Amanda Marcotte rips into stupid gotcha by Marco Rubio.
When Rubio appeared on CNN after Thursday night’s Republican debate, he kept insisting that this vague entity called “science” has declared that human life begins at conception. (Actual biologists, for what it’s worth, argue that life is continuous and that a fertilized egg is no more or less alive than a sperm or an unfertilized egg.) CNN host Chris Cuomo vainly tried to point out that “science” says no such thing, and Rubio got a little excited.
“Let me interrupt you. Science has—absolutely it has. Science has decided… Science has concluded that—absolutely it has. What else can it be?” he asked. Then Rubio reared up for what he clearly intended as his wowza line: “It cannot turn into an animal. It can’t turn into a donkey. The only thing that that can become is a human being.”
This seems to be the core pseudo-scientific premise of the anti-choicers, and it rests on a fundamental flaw in their reasoning. Yes, it’s true that a human zygote is alive and cannot become a cat or a donkey, but “human” here is being used in the broadest possible sense. We do not offer full rights and protections to everything that is “human”, or bleeding, spitting, and masturbation and menstruation would be illegal. Those acts also destroy living, human cells that cannot become donkey or cat cells.
We only offer legal rights to reasonably well-organized collections of human cells. Teratomas do not have a right to exist, nor do warts or severely damaged limbs — we will amputate badly injured, irreparable limbs even though they contain living human cells, because their retention puts the conscious part of the organism at risk.
I think the reason for this flawed argument (besides motivated reasoning) is that the public has a serious misconception: they know about genes and a little bit about inheritance, and unfortunately what they infer from that tiny bit of knowledge is a kind of genetic determinism. People, they think, are defined by the genes present in their nuclei. They aren’t.
I wish there were a way to get this across, but I’m aware that it’s a difficult argument that requires a deeper understanding of biology than most people have. Humans, in the narrow sense of conscious, behaving entities with a full suite of functioning tissues that allow at least semi-autonomous existence, are the product of genes plus developmental processes plus experience. Genes are not sufficient.
Genes are fully human in the same sense that a hunk of lumber is furniture. You have to recognize that there’s more to it than just a raw material.
I think most people get that. It isn’t new information that the zygote contains the full complement of DNA. This isn’t a recent discovery or something that scientists have just determined. It’s been the state of knowledge since before Roe v. Wade. So it really doesn’t matter to the public discourse, I would think.
Science has concluded that if you just keep repeating the same thing over and over then people will believe it. There was a German Catholic philosopher in the last century who spelled it out.
I think the best counter to this argument is that a 50 year old man has “unique DNA” that differs from mine but he can’t use my body against my will to keep himself alive. Which means even if you think an embryo is a special snowflake separate person with equal rights, it still doesn’t have the right to use my body against my will to stay alive any more than the 50 year old man does.
I am surprised that Rubio is not suddenly transmogrifying into an ass… he is alive isn’t he?
It could become an embryo that fails to implant, or a miscarriage.
MedlinePlus: Miscarriage
Every sperm is sacred,
every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
Marco, I’ve got some bad scientific news for you…
One thing from the whole “unique human at conception” crowd that I’ve never gotten a complete answer to: what about identical twins? They’re formed, as I understand it, by more-or-less-spontaneous division of a zygote, which means that by their logic, there is a single human with two bodies. Since it’s not really killing that human to remove one of them, would aborting only one of them (if such a thing is feasible) be OK? Do they have independent rights? If one of them wants their extraneous body excised, would it still be murder if they did it? The answers to these questions are so much simpler if you don’t assume genetic code is the same thing as individuality.
And, yes, it would be nice to put the whole “life begins at…” nonsense to bed. Life isn’t really beginning at all at this point, as far as we know.
knocking down silly Christian arguments against abortion is easy. Yet I find folks (including FTB) tip-toe around atheists who are against abortion. I recall Christopher Hitchens debating Dinesh D’Souza and Hitch loudly proclaimed that a human embryo deserves a more special status than a human appendix.
Also, I recall an atheist (whose name I’ve forgotten) committed to social justice but also anti-choice based on eugenic abortions. His thought experiment was the following. In one hand you have a bunch of M&Ms and in the other hand you have a bunch of living embryos. And this atheist fully agreed with the secular scientific notions of life ie. no supernatural souls in the embryos. At the edge of a cliff you drop only the black M&Ms from one hand. No big whoop. You know where this leading to of course. In the other hand you only drop the……….And there are several of these sorts of secular reasons against abortion that pro-life atheists have pinned a pro-choice guy like me against the wall.
It’s easy to knock down a religious pro-lifer but what are your recommendations for counter-arguments against prolife atheists?
You know, there’s a lot of controversy around this — some scientists may say that life begins at man-made conception, but others disagree. Now, I’m no scientist, so I can’t really say if life begins at conception, and if so, how much of that is the responsibility of man, but the science clearly isn’t settled yet.
I think a zygote is different from other human cells in that it can turn into a different human with out any further genetic intervention.
Jake yes you can selectively terminate one twin, its done quite frequently.
Life begins at abiogenesis.
I think I should just stick with the tried and tested best counter-argument. It’s simple and the best:
My body, my choice!
I’ve been working on an argument that gets to the point of bodily autonomy.
Organ donations save lives. There are numerous people walking around with a donated heart, liver, blood marrow, etc. who wouldn’t be otherwise.
Some people sign up to donate organs. Good for them.
But should the government have the power to force you to donate organs? Let’s leave aside the heart and liver, which you would have trouble doing without. Most people could donate a kidney. Bone marrow is a relative cinch. So how’s about it?
I believe most people would say no. Why? Because it’s my body, my choice. I have the right to autonomy, to self-determination. Even if an organ donation would save a life, and would not bring a grave cost to me, it’s just my decision to make. Most anti-abortion people would agree with this.
Unless the organ you’re talking about is a womb.
What’s so important about “different human”? How does this apply in the case of identical twins? Suppose I could, with advanced cloning technology, turn any human cell into an embryo, implant that embryo and bring it to term? Does it matter whether the genetic material is unique from the donor or not?
human life (n.b. the qualifier) continues with each conception. human life began roughly 2.5 million yrs ago, branching off from a similar lifeform. Distinctions.
Even if we allow your assertion to stand unmolested, where does one person have the right to force another person’s body to provide the lifeforce you insist it must require to live? The usual extrapolation is: forced organ donation, is that not inevitable from a forced birth scenario? where do you draw the line?
Jake Wildstrom,
Heh, I guess we need to make our own signs.
“Life begins at the Eoarchean!”
“Human life begins at the Pleistocene!”
That would piss off both the anti-choicers and the creationists, it’s a double win!
You mean genome. The genetic code is universal, saving a few exceptions.
(Sorry, it’s a pet peeve.)
***
fergl100,
I don’t see the relevance of this, though. It can’t turn into a person on its own, it isn’t yet a person, and it may never become one. It needs a kind of intervention too, namely that the person whose body it is using keeps on providing it with the right conditions to develop.
Brilliant! *standing ovation*
Along those lines, one could ask if it would be okay that the government forced one to be probed in an intimate area, then required a doctor to show the donor recipient on a monitor, and point out the donor recipient’s heart — all without one’s consent, just in order to NOT be an organ donor.
Or, should the government be able to force someone to listen to lies and disinformation about how not-organ donating causes cancer and sterility. And depression and suicide.
@14 Reginald
While it is true that a person can’t demand another person donate an organ, once said organ has been donated and that second person is dependent upon it for survival, one can’t demand the return of the organ either. Which is why the analogy to organ donation works for conception but is a bad argument in support of abortion.
It’s creepy that Rubio is trying to use science to shut down reproductive rights for women and that the mainstream media has given him a pass. Ditto for the other Republicans who have made it clear that if they win next November, women’s access to safe, legal abortions will be in jeopardy nationwide.
@ragdish
I don’t get the argument.
@chris61
Once the donating process is over, you can’t change your mind. Just like once the gestating process is over, changing your mind is called infanticide, not abortion. At any point before that, you can certainly withdraw your consent.
chris61,
I hope you can see why the analogy you are trying to make here doesn’t work for unwanted pregnancies at all. If I didn’t mean to get pregnant, I never consented to anything resembling an organ donation.
If life begins at conception then ova and sperm are dead? Because if they are, and they produce something alive, then their argument that life cannot come from non-live, is inmediately trashed.
If a unique genome is somehow special, why aren’t every single one of my cells considered people? None of them are identical…all of them are genetically unique…
What’s the special thing…meiosis? Is that it? Are birthers some kind of meiosis fetishist?
These people don’t know shit about biology….
“Teratomas do not have a right to exist, ”
I’m pretty sure there are FOUR brain teratomas sitting on the US Supreme Court right now.
Removing them surgically will be difficult, but essential for the survival of the body politic.
For starters, I suggest spelling “Anti-choice” correctly.
At the point where the organ “has been donated” it is no longer inside the donor’s body. The parallels should be obvious.
Jake @8 – further complicating your points about twins are the more rare chimeric pregnancies, where initially two separate eggs are fertilized by two separate sperm (fraternal twins) but early during development they come together and develop into a single fetus. Is this one person by the standards of the religious? Two? If one, which is the murderer? If two, do we give them two votes?
We do not offer full rights and protections to everything that is “human”, or bleeding, spitting, and masturbation and menstruation would be illegal.
In fairness, some of them are against the latter two.
Ragdish
Do you really? I don’t read FTB outside PZ and Greta, but I don’t think either blog would tiptoe around that. Of course they wouldn’t get as much time as the biggest obstacle (by numbers) for reproductive rights is fundamentalist Xianity.
Ibis
If you allow abortion then you allow women the option to terminate based on eugenic or “ist” grounds (race, gender, whatever).
Which is largely fine by me really. We accept the rights of some people to have more children than others, and to choose their partner on whatever criteria (race possibly, height often etc.) they want without considering how it will affect demographics or “fitness”. I think the gender divide looming in China is a shame and going to lead to real problems, so I wonder if there is a point where we do have to weigh choice and wider social problems arising from it. Someone bringing that up in the context of western abortion laws is stretching very far though.
slithey tove
I got into this debate with strange gods before me before.
We don’t accept total personal autonomy generally. You can’t opt out of taxes, out of drug laws for instance. Police can stop and search you if they have a reason to. So it’s a question of where to draw the line. If someone could save the life of someone else (or 100 or 1000 or whatever number) by donating a ml of blood (again you can substitute whatever tiny action or cost you like), should society really not compel them?
Now it’s a long way from that hypothetical to forced organ donation, but just something to consider on theoretical grounds if you’re inclined to waste your time on this type of thing.
I don’t consider it at necessary to have a pro-abortion argument beyond “it’s not even sentient” FWIW
@ 27 Azkyroth
Yet another reason that forced organ donation makes a poor analogy for unwanted pregnancy.
Perhaps Marco can explain the soul situation of the Hensel twins?
No.
That was easy.
This is the bait-and-switch at work. They confuse “human life” with “a human life”, by which they mean personhood.
But you can’t get there from here. Personhood is not a scientific concept, it is a social/political/legal distinction, so trying to “prove” it scientifically is a category error. Furthermore, even if one were to concede personhood to a zygote, not all persons are granted the same rights. Persons under 16 cannot drive, under 18 cannot vote, etc. Also consider that corporations are legal fictional persons.
Crap, missed the “not” in “should society really not compel them?”
In which case, “Yes”.
I would not want to live in a society where bodily autonomy were not treated as absolute and unassailable, no matter the cost of “fringe what-if scenarios”. I would not want to live in a society where bodily autonomy were subject to the values of others.
it laughable when anti-abortionists try to use the language of reason to argue their point when regardless of the terms they use their argument it is at the very root an emotional one which is almost completely unconnected to actual living human beings. It is an argument made of a bizarre shifting mixture of love, hate and guilt. It is so full of inconsistencies, as pointed out above, that reason does not seem to have much effect on it.
uncle frogy
Marc Abian, #30
I hope there isn’t such a point. Because that would mean a woman wanting to have an abortion would need to ask permission from her government first to see if the government values fetus inside her more than her own decision about her body for reasons.
Oh wait…
I would say that it is not a “bad” argument, but a limited one. Every analogy is limited, and should not be stretched too far. Nonetheless, my argument should get the listener thinking along lines of the personal autonomy of the woman, whereas most anti-abortion arguers do not consider the mother as anything more than a baby factory (whether they realise it or not), and concentrate solely on the alleged rights of the embryo. In the analogy, the patient who requires organ donation has no right to demand possession from the donor, the donor’s consent is required. Even if a donor grants consent, I would think, and would expect most people to agree with me, that consent could be withdrawn at any time up to the operation.
Nightjar has already made the point that getting pregnant does not always involve consent. This is important because some of the current GOP candidates would deny abortion even in cases of rape or incest, and this consideration plays very differently in scenarios of fetal rights vs. the mother’s bodily autonomy.
Gee, I don’t suppose it ever occurred to these so-called professional journalists that if candidates are going to make biological arguments, it might be a good idea to have a biologist handy to fact-check them, because that would make entirely too much sense.
I agree with Marc Albian #29. This issue has been dealt with in a straightforward fashion by multiple atheist/freethinker blogs I peruse. The arguments are considered, examined, and usually rejected. Usually the arguments do not differ substantially from religious anti-abortion arguments. They try to hide the overt religious content, but are not successful at it. Also, they make the same bogus appeals to science.
The legal precedents are pretty clear, and the answer is no. Even in criminal investigation, the government may not compel even a fingerprint or a DNA swab, both of which are less invasive to the “donor” without either consent or substantial evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Blood donation is already a thing. I donate regularly. The Red Cross and other blood-providing agencies advertise quite a bit to convince people that it is a good and helpful thing to do. And yet I have never heard anyone argue for government-backed compulsion.
PZ Myers,
I wanted to leave a comment on your post “Marco Rubio is already Gish-Galloping,” but it appears the comments are closed (the “Leave a Reply” box was not visible at the bottom of the existing comments).
It seems to me (although I am willing to be persuaded otherwise) that the claim “human life begins at conception” is, or ought to be, uncontroversial. For at conception, a new organism comes into existence that is a member of the species homo sapiens.
I am understanding the word “organism” to mean a whole animal (or plant) and not a part of an animal (or plant). (Surely, biologists recognize a distinction between an animal and its parts. If the word “organism” is not the right word for a whole, please correct me.) A sperm and an egg are parts of an organism. They are not themselves organisms. Is it not the view of biologists that a zygote is an organism, i.e. not a part of an animal but a new animal? If the answer to that question is Yes, then a human life begins at conception.
Of course, none of this really bears on the abortion debate (or, at least, the abortion debate between intelligent people). Most sophisticated pro-choice advocates simply assume (as a settled biological question) that human life begins at conception, but they deny that this is relevant. (See, for example, http://www.philostv.com/don-marquis-and-michael-tooley/) Their argument involves personhood. Thus, their argument and the various responses to it are not biological but philosophical.
Snort.. Aside from the fact that I see creationists becoming asses all the time… I sometimes wish this was a world in which something like lycans really existed, just so you could look at one of these people, and grow fangs, both because a) it would undermine their argument instantly, and b) it seems way cooler to growl at them with fangs, than to just growl. lol
Ask yourself this: were there a subset of zygotes that did not progress, but simply stayed stagnant at some few-celled state, would they be categorized as homo sapiens? Clearly not. A zygote might become a homo sapien, but it isn’t one yet. Things are not categorized by what they might become, but by what they are.
“Would they be categorized as homo sapiens? Clearly not.”
Well, it’s not clear to me. First answer the more basic question: Is a zygote an organism? If it is an organism, then it must belong to a species. And to what species would it belong if not homo sapiens? (Something like this last question is, I think, what Rubio has in mind; but he expresses himself poorly).
Wrong. Biological. Where is the fetus? Inside of the woman, not outside of it. Her body, her choice. Period, end of story.
I suppose we could throw Rubio’s own words back at him as self-contradictory.
As in,
So, it is not yet a human. It can become one. eh? so it isn’t one now; so QED, it can be aborted with no moral consequence. eh Rubio? your words. … gotcha
You’re the only one.
But “organism” and “species” are inperfect human constructs applied roughly to the world. They are maps of reality, not reality. They are not the discrete concrete concepts you desire. You can’t turn a zygote into a person playing those sorts of word games.
@45
My (I would have thought obvious) point is that personhood is not a topic for biologists but for philosophers. That point has nothing to do with the location of a fetus, etc.
as I understand it a zygote does have all or a complete set of genetic material . It is far from complete as far as organs and tissues and must undergo a period of development before can be said to be a complete organism able to survive without being connected to the mother’s body. Therefore I would think that until at least viability it only has the possibility of being a complete organism, 1 cell or 100 cells or even 10,000 cells are not a complete organism when talking about animals like human beings.
uncle frogy
“You can’t turn a zygote into a person playing those sorts of word games.”
Good grief. That is not at all what I am trying to do. Of course a zygote isn’t a person. So, put down the talking points and think with me for a moment.
Are you telling me that “organism” is too vague a concept to be applied to a zygote? Perhaps you could explain what you take to be the difficulty.
@49
If “complete” in “complete organism” means “not fully developed,” then a zygote is not a complete organism. Neither is a human infant.
Nevertheless, a zygote is still an organism. It’s not half of an organism, so to speak.
Marco, nice to now without a doubt what science says about human embryology. Now, what does science say about anthropogenic climate change???
Oh, that’s right, now you’re not a scientist.
ipse,
No, I don’t think I would call a zygote an organism. I also wouldn’t call the hazelnut I just ate an organism. Those things can develop into organisms if allowed, but I wouldn’t call them organisms.
This is semantics, though, not biology. What is biology and the point here is that a diploid cell with a unique combination of genes does not, in itself, define a human being (or a human organism, or a human individual). The developmental processes it has to undergo are important, and before they happen you don’t have yourself an unique, individual human organism yet. In the case of twins, these developmental processes can even make that zygote turn into two unique organisms. So I really wouldn’t rush things and call a zygote an organism right away.
@ Ipse;
I am not trying to put words in your mouth here or imply anything about your motivations at this juncture, but I think you might be well served by considering how your arguments on this thread may appear to those people reading it, especially those who have had, or are at risk of having, their bodily autonomy threatened by the anti-choice movement – you seem to be working very hard to try to inject ambiguity into the debate, and shift the focus away from developmental science and toward philosophy. This could be entirely innocent of course, and simply a matter of your interpretation of the logical basis for the pro-choice argument, but it could also be read as trying to manoeuver the discussion onto philosophical ground that is often perceived in some quarters to be more malleable for political agendas than the biological sciences.
Your approach could be interpreted as trying to create space to argue semantics in such a fashion that the actual bodily autonomy of women is sidelined.
Imagine that you were one of those women who perhaps was denied an abortion or whose abortion was opposed based upon just the kind of anti-choice blather Rubio is spouting here, or perhaps has known people who have suffered or even died as a result of obstacles put in the way of proper healthcare for women, or who live in fear that all of this could one day happen to them simply because they are sexually active and have the misfortune to live in a society riddled with gross misogyny and toxic hangups about sex and sexuality, and doubly so should someone like Rubio (of which there are all too many among the Republicans and even some among the Democrats) take office. This topic is in no way abstract for them. Consider how they might be feeling, and how seeing someone argue about whether or not the issue of their recognition as full human beings should revolve more around biology or philosophy might effect them.
The semantic specifics may matter a great deal to you, but I doubt it is of great import to the women at the sharp end. If you agree that women should have the right to control their reproductive capacity, then arguing about the philosophical niceties is largely moot and distracts from a far more important issue. Of course, if you don’t accept that women should have such a right, then that is a whole other discussion.
All I am suggesting is that you consider your audience before writing anything more on this topic. Not everybody has the same stake invested in this particular issue, and it might be a good idea to recognize that.
Re “tiptoeing around atheists who are against abortion”:
CFI Ottawa just last night had a small group discussion on this topic with opposing views provided by a pro-choice atheist (me) and a pro-life atheist. The basis of the pro-life argument was that from the moment of conception there is a unique human life, and even a 64-cell blastocyst should be regarded as a “preborn child” who is a full member of the human species, because the only difference is a matter of time to develop. In response to the arguments about organ/blood donation (which I do think provide a useful explanation/illustration of bodily autonomy), the answer was that for most cases the pregnant women bore responsibility for the existence of the “preborn child” – she had sex, she should be prepared to suffer the consequences. As for the question about the pregnancy being the result of non-consensual sex, the response was to say that it would beunfair to kill the “preborn child” just because of the bad behaviour of the father (and also to cite examples of raped woman who had found healing by opting to continue their pregnancy and either raising the baby or giving the baby up for adoption).
Kagehi @ 42;
It could be difficult to explain away why you ate/exsanguinated/eviscerated/*select preferred killing method for your mythical monster of choice* all the creationists and anti-choicers though. Still, at least it would probably be a net benefit to humanity if some obliging entity did exactly that…
ipse,
But gametes would be half of an organism then, right?
Now look at the life cycle of plants. Which of the following are organisms and which are half of an organism: sporophytes, spores, gametophytes, gametes, zygotes? Keep in mind that a gametophyte can, in some plants, look like this. Is it an organism? So why aren’t the gametes?
@9, ragdish.
Extend the scenario to a common other one: You’re in a room about to be consumed by fire. To one side, you have a canister of frozen embryos. To the other side, you have a crying baby. You can only save one. Which do you choose?
A zygote is not an embryo is not a fetus is not a baby is not a child is not an adult. The Roe v. Wade decision is actually quite brilliant in that regard. It isn’t based upon notions of “personhood” or “humanity” or such but rather that the ability to be an independent organism determines how we can treat it. Early in the pregnancy, there is very little independence of the growing organism. Late in the pregnancy, that situation has changed. Because of that shift, the state acquires a growing interest in the way this life is being treated. That’s why you can get an abortion for any reason at 8 weeks but not at 8 months. That line is viability.
In a similar way to age of consent, we know that the line determining viability is not crystal clear and cannot be accurately determined until you’ve passed it. Thus, we have to come up with an arbitrary choice for when that will be. We would hope that reliable information about the biology going on (as well as other, social factors such as accessibility to healthcare) will inform us, but it is still arbitrary.
Now, if an atheist values every conception, that’s fine. It really doesn’t matter why they value it. “I think it’s important” is sufficient. But they are going to have to explain why someone should be forced to give birth against her will.
Which one do you save?
If it’s the baby, then clearly we understand that there is a difference between a fetus and a baby and thus why abortion is not murder.
One Scripture-based argument permitting abortion is the Hebrew interpretation of passages of the Pentateuch, which state that life begins at first breath. http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_biblh.htm
However, focusing on the ‘life’ of the fetus is accepting the framing of the pro-birth side. I prefer to frame the argument to support a woman’s right to decide what to do with her body.
Oh kindly fuck off. I gave you much benefit of the doubt in treating your verbal masterbation as if it were “thinking”, and you accuse me of reading from a script? Your ugly marriage of half-assed biology and half-assed philosophy will waste no more of my time.
theobromine @ 55;
So essentially they just wheeled out the standard anti-choice double standards then? Pretending that the foetus should be granted full personhood because it might become capable of independent existence one day (and only might, many foetuses naturally fail to implant or develop), while ignoring the personhood of the already adult woman?
Stating that women bear ‘responsibility’ for sex without taking into account the responsibilities of the man, or acknowledging the possibility of contraception failing or a woman otherwise believing herself to be incapable of conceiving with this partner only to discover that the information she was operating on was inaccurate. They also fail to establish why their should be any freight of responsibility pertaining to sex that is so overwhelming that it establishes on behalf of the foetus a legally and ethically unprecedented right in the flesh of the woman carrying it. There are good reasons why the forced birthers are considered to be advocates of what can only be called procreative slavery.
As for their claim that it is unfair to the foetus to abort in the case of rape, it is again notable that they have no qualms about being unfair to the woman by forcing her to carry to term a child conceived in rape, and in the process compelling her to undergo a physically traumatic and potentially life threatening process against her will. They are clearly positioning the foetus’ continued existence as more important than the woman’s life and the recognition of her humanity, and so we are right back to procreative slavery again.
As for some women ‘finding healing’ through giving birth to a child conceived in rape, some women might, but so what? The specific experiences of certain individuals cannot be generalised, and it is no basis upon which to deny rape victims their bodily autonomy. Some rape survivors probably ‘find healing’ from crystal therapy; does that mean it should be compulsory?
This all seems like a lot of the same old standard form anti-choicer lies (with a particularly nauseating added whiff of rape apologia) that someone has incompetently edited to try to mask the clearly theistic basis behind the arguments. Either the anti-choice atheists you were debating weren’t bright enough to spot the theistic influences within the arguments they were fed, or they weren’t being entirely honest about their atheism. Either way, the misogyny on display is repellant.
I’m going to disagree with a whole bunch of people here.
An ovum and a sperm cell are both organisms. Would you say a caterpillar is not an organism because it isn’t a butterfly?
There are multiple ways to classify an organism. Morphologically, a sperm cell is not a human being. Genetically, by descent, and molecularly, it is a human sperm cell.
All gametes are alive. Gametes that come from human beings are human gametes. Therefore, all sperm cells from men are biologically human and living. If we’re going to play that game, masturbation snuffs out a living human. Actually, every procreative sex act therefore kills 199, 999, 999 humans (or thereabouts) to give a pair a small chance to grow up.
Furthermore, ipse @ 41, human life begins at spermatogenesis/oogenesis ought to be completely uncontroversial.
If you want to argue, the term that is up for debate is not “living”, “gamete”, “zygote”, or “organism”. It’s “human”. Anti-choicers always impose a severely reductionist and ridiculous interpretation on that, such that the life of a single cell is seen as equivalent to that of a mature, conscious, complex, multi-cellular adult.
theobromine
Seconding Gregory Greenwood. The entirety of your opponents arguments just don’t make any sense in world without souls. Now, being an atheist doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t believe in souls, but my best bet is that this person, even though not a theist any-more, is still trapped in a very theist mindset, and views the world through lenses coloured by magical thinking.
why is it that so hard to realize that there are very few hard edges in reality. The closer one looks the edges seem to be less distinct.
A human zygote does not have any of the organs associated with a human being in fact at earliest stages is hard to distinguish from some other none human zygotes by appearance alone.
I would have to say that a zygote is not yet a “complete organism” nor is it a part of the mother and is as much as process as it is a thing in itself. there is just no hard either or, black and white distinction that can be made.
An infant is an individual but does not have the same rights and privileges of an adult nor the same abilities.
Just as we define differences in right and privileges post birth so we also do at the other end of life that have little to do with what the genetics are it is not a hard line. We have had many court cases where this was in contention including competence and whether there was life present at all or was the “person” even there.
uncle frogy
PZ, #62:
After writing my #57 and formulating those questions it did make me think a bit too, and I was prepared to answer “they are” to my last question (“So why aren’t the gametes [organisms]?”). Meaning I’d have to take back the part where I said I wouldn’t call a zygote an organism, in that case…
But I maintain that either all the stages are, haploid or diploid, or only the multi-cellular ones are, haploid or diploid. Haploid cells/organisms are just as genetically unique as diploid ones, so that in itself isn’t sufficient for granting zygotes any special status.
Nightjar,
I suppose what we need is an agreed upon definition of “organism.” Unfortunately, I don’t have any biology textbooks lying around. Can anyone help with a definition?
I think calling these questions semantic in an attempt to minimize them is a mistake. We think about the world using (both technical and everyday) language. Therefore, to sharpen our concepts and apply them rigorously is to improve our thinking about the world.
I think “twining” is a different question. Whether the zygote ends up becoming two (or three, etc.) organisms is irrelevant to the question of whether it is an organism.
I think much of the pro-life argument is based on teleology. The “purpose” of a human gamete is to join up with another human gamete to make a human zygote. The “purpose” of a human zygote is to develop into a human being. This “purpose” is what makes it a “preborn child”, instead of just a bunch of cells.
Gregory Greenwood,
Thank you for your comments. Let me put all my cards on the table, then. First, my training is in philosophy, and the debate among bioethicists on abortion is something I am fairly well-read in. On the other hand, when it comes to biology, I am more or less uneducated (having long ago forgotten my high-school biology, which was my last formal contact with the subject). Second, I believe that abortion is morally impermissible, but my reasons for believing so have nothing to do with religion, and I am willing to be proven wrong. Third, I respect my interlocutors and think that reasonable people can disagree on the topic of abortion.
However, my intent in joining this discussion here at PZ’s blog is not to make the case for my beliefs concerning abortion (although, if invited to do so, I would not mind). It is, rather, to make the very narrow point that, regardless of what else someone may think of Rubio, it is possible to make (something like) the point he was making without being an idiot. I hope that is not unwelcome here.
PZ Myers,
I would like to understand your reasoning. What is your definition such that an ovum and a sperm cell are “organisms”?
The point I’m after (and, as I said at the beginning, if “organism” is the wrong word, then I am happy to switch it out for another) is this: I want a biological principle of individuation that will make it possible to say whether, in any given case, there is one animal or there are two (or more) animals. So, when considering a female human being whose body contains a zygote, I want to be able to apply this principle to say whether there is one animal present or there are two animals present.
In short, how does biology individuate animals? I had thought that an answer to this question would be to give a definition of organism. Perhaps I’m wrong. But even so, there must be some way that biologists answer that question.
PZ Myers,
One more point: I think the question is not “When does human life begin.” As you point out, that question can be understood in such a way that “200,000 years ago” is a correct answer. But that is clearly not what Rubio had in mind. What he was asking could be better expressed “When does a new human life begin” or better, “When does a new animal belonging to the species homo sapiens begin.”
ipse:
I’m sorry, were you perhaps planning on making something actually approaching an argument at any time?
Ipse: Your problem is that you keep demanding that there be a hard and fast line dividing what is actually a continuum. Until you get this ridiculous black & white thinking cleared up, there’s no point in having a conversation.
If you want one, here’s a nice sharp line for you: Rubio actually is an idiot for making that argument. There is no magic moment when you can say a developing organism unambiguously becomes a human person.
Ipse @ 70:
Birth.
Ipse,
Consider certain bees. An unfertilized egg becomes a fertile male. A fertilized egg becomes female. Whether that female is fertile queen or a sterile worker depends on whether it is fed royal jelly
So a new individual life “obviously” begins when the egg is formed.
PZ Myers,
Forget, for a moment, about any particular application of the requested principle of individuation. Are you telling me that biologists have no principled way to answer the question (a question that can be asked of any living thing whatsoever) “Are there two animals here or only one?” If that is what you are telling me, then I agree, there is no point in having this conversation.
ipse:
You haven’t said what your reasons for believing that. I’m sure you’re wrong about that, and it would help to see where exactly the wrongness appears.
I don’t see how your discussion about organisms is relevant. A zygote is not a person, who thinks, feels, remembers, creates, plans, etc. They can’t be harmed or helped like a person can be, so how could we have the same moral responsibilities toward them as we have toward each other? If you’re going to use any analogy whatsoever, to take you from how we should treat each other to how we should treat it, how could you even take the first step?
If you change it enough, you can make any kind of bullshit look more respectable. You could even dress up two mutually-inconsistent claims, yet they can’t both be right, so what does that really buy you? Of course you’re welcome to say whatever you want, but I hope you’d be honest about how you’re distancing yourself from Rubio’s arguments. You ought to be willing to say there’s something wrong about them, not only come here to give vague and half-assed defenses of them, if you actually do think they’re wrong and have something else to offer.
Biology (and nature generally) doesn’t tend to respect the sharp distinctions, which we might have thought it “must” have prior to learning anything about it. You could make some reasonably useful distinctions (like “this is one species, and this is another”) which work for most practical purposes, but drawing conclusions about reality from that is generally a bad idea. You’re working with theoretical terms there and saying (at best) something about your theory, not much about how the world is.
Not that any of that is relevant here, because like I said, we shouldn’t care whether something is an organism. If we built a sentient robot, we should consider it a person (whether or not we built it, just so that’s clear). That should be the kind of factor that matters when we claim certain things we do to it (or for it, with it, etc.) are permissible or impermissible. The fact that it’s not an organism, not alive, not a biological entity, and so forth, doesn’t have any effect on that — it isn’t the sort of fact we should be considering in order to make determinations like that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but pretty much every definition in biology is a ‘generally useful but blurs at the edges’ kind of thing: from What’s a Cell, to Is Something Alive, biological definitions tend to cover middle cases very well and edge cases very poorly.
Asking probing questions in biology is a lot more likely to get you answers that begin with “What we generally refer to as…” rather than “Here’s the exact definition of…” Yes?
Ipse, just out of curiosity, did you assume the embryo photo accompanying the post was that of a human?
No, PZ is not telling you that there is NO way to answer that question, he is telling you that the question cannot be answered in terms of absolutes.
Elaborating on what PZ and Amphiox say, here are some edge-cases that might be helpful to delimit what/when is human life. I think most people here would agree that sperm and ova are not human life, and most people would agree that a 6-month old homo sapiens is a human life. And most people would say that identical twins are 2 people and a tetragametic chimera is one person.
But for ipse, I would echo others who have said that it’s a moot point when life begins, because the pregnant person has an absolute right bodily autonomy which means that they do not have any obligation to continue to host a zygote/blastocyst/embryo/fetus if they choose not to.
I live in Canada, where there is *no* abortion law. Pro-lifers think that is horrible because it means that a pregnancy could be terminated at any time up to birth. Even some people who consider themselves pro-choice might think it reasonable to put a limit on very late term abortions. But my view is that we should trust the person who owns the uterus with the power to make this sort of moral choice. In the case of pregnancy complication, they need to be able to choose whether to risk their life to sustain the pregnancy or to terminate it (and chances are, if the fetus is healthy, they would choose to end the pregnancy by live birth if at all possible. But the decision should be entirely under the control of the pregnant person – informed as much as possible by medical advice and counsel, but not restricted by law or policy.
@ipse
Can you pinpoint the moment at which a sperm+egg became human? Is it when their lipid membranes touch? When the cell membranes fuse? When the pronuclear membranes dissolve? When the nuclear membrane re-forms?
Look through sections 4.5 and 4.6 here: http://www.embryology.ch/anglais/dbefruchtung/planmodbefru.html and see when it looks human. I’m curious if you can specify the exact moment down to the femtosecond :)
Consciousness razor: “You haven’t said what your reasons for believing that. I’m sure you’re wrong about that, and it would help to see where exactly the wrongness appears.”
I have a few arguments against the ethical permissibility of abortion. However, the only one that does not require any philosophical stage setting is the following.
The argument depends on three claims that can be easily defended.
Claim 1: intentionally killing an adult cow is ethically permissible.
Claim 2: intentionally killing a one-week-old human infant (hereafter, OWOHI) is ethically impermissible.
Claim 3: the psychological life of an adult cow is “richer” than that of an OWOHI (e.g. the cow feels emotions and has memories, but the OWOHI does not).
The argument has the form: If P, then Q; not Q; therefore, not P. This form, called modus tollens, is universally valid. Therefore, if its premises are true, then its conclusion must also be true.
Here’s the argument:
(Premise 1) If it’s ethically permissible to intentionally kill a human zygote, then its ethically permissible to intentionally kill an OWOHI.
(Premise 2) It is not ethically permissible to intentionally kill an OWOHI.
(Conclusion) It is not ethically permissible to intentionally kill a human zygote.
Now, Premise 2, which is Claim 2, should be uncontroversial. It seems to me that anyone who denies it is a monster. Regardless, it is a claim that is accepted by the vast majority of people. So, the soundness of the argument rests on the truth of Premise 1. That is, if Premise 1 is true, then the Conclusion is true.
In order to establish the truth of Premise 2, all we need to do is show that there is no ethically relevant difference between an OWOHI and a human zygote. (Notice that not there are many differences that are not ethically relevant. For example, an OWOHI has toes but a human zygote does not. But no one thinks that having toes is ethically relevant).
Here’s where the cow comes in. Given the truth of Claim 1 (viz., intentionally killing an adult cow is ethically permissible), no characteristic possessed by an adult cow is ethically relevant. For if it were, then it would be ethically impermissible to intentionally kill an adult cow. But hardly anyone believes that. It follows that having a brain, a heart, or any other organ is ethically irrelevant. It also follows that having the ability to feel pain, to feel emotions, or to have memories is ethically irrelevant. Thus, there are no ethically relevant differences between a an OWOHI and a human zygote. This establishes the truth of Premise 1 and hence of the Conclusion.
Therefore, anyone who accepts Claims 1, 2 and 3, is committed to the conclusion that abortion is ethically impermissible.
Sorry, in the third to last paragraph, the first sentence should read “In order to establish the truth of Premise 1.”
Ipse, the only way abortion is impermissible is if you feel it is morally okay to FORCE me to risk disability and death for a fetus that I do. not. want. The only way for it to be impermissible is if I, as a woman in possession of a functioning uterus, have fewer rights than other human beings. The only way for it to be impermissible is if I am not worth as much as other human beings.
I regularly assist in performing abort spays on dogs and cats, even those that are pretty much at term. Is this also morally impermissible? Are you are okay with me assisting in the aborting of fetal cats (TNR program)? Fetal dogs, cats, and humans are pretty damn similar and all of them are unaware. There is little to no suffering caused to the fetus, especially if aborted early.
Amphiox: “No, PZ is not telling you that there is NO way to answer that question, he is telling you that the question cannot be answered in terms of absolutes.”
I am perfectly willing to admit that there may be gray areas. However, in order to know whether a given case is “gray” or not, we first need a general principle. We can whether and to what extent the principle is applicable. What I have been requesting, but no one seems to be willing or able to provide, is some biological principle of individuation.
For example, PZ Myers confidently proclaimed that an ovum was an organism. So, there must be a reason that he thinks it is an organism. What is that reason? What is his definition of organism?
Your claim 3 is faulty; human infants can feel emotions.
Your premise one is faulty… in fact, it’s stupid, because a zygote is not independent and must leech nutrients from its host and is physically attached to the host, and is incapable of sensation. A one week old human infant does not have a physical attachment to a host, does not require leeching nutrients from the host’s system, and is capable of sensation and is aware.
If the OWOHI = zygote,
then neither of them require the woman to be present for them to survive,
therefore …
Oh wait. Might be an error in that first statement.
Overlooking a major difference in the two organisms seems disingenuous. I really hate that whole Vulcan logic stuff. Only, I suspect the Vulcans would not overlook the problem with the first statement.
ealloc: “Can you pinpoint the moment at which a sperm+egg became human? Is it when their lipid membranes touch? When the cell membranes fuse? When the pronuclear membranes dissolve? When the nuclear membrane re-forms?”
Certainly, I cannot. Let me also stipulate that no one can. I don’t think it matters for the kind of question I’m asking. Presumably, all of these processes take a very short amount of time. After they have been completed, is there or is there not a new animal? That’s the question.
No, the question is what the fuck is it NOW, not later. Anybody but a proselytizer knows that. And what it is, isn’t fully human by any stretch of the imagination. Except by a proselytizer with false presuppositions.
Rowan vet-tech,
Even if I grant that an OWOHI feels emotions (a dubious claim that will require us to have a long talk about emotions), it is still obviously true that an adult cow’s emotional life is more developed than that of an OWOHI.
You complaint against Premise 1 indicates that you need to read the argument again.
@ipse
You are trying to argue that a sperm and egg lying together 10 nm apart are not human, but that once the sperm’s DNA has floated a few hundred nanometers to the left, all of a sudden you have a human being.
Do you think that a micrometer shift in position of a couple microscopic pieces of organic matter really make a big enough difference, that you’re going to condemn destruction of one setup but not the other? Seems a bit silly to me!
Wrong question!!! Cthulhu, this is stupid.
1. The right question is when a zygote becomes a legal person. In the bible it is one month after birth.
2. This is common in pre-modern societies. In transitional societies even today it is up to 3 months after birth. They won’t even name a baby until then.
3. This is because without modern medicine, half or so babies died. There was no point in getting too attached until they had survived birth and the first month or so.
4. In our western societies it is when you are born. This is tacitly acknowledged even by Oogedy Boogedy Darksider xians. Generally, there are no graveyards full of miscarriages. Despite the fact, that 40% of zygotes miscarry. They are treated as medical waste.
ealloc,
I don’t think that is a fair characterization of my view. It is my understanding that the consequences of a sperm fertilizing an egg are quite a bit more involved than the one’s being closer to or in contact with the other. It seems to me, and what I am trying to confirm whether biologists and embryologists would agree, is that nearly immediately following the process of fertilization, etc., there is something that is properly characterized as a new animal.
Your premise is a presuppositional fuckwittery, and will treated as such. You are preaching, not discussing, as you can’t be wrong. Until you can be wrong, and be able to admit it, you have nothing cogent to say.
Raven,
Legality and morality are not the same. See slavery.
You don’t think a one week old infant feels fear or distress or pleasure? Are you also one of those people that don’t think fish feel pain (not in the way we do, probably, but pain none-the-less)? Lizards feel pleasure; they are capable of soliciting physical contact.
Nope, sorry. I read that part just fine. The second does not naturally follow the first. It’s like saying “If something exists, then God exists.” There are clear differences between the two things, important differences, that make it so that the latter does not logically follow the former. The argument is stupid.
Also, Ipse, please respond to my post at 84.
Ealloc is a Darksider xian. A serial killer. Many or most of them are.
They are slaughtering a straw person. Too bad there isn’t a hell for these killers. Then Ealloc could be repetitively set on fire by the ghosts of murdered dead strawpersons.
The question isn’t one of a few nanometers. The question is when a zygote becomes a person. Our society long ago chose when you are born as that date in our society.
You can’t claim a fetus on your tax return as a child and get the deduction. Or list the date of birth on your driver’s license as your date of conception. Fetuses and miscarriages aren’t given funerals. They are treated as medical waste.
Rowan vet-tech,
Concerning your 84, I have a question: do you believe that some rights supersede others? For example, does one person’s right to life, supersede another’s right to property?
Religion and morality aren’t the same either. Just look in the mirror.
Irrelevant. Show documented evidence that a fetus has a right to life, or shut the fuck up about it.
Why couldn’t it be that the relatively small number of people who do believe that are correct? Why appeal to popularity? How could such grand claims as you’re making rest on such a shaky and ill-motivated foundation?
Of course… what if you intentionally killed the cow, but it was in self defense, for example? Then the picture is more complicated, yet there’s no need for it to be a black-and-white yes/no question, taken as something completely independent of anything else in reality. But if you’re not giving any context like that, then the simple, gratuitous, unmotivated, unjustified killing of a cow is wrong. It’s wrong because it can feel things, be deprived or violated or mistreated in ways that come to grips with what ethics is actually about, which only happen to it as an entity with certain attributes, abilities, etc. It has psychological states, which a zygote or fetus (e.g.) doesn’t have, and killing a cow also has larger social and environmental consequences, not just for that individual but also for other beings with psychological states who should also be taken into account for that same reason.
You might, say, have reason to care about the pregnant woman, not just direct your tunnel vision at this particular clump of cells inside her body. Why does she matter at all? Can you say anything about that, which at least reminds me a little bit of reality and doesn’t come in the form of a syllogism?
If you find yourself with an absurd conclusion like that, that’s a good reason to examine your premises again (or perhaps for the first time), not just assert them and demand they be followed because you say so or because they’re popular.
@ipse,” I am trying to confirm whether biologists and embryologists would agree, is that nearly immediately following the process of fertilization, etc., there is something that is properly characterized as a new animal.”
That’s what I was trying to to work through with you. In order to answer that question we first need to decide when fertilization is “complete”. Then we can look at the object at that moment, and decide if it counds as a “new animal”. You can look at the scientific facts and judge for yourself.
Presumably, you believe that by the time the zygote has undergone the first cell division, it counts as human. Presumably, you also believe that a sperm+egg that have not touched are not human.
But, what do you think of a fused sperm+egg, in which the new nuclear membrane has formed, but which has not yet divided? Does it count as fertilized? Is destroying it immoral? What if the nuclear membrane has not formed?
They can be but there is no way to tell. There is no such thing as absolute morality!!!
I take it ipse is a forced birther and a female slaver. It’s popular among theists, and some but not all xians.
Most in our society have decided that if you don’t own and control your own body what are you? A slave.
Unfortunately for the slavers and forced birthers, we and I have the right and opportunity to say, No, we aren’t slaves.
Fuck off, ipse the wannabe slaver. Without being able to use lethal force, you aren’t a real slaver, merely a stupid internet troll and a wannabe.
Ipse, that is a lovely dodge you have made there. This tells me that yes, you DO think it’s okay to force to me to face, in the united states, a 28 in 100,000 chance of dying due to complications of pregnancy. And that it’s okay to force women in other countries to have up to a 1 in 10 chance of dying. This also tells me that, yes, you DO think that I do not get to have the same rights as other human beings.
raven @98:
WTF? Can you even read?
consciousness razor,
I do not need to appeal to majority opinion for the claim about cows. But it’s quicker. Part of the appeal of the argument is that it shows that, given what most people believe, they are logically committed to the conclusion that abortion is ethically impermissible. For those who would deny the claim about cows, the discussion is longer (and there are limits to what can be accomplished in combox.
Notice that, if cows had a right to life, then most contexts in which one could situate the killing of a cow (e.g. to make hamburgers) would be ethically impermissible. Self defense? Sure. Leather products? No. Thus, the fact that we are comfortable wearing leather and eating burgers shows that we do not think that cows have a right to life. Even people who are ethically opposed to the intentional killing of cows do not react to someone wearing a leather jacket the way they would react to someone (like that character from Silence of the Lambs) wearing a suit made of human skin. That is, the don’t see the killing of cows as murder. Even the gratuitous etc. killing of a cow is not seen as wrong because of the effect, the killing of the cow, but because of what it indicates about someone’s psychology, e.g. that they are cruel. We might have similar reactions to a boy that likes to torture and kill flies. But not because the flied are dead. Rather, because that sort of behavior is disturbing.
Your other comments about the moral value of the psychological states of cows, etc. take us into deeper waters. In virtue of what, we may ask, does something have a right to continued existence (as opposed to the right not to feel pain). The standard answer is personhood. But a discussion of personhood is much too big for a combox. I recommend the video I linked above as a good introduction.
ipse @ 75:
Are we still holding with this principle, or did it get dropped like a hot rock when we refused to swallow the frog that you didn’t have any sort of agenda?
ealloc: “But, what do you think of a fused sperm+egg, in which the new nuclear membrane has formed, but which has not yet divided? Does it count as fertilized? Is destroying it immoral? What if the nuclear membrane has not formed?”
I have no idea. Does it matter? I gather there are many stages of the process that begins with a physically separated sperm and egg, and a zygote. Concerning the status of the thing of things undergoing that process, I don’t know what to say. Even so, can’t I maintain that, once there is a zygote, there is a new animal?
Let me put it this way: If I answer you that all I’m interested in is that moment, whenever it is, when we have a zygote. I have been referring to this moment (probably colloquially) as “conception.” But if that’s wrong, then I’ll simply give up the word “conception.” It’s still the case that, very early on, there is a zygote. And at then, it seems to me, there is a new animal.
Anri,
My questions/claims about when a new human life begins had a limited motivation, namely, making the case that something like Rubio’s claim was, if not correct, then reasonable.
I was then asked about my own view. And I answered. I would be happy to go back to the first topic and leave the second. Indeed, if someone would simply give me either a widely accepted definition of “organism” or a general biological principle of individuation, I would happily move along.
consciousness razor,
Concerning absurd conclusions, I might add that almost every prominent bioethicist who defends abortion on the grounds that the fetus is not a person also defends infanticide for the very same reason. Again, watch that video I linked to, or read Peter Singer’s work, or read this paper: http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/03/01/medethics-2011-100411.full
ipse @ 110:
Are you unable to find one on your own? That strikes me as unlikely. If you’ve found one you like, use it.
If you haven’t found one you like, substitute your own.
If you can neither find one that satisfies you, nor come up with one that satisfies you… the problem might not be with the question.
To put it another way, if you want to make an argument based on your preferred definition of ‘organism’, please feel free to do so. I’m willing to accept that there is not hard-and-fast, set-in-stone definition that lends itself to binary thinking – most things in the real world are like that.
If you refuse to accept that answer, that’s not really my problem… or anyone else’s save your own.
Irrelevant, as it isn’t outside of the womb. Fuckwitted philosophy to be dismissed for what it is: fallacious presuppositional unthinking.
Anri,
I have found a few. But not being a biologist, my preference seems to be of little value.
Perhaps there is nothing like a consensus. However, it that’s the case, then how can someone (PZ Myers, for example) be so confident that a definition of organism which supports Rubio’s claim is false and hence that he is an idiot?
ipse #114,
The claim was that Science has declared human life begins at conception (made by non scientist). A reason being that it cant turn into a donkey.
PZ, a scientist, claims that science hasn’t declared that and proceeds to give biological reasons.
Is this really that hard? Am I missing something?
But you’re not starting with what most people believe in the abstract, nor is that what they should believe. You’ve selected one particular prejudice that many have, in order to support another. Also, when you actually question them about this, they don’t tend to make absolute statements that under all circumstances killing a cow intentionally is never wrong and requires no justification whatsoever. They try to say why they’re doing that (by eating meat, let’s say), acknowledging that there really is a legitimate moral concern to have about the cow but claiming that other issues have priority over that. We could discuss whether those claims are invalid or mistaken, but that is how they think of what they’re doing when they attempt to justify their behavior. Realistically, people have many concerns which are often in conflict with one another, and they only should agree things are wrong when somebody can point to a reason why it is wrong and how those valid conflicting concerns can all be addressed appropriately: you say that it causes harm unnecessarily or you give similar reasons like that. You haven’t given a reason why abortion is wrong, just a formal argument containing easily-deniable premises that don’t address the concerns people actually have, so nobody should agree with you.
The general concepts people are working with (what ethics is about, what the criteria are, what it is that makes something permissible or impermissible) are not logically consistent with a view that non-human animals are the moral equivalent of a rock, because in fact they’re not equivalent in a theory that works and is capable of telling you why we should act or think in particular ways in particular circumstances (that is, an actual, clear, well-formed, truthful, plausible, usable, theory of ethics, not nonsensical bullshit like yours).
But for the sake of argument, assuming that’s the way anyone actually thought and assuming anyone should care what they think, you’ve already got a boatload of contradictions embedded in there at a very basic and general level, and you’re taking that and running with the claim they’re somehow logically committed to that. No idea how that could possibly be true. There is no particular thing that logically follows from a contradiction, as if one particular line of reasoning that’s based on such a thing works while an opposing one doesn’t.
Who’s “we” and what if “we” are wrong about that? How could you know that you’re right about it, and how could you know that you’re wrong?
@ipse,
The point of going into the details of fertilization was to show that there is no “moment of conception”, despite Rubio’s claim. There is a continuous progression from sperm+egg to zygote. If you can see the moment, you’re free to point it out. I gave you a link.
By the way, presubably you would agree that the names scientists happen to give things is irrelevant to the morality of the situation. Similarly, whether or not we call some stage of development a “new animal” is irrelevant. So, aside from Rubio, I’m still curious what you think the phyical/observable difference between sperm+egg and zygote might be, such that one is human whose killing would be murder, and one is not? Is it the 2um shift in position of the DNA :)? Aren’t you curious what the difference could be?
Ipse is lying here. It never takes them long. This is BTW, straight off xian wingnut anti-abortion sites.
The fact is virtually everyone has condemned Peter Singer’and his views. Including me.
He’s now an outcast in most circles. Including anyone I know in medicine and science.
I’m done here. All the forced birthers/female slavers have is lies and it isn’t worth any more of my valuable lifespan. And violence up to and including murder. To paraphrase Voltaire. Those who can’t make you believe absurdities can, have and will commit atrocities.
Kooks like ipse have a long and familiar history of violence up to and incuding murder.
Peter Singer is not a scientist at least, thank Cthulhu but a philosopher and one of many that give the field a bad name. His claim to fame is defending infanticide recently.
He is IMO a vile person. It’s a view widely held in science, medicine, and philosophy. He’s made himself an outcast and I don’t have a problem with that.
Ipse the liar would have you believe a lot of people agree with him. That’s not remotely true.
ipse @ 114:
I suppose at that juncture, you can either accept that biology gets along just fine without a rigorous definition of an organism, or you can arrogantly assume it owes you one and demand it of people.
Check which you’ve been doing here. Really, go back and read your posts (out loud might help) if there’s any question in your mind as to which path you picked.
Like this (from the OP):
A perfectly rigorous definition of organism is not required for this statement. Just a general, works-in-most-cases-in-the-real-world understanding of some general characteristics organisms have is all that is needed. That’s why you were cautioned against black-and-white thinking up above, because it would lead you into error.
Hunh. It’s almost as if a biologist knows more about biology than you do. Go figure.
ipse
Are you referring to his claim that science says life begins at conception, or this part?
I would characterize the quoted portion as irrelevant religious pleading that clearly considers human life to be somehow magically sacred and each human pregnancy a miracle ordained by god. The science of biology has shown that conception and gestation are reproductive processes common to all mammals, and that humans are just naked apes. Life does not begin at conception, both the egg and sperm are living cells. The religious believe that every fertilized human egg is somehow a precious miracle, thus the “life begins at conception” clap trap. I characterize Rubio’s grasp of what science says about sexual reproduction as utter malarkey. There is nothing special about a human zygote, and Mr Rubio and all the other pro-life liars really need to shut up and mind their own business. Women are entitled to their full rights to privacy, full stop. If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one. Ethical dilemma solved!
anri @120
(emphasis mine, of course)
I don’t think a definition of organism is the issue. I think (but don’t know) that PZ would have no qualm referring to a zygote as a human organism. I think his is point organism-hood and personhood are different concepts. The zygote is not conscious, doesn’t behave or react, and has no set of functioning tissue. It hasn’t developed. It is an organism; not a person.
(Unless it’s not an organism; I’m not the biologist here. But I think it is.)
ipse plays the “where in the development do you draw the line” game. This is the pile-heap dilemma. Or the poor man-rich man via pennies dilemma (at what monetary value can you say a poor man is no longer poor? $738.59? $738.60… ? Do you have an answer, ipse? If I keep adding a single penny at a time, precisely which penny will be the one to make the man stop being poor. Does not knowing mean that the man was never poor to begin with?). Not having a single point of demarcation value is *not* the same thing as saying therefore no differences exist. It is not our responsibility to find the demarcation point and our inability to do so does not magically make differences in stages disappear.
Ah, propositional logic. One of the first things the teacher tells you when you start learning propositional logic is not read too much into problems. That can easily make you fail at doing actual logic.
That’s because life isn’t as nice and clear and simple as formal logic. But don’t let me interfere with the philosophical analysis of my human rights.
One more for the road.
1. Ipse is just lying here. Peter Singer is a crackpot who has been universally condemned by everyone. In fact, I haven’t found anyone who agrees that we should legalize infanticide.
2. This is also cosmically stupid. It’s the slippery slope argument. If we legalize abortion, we will eventually legalize infanticide, kill the disabled, and kill old people.
3. The fact is, all of life is standing on myriads of slippery slopes. Looking at hundreds of shades of grey. We draw lines on slippery slopes all the time and just deal with it. It’s reality after all.
To continue a bit. Slippery Slope arguments don’t work. They lead to absurdities and rapidly.
1. We execute serial killers. The Slippery Slope says we may someday execute jaywalkers and speeders. We simply draw lines on where captial crimes are versus the more mundane type.
2. If xians actually followed their magic book, they would draw the lines very differently. Blasphemers, sabbath breakers, disobedient children, and adulterers would all be stoned to death.
And few would be left alive in the USA. We simply draw different lines than they did.
3. Birth control is legal. Abortion is legal. We have no plans to legalize infanticide.
4. Slippery Slopes are everywhere and you can’t avoid them. It’s part of everyone’s life. Those who look for nonexistent absolutes end up as…monsters, often enough.
Beatrice
Yup, the comparisons to cows are especially bizarre. WTF do cows have to do with it?
Nope. Immediately after fertilization you have a cell that is dividing itself into a structure that will give rise to a placenta, amniotic membrane, umbilical cord and fetus if everything goes right. It is highly likely that things will not go right, as about half of all fertilized eggs die before implantation Even so, it takes several months before a human fetus has developed enough to bear a passing resemblance to a new person. It does no good to pretend that humans do not go through a phase in gestation where they look a lot like salamanders complete with long tails.
Inmediately after fertilization you have a single cell. A single cell is not an animal, let alone a new one.
Continuums, abstracts, how do they work?
Horseshit…That doesn’t follow at all and you haven’t even attempted a justification for that premise. You are a shit philosopher…
ipse, #66:
That’s like asking for a textbook, agreed upon definition of “life” or “species”. There isn’t just one. Like many people have pointed out, biology is blurry and complicated, it doesn’t care much for the fact that:
But of course there are definitions of “organism” out there. I would think it is your job to come up with one that includes zygotes and excludes gametes if that’s the line of argument you want to pursue. And of course then you’d still have to explain why “it is an organism” + “it has an unique combination of human DNA” is sufficient for it to have a right to life that overrides my right to decide what I allow to stay inside of my body. That is important, you know, it’s not like human zygotes are out there floating in the aether.
***
On to cows (seriously?):
No.
Newborns and cows are sentient, independent, individual animals. They don’t need to be inside anyone’s body to keep on existing.
Zygotes aren’t any of that. They aren’t sentient and they aren’t viable outside of someone’s body. What’s not ethically permissible here is to force me to carry a pregnancy to term against my will because of a fucking zygote.
Hey, it works both ways, this “appealing to people’s gut reactions” argument!
What? If the gratuitous killing of animals is not wrong, if we have no ethical obligations towards them at all, why is it “disturbing” and “cruel” to kill one for fun? If I were to go into the lab now, grabbed an inoculation loop and burnt a bunch of E. coli on the Bunsen burner just for the fun of it, would that be “disturbing” and “cruel” too?
Also:
I see where you’re going with this, but just to be clear:
1. A fetus isn’t a person.
2. My body is not just my “property”, like an house or a computer. It’s me. I am my body. Persons and non-persons alike have no business using it for their purposes against my will, not because it belongs to me, but because it is me.
I saw a very good meme recently.
It consisted of a picture of an embryo at that ambiguous stage when they all look pretty much the same. Above this picture were the words “THIS IS NOT A HUMAN BEING”. Below, “If that offends you, tough shit. Because this is an elephant embryo, and you are a kneejerk moron”.
I found it most amusing.
woozy @ 122:
Exactly.
You have stated what I have been trying (and, apparently, failing) to get ipse to see.
Nightjar @ 129;
Quoted for truth.
This is the crux of the matter – bodily autonomy is the important issue. Denial of the bodily autonomy of women in the name of protecting a partially differentiated cellular mass is nothing less than advocacy for gendered procreative slavery. No amount of empty philosiphising or semantic manoeuvering changes that.
Thumper,
I think the embryo in the thumbnail of this post is of an elephant too. If you click the photo you’ll see the following URL: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/files/2015/08/elephant-embryo.jpg
I’m sure ipse thinks it is ethically permissible to kill it, though, ’cause it doesn’t have the *magical human DNA!* in its cells. Everyone knows that stuff without *magical human DNA!* doesn’t have any rights at all. Also, pregnant women. Those don’t have rights either, despite the human DNA.
@ Ipse
It seems that my post @ 54 asking you to consider the impact of your words on women who have either had their bodily autonomy denied to them by anti-choicer policies, or are at risk of such, was wasted keystrokes. It seems pretty clear to me from your subsequent posts that you have a fixed notion in your mind that pregnant women have fewer rights and are generally inferior to the foetuses they carry. That attitude burns through my stocks of good will and benefit of the doubt very quickly indeed.
You are trying to establish a right in the flesh of a developed human being with dreams and aspirations, not even on behalf of another developed human being with dreams and aspirations (which is also utterly ethically indefensible), but rather on behalf of a zygote, and apparently a zygote at a stage of development when you can’t even tell if it is that of a human or an elephant.
You are advocating for the denial of the bodily autonomy of women here; for the gendered procreative enslavement of half the population. Consider what that says about you as a person and your faculty for empathy. Has it occurred to you that there are probably women who are reading this very thread right now who have suffered as a result of anti-choicer arguments? Women – actual functional, conscious women with unambiguous standing as human beings with full rights; not zygotes – are dying preventably because of this (not to mention having their lives ruined in countless other ways), and all you can do is try to rationalise away their humanity in order to protect what is essentially a parasite they are being forced to carry against their will? Are you sure you can live with that?
I had a weird conversation once where the anti-choicer argued with me that it was OK to prefer the life of the unborn over the life of the born because “the born person has a life, and it’s not fair to selfishly deny the ‘baby’ its chance to live too” and “because the born person is a sinner and the ‘baby’ is innocent” (so you do know the baby will be born in sin, right? “Less sin than the woman.” Yeah, whatever.). At the same time this person was OK with killing any animal for any reason because “they don’t have feelings and thoughts like we do, and if you think they do, that’s the Devil lying to you”. Someone listening (presumably a nonreligious person) also chimed in that “even if you don’t believe in the Devil, animals don’t have real feelings, we just think they do because of anthropomorphism”. FFS. I asked them how they were sure that other people had thoughts and feelings. Thing 1: “Because the Bible says we should love one another”. Thing 2: “Well, really, we don’t know for sure, but we assume they do because they’re biologically human”. I then asked them, if they believed that other people had thoughts and feelings, why they were prepared to disregard those of the pregnant woman. And back to square one.
@ipse
“Conception” is not really real in the way you think it. Is it a potential organism when the sperm penetrates the egg? Or is it when the DNA joins / fertilises? Or when it splits for the first time? Or when it hatches? Or when it implants on the uterus wall? Or when it taps maternal blood supply? Is it when the proto heart starts beating? What if it’s ectopic? “Conception” isn’t the single mystical event you think it is.
ibis3@21:
That’s because you don’t accept “assuming the consequent” as a valid form of argumentation, silly!
Strewth@28, on chimeras:
Most importantly, how many souls are associated to the single body? And, if two, for those among the religious who believe in bodily resurrection followed by judgment, what happens to the single body in case one of the souls is damned but the other is saved?
Maybe we can get a grant from the Templeton Foundation to find out!!!
And one that can be left to theobromine!
@ipse – I have the impression that you’re trying to find a metaphysical alternative for the “life starts at conception” argument now biology doesn’t support it. It won’t work. Even philosophy must be grounded in reality, and in reality there is no demarcation. We make the demarcation ourselves. The thing is: the conservatives claim their demarcation to be reality, where it really is not.
In the end, ethics are always personal opinion. A democratic society should accommodate people to live by their own standards as much as possible. This is exactly what conservatives do not want us to do. Because a zygote is sacred to them, they insist zygotes are sacred to all of us. Well that’s not how it works. Despite its flaws, the US still is, or is supposed to be, a democratic society. The anti-choichers should be recognized for what they are: the opponents of democracy.
re: OWOHI
Look what I found.
http://shamelesspopery.com/abortion-souls-and-the-atheist-conundrum/comment-page-1/
@ ipse #82
Depends who you’re talking to. But generally accepted as such under certain circumstances yes. Because morality is circumstancial, which is a thing you seem to have ignored. I think you’d struggle to find anyone who would say that killing a random cow for fun before burning the body was ethically fine.
Fairly uncontroversial; yes.
Arguable. Firstly, the richness of a life under this definition must surely depend not only on the accumulation of memories and experiences, but also on the ability of the organism in question to collect and categorise such experiences in order to build awareness of itself as an individual. The mere collection of memories is not enough on it’s own. Secondly, define emotion, then explain what evidence you have that a cow does experience them and a OWOHI does not.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. This argument is actually a formal logical fallacy known as “Denying the Antecedent”. Modus Tollens, which does indeed constitute a valid logical argument, takes the form: “If P, then Q. Not P, therefore, Not Q”. Your reasoning is flawed.
And Premise 1 is nonsense. So therefore the conclusion is invalid.
[1] Correct.
[2] No it doesn’t.
[3] What? This is the very definition of a non sequitur. How does the fact that an adult cow possess no characteristics which you deem to be ethically relevant at all lead to the conclusion that there is no moral difference between killing a OWOHI and a human zygote?
If their argument hinges on the “richness” of life, and they accept all three claims, and they are idiotic enough to accept premise 1, then they will agree with the conclusion.
This really is a terrible argument, all in all.
@Thumper #142
Sorry to say but here you are wrong. If not P, Q could still be true for other reasons. If not Q, then P cannot be true.
“This seems to be the core pseudo-scientific premise of the anti-choicers, and it rests on a fundamental flaw in their reasoning. Yes, it’s true that a human zygote is alive and cannot become a cat or a donkey,..”
Could somebody help me with a few questions?
1. How does a newly formed early-stage fetus in a human differ from that of any other animal?
2. How does a newly formed earl- stage fetus in any other animal e.g. a cat differ from a donkey fetus (to use your example)l?
3. At what stage, generally, does a human fetus clearly become a human fetus, a cat fetus clearly become a cat fetus etc.?
@chigau #141 – Well who would have thought.
@ rietplum #143
Ah hell, I got it backwards didn’t I? You’re right of course.
Oh well. I stand by my other arguments.
@ woggler
In answer to #1 and #2; DNA. #3 I will leave to our resident smart people who actually know what they’re talking about.
Thumper,
I think what ipse is trying to do is getting us to “admit” that the only ethically relevant characteristic that an OWOHI has and that an adult cow doesn’t have is… human DNA. Thus, if sentience isn’t ethically relevant, if having organs isn’t relevant… clearly the only thing that makes it wrong to kill the OWOHI is the fact that it has human DNA. A zygote also has human DNA. Therefore…
Of course this is all ridiculous. First, because having or not having “human DNA” is a stupid reason to base your ethics upon. Second, because ipse is conveniently ignoring a key, ethically relevant difference between an OWOHI and a zygote: the adult human being attached to the zygote that you would have to enslave in order to save the zygote.
It’s bullshit, and it is now obvious why ipse is so upset by PZ stating that gametes are living things/organisms with human DNA. ipse would now have to add diploidy to the list of ethically relevant characteristics (which is silly) or admit that every sperm is sacred too (which is silly).
re: OWOHI
One week old conjoined parasitic twins have been separated, knowing the parasitic twin will die, in order to give the non-parasitic twin a chance at a normal life. In most places this is considered ethically permissible.
Would you consider a one week old parasitic twin to be an “infant”? If not, why not? It has all the attributes of its non-parasitic sibling save for one. It cannot biologically survive independently on its own, without appropriating the biological resources of an individual who CAN survive independently on its own.
It is telling that ipse considers the violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy as something that does not constitute an “ethically relevant” difference.
more re: OWOHI and “ethically permissible” killing, and the comparison to cows
One can make a case that killing ANYTHING without a valid reason is not ethically permissible.
It is the need for food that makes killing an adult cow ethically permissible for most people (not all). Wantonly shooting cows for no reason but thrills would be ethically permissible to far fewer, even if it is cows the shooter owns.
No judgments of ethical “permissibility” are made in a vacuum. All are made through weighting competing values against each other.
A OWOHI does not need to violate the bodily autonomy of a woman to continue to survive. An embryo or fetus does. Thus to argue that the killing of a OWOHI and the abortion of an embryo/fetus are ethically equivalent things such that there permissibility can be directly compared is to, de facto, admit that for you, the bodily autonomy of a woman is not a relevant concern.
B-b-b-but… Amphiox! Are you… are you perhaps suggesting that the ethical permissibility of actions depends on *gasp* circumstances?
How is poor ipse’s black & white-thinking brain supposed to deal with that?
As Nightjar says, the key, ethically relevant difference between an OWOHI and a zygote: the adult human being attached to the zygote that you would have to enslave in order to save the zygote.
Which is why, even if they are granted the continuous personhood from the moment of fertilization, the atheist pro-lifers still have to create a moral obligation for the attached human being based on their unique and specific responsibility for the existence of the “preborn child”.
ipse, #99
You’re switching from zygote/fetus to person. If Rowan was saying she wants to do something bad to a small child because the child is an inconvenience then you could ask your question. But she’s not talking about a child.
When she asks you if she has “fewer rights than other human beings”, by other human beings she does not mean the fetus. She basically means people who are not capable of being pregnant (whose full bodily autonomy you would respect but her full bodily autonomy you would speak against).
Rowan’s #84:
Oh, christ. Ipse at 82 plays the syllogism game. I have seen Christians play this game so many times I ought to just make it a bannable offense.
Here’s the game: array your biases, opinions, and incorrect assumptions into a sequential series of “logical” statements. Never mind that some of them are wrong: they just have to look like a philosophical/logical argument. All that matters is the form, not the content, and you’re not going to really test any step.
Voila! It’s impressively logicish. Claim victory and go home.
ipse, #82
LOL
Just wanted to make sure other people caught this too.
@ Nightjar #147
Yep. They’re ignoring sentience, and, assuming we accept that an embryo is sentient, which I don’t, they’re then ignoring an issue of contradictory rights. It’s like TW all over again.
@ Amphiox #150
Yuhp. Morality is circumstantial. ipse also repeatedly ignores this.
@ Saad #155
Oh yeah, I saw it.
@ Thumper #156
Technically, they are not ignoring sentience, they are asserting a consistent continuous identity between the non-sentient zygote and the sentient newborn baby => child => adult. (I think this is a kind of DNA essentialism that is flawed in principle, but, as I understand it, the basis of there argument rests on the concept that because you can’t point to a specific instant when the zygote is a person, that supports the idea that it is a person from the moment egg meets sperm.)
QFT. What’s most remarkable about ipse is that they claim to be a philosopher, yet show a truly astounding lack of philosophical sophistication. For example, as others have pointed out, the bare assertion that “It is ethically permissible to kill an adult cow”, without any consideration of the circumstances under which it is done.
Then there is the bizarre attempt to use the adult cow’s (dubious) “richer” mental life than that of a one-month old human infant to support the claim that there is no morally relevant difference between killing a zygote and an infant. Setting aside (for the moment) the central question of the bodily autonomy of a pregnant person, would it actually follow that if:
1) It is permissible to kill an adult cow.
2) It is impermissible to kill a one-month infant.
3) An adult cow has a richer mental life than a one-month infant.
then:
4) It is impermissible to kill a zygote.
No, of course it wouldn’t. Because a combination of an entity’s features can have ethical implications which none of them has in isolation. For example, if I am (a) currently sober, and (b) a fully qualified neurosurgeon, it is permissible* for me to undertake an operation to remove a brain tumour, whereas neither of these features in the absence of the other has the same implication. Or again, if I am (a) terminally ill and (b) requesting euthanasia, many people would say it is permissible to kill me in circumstances where neither feature on its own would justify this. So ipse would need to show that the combination of (a) being a member of the species Homo sapiens, and (b) being sentient, has no ethical implications which do not follow from one or other of these features on its own. This they have not even attempted to do. The reason for that failure is quite clear to most of us here: what they have actually done is to start with the conclusion they want to reach (“abortion is impermissible at any stage”), and sought a way of justifying it which looks philosophical because it has the form of a syllogism.
Finally, to bring the key question of bodily autonomy back in, ipse appears to follow a very unsophisticated version of deontological metaethics: that there is a well-defined set of rules which specify what is right and what is wrong, regardless of the consequences of adopting these rules. But, as several others have pointed out, the consequences of adopting the rule “Abortion is wrong under any circumstances” include at least the quasi-enslavement of pregnant people**, who are denied bodily autonomy, forced to assume significant risks of death or permanent disablement, and subjected to the possibility of severe legal penalties for events over which they have no control (natural miscarriage). They also include the reinforcement of existing gender inequalities. None of this appears to be of any concern to ipse – indeed, one might reasonably conclude that they are regarded not as bugs, but as features.
*More exactly, it may be permisisble, given other circumstances.
**I’m using “people” rather than women because there are people who do not identify themselves as women, but can get pregnant. Of course, most people who can get pregnant do identify as women.
1. You don’t have to. At one point I was a zygote. I’m now a US adult person. This doesn’t mean I was always a person. In fact, that there is no sharp dividing line doesn’t mean that a zygote is a person.
2. In fact though, we define a person as someone who is born and is alive. This is done over more or less all of the civilized world and this has been the case for centuries.
3. Even the fundie xians do so. They don’t hold church funerals for miscarriages. There is no tiny box with a clump of cells, with a preacher saying they will go to heaven or hell because they weren’t baptized (depending on the cult’s beliefs which vary in time like all sacred eternal truths). Followed by a grave and headstone in a cemetery. They don’t even usually give it a name like Susan or Paul Zachary.
The fundies intuitively assume that the dead embryo isn’t a real person. It only becomes a person when they are being a troll online or attempting to run other people’s reproductive and family lives.
@raven #158
Just to clarify – I agree that *I* don’t have to point to when/how a zygote becomes a person, and evidently neither do you. But there are those who are uncomfortable with the continuum and blurry lines. For Christians, it’s much easier since they can assume that God has endowed the zygote with an immortal soul. For anti-abortion atheists, it’s very difficult to do without resorting to an essentialism which I think is irrational.
As for the intuition, I’ve posed the thought experiment to ask those asserting personhood from conception which they would pick if faced with a choice whether to save one 2-year-old or 100 frozen embryos. The answer from an anti-abortion atheist was that they would save the 2-year-old because it would be an emotional decision. The answer from an anti-abortion Christian was that they would save the 2-year-old because the frozen embryos were not capable of life on their own, but would need a host to survive.
A slice of the ipse argument:
If you need to establish the truth of it, then it is not a premise, it is a conclusion. Your final argument if valid, does *not* prove that it is immoral to kill a zygote. It proves it is immoral to kill a cow. … If your argument is valid. It isn’t.
You’re making the chocolate covered garlic fallacy. (“Americans like chocolate. Americans like garlic. Therefore it follows….”) The reasons it is permissible to kill a zygote are different and isolated reasons than the reasons it is permissible to kill a cow. A zygote has no brain. A zygote has nothing. A zygote is a unicellular, functionless, bit of tissue. There is no moral imperitive to it whatsoever.
The reasons it is (maybe) acceptable to kill a cow are entirely different and have to do with functionality, food, quality of live relative intelligence, practicality, etc. And, fuck it, maybe in the weighing of all factors, it doesn’t pan out and maybe it *isn’t* acceptable to kill a cow. But it has nothing to do with comparing characteristics to another thing it isn’t acceptable to kill.
You argument what cut both ways. If it’s not morally acceptable to kill a zygote than it is not morally acceptable to kill a stalk of broccoli. After all there is no characteristic the single cell zygote has that a stalk of broccoli doesn’t also have.
The traditional argument, and the one still prevalent, is that the cow doesn’t have a thinking brain. Of course, we now (sorta) know cows think better than we like to imagine and new-borns not so much. Which leads to the observation that killing a one-week old human infant is *NOT* universally unacceptable. The Igbo killed twins after birth and in Hebrew tradition one didn’t name or circumcise the child until eight days (one day after your week by odd coincidence) lest the child die in the first week (oh well, too bad).
Which leads to the “icky” aspect of morality. As a social cohesive unit we can’t really function if we decide infanticide is okay. The have eyes and their undeveloped brains or forming connections which although not yet capable of thought and memory are “getting there”. They have parents who are bond with them and thinking of them as human. Thus because we can’t cope otherwise, we believe it immoral to kill infants.
Philosophers of course find such reasoning illogical and being illogical must therefore be wrong.
Well, no. We have to live in this society and we have to believe in it and feel comfortable in it. That is as much a factor as any in defining morality.
After all new-born are really only gastral-intestinal tracks with eyes and no real harm would come if we tossed a few in the snow-drift. It sure would be icky though.
@chiagu #141
Yeah, you see… that makes the same errors. It argues from a conclusion, declares it to be a premise, and retrofits a broad coclusion and declares “If you can’t find the logical fallacy than it has to be correct”. (I like to think of two fifth graders arguing. “Do you know how oxygen bonds with hydrogen?” asks one. “Not really,” answers the other. “Me neither,” says the first, “so I guess we’ve just proven that it doesn’t.”)
Broad statement: “Killing an innocent human is morally wrong.” If you make such a statement, it’s only fair that you defend why this is true. The first inclination is “well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” And yes, it is. But why? What about euthenasia where the person is in pain, sick and wants to die? And you put in “innocent”. I thought it was immoral to kill non-innocent people as well. I mean, is it moral to put prisoners in bear-baiting pits or to cut out their organs merely because they are not innocent. And what of war? Aren’t soldiers innocent?
“Well, you know what I mean,” protests my inner 5th-grader. And, yes, I do even if I’m too lazy to put it into words. It’s something about humans enjoying life and being entitled to life in general and other individual shouldn’t take it away capriciously. Devil in the details and all that but somewhere somehow I’m sure I can somehow express “Thou shalt not kill” and I will believe it. And I will also know it doesn’t apply to a zygote with no brain; not because a zygote doesn’t fall into the broad category of developing human being organisms, but because zygotes don’t count.
#159 Nick Gotts:
From a strictly logical point of view, and I *do* like, value, and respect but mostly like logical arguments– I really do– what this shows is there is a logical fallacy somewhere. When you come across a logical fallacy you *have* to stop, isolate it, correct it and start over. You *can’t* continue, reach an impasse and then declare proof of a global nihilist statement.
Were these arguments valid and logically perfect[*] then the correct conclusion would be: “Either it is immoral to kill a cow or it is moral to kill an infant or both but not neither”. You *can’t* accept an inconsistency (which infant killing immorality and cow killing morality has been shown to be[**]) and carry it through to a conclusion about zygotes (or *anything* else).
[*] They aren’t.
[**] If these arguments were valid and logically perfect which [*]
Aw, sorry to interrupt the very important philosophical debates about zygotes, but this is happening right now in the USA
Giliell, #164
Fuuuuuck….
So if they take away parental rights before the birth, will she also be charged with kidnapping?
Gotta love “small” government and states’ rights.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @ 164;
Your linked article is beyond horrendous. At one point the author makes a comparison to The Handmaidens Tale that is wholly and terrifyingly apposite. Alabama has effectively declared not only the bodies of pregnant persons, but also the bodies of persons who may potentially become pregnant, to be state property to all intents and purposes – literal ambulatory incubators rather than people. It is the stuff of dystopian nightmare.
And yet with a backdrop like that – with hard evidence of the Republican war on women in full swing and clear and unambiguous examples of procreative slavery in the here and now – people like ipse still think it acceptable to argue (really, really poorly, but still) over the notional ‘rights of the foetus’ over and above those of the person carrying it. We can see the dire consequences of foetal personhood arguments right in front of us, and yet the ipses of the world don’t care so long as they can find an excuse, any excuse, to punish women even further for simply being female bodied.
The sheer injustice and cruelty of it all makes me sick even thinking about it, and all so that cabals of misogynistic old men can lay claim to, and exert control over, women’s uteruses.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
more from the article:
I think that many people who do their little “fetal rights” spiel have never actually thought through what they’re actually advocating. It’S this shit.
It’S forced C-sections, where screaming women are tied to tables and then cut open against their explicitly stated wishes. They are happening, too.
BTW, I think PZ owes me royalties for the elephant embryo pic idea. It’S one of my favourite tricks I pull on forced birthers: ask them if that’s more important than me.
Right. They went the route of “slut-shaming.” Most of us already know the counter-arguments.
1) Consent to have sex is not consent to become pregnant.
2) Ignores cases in which no consent of any kind was granted. (i.e. rape)
3) This “engaged in behaviour – must accept consequences” argument does not seem to be consistently accepted. Consider someone who goes skiing. We all know skiing is hazardous. So when a skier breaks his/her leg, do we leave them on the side of the mountain to die of the consequences?
Ipse
If A is ethical, then B is ethical.
B is not ethical.
Thus A is not ethical.
Logic fail. Didn’t expect more from a forced birther.
Is it ethically permissible to kill the “separate organism” that is the tapeworm nestling inside of ipse? Maybe if a start making comparisons with random cows it suddenly ceases to be.
I think that this is a very positive development
this is happening right now in the USA
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/08/12/alabama-jane-doe-dangers-fetus-first-laws/
let me explain. We all know that this is what they intend but as we see by people like the fool above, they avoid actually saying it out loud and directly. That makes it very easy for the majority to just hear the sentimental argument and literally ignore the implications because life and babies and love. this action makes it very hard to ignore the barbarity of the anti-abortion argument, they just do not consider real people at all their black and white thinking will simply not allow it. It has led to murdering people in the name of saving “lives” .
welcome the “Inquisition”
uncle frogy
Giliell,
^This. This can’t be said often enough. This is what violating someone’s bodily autonomy really looks like. This isn’t like taking away your property, this isn’t like being forced to pay taxes, this isn’t like being searched by the police (yes, I’m looking at you too, Marc Abian). This is a dystopian nightmare as Gregory points out, except it is real.
It’s fucking frightening, and yet ipse wants us to think about cows, newborns, zygotes and syllogisms. Anything but the person with the uterus. I suppose if you have an uterus you are “ethically irrelevant” too.
And I feel sick now. Literally.
BTW, I almost forgot*, ipse, if you are still reading, you asked:
and requested:
Now that I’m home and feeling all generous and stuff… *picks book off the shelf*
Campbell sez: organisms are “individual living things”.
Was that helpful?
__________
*Sorry, I tend to forget about these things when people start making silly syllogisms to justify taking away my rights.
@chris61
The organ that connects the fetus to the uterine wall and allows for nutrient uptake also ceases to be inside the donor’s body, usually within half an hour of the baby being born. If it isn’t expelled naturally, it’s removed by doctors.
I’ll grant that a very small number of mothers engage in placentophagy, so you could say those placentas ultimately end up back inside the donors’ bodies. That is REALLY splitting hairs.
The only thing that that can become is a human being.
It can also become various other things: a naturally miscarried foetus (in about 40% pregnancies), or, for example, a hydatidiform mole.
Giliell, I think perhaps you are being too charitable to suggest that the fetal rights advocates have not thought through the consequences of their proposals. They probably have thought it through to their conclusion that 1) the people that will be subjected to the nastiness have brought it upon themselves through their wanton behaviour, and 2) it would never happen to them (i.e. the forced birthers) or anyone close to them.
unclefroggy
Yes, please explain how locking women up in prisonf or “endangering” their fetus and denyingt hem abortions is a positive development.
theobromine
I think there are several groups
One groupi s the “hardliners” who make those laws and who fully intend to enforce reproductive slavery an all people with uteri.
One group is thinking this half way through. THEy are thinking of “extreme” cases. They think of drug addicts and they probably think that they’re doing the pregnant person a favour because they are stopping them from being addicts
One group, and I think they are a very large group, doesn’t think that through at all. They think babies. THey think that if you sinply say “no, you can’t have an abortion!” the pregnant person will say “OK”, go through with the pregancy and either become a doting, loving parent or give a beautiful baby up for adoption.
You can see this also when peoplea re asked what should be the punishment for abortion if it is murder. Some say “death penalty”, but very few. Most people are flabberghasted because they never thought about the implications of “abortion = murder”
It’s not a favor to stop someone from being an addict if the person does not want to stop from being an addict. It won’t work either.
One could argue that some force is justified if the person is pregnant and is having the baby, because the baby could suffer the consequences of the addiction.
However, if the person is not having the baby in the first place, that argument is moot.
The outrage is that Jane Doe must have the baby because of the absence of a clinic in the vicinity, and because the sheriff doesn’t feel like the paper work.
Every Jane Doe in the US should be pretty scared now.
@ Theobromide #158
Sorry, I was unclear; I meant ipse is ignoring sentience insofar as they are ignoring the fact that an organism’s sentience or lack thereof is a major factor in the level of rights we endow that organism with. It does not seem to me that a foetus or an embryo is sentient.
Giliell,
Some say “nothing”. Really. There are people who will say that abortion is ethically impermissible, should be illegal, that the embryo has a right to life and abortion is murder !!!! But then you ask them what should happen to women who get abortions they just say nothing.
Back in 2007 when we had the abortion referendum here, a lot of people placed themselves in that camp. A political commentator, particularly, got mocked for this in a comedy sketch that went more or less like this:
Interviewer (young woman): “Abortion is an extremely horrible, despicable thing, isn’t it?”
Commentator (old white man, condescending voice): “Yes!”
I: “So it should be illegal?”
C: “Exactly!”
I: “And what if I wanted to get one?”
C: “You could, illegally.”
I: “And what would happen to me if I got caught?”
C: “Nothing!”
I: “But I would be going against the law?”
C: “Yes!”
I: “And how would the law punish me?”
C: “In no way whatsoever.”
I: “Isn’t that a bit incoherent?”
C: “Shh.”
@ Gilliell #164
Sweet Christ, that is disgusting. And it gets worse. Here follows an example of the slippery slope in action.
Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened @ 181;
The insidious expansion of a grossly unjust principle of foetal personhood is very worrying indeed, especially since effectively forced C-sections and prosecuting pregnant persons for accidental injury to themselves, and by extension the foetus, is now very much on the table.
And I fear it will go even further than that. The anti-choicer’s war on abortion really is only the first volley; they will attempt to ban contraception next. Indeed, some have already started to campaign for just that, and these dangerously misogynistic laws may well form the basis for such a push. The ultimate expression of foetal personhood rights would be an absolute right to exist, and that will inevitably be construed as the right to not have that existence prevented by artificial means. They could take out plan B already as Alabama’s laws currently stand by disingenuously arguing that the fact that it is taken some hours or even days after sex could mean that it was chemically endangering a (really early stage) foetus. From there it is only a short step to declare the prevention of sperm fusing with egg to be endangerment of a foetus that ‘should’ exist according to the will of their sky fairy – they would just go the ‘every sperm is sacred’ route and enshrine it in law.
With all that we are seeing, it is hard to believe that anyone still tries to argue that the Republican war on women is not an actual phenomenon.
@ Gregory Greenwood
That’s a worrying thought, and I think a probable move on their part. Given the language of the law and the legal precedent set (especially with the example case given in Gilliell’s link regarding the woman who was prosecuted for taking half Xanax while pregnant; a perfectly legal drug), it could logically be argued that the morning after pill constituted chemical endangerment of the foetus.
Jesus. They’re really gaining ground with this.
Nightjar
Actually, that is exactly the situationi n Germany.
Legal aborion is very restricted: Rape, health of the mother and a very mushy concept called “psychosocial indication” which is when it would be too much of a burden for a woman to continue the pregnancy. In claerspeak that means the fetus is severely malformed or ill, but with German history you simply can’T say a fetus is abortedf or being severely disabled.
So, outside of this, I could get an abortion during the first 14 weeks (actual first 12 weeks of gestation, but for convenience pregnancy is usually claculated 40 weeks from the date of your last period) . I would have to go to mandatory slut shaming, i.e. “pregnancy conflict counselling” which is not open but must be “pro life” so I could get a slipt hat basically says “this horrible person wants to murder her baby in cold blood and we couldn’T make her see reason” with which I could then get an illegal but not punishable abortion. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
I see you missed my point I thought it would be easy to understand sorry let me try again.
First I would have to say that abortion rights is part of civil rights and the struggle for human rights.
It is a political struggle and it needs to be out in the open and part of the public discourse.
Let me go outside of the immediate issue of forced birth for a minute. The police have been killing back people with impunity for a very long time over 150 years probably so why now do we hear “Black Lives Matter”?
Because cameras have brought the killings into the living rooms of everyone. People are appalled and more than just the blacks who have all ways known just how dangerous it is,it is ordinary white people who are shocked because the fucking stories they hear just do not match the pictures they are seeing.
They can see that what happens is unjust and they do not like it.
It was not good that Michel Brown got shot dead in the middle of the street nor was it unusual but is was recorded and broadcast which was a terrifically good thing. Same thing here the actions taken to force the birth are what we who follow this struggle know is the intention of those who would take away the rights of women to decide their own fates. it goes hand and glove with shooting dead doctors.
this story needs to be on something like 60 minutes or the 6 o’clock news. the question has always been how to get “the other-side” to show their true colors.
They talk all love and babies but their actions are black and white judgmental absolutism and cruelty.
What is good about it is that they are doing it not pretending they wouldn’t. I can’t see that it will do the best for them politically kind of like shooting a doctor did for them not many rallied around that particular banner.
uncle frogy
@ unclefrogy
What I think you’re saying is that these situations, providing they are well publicized, are too horrific for the general public to ignore, and that’s a good thing as it may well lend weight to the pro-choice argument.
I think I’d agree with you. The problem, of course, is that real people have to go through those horrific situations in order for them to be publicized, and I think that’s the root of other people’s objections. And of mine; I’d much rather these situations just didn’t happen in the first place. I’m not interested in winning some philosophical battle with the anti-choicers, I’m interested in stopping people suffering.
I’m quite happy with legislation in The Netherlands. Taken literally it is far from perfect, but in practice abortion is the woman’s autonomous decision and legal up to 24 weeks. A five days consideration period is the only limitation. In theory a doctor could refuse an abortion, but I doubt that ever happens.
Giliell,
Here in Portugal, after the referendum, abortion is legal in the first 10 weeks. After that, only in the cases you mention (rape, woman’s health, fetal malformation). There is a mandatory three-day reflection. Three days in which you are supposed to contemplate the horrible person you are and the terrible crime you are about to commit, I suppose. Then you can get your abortion. So I guess it is also a case of “this horrible person wants to murder her baby in cold blood, we gave her three days to think about it on her own, she still wants to murder”. But that was it.
Was. After the referendum, last government’s law. This government now? They just decided that it was too easy to get an abortion, what with you not even having to pay for it and being able to get it on the National Health System for free and all. So they came up with a tax. Yes, a tax. To discourage, and I am not making this up, to discourage women from using abortion as a substitute for contraception (which is a thing that totally happens, you know). Yes, these words were actually said, this was the justification. Along with this also came mandatory “psychological and social counseling” (very likely slut-shaming). This law passed in the parliament last month, IIRC. We’re happily going backwards.
As I mentioned earlier, there are no legal restrictions on abortion in Canada, so it is theoretically permissible at any time up to birth. In practice
(http://www.arcc-cdac.ca/postionpapers/22-Late-term-Abortions.PDF)
However, there are some provinces (Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan, the Yukon and Northwest
Territories) where there is no access to abortion, and people wanting to terminate a pregnancy are forced to travel elsewhere. Canada just recently approved the use of RU-486, which may provide a means for access to abortion in those areas).
(BTW, the pro-lifers in my discussion group tended to refer to abortion in terms of “violently dismembering” or “poisoning” a “pre-born child . They consider use of RU-486 to be killing an innocent person, and the “morning-after pill” to be morally wrong if it will prevent implantation, but not for its other means of action. Atheist pro-lifers are generally supportive of contraception (they even give out “Secular Pro-life” condoms); I didn’t get a chance to ask about IUDs, but I’m guessing they would agree with the religious people who consider them to be abortifacient. and therefore morally wrong.)
YEah, because women really need to think more about getting an abortion. Because it can’t be that we thought about this before wew ent to the doctor and said “hey, I’d like to be not-pregnant.”
I mean, ifm y contraception failed I’d getan abortion. I made that decision a long time ago. Nobody needs to tell meab out how wonderful babies are and that there are daycares and shit. I already have two of them, I know the joy and also the work and the cost. What is some counselor going to tell me about my life that I don’T know already?
NOw, in Germany neither side really tries to do anything about the current situation because it’S not oportune, but one fucking anti.choice guy thought, well, if you can’t touch the normal access, why not force people who need second or third trimester abortions into waiting periods? Shows what complete bastards they are. People who need abortions at that stage are usually people who actually would like to remain pregnant and have a baby, but something has gone horribly wrong. They have seen experts, they have learned what this condition would mean for their child and so on. This all in a situationo f extreme shock and despair. And then the “pro lifers” want to make women wait some more days with a doomed fetus, knowing with every kick that this is the kick of the child they’ll never feed, snuggle, change.
Assholes.
Ipse I notice has failed to respond to or note the various posters who have mentioned the fact that 40%, (I”ve seen higher figures), of zygotes are naturally “aborted”. I would add that Ipse seems to be unaware that the zygote doesn’t just become the fetus if it successfully implants itself; about 1/2 of it becomes the placenta.
Ipse seems totally at odds with reality. Irreversible changes at birth make it a natural phase change in the continuum of life. Much more of a defining point than conception. Of course, any facts that don’t agree with their presuppositions are ignored. Typical of religious arguers.
@69, ipse
That’s nice.
– From Stephen Crane’s “A Man Said to the Universe” in his 1899 War Is Kind and Other Lines
Human heuristics distinguishing things as separate categories may be useful at simplifying the universe toward understandibility, but it’s only a heuristic; the laws of physics (from whence biology emerges) pretty much applies to all arbitrary sets of the universe’s subsets.
Bill Donohue speaks: Marriage is ‘not about love’
sorry if this is a tangent, spurred only by that word “Christian” in the title of the OP.
FWIW. discuss…
What nonsense! The whole purpose of marriage is to confer legal rights. Having a family, making people happy and love can all be achieved without marriage.
Nicely said for century old logic. Marriage should encompass love, etc., with legal rights for the partners. It need not encompass having children.
Sure. A lot of people feel the point of marriage is a commitment made in love. The word family shouldn’t enter into it at all, as children do not define family.
You silly, silly people. Don’t you know that the idea that “love” should even be included at all, in marriage is a “modern” concept. Its proper, ancient (by which I mean maybe a century ago, even) purpose was a, “Financial transaction, of sorts, which included cementing useful political and economic ties, and guaranteeing inheritance.” This “love” thing never entered into it.
Marriage as an institution is really a contract between the couple and society/the community.
Society confers a certain recognition of the union, and certain privileges, while the couple pledges to conform to a certain standard of conduct, publicly and privately. Details vary with time and culture.
The private interpersonal things between the couple, be it love, children, financial security, can all be achieved without marriage, in private.
But it is the recognition and acknowledgment of the union by the community that makes marriage unique. That is the reason why civil union/separate but equal alternatives are not sufficient.