Diogenes wrote:KitemanSA wrote:Diogenes wrote:
Do you have a clearer place to put a boundary?
If your measuring point is "life" then fine. But then you would have to start charging anyone who removes a cancerous human cell with murder.
It is not well thought out statements like this which make me wonder if you are capable of coherent thought.
A zygote is the early stage of the human op-code in the process of decompressing.
A Cancer is a condition during which the differentiation subroutine of that same code crashes, and begins replicating itself over and over again, while demanding more memory. (matter)
On a software level they are worlds apart. (and in reality as well.) Given your level of apparent understanding, do you mistake ordinary cells for pluripotent stem cells? They are actually closer to being the same than is a cancer to a baby.
KitemanSA wrote:
My boundary for "sapient rights" which most folks are parochial enough to call "human rights" begins at the beginning of sapience, not "life", nor even "life with a "human" genome". Sapience. Show me the graph for that, please.
If sapience is the condition necessary for you to grant rights (and don't forget, you are presuming that your subjective opinion on this matters to people other than yourself) then it is a comfort to the world to realize that people who don't measure up to a certain level of intelligence can be considered to be "non-persons."
Where have I heard this notion before? Oh yeah, it's good old fashion Eugenics! Funny, I would have thought you went the other way on that subject.
I propose defining the boundary between life and death (your "sapient rights") as the point at which anyone (not just the woman) can kill this "non-entity" without consequences; The laws have to apply equally to everyone. If it is legal for a woman to kill a non-entity than it is likewise legal for anyone else to do it too.
At what point does this "non-entity" acquire the protection from injury or coercion of which you constantly prattle when we are discussing drugs?
Pluripotent stem cells and cancel cells are not so very different.
And that raises a difficulty with the "system capable of developing into a human" argument.
Suppose you harvest adult stem cells. We are now near the understanding which allows us to turn these into embryonic stem cells, and therefore clone a human.
Would you argue that the intervention which changes the cells is different qualitatively from the intervention (the environment in a mother's womb) which allows a zygote to multiply? If so how?
If not, and you set the benchmark for human rights at potential humanity, how can you not see as murder the denial of adult stem cells the environment necessary to sustain their development.
If you object to the adult/embryonic cell intervention, how about embryonic cells for the placenta? How is it Ok to deny them the human right to a sustaining environment?
The fundamentalist "zygotes are people" argument is really not easy to support, because of course zygotes are not people.
Further, if zygotes are people then coil contraception is murder.
As our knowledge of molecular biology increases we will in the end be able to create artificially all the mechanics of a human cell. In which case this + DNA means artificailly created zygotes. Do these collections of proteins and amino acids suddenly become people? If so at which stage in their creation do they assume personhood and human rights?
This reductio ad absurdum shows that absolute people/not people divide will in the end never be consistent. So we are left with according "human rights" to other entities in some (not easily defined) graduated way.
Personally I don't see that a non-sentient lump of 16 identical cells that could in a womb develop into a human is much more worth rights than an ovum which could given a sperm and womb also so develop.
