[cgmg]

> I'm going to guess this dodge is here because you support, or at least wish to avoid antagonising, people who believe that killing other people is a legitimate criminal punishment and so somehow it's not "murder" if the state chooses to do it. Although it's also possible you condone extra-judicial killing, with the same dodge, it's OK to torture somebody to death so long as you know, they're bad guys...

I don't believe killing an embryo is murder, but this comment is a red herring. You're claiming it's possible that ¬innocent ∧ murder. But this is entirely consistent with mjh2539's claim that innocent → murder. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent.

[tialaramex]

We've drifted far off topic here, but what's happened here is you've (hopefully by mistake) mistaken human natural language for a system of logical statements.

Human utterances in natural languages have a bunch of unspoken rules, breaking the rules is something that happens periodically by accident, and enables some amusing comedy (the late Ronnie Barker's most famous work "Four Candles" is a classic example) but on the whole honest participants in a conversation are not trying to break the rules. So. One of the rules is you mustn't mention things in the utterance that are irrelevant. For example:

"I've never been to Sweden in the summer" doesn't _logically_ preclude having never been to Sweden at all, but the rule means "in the summer" shouldn't appear in this utterance unless it's relevant, so it becomes a reasonable assumption for the listener that the speaker _has_ been to Sweden in some other season.

If a person says they believe "Innocent people should not be hanged" you're correct that _logically_ this offers no opinion on whether it's fine to hang guilty people. But the rule says it _does_ carry such an opinion implicitly, if innocence wasn't important it would not be mentioned.

When somebody is being very careful to define something in terms of other words and phrases they've used, we shouldn't assume they just threw some of them in for a laugh, they must all be part of the meaning intended - otherwise we can't communicate at all, just as we can't communicate with people who insist on Humpty Dumpty's rule (a word means whatever Humpty chooses it to mean).

[mjh2539]

You were wrong (and were also being uncharitable). The reason why I phrased the definition the way I did was so that I did not preclude the possibility of killing someone who was not innocent. This includes every instance of lack of innocence, but minimally, instances of self-defense.

I found your talking about implicature patronizing.

I agree, we can't communicate with people who insist on Humpty Dumpty's rule; what you fail to recognize is that you're happy to use Humpty Dumpty's rule in regard to 'human'. You have to make recourse to odd language like 'clump of cells'. The human fetus is a human being; that is, it is a human, and it doesn't really matter that you don't want to admit what is obvious to biologists, OB/GYNs, couples trying to conceive, people in parts of the world that haven't been colonized by Westerners and their ideologies, etc.