Doubting Didymus

No, I think you get the idea. That is the whole point of my analogy, the point of which is NOT that sperm and egg should be considered human. My point is that NEITHER sperm and egg nearby, NOR a fertilised zygote, can meaningfully be considered human.

So no, a criminal about to rob a bank has not robbed a bank, and a developing slice of unthinking, mindless tissue is not a human.

In fact, your analogy work just as well. A criminal with intentions to rob a bank (say for arguments sake, that he WILL DEFINITELY rob the bank) has not committed a crime until he DOES rob the bank. "attempted robbery" in this case does not apply to the zygote, as there is no clearly analogous intent on the part of the zygote cell.

fromtheright

(trying to resist being dragged in, holding onto the door frame, don't want to give you the shits)

WADR, I think you've missed Marco Polo's point in saying that your

point is that NEITHER sperm and egg nearby, NOR a fertilised zygote, can meaningfully be considered human.


I think that MarcoPolo's point (though I certainly welcome MP to step in and confirm or deny my understanding) was not whether one or the other is human but which has a chance at becoming human. The egg once fertilized does have a chance of becoming human (IMO, IS a new human being), the unfertilized egg does not until it becomes, through fertilization, a different entity. A won't get to C without going through B.

Toto

A zygote does not automatically become a human being. If you put sperm and eggs in a petrie dish under the right circumstances, you get a fertilized egg. (It's how some fertility treatments work.) That egg will not develop into a human being in the petrie dish. Fertility clinics have scads of excess fertilized eggs, because they fertilize a lot of eggs at once to save time.

The anti-abortion debater I heard wanted to argue that if you flush that fertilized egg down the drain (suppose the fertility treatment works, and the parents have enough children, so that fertilized egg is excess), or if you use the fertilized egg for stem cell research or treatments, you have taken a human life.

It doesn't make sense. If there isn't an available womb for that fertlized egg, it has zero chance of turning into a human. If the zygote failed to implant in the womb properly, it would have zero chance of developing, and the woman would never know that the egg had been fertilized. How can you equate this very common event with the death of a human? That is a very inhumane position.

Doubting Didymus

Sure, but in my scenario, A WILL go through B, unless you stop it. Then it will be C. So in both cases, leaving the entity/ies alone will result in a human, with approximately equal probaility. Thus, interrupting the sperm that would otherwise have certainly fertilised the egg is an equal interruption of potential.

I will now extend this argument to include D: the uteral lining.

C (the zygote) can never possibly become human without D.

So if an egg may ethically be destroyed even with a sperm about to fertilise it, because it can not become human on its own, so can a zygote be destroyed, even as it approaches the uteral lining, because it needs to embed in the uterus before its potential has any hope at all.

Again, leave either of these combinations (egg/sperm or uteris/zygot) to their own ends and a human will result. So how can either be more or less of an interruption of potential?

MarcoPolo

Well, hopefully you were constipated and it's doing you some good.

:|

Tell me where that's wrong.

Of course not. An unfertilised egg with a sperm near by has the potential to become a fertilised egg. That fertilised egg has the potential to become a human.

THEY (the egg and sperm) don't have the potential to be a human. The sperm can NEVER be a human without the egg and vice versa. THE fertilised egg does.

Oh we're way past that.

And I'm sure there's a school that could teach you how to come up with unique put downs as well.

Ok. I see what you're saying. (Actually I've seen it all along, just thought I'd add some mockery.)

Your panties are in a wad because of the time. Until the sperm actually fertilises the egg, it does NOT have the potential to become human. Is that better? And in the same case, until the egg is fertilised by the sperm, it equally has no potential to be human. Is that something we can agree on?

Stopping the fertilisation process is different than aborting an egg that has already been fertilised.

Or is that what you're claiming is the same thing?

Right!

Wrong! They have the potential to become a zygote. Until the sperm has fertilised the egg, there is no potential human.

For the record, my stance on this whole thing is:
pro-life; anti-abortion; atheist.

Toto

MP: Take, for example, two different methods of birth control, practiced by a legally married couple who are responsible about family planning. Method 1: a condom prevents the sperm and the egg from meeting. Method 2: the sperm and the egg meet and produce a zygote, but an IUD prevents implantation.

You are saying that method 1 is fine but method 2 is murder?

And what is your position on stem cell research?

long winded fool

Good question. Since I'm not a biologist I'm afraid I can't, however if you give a biologist, pro or anti-abortion, a human zygote, he will identify it as a human zygote, if you give him a mass of cheek cells, he will identify it as a mass of cheek cells. Since there is a way to determine the difference between an organism that is a product of the genome it carries, and a piece of the organism that carries the full genome, then whatever that difference is would be a logical answer. There is NO potential for cheek cells to naturally develop into an adult human. Not only is there the potential for this in an embryo (which is all that's needed for the argument against abortion to stand) it is inherent in the very organism that this will happen, barring destruction of the organism. It won't become a fish or a dog; it will become a man or a woman.

Many of your criteria seem to also be lacking in newborn infants. Do infants "think?" Can they survive without their mother? (or at least another human?) Can they comprehend? Are they self-aware? Is it less wrong to kill an infant than it is to kill an adult human? Once again, the argument comes back to the definition of human. Exactly when do a non-human homo sapiens attain humanity? When does the right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness apply to these things? When can it be revoked? If you don't know then why do you condone their destruction? See my bulldozer analogy. If you do know, then please tell me. And be prepared for me to question the validity of the claim.

So then some homo sapiens have more value than others? On what do you base this, exactly? At what point does a human "attain value?" If it is a gradual process, then obviously a 5-year-old child has less value than a 52-year-old man. Who determines who has what values? And why can't it be Adolf Hitler? Or the Ku Klux Klan? If my redheaded stepchild riles my anger and his life is of lesser value than mine, why can't I tie him to the railroad tracks? He has fewer cells than I do. If values are subjective to the person who is inconvenienced, then you can say nothing if I kill my children, (or your children for that matter) since I esteem them of lesser value than myself. By your logic I need no concrete "criteria." I only need to think of some criteria that I have and that they don't have to prove that my children aren't really humans and I am. To assume that any organism under the umbrella term of homo sapiens has less value than another and take its life is the same "morally subjective" logic used for the genocide or enslavement of another race, just less extreme. Extreme delusions and the simplest of errors in reasoning are both fallacies that should be examined. Either all humans are equal or they're not. If not, then who gets to decide who has rights and who doesn't? Maybe Toto's "fascist dictator?"

Is a fish a human? Is a monkey a human? Obviously there IS a boundary between human and inhuman. Assuming there isn't just because we can't agree on where it is is not logical. If humanity develops over time, then the young have intrinsically less humanity, and therefore less rights, than the old. How much humanity is needed before legal rights apply?

"If I destroy an acorn I am not felling a tree." Likewise if I destroy a sperm cell I am not killing a human. If I kill a sapling I AM destroying a tree.

"I have no burden of proof to demonstrate the negative of YOUR claim that a fertilized cell is a human." Then why does the driver of the bulldozer have to prove the negative of the claim that there are still children inside the school he is about to level? When physical actions take place that could jeopardize the life of a human, the rule that the burden of proof always lies with the positive no longer applies. Obviously, in this case, the burden of proof lies on the negative side. If there's a chance that an embryo is a human, you must prove that every given human embryo is not a human for abortion to be considered anything other than murder. And this IS a provable claim. It just has yet to BE proven.

And incidentally, the only potential for a human lies with the fertilized egg. You are trying to use "the potential for the potential" for there to be a human. This is can go back ad infinitum and is silly to dispute. You also say that there is "no clearly analogous intent on the part of the zygote cell." Of course there is. All zygotes are the beginning stages of the formation of a human. Before the fertilized egg, there is no potential for a human in the same sense that before the robbery, there is no danger of being convicted of the crime of robbing a bank, no matter how much intent is involved. Wouldn't the zygote be equivalent the robbery in progress? Once the robbery has commenced, a crime has been committed. Therefore, even at the initial stages of the process of the formation of a human being, there is a human. Before the sperm joins with the egg, there can be no human, and thus, there is no problem with contraception in this sense.

Though many of you say you oppose the simple idea that all we need to do is define humanity, all our arguments seem to come straight back to this fact. If the people of this nation were rational and honest, the abortionists and anti-abortionists alike would need to do nothing other than wait for the legal system to embrace a logical definition of humanity and murder that excludes homo sapiens sapiens under a certain age. Until then, abortion must logically be considered murder and any who perform abortions must be considered murderers, if unwitting ones. And any rape victims or homeless teen mothers who hire a doctor to perform an abortion are (hopefully unintentionally) guilty of enlisting the services of someone to murder an innocent human being.

[ December 10, 2002: Message edited by: long winded fool ]</p>

Toto

Roe v. Wade was based on the question of the dividing line between persons and potential persons. The Supreme Court examined common law precedents, and decided that the point of viability of the fetus, at about 6 months of gestation, was the dividing line, and that interfering with the woman's right to bodily integrity before that time was a violation of her rights. That's the state of the law.

Even when abortion was illegal, it was not considered murder. Your definition of humanity, and defining any injury to a fertilized egg as the equivalent of murder, is a radical revision of our collective legal history and social norms, and flies in the face of most people's sense of what is right.

And I do not think you have dealt with the fact that a fertilized egg does not automatically become a human. Focus on that petrie dish in the fertility lab. Is it full of microscopic humans? Do they have a right to life? Can you draft any random woman and force her to bear a child?

Your position leads to many absurdities.

LordSnooty

Yes, they clearly do. They also dream, have a nervous system, and feel emotions. Therefore they pass the criteria with flying colours.
To my mind, that right does not apply until the fetus is sufficiently developed that it has a properly functioning brain. True, we can't tell exactly when that occurs, but the point still stands. Why would the death of something that doesn't think or feel have any effect on me? I couldn't care less. You want to call it murder? Fine. If someone 'murders' a zygote, I really don't care in the slightest.

The fact that a zygote will eventually become 'human' (putting aside all semantic frivolity for a moment, and assuming for the sake of argument that the 'human' state begins at birth) is utterly irrelevant. 'Potential' life is not the same as 'actual' life. The zygote would never know that it existed. It would feel no loss.

Do you imagine that this tiny blob would somehow see it's potential life flash before it's eyes as it was killed by some manner of abortive mechanism?

Do you even understand why killing someone is wrong? Hint: It's not because humans are called 'homo sapiens'. It's for other reasons entirely.
Once a human being begins to think and feel, that's it. All of the same value. Why can't you grasp this?

I would put less value on the life of someone that was brain dead, for obvious reasons.
It was never a question of cell-count. It's just a question of whether it's morally wrong to kill something that is incapable of thought or feeling. This is obviously going to be an objective moral opinion. But in this case, I can't even begin to understand yours.

Imagine you had a gun in your hand. To your left was a petrie dish containing a zygote that was to be implanted into a mother's womb. To your right was a 30 year old woman. You have to shoot one of them. Don't make excuses, just take my word for it that you have to do it. Which do you shoot? Which has the more value, and why?
It's clearly totally different, since we have clearly stated why a zygote has less value than a human. You seem intent on avoiding this issue.
They're not equal until they are sufficiently developed. They are not equal. Not... equal. Why should they be?

Can you tell me why a zygote has the same value as a grown human? Can you tell me how a potential life has the same value as a life?

Do you honestly value human life so little? Do you care about the term 'human', but nothing for the person himself?

Paul

Oxymoron

For those with a bold heart, check out the views of Prof Peter Singer, an esteemed Ethicist and atheist:

<a href="http://www.hli.org/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/001/106dchud.asp" target="_blank">http://www.hli.org/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/001/106dchud.asp</a>

Summary: infanticide is more morally justifiable than "animalcide" (shows shocking lack of vocabulary and invents a word).