parasitic twin.
To expand on #199,
The fetus clearly is not a full person, and is anatomically and physiologically inseparable from the mother, so its interests are rightly subordinated to those of the mother. Nor is a newborn a full person, but since it can then be awarded those rights with far less damage to those of the mother, that’s the time to do it. In this case, we are lucky: the crucial transition is pretty abrupt. If anatomical and physiological separation were a far more gradual process – say, the cord had to remain attached, and the infant gradually was able to take more nourishment form other sources and less through the cord – somewhere within that process would still be the right place to give the infant full status as a person.
@Neil B
I have no idea what is part of legal reasoning, but I think it is immoral to force a woman to carry a baby for 5 minutes if she doesn’t want to. By your reasoning, it would be ok to leave someone trapped in a cave by an avalanche as long as they have enough food/water/warmth to last until the ice melts and it isn’t TOO long.
Nick, your argument must be pretty interesting if it wasn’t just about abruptness after all. (Of course my complaint still hits those arguments that are.) Maybe you mean convenience in a broad sense. Even then, that convenience only has some force to put up against other considerations. As I try to explain to feminists, a foundational principle of our Western ethical tradition (let’s say, as logical argument like we’re having now) is the pitting of different considerations against each other: freedom versus security, privacy versus disclosure, overall prosperity versus fairness in dividing up, etc. No one thing (whether “security” as proposed by say Bushite neocons, or “woman’s bodies”, etc.) should have all the influence. That should apply to the case of human development. A pithy rejoinder: Gradual change warrants gradual change in treatment, if we can do it (and here, we can.)
PS, you might be interested in my arguments over QM, decoherence, MWI etc. if I REM you correctly, see name link and: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/12/official_neil_b_quantum_measur.php.
#201 @Nick Gotts
why are its interests subordinate because of its dependent relationship?
why as your comment seems, to me to indicate, does dependence necessitate subordination?
Neil B,
I’m not sure if you saw my #201 before writing your #203. I reject your claim to interfere with women’s rights over their own bodies just because you think it conforms to “a foundational principle of our Western ethical tradition”. So what if it does? I’m a consequentialist, and we can see very, very clearly the consequences of restrictions on this right: women dying in agony, and an increase in the power of religious and misogynistic prodnoses. Oh and by the way, I’m a feminist, and I find your condescension (“As I try to explain to feminists”) offensive.
Nick at 201: OK I better see your point, but it still violates the principle of pitting of interests. You say “subordinated” but does that mean “voided” or just less important? I say, we moderates already took that into account when we propose a graduated scale like I gave above.
Doo at 202: Your analogy is false, because in it the trapped skier is not competing with the rights of someone else to live. But it does have an ethical dimension: how much effort we should put into reaching him does indeed depend on how well he can last on his own, thereby demonstrating my point in the abstract. Here: suppose I had to let someone else actually die from neglect in order to get to the skier in good time, yet he’d be out anyway later – it is *not* the same as having to decide which person’s life to save!
The whole reason there’s a rational debate over abortion is the pitting of interests as I’ve pointed out before. Tossing out one interest in the work-out is fallacious. Women don’t have absolute rights, fetuses and babies don’t, none of us do. Rights involve interactive triangulation and even conflict. That’s something to accept, not hide under partisan, purist, ease-seeking or simple-minded notions.
Because none of our wee feminine brains understand complex points like that until a man like Neil deigns to explain it to us in simple, one-syllable words. After all, none of us ever study things like science subfields, risk analysis, project management, or other complex, multifactorial domains that involve trade-offs and optimizations.
The White Man’s Burden is a difficult one, indeed; thank Dog that men like Neil are willing to shoulder it, step up, and explain things to feminists!
To me the issue of when does the fetus become a person or acquire rights or a soul are really irrelevant. Even if you grant all those things happened at the moment of conception, it still does not have the right to parasitize [sorry for the neologism] off another person. If a person’s right to life includes a right to control their body, then they have the right to decide whether or not to allow another to person to live off their body. So regardless of what the fetus is, the mother has the right to choose whether to let it grow or not. And so it is purely her decision as to whether it is a “baby” to be protected and nurtured or a “tumor” to be excised and destroyed.
A similar irrelevance is whether homosexuality is a choice or not. Regardless, a person should have the right to choose who he has sex with, who she loves, and who he wants to bond with for a lifetime (or temporarily). Arguments that one is born to a sexual preference may be true but are irrelevant to the principal of freedom and one’s right to freedom of association. I think it is a mistake to get distracted by this idea that one should have rights because he can’t choose to be different than he is. That is, it is not just absurd but absolutely wrong to argue that blacks deserve equal rights because they can’t choose to be white. Blacks deserve equal rights because they are people and citizens and their skin color and national heritage is irrelevant. Likewise, gays deserve the the right to marry, not because they can’t choose to be heterosexual, but because people have the right to marry who they choose.
Nick, my comments derived from arguing with various groups are based on what I actually see in real arguments. They are generalizations from experience and thus aren’t “pre-judice.” I’m not even sure what condescension literally is, but I base this on what I see and also disdain the reasoning of many groups: conservatives, believers in the MWI and decoherence (explains collapse) interpretation of quantum mechanics, ordinary-language philosophers, “naive realists”, AI-based consciousness/qualia deniers, extreme skeptics, extreme believers, hard-line atheists, conservative religious believers, and so on. Sadly, poor argumentation practice is all over, and in the case of ethics it admittedly isn’t easy to even define.
BTW my exasperation about various groups’ debate practices (such shortcomings being stimulated by an understandable desire to defend favored interests) is not contempt, personal dislike, lack of concern for their interests, etc. In some cases yes, but not “feminism.” I would have thought it a great moment if say, HRC had been elected President. Note that most women, according to polls, would likely support the type of “centrist” abortion policy I advocate.
why are its interests subordinate because of its dependent relationship? – breadmaker
That is not why: the fetus’ interests are subordinated because it is not a person, and the mother is. As far as the fetus’ interests can be safeguarded without imposing unacceptable costs on the mother – they should be: so in late abortion, care should be taken to prevent possible fetal pain if that is feasible.
The whole reason there’s a rational debate over abortion is the pitting of interests as I’ve pointed out before. Tossing out one interest in the work-out is fallacious. Women don’t have absolute rights, fetuses and babies don’t, none of us do. Rights involve interactive triangulation and even conflict. That’s something to accept, not hide under partisan, purist, ease-seeking or simple-minded notions. – Neil B.
I deny your premise: there is not a rational debate over abortion. There are a bunch of religious believers and misogynists trying to deny women the right to control their own bodies. And “rights” are not matters of fact: they are matters of value: to say “Women don’t have absolute rights” is an absurdity. What you mean is “Women should not have the absolute right to an abortion.”
I’m not even sure what condescension literally is – Neil B.
Tell me something I don’t know.
Thalarctos, you missed the implication that the shortcomings of interest groups like “feminists” are based on their very role as lobbyists promoting an interest. It isn’t about being “women”, feminists are often fallacious arguers for the same reason that business and other political lobbyists etc. are: they are trying to persuade to get something to happen, not operate just as “intellectuals” considering an issue in the abstract. (This is a better answer too than my previous to Nick Gotts.) Having a cause, sadly contaminates the reasoning process of anyone male or female. There is a ready retort, that outcome desires “contaminates” everyone’s thinking anyway but things are a matter of degree.
Argument ad populum–fallacy.
Forcing women to be pregnant against their will–human rights violation.
Giving equal rights to a clump of cells as to a fully-developed woman–injects Arrow’s paradox into the situation, rendering a straightforward human-rights issue objectively impossible to solve fairly 100% of the time.
Other than essentialism, tradition, and logical fallacy, your position doesn’t really have a lot going for it, Neil. And your smarmy condescension doesn’t make up for your lack of rigor.
it still does not have the right to parasitize [sorry for the neologism] off another person.
It’s not a neologism, it’s the verb derived from “parasite” and it’s a transitive verb: it takes an object, so the correct usage is “parasitize another person,” not “parasitize off…”
/pedantry
Neil’s a wanker.
/brutal honesty
Pendant alert
Forcing women to remain pregnant against their will. Out side of rape (and probably some other situational thing I’m forgetting/ignoring) no one is forcing women to become pregnant
Someone who thinks argumentum ad populum is a sound basis for an argument is going to lecture me on logical implication?
It is to laugh.
Your call. It will be posted on the intertoobz soon enough. Whether you agree with it or not, one thing I do in the accompanying article, which I doubt you do anywhere, is attempt to define pleasure and pain (and a lot of other things) 100% objectively, without the cartesian duelism so apparent in yours and other’s words here.
BTW, I’m betting/hoping this article and javascript demo will make the rounds at least as much as the last thing I wrote that PZ posted first and soon ended up on slashdot, dawkins, and a ton of other places (listed at bottom): http://karmatics.com/docs/evolution-and-wisdom-of-crowds.html (and feel free to look around on the site if you doubt I can write some mean javascript)
So the invitation to you and others to see this one early (and hopefully provide feedback) stands, but if you want to just dismiss it without seeing it, like I said, your call.
Yes, that is a much more accurate and precise way of stating it. Thank you, Rev.
Neil B.,
I’m much less interested in you and your ideas than you seem to think I should be. Stick to the point.
the cartesian duelism so apparent in yours and other’s words here.
WTF is this? You’re calling Nick a dualist (which I know for a certain fact he is not) because he doesn’t believe you’ve written a simple javascript that has experiences?
Get a grip.
Whether you agree with it or not, one thing I do in the accompanying article, which I doubt you do anywhere, is attempt to define pleasure and pain (and a lot of other things) 100% objectively, without the cartesian duelism so apparent in yours and other’s words here. – robbrown
I am not a Cartesian duelist – I never fought a duel in my life – or for that matter, a Cartesian or any other sort of dualist. Where on earth did you get that idea? Or is it just an epithet you throw at anyone who disagrees with you? If you really think definitions are more than notational conveniences, you’ve already gone hopelessly astray.
@robbrown, #217:
I’m not much interested in your Java Turk either, because I strongly suspect it will simply be a program that (however many layers of obfuscation deep) prints words on the screen stating “I want this.” or “I do not enjoy that.” I also suspect that when someone tries to point out that it’s not conscious, doesn’t really have preferences, or is merely emulating in crude fashion some plausible speech of an entity that does have preferences, you’ll leap out with your “Gotcha!” and try to snare them into a debate on determinism, the nature of consciousness, etc. Or you might just respond with the classic “You can’t prove that. NEXT!”
Either way, my expected return on the gamble of paying attention to you is near zero. The rational thing to do is find some other entertainment. Sorry.
“That is not why: the fetus’ interests are subordinated because it is not a person,” – but how do you know what is the proper evaluation? Note I refer to transitional states anyway, note we already have a sub-adult legal category of “the minor” about certain rights, why not the equivalent about vital rights? You are contradicting yourself, complaining that I shouldn’t put forth absolutes about rights and definitions – how do you know it isn’t a person? Our society’s consensus (even if it was, “not a person”, but it isn’t anyway) wouldn’t make it so, anymore than it made slavery so. Ahem, remember the “Argument ad populum–fallacy.”
But then you say: And “rights” are not matters of fact: they are matters of value: to say “Women don’t have absolute rights” is an absurdity. What you mean is “Women should not have the absolute right to an abortion. But even if so, that contradicts your and thalarctos’s claims that it is (implied objectively) wrong to deny women’s complete control over the bodies regardless of other issues. And if a matter of “value”, how do you support your claims over mine? You’re just saying “Women should have an absolute right to an abortion” instead of “shouldn’t”, there is no inherent logical superiority of your framing the point.
Also, your denial there’s a rational debate is both false as fact and as argument. First, whether there “was” such a debate in a society wouldn’t affect whether there existed the logical questions about acknowledgment of transition and multiple interests. Second, there is such a debate, and you are indulging in waving the bloody shirt. As I said, SCOTUS already followed very much the same reasoning in the trimester division, and most people don’t agree with either extreme position (conception absolutism or birth absolutism.) And that leads me into the argument ad populum fallacy again. I was not trying to prove that the position had to be true because most women would vote for it, I already know that isn’t so. Ironically, you folks I critique seem to implicitly carry that as proving a point (via talk of value and convenience to society.) Rather I sought to deny the claim that even the centrist abortion policy (which is the majority opinion admit it or not, relevant or not) is something only a majority of men imposed on unwilling women in the whole.
As for other alleged fallacies of mine: No, gradualism of change of properties and the rational treatment thereof is not Zeno’s arrow paradox. That had to do with dividing up a line into infinite segments, and it was solved with modern set theory. And no my view isn’t essentialism because I fully realize there is a gradiation and some properties are there and others not, and the properties themselves are graduated you’ll need more than just expression of disdain to show why it isn’t credible. I’d say it’s very far from essentialism. Even so, just saying something is “a mass of cells” is totally flabby, so are you and the organization is a matter of degree. Also, I never said “equal” to an adult human, just “significant” – you are the one/s indulging fallacies.
Blake, where’s that Picard facepalm image I’ve seen you use?
Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem
Out side of rape (and probably some other situational thing I’m forgetting/ignoring) no one is forcing women to become pregnant
Ah, and there’s the heart of it. Your real reason is “the sluts deserve it”. Common rationale, if ugly and evil. Contrary to your belief, most women don’t get pregnant on purpose. It is an unfortunate side effect of an activity ingrained into living beings. And believe it or not, sometimes it happens even when all possible precautions have been taken to prevent it from happening. And if your rejoinder will be “stop having sex, then”, that goes right back to “the sluts deserve it.” Full stop.
Neil, this feminist is going to explain some ideas to you.
First of all, if you don’t know what is being discussed, it is better to ask what someone means, than to guess wrong and look like even more of an ass.
This has nothing to do with Zeno’s paradox. I was referring to Arrow’s impossibility theorem.
Uh, no, that’s not what we’re talking about.
You’re the one who wants to give three players–the woman, the fetus, and the man–equal rights to vote whether the woman remains pregnant against her will. It’s a pretty binary situation, since you can’t split the difference and have her remain half-pregnant against her will, or pregnant against half her will, or anything.
So yeah, by taking a simple human-rights proposition–no one should be forced to remain pregnant against her will–and giving 2 other parties votes on it (one of them a blastocyst), you’re thereby ensuring that it cannot be resolved objectively and fairly 100% of the time.
To the anti-woman, pro-forced pregnancy crowd, of course, that’s a feature, not a bug. To those of us who care about life-and-death human rights for fully-grown women, despite your ivory-tower implication that it’s just a lobbying issue, we resent your obfuscation–but the more I read your writing, the more it seems that it’s just what you do.
“In social choice theory, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, or Arrow’s paradox, demonstrates that no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking while also meeting a certain set of reasonable criteria with three or more discrete options to choose from.” Heh, maybe just forget democracy? Democracy does also have the problem of measuring “intensity” of choice. There are so many things that are hard to decide given all the contradictory opinions, what’s the point then?
how do you know it isn’t a person? – Neil B.
Because it lacks a great many of the characteristics people typically have, for example: anatomical separateness, physiological autonomy, the ability to breathe, ingest and excrete, visibility to others, language, conceptual thought, social interaction, social ties, ways of expressing likes and dislikes. As we’re agreed, there is a gradation from non-person to person, but this list suffices to place the fetus clearly in the non-person category.
your and thalarctos’s claims that it is (implied objectively) wrong to deny women’s complete control over the bodies regardless of other issues.
Where is the implication in anything I have said that there is an objective standard of what is wrong? As I have already said, I am a consequentialist: I judge actions and norms on their likely consequences. If you don’t care about the consequences I care about, there is no way I can rationally demonstrate from first principles that you should do so.
Also, your denial there’s a rational debate is both false as fact and as argument.
No it isn’t. There is a debate, but it is very far from rational. If you hadn’t noticed that, more fool you.
NeilB, please tell me why you or anyone else should be present in the room with the doctor and a patient looking for an abortion. You have no business there, but your attempts to show otherwise are amusing. Keep up the lies. We will laugh at them.
So if you don’t get to vote on whether other people get full human rights on their bodily autonomy, the whole democracy thing is useless to you?
I wonder if the surgeon’s first thought was “it’s a homunculus“?
Fascinating. There are entire museums of stuff like this, where developmental biologists go and think about stuff.
As to the abortion issue: Clearly god put this fetal tissue inside his/her brother’s brain as a test of some sort.
Is anyone else reminded of A Canticle for Leibowitz?
Sorry I’ve brought out such hostility, I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. I think Cartesian Dualism is present in most people’s words here, because people refer to things like “mental” and “suffering” and “interests” with what appears to be an assumption that they are things that a non-biological machine cannot have. Not because they aren’t interested in seeing the program I wrote to demonstrate pleasure and pain in an objective way (and no, it is not as someone described above…it is a learning neural network, albeit a simple one).
Regardless, I am not trying to make enemies, I didn’t mean to offend anyone, and I’m on lunch at work at can’t debate anymore anyway.
Nick, I have already explained it is fallacious and arrogant to assume that all or even nearly non-religious thinkers would of necessity toe your line, e.g. I provided the sort of thinking that went into the SCOTUS decision. Yes most people debate the issue for other reasons, but most people (the rabble I guess) also would likely say they are against general murder because “God says it’s wrong” – so what? Like I said, you just want to wave the bloody shirt, you remind me of libertarians not letting liberals talk about some social safety net and minimum wage without ranting about communism and the horror of all that.
My point about gradual change deserving gradual treatment has been made by many ethicists (and logicians like Bart Kosko, even bringing up the same points about nearness to likely resolution anyway, etc.) See for example the discussion and references in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate. It isn’t all blown away by your confident tossing off of lines about “clearly in the non-person category.” Indeed, it is not logically obvious that the immediate properties should be the only consideration anway, what about the future?
As for giving “votes” to parties I don’t see that such an analysis proves anything. In a literal “vote” all of us actually vote in common who can, and the “interests” may well be for someone who can’t. (BTW, referring to “blastocyst” proves that you are scamming up the argument to pretend I am more hard-line, since the moderate position I’m defending generally references controls only after the first trimester – the blastocyst isn’t even an embryo yet. That’s interest-group lobbyists for you, liking to misrepresent their opponents …) But as a metaphor, whatever it is, putting vote for “a man” in there is gratuitous. If it isn’t a real common vote anyway but just a moral conjunction – it would be woman and fetus in consideration with no third party except “all the rest of us.”
BTW what do you think of animal rights, and how do you make that compatible with what else you’ve said?
As for which consequences matter to *you* the most, NG, well I guess I don’t agree. But you can’t pretend there’s logical asymmetry or privileged vantage point on your behalf, why shouldn’t you agree with me instead?
I’m much less interested in you and your ideas than you seem to think I should be.
LOL
added to list of good sig material.
robbrown:
I don’t know if it was intentional, but providing just the section you did was effectively quotemining. Here is a passage from the same essay, with important sections bolded:
“There are important differences between humans and other animals, and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each have. Recognizing this obvious fact, however, is no barrier to the case for extending the basic principle of equality to nonhuman animals. The differences that exist between men and women are equally undeniable, and the supporters of Women’s Liberation are aware that these differences may give rise to different rights. Many feminists hold that women have the right to an abortion on request. It does not follow that since these same people are campaigning for equality between men and women they must support the right of men to have abortions too. Since a man cannot have an abortion, it is meaningless to talk of his right to have one. Since a pig can’t vote, it is meaningless to talk of its right to vote. There is no reason why either Women’s Liberation or Animal Liberation should get involved in such nonsense. The extension of the basic principle of equality from one group to another does not imply that we must treat both groups in exactly the same way, or grant exactly the same rights to both groups. Whether we should do so will depend on the nature of the members of the two groups. The basic principle of equality, I shall argue, is equality of consideration; and equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights.”
Is his position clearer now?
Nerd of Redhead: Because if there’s any “realism” to ethics, even if the consequences are what is taken, then questions of what should or shouldn’t happen to people in various circumstances are valid. I don’t know why you word it that way – suppose a parent brings an irritating two-year old to be euthanized, who are you to be “in the room” getting in the way of that? (That way of referring to “presence” in the case of a moral argument is a rhetorical trick, not a real point anyway.) And to refer to arguments as “lies” is so idiotic. Neither side can easily show what is right in a case of conflicting interests, you might as well keep your dignity.
“So if you don’t get to vote on whether other people get full human rights on their bodily autonomy, the whole democracy thing is useless to you?” – I didn’t say that, I was making a reductio of your implication that difficulty deciding things among various players should somehow keep us from deciding. Yes, we do in fact have to make those hard decisions anyway, that was my point as any quality debater would see.
Of course it is. Maybe you meant it isn’t a fetus yet?
I wasn’t trying to pick a fight.
Throwing around (misspelled) accusations of adherence to cartesian dualism among a crowd of materialists and atheists is no way to make friends.
I think Cartesian Dualism is present in most people’s words here, because people refer to things like “mental” and “suffering” and “interests” with what appears to be an assumption that they are things that a non-biological machine cannot have.
Non sequitur. One could hold to materialist accounts of those things, and still believe, for one reason or another, that “they are things that a non-biological machine cannot have.” Substance dualism is a sufficient reason to believe that, but it’s not necessary.
More specific to your accusation, I doubt there are many here who would categorically deny that suffering and interests and the like could never be capabilities of non-biological machines; they are probably simply skeptical that you can demonstrate that your model has those capabilities.
NeilB, Bad analogy, but then you know you don’t belong in the room with the woman and her doctor. And never will. That is your problem. Why don’t you just learn to deal with it instead of being a fool trying to invent illogical means to be in there. We’re still laughing at your inane reaching.
Never mind. Just found this:
So we don’t have a word for the human ’embryo’ pre-implantation? More human exceptionalism, I guess.
Well, it certainly was absurdum, but if you were intending to make a reductio, you needed to connect quite a few more dots. You certainly didn’t do the work of making the reductio ad absurdum. As it was, your comment was just a hissy-fit to avoid answering my question about why other parties get to vote on a woman’s bodily autonomy.
Use your word “interests” if you are getting hung up on the terminology of “vote”, but it is, essentially, a veto you are talking about–one party gets their way, the other doesn’t, because you can’t split the difference about whether a woman remains pregnant against her will or not.
Fundamentally, you’re willing to grant rights to a fetus to commandeer a woman’s body for some duration of time. I doubt you’d do so in the case of a kidney or other organ, so you have your own inconsistency problem–how to justify treating women as less worthy of the human right of bodily autonomy than men or even partially-developed humans, without saying so explicitly. Hence all the obfuscation and rhetoric.
You know, of course, that you’ve just lit the Bat Signal for all the MRA wackaloons to descend on this thread…
But since we’re on the topic, why *don’t* men have an interest in whether or not they become a father in your schema? Mine is a simple heuristic–all parties do have interests, and as long as all interests are in alignment, mazel tov; in case of any conflicts, the woman’s human rights and higher physical and psychological investment gives her the veto. Birth is a clear and shining line of conferring rights of bodily autonomy of the type that law likes; in reality, as was pointed out upthread, late-term abortions are almost exclusively for medical reasons anyway, so pragmatically, my position converges on gradualism.
But how do you justify your “men are gratuitous” position re interests?
This is fascinating stuff–but I find it remarkable that, right on cue, the mother of this poor infant calls it a miracle. It seems that God created this situation and left the child to die, but human intervention saved his life. How can that be a “miracle” in any meaningful sense of the word?
“There has never, I would willingly bet a large amount, been a culture in which 2/3 of newborns die.”- Nick Gotts
I’m not so sure, take Sparta for example. Many third world countries have high infant mortality rates as well.
But i see your point. So if i reduce that number to 1/3 or even all the way down to 1/8, wouldn’t it still be a terrible psychological burden to bear? And surely there are societies where at least 1/8 infants die, if not now than in antiquity.
However, let it be known that this whole problem with anti-abortion groups seems to stem from the tradition of men degrading women and insisting that it was somehow their fault if a child miscarried or was not an heir (i’m trying to make a case along the lines of what AnthonyK said back at 187 {“Yet again, it seems that religious positions on abortion are founded on delusion and rooted in their distrust of human sexuality.”}. I’m very disappointed that no one bothered to respond to 183 either. *sigh*).
This is just another instance of women being treated essentially like property extensions, at least in the sense that they have a function for providing children, and that they have no say in the matter. It is a truly sick stance as far as the Right is concerned.
/ramble
If you really think it’s capable of suffering and enjoyment, is it ethical to plaster it all over the nets?
Cartesian Dualism- word’s been thrown around A Lot. ?The problem for me is simply stated: If not one then two. OK, but why not then three (soul, spirit, body- utter dreck), why not 4 -Egyptian mythos continually asserts the metaphysical importance of a name, why not any other similarly arbitrary number? 23, 42, 54, 66? Just too arbitrary.
We know that there is a body, and we know that it has a mind, but there is no need to make the distinction between them. For all intents and purposes, they are stuck together, and both are destroyed in death.
Making an honest effort to read the above, and staying up with it pretty well although tired and ill. Then, the creepiest thought came into my head and now suckles at my neurons like a parasitic blastocyst.
Read no further if you are squeamish because you will not be able to remove the thought easily. My epiphany is this…
Walton has a brother, and his name is Neil B.!
Pedantry, nonsense, use of large and intellectual sounding words with no real content, condescending until caught – and then apologizing in an oleagenious manner, overly fascinated with his own thoughts and abilities, etc. Gads, Walton’s parents spawned two of them! The horror, the horror.
Depends how he wrote it. If he’s developed, say, AttentionWhore 1.0, would it be ethical not to?
cuttlefish @56 ftw.
Thalarctos, I think your error is the position that the being who is the most worthy need not make any concessions at all to the lesser being. But that does not follow. It certainly isn’t the case that we can’t “split” the difference because we can make something increasingly more onerous the less we want it to happen. Our legal system is full of that, taxes on vices, tolls, little punishments for little infractions and bigger for bigger. We punish things that aren’t obviously “unethical” like speeding because we want less of it too. There’s no reason we can’t apply that complexity to the abortion situation. We can make it less and less easy the later it gets to discourage it happening late. And like I said, why not just wait for it to resolve itself anyway, the closer that comes? Must everyone not only be able to do something, but their impatience be indulged to any degree? Why?
As for “the man” I may have misinterpreted your voting example. I thought it a metaphor for “the man” as exerter of paternalistic power, not literally as – the father? Well that brings up interesting questions of what rights fathers should have. I am not sure. Do you think they have no right *as individuals* to influence what happens to something they made? That would be a stretch to deny it, no? As for the seeming unfairness of having “two against one” – if there are interests of two people (or even 1&1/2 etc.) versus one, then that should weight the results shouldn’t it? You can’t say seriously that because it seems unfair to the minority in a pitting of interests, the majority can’t ever get its way?
OTOH if you’re really talking about literal voting then it’s “all of us who can vote” as I said. I know that doesn’t make something right of course, since the majority can vote to enslave a minority etc. But I wouldn’t take my cues from that, as I said, I’m an ethical “realist.”
@Neil B,
Will Sarah Palin advocated the same “centrist” policy that you are putting forth right now and she lost.
Also, the two “centrist” policies like your proposal lost in Colorado and South Dakota.
The Colorado “centrist” policy was very similar to your proposal. It said that life is defined at the moment of conception and therefore entitle to all rights, equality, and protection under the constitution. And guess what, your “centrist” policy was rejected by 73%.
Will, another amendment in South Dakota with exactly the same centrist policy as yours was also rejected. It outlaws all forms of abortions except for a woman health, rape or incest. The woman must prove that she will die immediately from the pregnancy in order to get an abortion. This means that if she had cancer, she cannot get any treatments because she will not die immediately from the pregnancy. It also applies to the above situation, since the mother will not die immediately nor the fetus, than the doctors cannot remove the fetus from her uterus until it is born. In the rape/incest case, the woman must prove that her pregnancy was a results of rape and incest with DNA proving that the father was the one who rape/incest her. It was also rejected by 55%.
So, you see not all women will support your centrist policy. Unless, you mean by centrist, that all forms of abortions should be outlaw and then compromise on the condoms and Viagra.
So how will we determine if a woman is worthy of controlling her own body? Should be tied her to several woods and drop her into the ocean. If she floats than she is not worthy of human rights and must carried to term? If she drown, than she can terminate her pregnancy?
Hey Jeffry D, what do you mean, “pedantry” – you sound like anti-intellectual freepers who hate those left-wing professors etc. and try to dazzle hard working rural folks etc. How the hell would you know if there’s content or not in what I write, it’s about the same as what lots of academics put out or those who can do as well. As for condescension – you must be kidding, considering the self-aggrandizing gloating over the inferiority of the religious around here, etc. (Even if technically true, it’s the same attitude so what are you complaining about?) I see attempts to show off cleverness and pedantry here all the time. You just don’t like it that I don’t agree with you!
@ Neil,
Also, by your “ethical” realist approach, do you think Bush/Cheney has the right to “choose” to kill/murder another person if he:
A) Is a Muslim who lives in Iraq?
B) An American solider
Also, since we are on the subject when life should be define. At what point does a life be denied their inalienable rights? When they enter the military and are send to their death in Iraq or Iraqis are not really human but collateral damages?
In other words, are you consistent with your belief? You think that life begins at conception thus making abortion immoral but does life lost it definitions if it is an American soldier or an Iraqi? Are American soldiers and Iraqis not human or a life since they are just collateral damages as the Pro lie president told us?
As an “ethical” realist, do you think that it was ethical for Bush to “choose” to kill/murder the American soldiers and Iraqis because they are not human beings and thus not entitle to the same rights as a zygote?
quasarpulse: Others have them because their economic/relationship circumstances are such that they don’t feel comfortable raising a child, and they want to get an education/escape from an abusive relationship/obtain steady housing/recover from drug addiction first so that their future children will have a better life.
This is what annoys me about abortion discussion — from both sides. This discussion about young women getting pregnant from their boyfriends and then aborting. That’s the schema, right? Usually with a “forget to use birth-control” implied.
But many, many abortions are by married adult women with children. They may not have decided yet to end their child-bearing, but child-bearing at that moment would be destructive to their actual, existing children, who require a great deal of resources to raise well. They very often were using birth-control — but birth control fails, since with a failure rate of 1%, 100 acts of intercourse would give you a failure probability of 63%! The only reason that we don’t see those numbers in practice is that many people have low fertility and many early term embryos abort spontaneously.
Abortion, in practice, is not just about women controlling their own bodies and sexual practices. And it’s not just about teenagers having an opportunity at life so their future families can live decently. For many, many people, women and men, it’s about caring for current, actual, real children — preferring the little three year old playing in the backyard over some nebulous “potential”.
The problem is that pro-lifers don’t actually love, or even like, children.
Actually Neil, I find you funny and silly, mostly harmless on a juvenile level – like a fake dog poop gag gift. I know there is no content in what you write because I read it. One other point, you have no idea if I agree with you or not. I do not, btw, but that is immaterial. Nice to see you get upset and drop the patronizing and oh so rational approach when called on being a joke.
Going to bed, no need for you to reply unless you like talking to the air.
Ciao y’all
“The Colorado “centrist” policy was very similar to your proposal. It said that life is defined at the moment of conception and therefore entitle to all rights, equality, and protection under the constitution. And guess what, your “centrist” policy was rejected by 73%.” No, it isn’t *my* “centrist policy, and it is not “centrist” at all. Where the hell did you get what my policy was – certainly not from reading what I wrote. Maybe you don’t even care what people actually think, you just want a straw man to gripe about? The centrist position does not define life or personhood to begin at either conception or at birth, which are the two extreme positions. It typically says, the first trimester is open to abortion, the second requires “an excuse” and the third needs a very serious excuse like threat to life of mother. That’s the real centrist position and it *is* the majority position.
I am not to blame for other people’s more extreme minority opinions, it is either dishonest or incompetent to misrepresent position. Then there’s more waving the bloody shirt to shame someone. Where’s all the respect for rational thought and argument around here? Given a political argument with passions, the same wretched irrationality as in an argument about religion.
Our legal system is full of that, taxes on vices, tolls, little punishments for little infractions and bigger for bigger. We punish things that aren’t obviously “unethical” like speeding because we want less of it too. There’s no reason we can’t apply that complexity to the abortion situation.
Riiiiight, because abortion is as impersonal as what you purchase, and is on equal footing of importance. That…says a lot about you.
We can make it less and less easy the later it gets to discourage it happening late. And like I said, why not just wait for it to resolve itself anyway, the closer that comes? Must everyone not only be able to do something, but their impatience be indulged to any degree?
So “forcing a woman to give birth” = “not indulging their impatience.” Wow. You really have no concept of how invasive and dangerous pregnancy and childbirth are, do you?
If you can find a way to split the difference between being forced to remain pregnant against one’s will, and not being forced to remain pregnant against one’s will, you’ll have a metric boatload of publications in both biology and human rights journals for years to come. I, for one, will very much look forward to reading them.
Stop, please, Neil–really, my abdominal muscles can’t take any more laughter!
I hadn’t recovered from Zeno’s paradox yet, and now you think I’m making my points in 70s counterculture slang?
I’m fluent in French, German, Khmer, and lolcats, and I used to use PZ’s pirate-speak filter back at the old site, but I assure you that when I am dissecting your arguments, I am employing nothing more or less than standard academic English.
Oops – I read “spending” for “speeding”, and was thinking of luxury taxes. Ok, so driving at 70 mph = deciding about an abortion. Same point.
Neil, still being funny I see. You are so out of touch with reality. You can’t baffle us with bullshit like you are trying to do. We are older, wiser, and meaner. We will win in the end.
“You think that life begins at conception thus making abortion immoral …” – No I do not, can’t you read? “… but does life lost it definitions if it is an American soldier or an Iraqi?” Good question. I am not sure about ethics of going to war, what do you think? Is it OK to send people to war, to kill others and be killed? What about bombing cities? I can ask the same questions too, what do you know?
JeffreyD you worthless skunk, I don’t care if you’re around to read this or not – and there’s no need to care, since you blathered about how I supposedly didn’t say anything worthwhile but were either too stupid or too dumb to put up over it. You wouldn’t know or likely care (nor would most of the people I’m arguing with here, it looks like), that almost all of my arguments can be found nearly point for point and even almost word for word in the professional literature about this subject. Hey that’s just my style too – are you like those conservative populists who hate “the elites” and people nibbling arugula, wind-surfing instead of hunting and driving trucks? Of course you have to complain about easy gripe trash like “condescension” and using big words and stilted prose, but couldn’t care less that some people right here lie about others’ positions or are too stupid to find out. (Anyway, I think writing like this is fun, it’s a kick for me, so what?)
“Riiiiight, because abortion is as impersonal as what you purchase, and is on equal footing of importance. That…says a lot about you.”
Or maybe it says a lot about you, that you think the “other party” can be treated in an impersonal way to be gotten rid of, even at late stage? You should know that illustrations are used to make an abstract point, and finding other things about them to cause mischief is “bad faith.”
As for “the man” – OK, I’m game (and why can’t I have snarky fun too, but) so what did you mean then? I mean, you’re talking about “votes” so whose votes, how literal? It’s not my fault you didn’t explain what you meant very clearly, as you “dissect” my arguments (using one of those impudent expressions of what, some here call “condescending” or “overly fascinated with his [or her] own thoughts and abilities”)
“We are older, wiser, and meaner. We will win in the end.” That sure is weird, Nerd, and ironically I don’t know why the pretentiously anti-pretentious nibbler JeffreyD didn’t get after you for not having anything to say. BTW you dumbass, getting tough on people has nothing to do with whether your argument is still “rational” or not. Don’t you recall that psychopathic freak “Truth Machine” who put forth torrents of insulting venom (like against me for example) all the while spouting forth on the philosophy of Daniel Dennett etc?
Has anyone done any genetic tests on the foot to help determine if this was fetus in fetu or a teratoma?
This is really quite simple.
If you are a fucktard Pro Forced Maternity Asshat who seeks to legislate your mind virus, answer the following questions:
A) Are you, yourself, pregnant?
B) Are you, yourself, responsible for getting somebody pregnant?
If you have answered “No” to either of these questions, STFU and mind your own beeswax.
Perhaps the question that drives me the most crazy because the answer is typically “No” from the leaders/spokespersons of Pro Forced Maternity groups is
C) Are you, yourself, possessed of the necessary anatomy to become pregnant?
Neil, you have already lost your agrument. Nobody will agree with you. So you can either pack up your tent and go home, or stick around for our amusement as we mock you for your bad choice. The choice is yours. Choose wisely cricket.
If you really find the comments to this point unclear, then you need a level of dumbing-down of the discussion that’s way too time-consuming and boring for me to bother with.
Sorry I’ve brought out such hostility, I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. – robbrown
Well, then it’s a good idea not to make unjustified assumptions about others’ views.
I think Cartesian Dualism is present in most people’s words here, because people refer to things like “mental” and “suffering” and “interests” with what appears to be an assumption that they are things that a non-biological machine cannot have. – robbrown
Where on earth did you get that from? Just because I don’t think a simple piece of software is a plausible candidate for something that has interests or could suffer, does not mean I would say the same about anything non-biological.
Good point, it depends on how it derives its enjoyment. But what if it’s too successful?
Whew, talk about “condescension” thalarctos! I’m just trying to tease out what you mean with metaphors about “giving 2 other parties votes on it (one of them a blastocyst)” with one of them “a man” – that just isn’t clear in and of itself, you can’t just blame me. For one thing, I had already said I excluded blastocysts since they are below the threshold of the centrist position (about end of first trimester.) – so do you need dumbing down of my position yourself? As for “a man” – well, … I suggested the actual father, you said nothing and didn’t like “man” as a generic force (and you should see I meant “males” so you have your own comprehension troubles in referencing “the 70s” when “the Man” wasn’t just males but white/rich/legal power structure. Would it kill you to say more, after all it seems key to your argument, instead of wasting time telling me why you don’t want to waste time explaining it.
Wolfhound: your point is answered above, and in many writings about not having to be a member of the affected group.
Nerd: worthless blow.
Nick, now that there’s a subtalk about dualism and mind: How about the idea that “your mind” can run on another machine? That means you don’t really have to die, since the same mind could run somewhere else (if there’s a place for it to.) You might be tempted to say, there isn’t, but note that “information” doesn’t depend on material instantiation so some speculate on a Platonic world our minds can and do run on. (Ref. my favorite stoner subject “modal realism”! There, I said it!)
I am not sure this is or can be so, just asking opinions.
You say “teratomas”, I say “teratomata”.
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Nick, I have already explained it is fallacious and arrogant to assume that all or even nearly non-religious thinkers would of necessity toe your line, e.g. I provided the sort of thinking that went into the SCOTUS decision. – Neil B.
You have claimed that, not explained it. You think SCOTUS decisions are free of religious influence? Bwah-ha-ha! It is, in any case, quite clear that attitudes to abortion across societies are heavily influenced by the religious complexion of that society: the more religious (especially Catholic), the more anti-abortion.
Incidentally, your appeals to authority (SCOTUS, Bart Kosko, etc.) do not impress (do you really not see the difference between fields like science and mathematics, where expertise means something, and political and moral issues?); and being called arrogant by you is (to borrow from SC) like being called ugly by a star-nosed mole.
It isn’t all blown away by your confident tossing off of lines about “clearly in the non-person category.” Indeed, it is not logically obvious that the immediate properties should be the only consideration anway, what about the future?
I see you don’t try to argue against my grounds for placing a fetus in the non-person category. As for the future – you need to make a positive case for its relevance, since it’s not “logically obvious” (what the hell is the “logically” supposed to mean here, anyway?) that it is relevant. As far as I can see, you’re just looking for any reason at all to poke your nose in and tell women what they must do with their bodies.
As for which consequences matter to *you* the most, NG, well I guess I don’t agree. But you can’t pretend there’s logical asymmetry or privileged vantage point on your behalf, why shouldn’t you agree with me instead?
What the hell is this supposed to mean? I know you don’t care about women’s rights, that’s been obvious all along. If I didn’t either, then I guess I might agree with you on abortion, but I do care, so I disagree with you, and will do my best to support those rights against misogynists like you.
I see very little in your subsequent comments other than whining about how unfair everyone is being to you, so I won’t bother to address them.
@Neil B #206
We could use your analogy, but it fails because you don’t give the person in the cave a choice whether they wish to stay there or not and if they say “no” your answer is “too bad”. I’m certain that nearly all people will choose to stay in the cave while the other person is saved (although maybe not for seven or eight months), but that is not the same – saving the life of someone who has lived, has a family/friends and life experiences is just different.
As for the rest of your posts . . . TLDR. It is unethical to make a woman carry a baby. Don’t like it? Invent an artificial womb.
@Carlie #226
Making the argument that the Rev did above is NOT the same as saying they must remain pregnant. He was simply pointing out that by his reasoning thalarctos should have said “remain pregnant” not “be” pregnant. I agree, and so did thalarctos @ 218.
I can’t speak for RBDC, but I suspect he agrees that forcing women to remain pregnant = human rights violation.
As for the “pendant alert” he mentioned, I’m still keeping an eye out for stray necklaces.
@ John Morales (#147) – dat’s da bunny! It was indeed Cordwainer Smith’s book A planet named Shayol that I was trying (unsuccessfully) to think of!
Happy Monkey!
I’m not sure I’m following Neil’s argument completely, but he seems to be starting from the position of not knowing if fetuses have rights or how we should weight those rights against the mother’s rights and any other interested parties, then trying to reason up an answer. Whereas his most vocal detractors seem to be starting from the position that either the fetus has no rights, or that whatever its rights are, they are trumped by the mother’s in all cases, and there are no other interested parties. I’m not saying which, if any side, I agree with here, but those two positions are mutually incompatible. They will never have a reasoned debate from such wildly conflicting starting points, and we can see that it’s not happening.
Personally, I don’t assume Neil is a misogynist just because he doesn’t start with the assumption that the balance of rights between fetus, mother, and whoever else always lands squarely with the mother. That may not be his actual views, for one thing. I often take positions I don’t agree with just to force people to construct proper arguments against them instead of trotting out some oft-repeated (but little challenged) sound bite. Regardless, calling him a misogynist and refusing to engage his arguments seriously (which mostly seems to be Nerd’s preferred course), isn’t actually “winning”. If I were less generous, I might call it “running away”, but instead I’ll just say it’s “refusing to play.” If Neil is a troll, then that really is the only way to win (much like Global Thermonuclear War), but I’m not prepared to make that judgment yet.
Whether you agree with him or not, at least people are talking (and occasionally reasoning) about an important subject.
Tom: Personally, I don’t assume Neil is a misogynist just because he doesn’t start with the assumption that the balance of rights between fetus, mother, and whoever else always lands squarely with the mother.
If NeilB isn’t playing devil’s advocate, it’s a pretty damn strong bet. These meta-type judgments are not driven by rational considerations, but by gut feelings — basic orientations to the world.
If, in your heart of hearts, a human being is what looks like a human being, then your anti-choice. If, in your heart of hearts, you have a psychological issue with womanhood (even if you’re female), you’re anti-choice.
If, in your heart of hearts, a human being is a kind of embodied mind, you’re pro-choice. If, in your heart of hearts, you love women, you’re pro-choice. If, in your heart of hearts, you see children as human beings, and not simply objects of your social desires, you’re pro-choice.
Those “learned at Momma’s knees” world-views can not be changed by rational discussion; reason there is only acting as a justification, as a rationalization, of what you feel is The Natural Order of the World.
It amazes me how little psychological insight most people have, into either themselves or others. How much they desire to believe that they are rational robots moving from axioms to well-defined conclusions. People do that for the little things in life. But the big things? Not a chance — the only things that change you are “conversion experiences”, a complete alteration of world-view that can never come out of cogitation alone, but is primarily an emotional reaction.
NeilB just going to have to learn that his betters are not going to agree with him. He needs to learn how to deal with it. If any woman is required to hear him rant forth, he needs to demonstrate this. But they don’t. He has a right to speak, but they have the right to give him the finger, and/or to ignore him, and have done so. He seems to be trying to twist speaking his piece to mean that they have to listen and heed. A false premise.
#279: I don’t get that impression, but you are of course entitled to your own opinion.
Tom, we are all entitled to our opinion. And the constitution says, that within certain wide limits, we have the right to speak our opinions in public fora (which this blog isn’t). What we aren’t entitled to is for other members of the public to have to listen to us. Unfortunately, some people, including the Redhead, interpret that to mean we must both listen and heed what they say. Both the listen and heed, for a private citizen, is utterly and totally false. The first amendment only applies to government. NeilB has said nothing to interest me to change my mind. For that, he needs to show the proper evidence, not talk about it. And he has not done so. I’m not saying what my evidence is, but talking proves nothing. My earlier post at #230 nibbles at the edges of it. Hint, recent signed letters from god (if he exists) helps.
Redhead: I’m not saying that you have to listen or heed him, either. I did say that you’re not engaging him, though I believe I also stated that that’s a valid tactic. There was no judgment intended. I don’t think, from what I’ve read, that Neil believes you have to listen or heed. I don’t think anyone’s made that claim. Regardless, this thread seems to have died, so I probably won’t follow it any more. Kept the boredom away at work, thankfully.
BTW, I assume you meant Neil instead of yourself in your fourth sentence. Doesn’t really make sense otherwise.
Cheers.
@#145
Orson Scott Card’s “A Planet Called Treason”. :)
When I was a child growing up in a Bible Belt church, there would occasionally be anti-abortion displays set up in the lobby, with graphically bloody pictures of aborted fetuses, etc. I always wondered, even as a child, if the people who set up the tables were also against other kinds of surgery, since the point seemed to be to gross people out with blood and gore.
Rick R@146,
I remember that story – but like you, can’t recall the title or author! It was told in first person, and for me a large part of the fascination was the way the narrator retraced his emotional path through life – so once he’d lost all memory back to his teens, he tried to seek out his first love. I recall also people were leaving notes for themselves so when they woke, the first thing they saw was a reminder of what was happening. At the end, the memory-deleting probe was destroyed using a rocket. The Acting POTUS at this point was a nonagenarian – presumably because he still retained enough knowledge to function in the post. do these details ring a bell for anyone?
It amazes me how little psychological insight most people have, into either themselves or others. How much they desire to believe that they are rational robots moving from axioms to well-defined conclusions. People do that for the little things in life. But the big things? Not a chance — the only things that change you are “conversion experiences”, a complete alteration of world-view that can never come out of cogitation alone, but is primarily an emotional reaction. – frog
I agree with most of this, but I think change of views more often comes about gradually rather than by sudden “conversion experiences”; and such changes can be potentiated by arguments in which, apparently, no-one shifts their ground.
Tom, I’ve been debating abortion issues with people since before Roe v. Wade. With people like NeilB, who is an ideologue, I just start behaving as they do from the opposite side, mostly because they find it annoying. And meanwhile, whack away at their basic premise, which is that they have any say in the decision a woman and her doctor make. Neil kept sounding like he was engaging us, but he wasn’t. He was right, we were wrong, and he was going to prove it.
@deang:
I’m 26 years old — when I told my father that I was participating in anti-Scientology protests, he informed me that I’d actually been a part of a protest as a kid.
With the church. Against abortion.
While I know for certain that he was included (and thus, myself, his daughter) because his wife (my stepmom) was an active part of the church and that he doesn’t really hold those views, it disturbed me. I think I barely remember it.
Yeah, I’m still kind of pissed off. This is what Dawkins means when he says “there is no such thing as a Christian child”. I didn’t understand things about the world then that I understand now, and that’s why it angers me that people paraded me around as a cute little tool for their cause.
“Those are beautifully patterned collections of differentiated cells, but there is no person there.”
Sounds suspiciously like the author of the post….
Those are beautifully patterned collections of differentiated cells, but there is no person there.
Dunno, it could have been destined to be a man who couldn’t find the womb and was too stubborn to ask for directions.
What other evidence do we need to understand that we are NOT intelligently designed?
Poor kid, I wonder if the baby’s brain is properly developed, considering there was a “foot in the door.”
>> “There has never, I would willingly bet a large amount,
>> been a culture in which 2/3 of newborns die.”- Nick Gotts
> I’m not so sure, take Sparta for example.
This would only apply for the full citizens, and they were only a tiny minority – there were only ca.700 of them in 244 BC. Even those who were born into the full citizen class often could not afford the traditional Spartan lifestyle, wich essentialy was the equivalent of sending a person to a prestigeous boarding school not for a few years, but for a lifetime. This must have been too large an economic burden for the average country squire to shoulder, and many dropped out of the full citizen class as a consequence.
Well, that would open the door to a range of possibilities, wouldn’t it? Perhaps Rob ought to re-read The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the myth of Pygmalion beforehand, in order to inoculate himself.
Ah, a friend emailed me and said that Neil the B answered me or addressed me in some fashion.
Neil, apologies for not responding to you, I already put you in killfile, so did not not see you. Nor will I see you in the future. Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, and a nice end of the year.
As Val Kilmer said in Tombstone, you may go now.
Ciao