yguy

Knowing the definition is of no moment whatesoever. You cannot premeditate to kill with malice without knowing you are contemplating murder, even if you've never heard the word in your life.

No, that's just all we can see with the state of our science at present.

Only if you desire to kill it do you have problems.

I am thinking of people like Stalin. He knew he was doing evil, and he was happy doing it.

I think you have no way to support that assertion. I've heard of women boasting of having orgasms during abortions. They are no doubt very rare, but there isn't a doubt in my mind that some women hate the children inside them.

yguy

If that's the case, your point is meaningless, because not only is there no malice aforethought, there is no intent to kill. It happens without her even being aware of it, and even if she knows intellectually that it's happening, there isn't a damned thing she can do about it.

yguy

Put a sperm, an unfertilized egg, a skin cell, or anything else besides a fertilized egg into a womb, and get back to me when it starts turning into an embryo, k?

yguy

What is fallacious about the premise of the question?

You better belive it. Not only will they continue, they will increase.

So we draw the line at viability because that's where we draw the line. Thanks for nothing.

Sue me. I didn't know I had a gun to your head.

OK, so if infanticide is legalized you won't have a problem with your neighbor strangling her newborn, because then it won't be murder. Right?

How would that be?

There is nothing to address, because the "rights" you speak of are merely legal priveleges.

Autonemesis

Embryo, zygote, gamete... more arbitrary lines drawn. Why is the transition from gamete to zygote, or zygote to embryo, or embryo to fetus, or fetus to infant, any more special than the others? There seems to be a principle at work in all this line-drawing you do, but I fail to see what it is. So it seems to me your choice of where to draw the line is arbitrary.

Dr Rick

What legal rights are not "merely legal priveleges" and how do we distinguish them from those that are? How is the right to life not just a "legal privelege" but a prospective mother's are?

Rick

yguy

There IS, in my view, nothing special about the transition from zygote to infant as regards this discussion. I have just told you why the transition from gamete to zygote is different. A sperm cell is alive, but it is not a human being because it cannot grow towards infanthood given the same environment that a zygote can grow in.

yguy

I've taken a few whacks at the problem here. Perhaps that would be a better place to thrash out the general principle.

dk

That is an excellent observation, I had never thought of murder in that context before.

Dr Rick

Where? Here's some excerpts:

Clutch dealt with that in his direct response to you:
"Well, the thing about this claim is that it's false.

Try it. You have a pen? Make the right to life (or any other right) disappear. Get back to me when you've managed it.

The silliness of your claim here should constitute grounds to reconsider the conclusion you attempt to extract from it."

Clutch again:
"Good, you've made a step, though a tiny one, in the right direction. Of course your initial claim was absurdly simplistic, and now you are recognizing that -- by taking seriously just what would be involved in revoking a legal right. It is (obviously) not "the stroke of a pen"; it is a process that a large politico-judicial system would carry out, or at least be complicit in.

Still, you've missed the more important point, which is that we are not talking about legal rights, but what are often called "natural" rights. That is, rights in the sense that, were the duly elected authorities to carry out the steps you describe, they would thereby ignore one of the rights of children.

It is easy as pie to call rights derivative upon the letter of law, if that's what one means. Calling rights derivative on society, as is the topic of this thread, is a very different claim -- presumably it indexes rights to societal attitudes, to aggregates of behavioural dispositions, to the workings of institutions not part of the 3 branches... to society, in other words, which is rarely more than vaguely represented by votes in the Congress and Senate.

There are many different things that could be meant by claiming that rights are based in a society, and I have no particular motivation to defend any one of them as the canonical thesis. But one thing that it almost certainly does not mean is that rights are strictly legal or constitutional (though there is much to be said in favour of that view as well). If your criticism, that "a stroke of the pen" could make rights wink in and out of existence, is to worth taking seriously, you must first identify an interlocutor -- explain exactly what thesis you intend to engage, and then show exactly why your claim counts as a counterexample to or argument against that thesis.

When both your criticism and your sense of your opposition are as oversimplified and undetailed as they've been, your claims end up having effectively zero rational content."

Clutch responds:
"One of our inexhaustible stock of posters who fails to grasp the meaning of argumentum ad hominem. Saying that it is you, and not the topic, that is simple is not an ad hominem. It can be (in this case, is) a straightforward observation of fact.

It would be the a.h. fallacy if I said, "Ted is a dolt; therefore his argument doesn't work."

But the following is not a fallacy: "Ted's argument is dreadful; therefore Ted is a dolt." Indeed, depending on how dreadful Ted's argument is, this can be a quite dispassionate appraisal.

Now, back to the matter at hand. The thesis of the OP was, "our society creates morals and rights". That's what is under discussion.

You have left morals to one side, focussed on rights, and argued against the thesis that rights are purely legal constructs. I have explained a couple of times now that this is a red herring, failing to engage any of the theses that might be characterized as "Society creates rights".

Now, you can of course say that the legal/social distinction itself is the real red herring. You can say anything at all. But that doesn't make it any less of a dodge. 'Legal' does not mean 'social'; law is not society; do I really need to argue this for anyone not trying desperately to make a non-sequitur stick? If you already know that there's a difference, graspable by a child, between 'legal' and 'social', why do you keep muddling the two and pretending you're not?...The topic is whether rights are socially determined. You attempt to refute only a thesis that rights are legally determined. If you intend your remarks to be relevant, you conflate the legal and the social. (If you do not intend your remarks to be relevant, of course, then there is no conflation but merely a change of topic.) How much simpler could this be?...Like all things objectively true, your failure to notice is irrelevant to their obtaining."


There is nothing here that addresses the straight-forward question put to you: "What legal rights are not "merely legal priveleges" and how do we distinguish them from those that are? How is the right to life not just a "legal privelege" but a prospective mother's are?"

It appears that there is no distinction between the two, and your suggestion that we look at another thread "thrash out the general principle" was not helpful (though it was mildly amusing to read).

Rick