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ookdatnog | 7 months ago
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".
Thorrez|7 months ago
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.
ookdatnog|7 months ago
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
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2PAajlHbnU