M: I don't claim it's insufficient cause only insufficient when balanced against the rights of the mother not to submit to the accidental nature of human sexuality. She is female at the flip of a coin. It's an accident we reproduce by mating. It's an accident that conception is involuntary. It's an accident that we are driven to have sex. What reason should scientific people have to subject themselves to such biological tyranny?
CW: Maybe that is our purpose: to demonstrate that we can overcome our animal nature - to defy ourselves. Our faculties give us dominion over these impulses. The rub is whether or not we choose to exercise these faculties or these impulses. It is possible to go your entire life without having sex. Therefore, I would argue that conception, in almost every case, is quite voluntary.
M: I was not speaking of consciousness but of self awareness, the acquisition of the knowledge that we are a living separate entity. This is not possible without the acquisition of language and it's power to define. Prior to that there is no concept or fear of death. That does not mean we can kill any non self aware entity with impunity, but only as a balance of rights of the mother not to be a robot to biology. As I said, I hate this argument because there are no clean and satisfying answers but there must and will be law. I think it is imperative that the law seek to balance one right against another. If we side strictly with the fetus we imprison the mother and the other way we kill the fetus. I can see no solution that is not a compromise. The fetus cannot consciously suffer but the mother can. This is a case, it seems to me, when our ethics and morals get us into a trap and it's our ethics and morals that we have to surrender to balance the act. It is a case, it seems to me of doing what is least objectionable. Oddly those most insistent that abortion be abolished don't even want to pay deadbeat mothers welfare.
CW: Is life itself not sufficient to grant some dignity even to animals? We are more humane in butchering cows than in aborting embryos - cattle are electrocuted to unconsciousness before slaughter. Embryos are dismembered in utero without even the courtesy of anesthetic, and this is long after they develop the ability to feel pain. As I said, the mother chose to be in this position. Thus, she effectively waived her rights to freedom from the biological prison when she submitted to this biological impulse to engage in sexual activity. I believe in legislating personal responsibility, as that forms the basis for all laws.
[edit]So I realized that I have access to some people that are knowledgeable regarding the declaration of consciosness, self-awareness, and the like - a brother who is a cognitive scientist and another who is a psychologist. I asked them if there was a prevailing opinion regarding what constitutes a person or individual. Both agreed that this is more left to philosophers, and that cognitive scientists usually work around these constructs once developed. The consensus seems to be that there is no widely-accepted set of criteria to establish this. Here is what the cog-scientist said:
I would say though, that personhood is granted to all those with potential to be persons.
And that, the fact that babies are viewed as persons emphasizes that.
Even robots are often mistaken for persons, when they act in certain ways.
So I would say that in trusting human instinct to distinguish personhood, it is better to err on the side of caution in granting personhood than to err any other way.
That is the caution that ethics has always admitted necessary
(taken from an online conversation, hence the broken Engrish
)[/edit]
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