>Biologists from 1,058 academic institutions around the world assessed survey items on when a human's life begins and, overall, 96% (5337 out of 5577) affirmed the fertilization view.
Ethics are more complicated than a black and white definition of when a magical boundary has been achieved.
However, regarding the question of personhood, I wonder, when does it begin?
Does it begin at birth? I think not, because a fetus a few days before birth is essentially no different from a newborn in terms of development and abilities. There's quite a wide variance in how soon or late a baby can be born and survive.
Does it begin some time between fertilization and birth? I think not, because that entire time is a period of continual growth. There's no instant where the fetus is suddenly transformed. The fetus is getting older, developing. Similar to how a born baby gets older and develops. If personhood were to begin in this stage, it would have to be gradual, meaning partial personhood for some period of time. But that doesn't make sense. How can someone be a partial person?
I'm not talking about a magical boundary. I'm talking about (a) a biological boundary, and (b) the question of personhood, neither of which are magic.
You are defending the case that personhood begins at conception, and your argument supporting this case is "It's a unique living organism. A life. Different from a skin cell which isn't a unique organism."
If I get a kidney from someone else, and that person dies, according to your own argument, that kidney is a person. These cells are metabolizing and dividing, therefore alive, and they are unique with respect to the rest of my body.
Perhaps you'll argue that the kidney isn't an organism because it has no means of reproducing itself. To that I have two counterarguments:
- The argument implies that infertile humans are not persons.
- Nature contains every horror imaginable, including clonally transmissible cancers [0]. If my body develops such a cancer and it jumps to someone else, then I die, according to your definition my cancer that's colonizing someone else's body is a person.
I won't claim to know what defines personhood, but an obvious prerequisite (in the context of human life) is the existence of a centralized nervous system. If I am beheaded, and my headless body is placed on life support while my brain is destroyed, I, as a person, am dead, even if my body is alive. If my brain is surgically removed and placed on life support in a vat, and allowed to interface with the world somehow, then I, as a person, am still alive (whether such a life is worth living is a different question).
Accepting this prerequisite resolves the chimera problem, the kidney problem, the infertility problem and the transmissible cancer, and it results in the conclusion that a zygote is not yet a person, as it does not have a nervous system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
If we were to survey those biologists, what would they say? Same regarding an infertile person, and cancer. I think scientists have already resolved the questions you're posing.
BTW, I don't think the nervous system argument is very common. Pro life people won't use it, because it means early abortions would be ok. Most pro choice people won't use it, because it means abortions would have to be very restricted. The nervous system starts to form at 3 weeks of fetal age (5 weeks gestational age). Most people are in a tail-wagging-the-dog situation where their beliefs about personhood are derived from their belief about whether abortion should be legal or not, instead of the other way around. I see you haven't fallen into that trap. It does seem possible I have fallen into the trap. However, I do think science is on my side.
If a definition exists that avoids all these edge cases, please provide it. I am not aware of a definition of "organism" that would resolve all the problems in your stance.
> Most pro choice people won't use it, because it means abortions would have to be very restricted.
The most common pro-choice argument is based on bodily autonomy, for which the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant. It suffices to observe that there is no other situation where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy, so even if the fetus is a person, the state cannot force you to carry them to term.
So you are technically correct in stating that it is rarely used as a defense for the pro-choice position, but not "because it means abortions would have to be very restricted". In the bodily autonomy argument, the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant.
I agree with the bodily autonomy argument and the broader pro-choice position, but in this case I'm not really making a political argument, but a philosophical one, which is: it's a mistake to strongly identify personhood with the property of "being an organism" / "being alive".
One way to define a human is any living entity that is either an adult human, or will/would grow into an adult human as long as no problem has happened or will happen to the entity.
> It suffices to observe that there is no other situation where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy
The draft. And a lot of other military rules.
Another example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_captain_goes_down_with_the... . The captain has a duty to save passengers first before saving self.
>In the bodily autonomy argument, the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant.
I don't think that's right. Let's say there are 2 people: A and B. Both are innocent. Person A has some bodily suffering. The only way to solve it is to kill person B. So the options are to restore person A to full bodily health and completely destroy person B's bodily health (violating person B's bodily autonomy completely) or to leave the situation as-is, where person A has has only partial bodily health but person B has full bodily health (violating person A's bodily autonomy partially). I think the correct option is to leave the situation as-is, because that violates bodily autonomy the least.
Of course even better is for other people to give aid to person A to reduce the suffering as much as possible without hurting person B.
A few posts back you complained about "tail-wagging-the-dog" thinking, where one reasons backwards from the conclusions one wishes to reach. Your definition is obviously a product of that style of thinking: instead of clarifying what is or isn't a human, you will use the natural elasticity of terms like "problem" and "entity" to draw your boundary however you wish, based on pre-existing notions, when confronted with a challenge.
For example, if a child dies from starvation, therefore not growing into adulthood, you will of course say that the lack of nutrients is a problem that prevented this child from reaching adulthood, so it's still a human.
But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.
Or imagine a child that is born with a mutation that prevents it from reaching adulthood. Clearly we both want to consider this child human. But I would argue that no problem ever "happened" to this entity: the mutation is part of what defines the entity, there is no alternative hypothetical future where it could reach adulthood. According to your definition I could not call this child a human.
> The draft. And a lot of other military rules.
The draft is an example of the state overruling an individual's bodily autonomy, but I specifically said "[...] where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy". The draft is not an example of that: it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.
> The captain has a duty to save passengers first before saving self.
Yes, you can enter an agreement with another party where you make a legally binding promise to perform some duty that overrides your bodily autonomy. This is not an example of the law overriding your bodily autonomy, it's an example of how you can use the law to relinquish your own right to bodily autonomy. Getting pregnant does not require such a legally binding promise.
> I don't think that's right [...]
I'm irrefutably correct that the bodily autonomy argument does not depend on the fetus being a person or not. It's a sufficiently prominent argument that it has a section on the "abortion debate" page on wikipedia [0]. Perhaps the argument does not convince you, but that was not my point. I only wished to show that you are mistaken about the pro-choice position being dependent on the non-personhood of the fetus.
At present I'm not interested in starting a parallel discussion about the validity of the bodily autonomy argument. I can leave a video link [1] if you're interested in how it responds to the most obvious challenges, but I will not return to it unless, maybe, the personhood thread is resolved (to avoid a branching tree discussion).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate#Bodily_rights
I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.
>it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.
What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state. My response is (1) mandating citizens protect the state is protecting the people in the state, and (2) if there was some hypothetical case where citizens protecting the state didn't protect the people in the state, I don't see how it would be morally ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.
The difference is "clear" to you because you are reasoning backwards from a desired conclusion. You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you.
But this boundary just doesn't work very well. To begin with you ignored the "child with deadly mutation" challenge I presented: the only way the child reaches adulthood is if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.
And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.
I'm not sure even adult humans would qualify for being human in your worldview, come to think of it. Some people have had their brain halves separated during their lifetime, and this seems to lead to two separate persons locked in one body, at least in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain).
At this point, you can start overfitting your definition to draw an absurdly jagged boundary exactly around these counterexamples, but at that point I'd appreciate if you just admit that personhood starting at fertilization is just an axiom for you and everything else follows from it.
> What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.
That is very much not what I am saying, but I wasn't very explicit about the point I was making, so I shall clarify.
Two people can disagree about what they think the law should say, but one thing that all decent people would agree on, is that the law should be consistent. We want it to apply evenly to all, without strange exceptions. We don't want any laws that say "everyone is free, except people born in May, they have to do slave labor in the mines."
I was not making an argument about what the law should be, I was arguing that abortion laws make the law inconsistent, as there is no other case where the state violates the bodily autonomy of one person to force them to care for another. For example, if we are in a remote area and I get badly injured, and you are the only person with a compatible blood type nearby, the state can't force you to donate your blood to me.
My point was that it's inconsistent to say that the state can violate one person's bodily autonomy to keep another alive specifically in the case of pregnancy. If you want to make this consistent, you need to allow the state to do this in all cases, implying among other things forced blood transfusions and forced kidney donations. Perhaps you agree that the state should be able to force people to donate blood or a kidney, and in that case your opinion is consistent.
I wasn't expressing agreement or disagreement with the draft. I was stating that it is irrelevant as a counterexample. That's because the justification for the draft rests on a moral principle that's distinct from the one that justifies abortion laws (ie "citizens' bodily autonomy can be violated to defend the state" vs "citizens' bodily autonomy can be violated to save any individual's life"). Again, I deliberately offer no opinion on whether the draft is justified; for my purposes it's enough to show that it is not relevant as a counterexample.
I'm not making up this boundary. This is the scientific definition of an organism.
>To begin with you ignored the "child with deadly mutation" challenge I presented:
The deadly mutation would be the "problem [that] has happened or will happen to the entity." So it doesn't contradict my previous definition. Regardless of whether the deadly mutation could be fixed by gene modification or not, the child is still a person.
>if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.
I don't think I said that.
>And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.
I'm not sure either of those contradict my previous definition. The chimerism can be considered a problem that will happen. Regarding identical twins, we could argue whether "grow into an adult human" covers "grow into 2 adult humans" or not.
We can modify the definition slightly to avoid these ambiguities: "Any living entity that is either an adult human, or will/would grow into an adult human as long as no problem has happened or will happen to the entity and the typical development process proceeds."
>I'm not sure even adult humans would qualify for being human in your worldview, come to think of it. Some people have had their brain halves separated during their lifetime, and this seems to lead to two separate persons locked in one body, at least in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain).
I'm not sure how that situation in any way would lead to a strange interaction with my definition (old or new definitions). My definition would classify that person as a person.
>but at that point I'd appreciate if you just admit that personhood starting at fertilization is just an axiom for you and everything else follows from it.
The axiom for me is that there's no such thing as a partial person. From that axiom, the only logical conclusion I can see is that personhood begins at fertilization.
>as there is no other case where the state violates the bodily autonomy of one person to force them to care for another.
What about child neglect laws? Those restrict the parents' autonomy.
>For example, if we are in a remote area and I get badly injured, and you are the only person with a compatible blood type nearby, the state can't force you to donate your blood to me.
Generally the state's laws forbid one person from taking actions that would violate the rights of another person. For example, if I'm dying and need a kidney, it's not legal for me to forcefully take a kidney from someone else, even if that's the only way to preserve my bodily rights (avoiding death).
I think that is consistent to the state making it not legal for a mother to kill a fetus (assuming the state views the fetus as a person), even if that's the only way for the mother to preserve her bodily rights.
To begin with, you did not volunteer a definition for the term "organism"; you limited yourself to attempting defining "human". This was rhetorically a good move, because defining the term "organism" is significantly harder.
You keep repeating that your definition is scientific, but offer no evidence of this. I argue that no such definition exists. The wikipedia page for the term "organism" starts as follows:
> An organism is any living thing that functions as an individual. Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Several criteria, few of which are widely accepted, have been proposed to define what constitutes an organism.
> > if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.
> I don't think I said that.
> >And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.
> I'm not sure either of those contradict my previous definition. The chimerism can be considered a problem that will happen. Regarding identical twins, we could argue whether "grow into an adult human" covers "grow into 2 adult humans" or not.
You forget that my statement was a reply to something you said after you stated your definition. You argued that an unfertilized egg cannot be considered a person because it is "clearly" a different entity from the fertilized egg. That does not follow from your definition, because you don't define the term "entity" anywhere.
All my counterexamples were further attempts to divine what you mean by "entity" (which is an absolutely load-bearing concept in your definition which, again, you leave undefined). If you object to the unfertilized egg being the same entity as the fertilized egg, my hypotheses about your understanding of "entity" are that either changing the genome means that it becomes a different entity (generating the deadly mutation challenge), or merging two entities makes them a distinct entity from either original (generating the chimerism example).
My reasoning was a bit loose regarding the identical twins and split-brain examples: I implicitly generalized your potential objection to mergers to an objection to changes in cardinality. I personally don't see why one would reject mergers but accept splits, but that's not an inconsistent position.
At the moment I still don't know why you believe the unfertilized egg is necessarily a different entity from the zygote. Your response to the chimerism example provides no clarification on this: I was clearly challenging your notion of entity, but you responded only with that it "can be considered a problem that can happen".
> The axiom for me is that there's no such thing as a partial person. From that axiom, the only logical conclusion I can see is that personhood begins at fertilization.
I strongly disagree with this axiom. At some point in the distant past, our ancestors were non-human (and, possibly but not necessarily at the same time, not persons). The logical conclusion from your axiom is that there was, at some point, a hard boundary where an entirely nonperson animal gave birth to a "full person" human (and that first human then presumably had to reproduce through bestiality, unless through some amazing fortune another full 100% human being was born and fertile during their fertile years).
This seems to me a significantly less reasonable reading of reality than describing this as a gradual process towards personhood/humanity, where each successive generation is "more personlike". I find this also a more moral reading of reality: to me clearly an ape or an octopus is more personlike than a cockroach, which is in turn a bit more personlike than a jellyfish, which is a tiny tiny bit more personlike than a sea sponge.
> What about child neglect laws? Those restrict the parents' autonomy.
Correct. But it does not restrict their bodily autonomy. I don't think parents can be forced to donate blood or organs to their offspring. Of course most would without a second thought, but not because it is obligated by law.
> Generally the state's laws forbid one person from taking actions that would violate the rights of another person [...] I think that is consistent to the state making it not legal for a mother to kill a fetus [...]
There's a contrived "standard thought experiment" that responds to this: suppose A kidnaps B, ties them down, and connects B's bloodstream to an entirely innocent C with kidney failure, so that B's kidneys process C's blood. Disconnecting B from C will result in the death of C (assume there is no way around this). In this case the status quo is that B is keeping C alive, and it requires active intervention to change this situation. Does B now have a moral duty to remain physically connected to C at all times? Does B "kill" C if they disconnect the bloodstreams?
If you believe that it is, your opinion is consistent. If it's not, then you must at least permit abortion in the case of rape, even if the fetus is a person.
That's a good point. However, none of the examples of situations where the definition is debatable apply to humans. The page lists viruses, colonial organisms, zooids, and collaboration organisms. I think for humans (which I think is the most widely studied organism), scientists can clearly define what is an organism and what isn't.
I think if you were to survey biologists, the vast majority (95%+) would agree with me on all the cases ("is this specific thing a human organism") you listed.
>"entity" (which is an absolutely load-bearing concept in your definition which, again, you leave undefined)
Ok. Let's define it as "a cell or group of cells that are joined together and acting together".
>You argued that an unfertilized egg cannot be considered a person because it is "clearly" a different entity from the fertilized egg.
I said "I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA."
My point was that there's a clear difference between receiving nutrition and 2 entities with half a set of DNA coming together. My point wasn't that the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg are clearly different entities (as you've pointed out, that's not exactly clear, and depends on the definition entity).
My definition doesn't hinge on the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg being different entities. An unfertilized egg won't typically grow into an adult human. A fertilized egg will typically grow into an adult human.
>At some point in the distant past, our ancestors were non-human (and, possibly but not necessarily at the same time, not persons). The logical conclusion from your axiom is that there was, at some point, a hard boundary where an entirely nonperson animal gave birth to a "full person" human (and that first human then presumably had to reproduce through bestiality, unless through some amazing fortune another full 100% human being was born and fertile during their fertile years).
That's a good point. One thing though is that our actions today can't impact people in the past. So from an ethics point of view, we don't need to worry about the past, only the present and future. And as you say, we don't 100% know what happened in the past.
With the partial people view, someone might conclude today a person with a certain genetic disorder is similar to an ape, and thus a partial person, and thus doesn't need rights. By saying "no partial people today", we avoid that problem.
>If you believe that it is, your opinion is consistent. If it's not, then you must at least permit abortion in the case of rape, even if the fetus is a person.
I would say the way to resolve this is by defining what is the standard care that each person deserves.
If someone needs an exotic treatment that costs $1B/day to survive each day, and a hospital has the treatment in stock, is the hospital obligated to provide it to someone who can't pay? I would say no. It's within the hospital's rights to not give the person the treatment, or cease treatment if already provided in previous days.
However, is it within the hospital's rights to cease providing the person food and water against the person's will? (Let's avoid the euthanasia discussion and say the person is fully responsive but is quadriplegic.) I would say no. Food and water are standard care, and cannot be denied.
Food and water are standard care. The $1B treatment isn't.
2 people being attached permanently for the purpose of blood processing of a failed kidney isn't standard care.
A mother's womb is standard care for a fetus.
(Another thing to consider is what direct action is taken. In a D&E abortion, the fetus is cut into pieces with a scissors, which is the cause of death. So in the specific case of a D&E abortion, there's a second clear difference from the blood treatment case, in that it's a direct physical attack on the fetus that kills the fetus. E.g. in the kidney failure case, would it be ok to cut the person into pieces with a chainsaw? No, even if the person already is going to die of kidney failure. Other types of abortion are not as direct though, so this argument can't be as clearly used to condemn all types of abortion.)
> That's a good point. One thing though is that our actions today can't impact people in the past. So from an ethics point of view, we don't need to worry about the past, only the present and future. And as you say, we don't 100% know what happened in the past.
> With the partial people view, someone might conclude today a person with a certain genetic disorder is similar to an ape, and thus a partial person, and thus doesn't need rights. By saying "no partial people today", we avoid that problem.
Here it's important to remember exactly what positions we are defending. The viewpoint you have been defending is not merely that we should, for ethical reasons, consider the zygote to be a person. You are defending a much stronger claim, which is that denying that the zygote is a person goes against our current scientific understanding.
To be absolutely clear: I don't think that your belief that the zygote is a person is unscientific or demonstrably wrong (although I believe there are more sensible candidates for boundaries). What's more is that I understand the need for a "legal fiction" around personhood: a legal definition that is deliberately too broad, stemming from a hopefully broadly shared sense that we should try very hard to avoid false negatives.
However, I am very certain that this conviction is not a scientific necessity. It's specifically this part of your claim I am addressing with the "nonhuman ancestors" example. My claim is that science simply does not provide us with a clean boundary between persons and non-persons. Whatever boundary we are going to come up with for legal and moral reasons is going to be somewhat arbitrary, probably based on drawing the boundary a bit too broad.
You claim that your belief that the zygote is a person follows logically from the axiom that personhood is always non-partial. I agree with this as a legal fiction. But from a philosophical or scientific point of view, this is simply disprovable. If you accept that my nonhuman ancestors example disproves your axiom of non-partiality of personhood in the domain of philosphy/science (not in the domain of law), then:
- you can continue to believe that we should consider the zygote as a full person
- but, your argument that it is logically or scientifically necessary to consider the zygote as a person collapses.
> 2 people being attached permanently for the purpose of blood processing of a failed kidney isn't standard care.
I feel like your entire argument here rests on the idea that the attachment is permanent, making your sacrifice much greater than that of a pregnant woman. If we contrive a reason why, for example, you would only need to be attached for a month or week or so, this argument evaporates. If you need to provide your kidneys for the duration of one week, then your sacrifice is clearly much less than that of a pregnant woman. On what basis can the state then force a pregnant woman to stay pregnant for nine months, but not force you to remain a living dialysis machine for a week?
> My definition doesn't hinge on the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg being different entities. An unfertilized egg won't typically grow into an adult human. A fertilized egg will typically grow into an adult human.
Retracing this thread in the conversation, I'm getting confused about what your exact position here is. This is what I said earlier:
> Me: But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.
So you must either claim that it's a different entity, or that not being fertilized doesn't count as a "problem". The thread continues:
> You: I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.
> Me: The difference is "clear" to you because you are reasoning backwards from a desired conclusion. You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you.
> You: I'm not making up this boundary. This is the scientific definition of an organism.
Because of this quote, I was convinced that out of the "problem" and "entity" objections, you picked the "entity" one; that is, you respond to my challenge that the unfertilized egg can be considered a human being in your definition by stating that it is a different entity from the unfertilized egg, not that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem.
But then in your most recent post you state "My point wasn't that the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg are clearly different entities". Then what was the point you were making by bringing up the definition of an organism?
>However, I am very certain that this conviction is not a scientific necessity.
Well personhood isn't a scientific concept. So science can't prove when personhood begins. It can only provide evidence about development that we can use to try to determine when personhood begins.
>If you accept that my nonhuman ancestors example disproves your axiom of non-partiality of personhood in the domain of philosphy/science
It doesn't 100% disprove it, because we don't 100% know what happened in the past.
>If you need to provide your kidneys for the duration of one week, then your sacrifice is clearly much less than that of a pregnant woman.
Well if I'm tied down by a tube, would I be able to walk around, drive a car, sleep, use the restroom, have a private conversation? A pregnant woman can do all those things. Yes, while in labor her activities are more restricted, but that doesn't last a week.
If the level of inconvenience of the tube was similar to the level of inconvenience of pregnancy, I would be in favor of the state making it illegal to disconnect the tube IF it's the only way to prevent an innocent person from dying. The state should however compensate the healthy person. I'm also in favor of the state providing compensation for pregnant women.
>So you must either claim that it's a different entity, or that not being fertilized doesn't count as a "problem".
The "or" in that sentence is inclusive or, right, not exclusive or? So it's ok for me to claim both, or just 1?
I claim that not being fertilized doesn't count as a problem. Most eggs don't get fertilized. The standard course of events for an egg is no fertilization.
I also think the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg are different entities. But due to the "or", I don't need to argue this point. For the sake of an argument we could say they're the same entity, and my overall point would still stand.
>Then what was the point you were making by bringing up the definition of an organism?
You said "You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you." I do think that's the clear boundary between entities, and I replied why. However, my overall definition is valid regardless of whether they're the same entity or different entities.
World is full of human life. West (and not only) manufactures failed wars that killed millions of civilians without a blink of an eye (Vietnam, Iraqs, Afghanistan just to name a few) and sends its own people to death. Where are those life-at-all-costs defenders?
Such people are the last to force their own viewpoints on protecting life unto literally everybody else. Yet they feel the most righteous due to whatever fucked up morals they have to spread them and attack everybody who dares to think differently.
Another story - very similar people (to the point of calling them often the same) have huge mental barriers unplugging their relatives from life support, in situations when there is 0 chance for any sort of recovery and brain is heavily damaged. Wife is a doctor and most of them are religious freaks, ie italian where we live (nothing against you guys, apart from this). They let their closest people suffer horribly (within the limits of their state) for months or even years, put a massive financial burden on whole society just because they don't feel like signing papers for unplugging already dead person, its just some parts of their body is sort of kept alive. Absolutely deplorable weak 'humans', I have no nice word for those. Suffice to say wife saw her share of such folks during her years in hospitals and it was one of the reasons she moved to private sphere.
It's not just some definition. It's the scientific definition. Lots of people have the motto "I believe in science" but then reject the scientific definition of life when it comes to humans.
>If I develop a tumor is it also a life? It certainly behaves so.
Well, we could survey those same biologists. I think they would say no. Does it have DNA of a unique person different from the person it's in? I'm not a biologist, but I think no.
>World is full of human life. West (and not only) manufactures failed wars that killed millions of civilians without a blink of an eye (Vietnam, Iraqs, Afghanistan just to name a few) and sends its own people to death. Where are those life-at-all-costs defenders?
https://www.solidarity-party.org/
Their 2020 presidential candidate is so life-at-all-costs that his website TLD is life: https://briancarroll.life .
>Such people are the last to force their own viewpoints on protecting life unto literally everybody else. Yet they feel the most righteous due to whatever fucked up morals they have to spread them and attack everybody who dares to think differently.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. You say these people are the last to force their viewpoints on protecting life onto other people, but also they aggressively force their viewpoint on protecting life onto other people? That seems like a contradiction to me.
Maybe this really is different from all the things about which we've later lamented, "Never again!" but we certainly ought not consider that criterion easily satisfied.
Just because something isn't ethnic cleansing or genocide doesn't mean "never again" doesn't apply.
>fully developed humans
What's the definition of fully developed? Are physically and mentally disabled people fully developed? There have been large scale killings targeting them in particular. Are babies fully developed? There have been large scale killings that kill them.
I think what we should care about isn’t human life, but human consciousness. A person in a vegetative state doesn’t suffer when you pull the plug. The difference matters and is unmistakable between large organisms which have gone through a long process of development and tiny ones which have not; we should reasonably presume that only one of the two is conscious given no further evidence.
The likely response is the potential argument, and I don’t care about that. I care about human suffering.
Regarding the size of the organism, and amount of time spent developing, what about a very early preemie who is unconscious but will recover?
In the second case there’s no reason at all to do something so drastic. Abortion is acceptable only because the mother’s body is being used and damaged, and she should have the right to prevent that use. The preemie doesn’t need to damage someone’s body to exist.
Edit: having read some of your other comments, I have a question for you. Why should we care about a zygote and not a sperm and an egg. Why is the act of fertilization the line between simple reproductive cells and a beautiful human life. Both have the potential to make a person, both are genetically human, both likely cannot experience things in a human-like way.
Zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, adolescent, and adult are all different stages of the life cycle of a human organism. Gametes are not. Before fertilization, there are gametes. Unless fertilization happens, no organism comes into being. But once it does, it is the same organism from then all the way until its death. This is a biological reality, not a philosophical one.
Regarding your new position: if someone's body was being used and damaged, would it be ok to kill the unconscious preemie to prevent that?
>Edit: having read some of your other comments, I have a question for you. Why should we care about a zygote and not a sperm and an egg. Why is the act of fertilization the line between simple reproductive cells and a beautiful human life. Both have the potential to make a person, both are genetically human, both likely cannot experience things in a human-like way.
A zygote is a unique human organism. It has the full DNA of a human. It will grow into an adult human unless it dies for some reason. A sperm and an egg are not human organisms. Individually they don't have the full DNA of a human. A sperm won't grow into an adult human. An egg won't grow into an adult human.
The memories thing is different. Fundamentally, you’re not causing immediate suffering if you kill someone and they never know. The problem is that you can know they likely want to continue to live and you're violating their agency. The key difference with the fetus is that it has no and never has had the ability to want.
> Regarding your new position: if someone's body was being used and damaged, would it be ok to kill the unconscious preemie to prevent that?
I hope I’ve made clear why it’s not a new position. I presume we’re talking about a fetus fairly far along in development, such that we can have doubts about its possession of consciousness. In this case it’s a matter of triage, you do the least harm you can with the tools you have. Abortion methods should be nonlethal when possible out of an abundance of caution. Beyond that, mostly defer to what the mother wants and what risks she’s willing to take.
The way that wants are experienced changes over time. The way a newborn experiences a want is different from the way a 5-year-old experiences a want. We can infer what an embryo wants by what actions the embryo is taking. The embryo is working to grow into an adult.
If we want to go by when brainwaves are detected, that's 5 weeks fetal age, 7 weeks gestational age. There are only 5 places in the world that allow abortion for some age but ban a 7-week-gestational-age abortion:
* Turkmenistan (although for economic or social reasons, it allows up to 22 weeks)
* The US states of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina
* The Mexican state of Aguascalientes
In all 5 places, it's allowed later than 7 weeks in the case of rape.
I think the fact that these states constitute big changes is exactly why people intuitively latch on to them as points at which to assign moral value to a developing human. What I’m arguing is that the logic for this falls apart on closer examination, and that the only real reason I see to argue the conception idea comes from religious authority. Yet you haven’t used religion in your arguments so far, so why is it the point for you?
> The way that wants are experienced changes over time. The way a newborn experiences a want is different from the way a 5-year-old experiences a want. We can infer what an embryo wants by what actions the embryo is taking. The embryo is working to grow into an adult.
I absolutely understand this reasoning and I have a certain appreciation for it. The problem is, if you assign single-celled organisms the capacity to want from a perspective, yet you use the capacity to want as your bar for moral consideration, then you are more or less saying any organism of any scale should receive equal moral weight, yet seemingly arbitrarily deciding to restrict this to those with human dna. I don’t think that definition of want is useful; I think the capacity to want needs to be thought of as requiring conscious experience to make much sense here, which is also the thing I’m trying to assign value to.
> If we want to go by when brainwaves are detected, that's 5 weeks fetal age, 7 weeks gestational age.
You’re on the right track. I’m not trying to convince you of a specific cutoff, but of the logic I think should lead those developing a cutoff. I’d want experts in fetal development and brain development and so on to be the ones who decide so that risk of harm is minimized. I imagine there are studies on this; I’ve seen indications the result would be anywhere between 7-24 weeks, but I don’t know precisely when.
I value a human's life more than any other animal's life. I think that's the same for most people. Without that, we might conclude that a dog's life is more valuable than a newborn baby's life, due to development time and abilities.
> 7-24 weeks
Curtis Means was born at gestational age 21 weeks 1 day and survived. If personhood might begin at 24 weeks, does that mean that Curtis might not have been a person when born?
Well not really though, neither takes place in an instant. Both are complex processes that span some time composed of numerous simultaneous and sequential steps. I think some kind of partial personhood is more or less a given because biological processes don’t really happen in discrete steps. As for how that might make sense, a very crude example might be coming out of anesthesia or being extremely drunk. These are states where memory, sense of self, and consciousness can fade in and out independently; perhaps partial consciousness is a reasonable thing. Certainly many of the things we consider essential to our internal sense of personhood develop gradually, like our sense of self and, for that matter, our senses of the external world. We don’t initially, as infants, know the difference between our body and the world. Does this make infants not people? No, not legally or morally, but in some sense they lack aspects we’d associate with personhood.
> Curtis Means was born at gestational age 21 weeks 1 day and survived. If personhood might begin at 24 weeks, does that mean that Curtis might not have been a person when born?
My intuition is that curtis would qualify, and that 21 weeks could be too late for lethal abortion methods. At the same time, if a baby were born braindead I wouldn’t assign it personhood. Being born isn’t enough.
>We don’t initially, as infants, know the difference between our body and the world. Does this make infants not people? No, not legally or morally, but in some sense they lack aspects we’d associate with personhood.
I agree. I think this supports my view, that someone can be morally a person, even when lacking aspects we'd associate with personhood.
>I'm wary of classifying any group as partial people.
I think you need to in certain areas if you want to understand the world better is all. A braindead person isn’t the same as a non-braindead person, and there’s likely a continuum between them. My response is to suggest assigning a reasonable point between the two past which someone is a person.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. You seem to be agreeing there's not much difference between a fetus and an infant. But you're saying that this isn't an argument against abortion, because... are you saying killing a born infant is ok?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8406655/
> In mammals, fertilization involves multiple ordered steps, including the acrosome reaction, zona pellucida penetration, sperm–egg attachment, and membrane fusion.
All development is a continuum.
When choosing the point at which personhood begins, we should look at the stages of development to identify the most likely candidate. Fertilization is the most rapid period of development. Fertilization is the point at which the organism is formed. Before fertilization, there is no entity with a full set of DNA. After fertilization, there is an entity with a full set of DNA. Before fertilization, there is no entity that will typically grow into an adult human. After fertilization, there is an entity that will typically grow into an adult human. All these factors point to fertilization being when personhood begins.
If there were abortions that take place during the process of fertilization, then we would need to look into fertilization to determine exactly when during fertilization does personhood begin. But since that's not the case, we don't currently need to examine the substeps within fertilization to determine that. It's sufficient to say personhood begins some time during fertilization.
The problem for me is when people make very fundamental moral claims about what I think they see as the nature of reality off the basis of these very important, but arbitrary in relation to some fixed universal morality, heuristics of perception. The idea that we are each only one thing, singular and indivisible, has historically been a very enticing idea, but I feel that science and philosophy for the last maybe hundred years have also been realizing and grappling with the idea that we’re more group organisms, that what makes us us isn’t the material that constitutes our bodies but the dynamics of our separate parts, the same way a society is found in the dynamics of relations between people more than the people themselves. This makes it hard for me to accept the idea that any stage of development could constitute a step change, not just from our arbitrary perspectives, but in the grand scheme of things (which is what matters morally). The dynamics between sperm and egg, when placed in close proximity, constitute a set of real forces acting in the world to bring about a person. The fact that two becomes one seems irrelevant to me; both the sperm-egg system or the zygote system of dynamic, interplaying forces may eventually bring a person about. The one undeniable fact that to me could make a person a person is sentience; conscious awareness, because in observing the fact of our own conscious experience we avoid making our determination on the basis of something arbitrary. To the experiencing person, there’s absolutely no doubt they’re experiencing. I think when we make our moral codes we should be doing so not to protect particular assemblies of matter or dynamic interplays of forces, but to make our best effort at bettering and protecting the desired continuity of subjective, conscious experience. It seems like the only rational thing for us to do.
We don’t know exactly when or why all the stuff of a human body leads to a conscious experience, but we do know certain things it’s correlated against, e.g. people without brains seem not to demonstrate conscious awareness. Absent more information, I think the best thing that we can do to protect and better conscious experiences in general is to select an intelligible point in development where we think all the “machinery” for consciousness is present in the fetus and draw the line on abortion there. If I’m correct, we avoid harming what I think matters as much as we really can.
> Before fertilization, there is no entity with a full set of DNA. After fertilization, there is an entity with a full set of DNA. Before fertilization, there is no entity that will typically grow into an adult human. After fertilization, there is an entity that will typically grow into an adult human.
I hope you can see what my response would be already. A full set of DNA isn’t morally significant in my opinion, nor is there a meaningful difference between an entity, here defined more as physical body, which will grow into an adult human and a collection of physical bodies which will do the same. If in some weird universe (Asimov story) our life cycle had us develop as three independent beings which merged together at a later age, my answer would be exactly the same. If the independent beings or something about their interaction can be reasonably thought to lead to conscious experience, then they’re worth the ethical consideration we give to people.
So now there are 2 factors: continuation of consciousness and humanity. Is it possible 1 factor is more important than the other? There are several things that to me weaken the strength of the continuation of consciousness factor:
* It's continuation of consciousness instead of consciousness. Consciousness is somewhat intuitive. Continuation of consciousness is less so. Since it's a level removed from what's intuitive, that weakens the factor for me.
* Consciousness throughout life takes many forms. A newborn, an adult, someone with dementia, people with various other types of mental illnesses. It makes it hard to define consciousness.
* The fact that continuation of consciousness cannot stand by itself, it needs the other factor: humanity.
These 3 reasons make me think that humanity is more important than continuation of consciousness. In fact, I think humanity is so important that continuation of consciousness isn't essential. I think a human life is valuable even if consciousness hasn't developed yet.
> If in some weird universe (Asimov story) our life cycle had us develop as three independent beings which merged together at a later age, my answer would be exactly the same.
I'm not familiar with the story, but I think that's quite a different scenario. Those 3 beings each have value on their own, not because they might later merge into another being. Whereas a sperm and an egg have no value on their own.
The reason I dismiss the value of a sperm and an egg isn't because they can merge. If 3 adult humans could merge into 1 superhuman, I wouldn't dismiss the value of the pre-merged adult humans.
I say a zygote has value because it's a young human. It's growing into an adult human.
A sperm isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human. An egg isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human. A sperm and an egg that are nearby each other aren't a young human. Those 2 things aren't growing into an adult human. They might join or might not join. Or maybe some other sperm might zoom in real fast and fertilize the egg instead.
If the 3 independent beings were sitting in a room, would we call them 1 merged being? No. They're still 3 independent beings. Same with the sperm and the egg. Just because they're nearby each other doesn't make them a human life.
96% of biologists say human life beings at fertilization. Not when the sperm and egg are nearby each other.
It has to be. We need some interval of time to experience anything. Continuity also relates a lot to agency. Most people want to keep experiencing over dying.
> Consciousness throughout life takes many forms. A newborn, an adult, someone with dementia, people with various other types of mental illnesses. It makes it hard to define consciousness.
Consciousness is a very low bar honestly. Every one of the people mentioned would possess it in some form or another. You could use a different term if this one is too fuzzy.
> The fact that continuation of consciousness cannot stand by itself, it needs the other factor: humanity.
I think this is more a reflection of our current world than some perfectly ethical one. Since we’re humans, we’re always going to value our own offspring more than a dog. That’s deeply instinctual stuff. That doesn’t mean dogs aren’t richly conscious animals deserving of significant ethical consideration, but we’re not unbiased neutral observers in the matter. I’m just trying to come up with a consistent ethical approach to a narrow issue; for situations where two conscious things are being compared, you might be able to denote specific capacities, like recognition of self, by which you prioritize e.g. a person over a dog, but this is all very hypothetical and I don’t think we need it for the abortion debate.
> A sperm isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human. An egg isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human.
But they are? The only reason they try to fuse together at all is in service of the growth of a human.
> 96% of biologists say human life beings at fertilization. Not when the sperm and egg are nearby each other.
They’re not talking about personhood or something. They’re talking about something fundamentally classificatory, like asking “what makes a species separate from other species.” The usual answer is that they can’t breed with each other, but there are lots of kinda fuzzy exceptions and gray areas with that. To word it better, if I said “Presume the goal is to determine when, in the study of individual organisms, such organisms can be thought to come about. Tell me what stage in the development of a human comes first,” the answer would need to be around the time of fertilization because the question presumes the frame of biological study, the existence of an initial stage, etc.
> If the 3 independent beings were sitting in a room, would we call them 1 merged being? No. They're still 3 independent beings. Same with the sperm and the egg. Just because they're nearby each other doesn't make them a human life.
Right. By the same token, I don’t think a single cell constitutes a “human life”, with all the connotations that phrase carries. If it’s most appropriate to call that single cell a human life, then clearly human life isn’t the thing that determines ethical consideration. My fixation on the sperm + egg -> zygote transformation is a consequence of your belief that the left term isn’t morally significant but the right term is. I think everything that we care about is the same for both terms. Non-conscious, relatively simple mechanically compared to an adult, no nerves or brain, no awareness of the world, no hopes or dreams. The zygote lacks everything essential to personhood at this stage other than its human origin, which it shares with the sperm and egg.
What would we use? Existence of brain waves? Existence of neurons? Those both would include most animals.
>like recognition of self, by which you prioritize e.g. a person over a dog
Babies cannot recognize themselves in the mirror until around 1.5 years old. Several types of animals can recognize themselves in the mirror: elephants, dolphins, primates, mice, some birds, some fish.
If we justify the value of babies by saying that they'll have certain abilities in the future, that same thing could be said about a zygote.
>> A sperm isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human. An egg isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human.
>But they are? The only reason they try to fuse together at all is in service of the growth of a human.
Sure the only reason they fuse is in service of the growth of a human. However, before fusing, a sperm only has half the DNA of a human. A sperm's DNA doesn't define a human, and isn't sufficient to grow into a human, and thus cannot be called a young human. Same for an egg. A zygote has the full DNA of a human, which defines a human, and thus the zygote can grow into a human, and thus the zygote can be called a young human.
>>Just because they're nearby each other doesn't make them a human life.
>Right. By the same token, I don’t think a single cell constitutes a “human life”
That's not the same token. I was saying that 2 (or 3) things being nearby each other doesn't make them 1 entity. You're talking about whether a single entity has certain abilities or not. Those are 2 different discussions.
Relating this back to abortion, existence of brain waves is a higher bar than existence of neurons is a higher bar than fertilization. If I could convince you to care about either of those instead, then sure let’s run with that.
The question with abortion is “at what point are we concerned that killing something could be unethical.” For the criteria to include some or even most animals isn’t a terrible thing; we probably shouldn’t kill animals willy nilly.
>>like recognition of self, by which you prioritize e.g. a person over a dog
>Babies cannot recognize themselves in the mirror until around 1.5 years old. Several types of animals can recognize themselves in the mirror: elephants, dolphins, primates, mice, some birds, some fish.
>If we justify the value of babies by saying that they'll have certain abilities in the future, that same thing could be said about a zygote.
If I recall correctly, I was explicitly talking about how we might go about evaluating and comparing ethical worth beyond the developmental scale relevant to abortion, and I said this was just hypothetical. I wasn’t arguing recognition of self is relevant to abortion.
>However, before fusing, a sperm only has half the DNA of a human. A sperm's DNA doesn't define a human, and isn't sufficient to grow into a human, and thus cannot be called a young human.
I don’t consider the “completeness of DNA” philosophically relevant. The sperm-egg system, both considered together, does have a complete set of DNA. Why does the physical separation change the fundamental ethical nature of interfering with the process? If I have a sperm and egg very close to each other, about to merge, and place a barrier between them, why wouldn’t this be as ethically horrifying as immediately destroying the product of their merging?
>I was saying that 2 (or 3) things being nearby each other doesn't make them 1 entity.
Let’s agree my argument and analogy were poor. Why does entity-ness matter to ethics? When you say entity, are you referring to a physical body, or to a unified consciousness? Is a rock an entity? What about an amoeba?
Do you believe that killing a baby is morally worse than killing an innocent dog or elephant? And what is the reasoning for that belief?
Do you believe that killing an innocent adult is morally worse than killing a baby? And what is the reasoning for that belief?
I believe that killing a baby is worse than killing an innocent dog or elephant, because human life has intrinsic value significantly greater than non-human animal life.
I believe that killing an innocent adult and a baby are equally bad, because all people have equal value.
>I don’t consider the “completeness of DNA” philosophically relevant. The sperm-egg system, both considered together, does have a complete set of DNA. Why does the physical separation change the fundamental ethical nature of interfering with the process?
If they're physically separated, we don't have an entity that could be called a young human. We don't have an entity that contains a plan for how to grow into an adult.
After they've joined, we do have an entity that could be called a young human.
>If I have a sperm and egg very close to each other, about to merge, and place a barrier between them, why wouldn’t this be as ethically horrifying as immediately destroying the product of their merging?
No. In the same way that it's not horrifying if some other sperm zoomed in real fast and fertilized the egg and blocks off the first sperm. Before fertilization, there is no entity that could be called a young human.
>Why does entity-ness matter to ethics?
There's no known way a single person can be composed of 2 physical entities. So I say that when there are 2 physical entities, there isn't a single person composed of the 2 of them.
Another line of reasoning is why should there be a moral difference between a sperm and egg very close to each other and a sperm and egg miles apart? I don't see any reason. We would have to consider every possible pair of sperm and egg in the world as a person, which doesn't make sense.
>When you say entity, are you referring to a physical body, or to a unified consciousness?
Physical body. There's no known way a person can be split across 2 bodies. So a sperm and an egg can't be a person.
>Is a rock an entity? What about an amoeba?
Yes and yes.