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sundin13 on 21 June 2020
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NightlyPoe said:
sundin13 said:

While we can have a conversation about the meaning of "human" and "life", at the end of the day, that is simply a means of establishing a vocabulary to allow further conversation. Once we understand the definitions, we are able to get into the actual discussion of why this thing, that you've defined as "human" "life" should be protected. As you say in this post, you can't really do that beyond just saying that this human life should be protected because human life should be protected, which is, by definition, circular.

Do you believe that is a mischaracterization of your conclusion here?

I don't think that's what the conversation has been about.  It seemed you kept trying to dispute the very concept of humanity at conception and denied protections based on that.  I don't believe that the blood tangent could be viewed any other way.

If you wish to ask why human life should be protected in this case, I'd say that we have vast agreement that human life should be protected.  After all, intentionally killing a person without need for reason is considered a great evil across most societies.  I wasn't aware that this basic backbone of humanity needed to be defended in the first place.

Abortion advocates seek to carve out an exception to this rule.  Which I think puts the onus of providing a reason for this exception on them.  Not on me for simply applying a commonly held value without discrimination.

I was making an attempt to gain information about your worldview to find something that I could use to address the core question, as every time I attempted to broach that subject, it was largely rebuffed as "inherent". I admit, I failed. You demonstrated that your personal circle of beliefs is fairly robust. At the least, I can applaud you for not being a hypocrite.

The blood question was a means of demonstrating how your definitions ill fit the situation. At one point I asked how you defined a "human" and you informed me that "You have a scientist examine a fertilized egg and ask him what species it is, they'll answer, 'Human'". I thought this was an in. If this is your definition of "human", it is utterly insufficient at making a distinction between blood and a fertilized egg. You addressed this concern by clarifying that "human" is not simply something that a scientist will identify as being of the species "human" (not technically a species, but I thought I understand your point), but instead something that is in itself a stage of human development. I personally disagree with this, however, at this point, you had pulled my concerns into your circle. Turns out that I had not found something which would allow me to connect the outside of the circle to the inside, but instead, I was already inside the circle and I could no longer see the outside.

There wasn't really anything there that existed outside of the foundational argument of inherency.

And yes, even in this post, that inherency is still asserted. I ask why human life should be protected and your answers are:
1) People agree that human life should be protected - Fallacy of the appeal to majority and circular reasoning
2) Societies agree that not protecting human life is evil - Fallacy of the appeal to majority or authority and more circular reasoning

Yet even under these fallacies, I do not agree. You are conflating developed humans and fertilized eggs. While, according to you, they exist under the same definition of "living human", there is a clear distinction between the two, whether or not you believe that matters in terms of rights. In order to make the assertion that they should be protected under the same banner under such appeals, you would have to prove that ending the life of a developed human is wrong solely because it is a "living human" and not for any other reasons. Could it not be other properties than the nature of being a "living human" that causes us to protect the lives of developed humans?

I'm not sure if that makes sense, so lets reduce it to math:

x=7

7=Prime number

13=Prime number

Does x=13, or might some other property of "7" cause it to be equal to "x" other than the fact that it is a prime number?

Similarly (under your definitions):

Life should be protected of Developed humans

Developed Humans are Human Life

Fertilized eggs are Human Life

Should Life should be protected for Fertilized eggs, or might some other property of "Developed humans" indicate that their lives should be protected other than the fact that they are human life?

Now that I've written that out, I'm not sure if the math example helped.