No, I'm not. I'm carrying his reasoning and morality system (that a person who needs support from others is a fetus) to its logical consequences (that children who need support from their parents to survive are also honorary fetuses).
No moron. You are building a strawman so you can extend it into absurdity.
How about a little fire scarecrow?
Exactly, you were still a person even though you needed medical care. By Alyrium's logic you were a worthless "thing" because you needed life support.
Since when did I say worthless?
Alright kid. You are about to get a lesson in pain. If you cannot argue like an adult(honestly), I am not going to treat you like one.
Babies who are born naturally but require medical attention are still called babies. In fact ALL babies require a constant supply of food, parental attention, and protection from their parents - so by your logic a person remains a fetus until they can live without "life support systems". Heck, I'm 18, legally an adult, but I couldn't successfully function without life support from my parents.
If they kicked me out tomorrow, I would not be able to support myself without finding another person to support me.
You are also fully developed. A premie like DPDP was, should not properly be called a "baby" because he was not fully developed. You can call him that if you like. But if he was still in the womb, he would not be referred to as a baby, but a fetus. Hence the term "external fetus"
Do try to keep up, I know it is hard for you.
A brain is just a complex neural network. All the stimuli and actions shape
How is that a rebuttal? You just made my point for me. The brain of a fetus that is just barely viable is bare bones operating system. It has higher brain function, but none of the things that even makes higher brain function meaningful. It has no memories, no real thoughts, preferences, or desires. Just the ability to feel pain and pleasure. It has all the moral worth of a lizard despite having more advanced hardware. WHich is not to remove the lizard of its worth in a utilitarian calculus. We should not wantonly kill lizards, but some goals require it, and if the benefit of the goal outweighs the moral worth of the lizard, or fetus.
It needs experiences in the world, it needs to make a connection with the society in which it lives and with individual people who will care for it before it can graduate beyond that. A fetus needs to be fully developed before it can do those things inherently. Before then, its moral worth is not an intrinsic property, but a function of what value others place on it. namely the mother, or adoptive parent. And if she does not want it, the external fetus is SOL, because SOMETHING has to justify the cost of keeping it alive.
It has more individual value than a lizard because one day it will become a human. Consider that a toddler is no more intelligent than a great ape, but we give it more rights because one day the toddler will become a full person. Infanticide is illegal while killing a more intelligent cow for meat is not.
Present value is a function of current state and future state. If that were not the case then killing a person who would otherwise die in 10 seconds is a full murder.
Do you value the seed the same way you value the plant? Do you confer all the value that you would on an oak tree to an acorn? Do you treat an egg the same way you would an adult chicken? No? I did not think so.
You might try to bring about an event that leads to X becoming Y, but that does not mean you should count your proverbial chickens before they hatch and value Y the same way you might value X.
By your logic, every sperm becomes sacred, because any one of them could become half the genetic compliment of a child, you should protect a handful of acorns the same way you would treat an oak forest. The argument is bullshit on its face.
Frankly, I consider killing a horrifically suffering person before their suffering is complete mercy, and would gladly take the punishment for it. On the other hand, it is punished because you are destroying their PRESENT not future value. Hell your argument does not make any sense, because if your argument were true, we would not expect such a killing to be considered murder.
Your logic train, as weakly propelled as it was, still managed to derail. Nicely done kiddo.
As for non-human entities. FIrst off, there is nothing special about a human on its own. We have been through this. Second, the argument above applies, and you are talking to the guy that thinks great apes should be afforded a similar moral and legal status we give to small human children. I think people that kill them (along with dolphins, whales and elephants) should be charged with some sort of murder-analogue, unless in times similar to the conditions for ethical infanticide where the situation was particularly dire or in self defense.
As for cows, there is a reason you kill a cow. For food. People generally do not eat a fetus unless they have no other alternative. Actually, infanticide can be perfectly ethical if the conditions are right. For example, if the survival of the entire group depends on killing a few infants to save the resources, lighten the load, or if the group is in desperate need of food. These situations are rare however, because other options usually present themselves.
The group-utility of killing and eating (as well as finding other uses for the body parts) of cows, outweighs the moral value of the cow.
Now you're playing with semantics, in context rights was clearly interchangable with "value", or whatever you care to call it.
No. "Rights" have a very specific meaning, and if you are going to talk about ethics, you need to use words properly.
This is a policy debate. US policy is not based off of a preference system. If it were, then a bunch of ant's desire to not get bulldozed
Wait? You mean to tell me that in a representative democracy preferences do not matter? Are you joking? Preferences and stakeholder input form the basis of our system of government.
The reason we have animal welfare laws is because a bunch of people got together and started acting as proxy communicators for the preferences of animals(expressing their own preferences which they assumed rather correctly were the preferences of the animals in question), serving as proxy stakeholders in the state and federal legislature, and local town hall meetings. This is how we got environmental legislation as well.
Preference rule utilitarianism (as opposed to act) using the framework of a social contract is how our government fundamentally works.
Now you're being pedantic. How do we determine whether a view is consciously held or not? Organisms take actions that they get pleasure from, and in the long run increase their reproductive fitness or the reproductive fitness of a group they are a part of. Ants sincerely want to keep their colony because that is what will allow them to survive and reproduce. Their general system by which they make decisions and adapt and reproduce is conscious of the fact that it's in their best interests because they end up reacting to it.
As you can tell I am a behaviorist.
Are you trying to talk to an evolutionary biologist about fitness?
It is very simple: The higher the cognitive ability of the animal, the higher on the scale an individual goes. Now, we can probably go a step further and account for social behavior and what it does to the system. But that would needlessly compicate the issue beyond what your child-like mind can handle.
In other words: we make an educated guess.
Now for other issues. Animals do not always take pleasure in the things they do. Ants probably do not take pleasure in being ripped in half by an ant from another colony for example.
An action is pleasurable because it increases fitness, not the other way around. Food that is good for you tastes better not because sugar is somehow special, but because your body has adapted to make you seek sugar. What you perceive as pleasure is a by-product.
Very few organisms actually sit around and consciously think about their fitness. In fact, we dont even do it most of the time. A lot of the stuff we do, we do unconsciously for other proximate reasons. But the reason that those reasons are compelling is to give us incentive to do acts which increase our fitness.
The decisions of an ant I actually have a fair bit of knowledge of. They dont think about colony fitness at all. If an ant from another colony comes along, they react aggressively because that is pre-programmed in their brains
"Different hydrocarbon profile---> attack and release alarm pheromone"
"detect alarm pheromone--->move to area of highest concentration"
etc. Evolution does all the thinking for them.
The more intelligent an animal, the more they can actually deliberate over a choice. A crocodile for example can actually deliberate and compromise with different possible nest sites. This is something it takes a group-level process for ants to do. Hence the group-mind analogy.
Dont tangle with me in the Areas of my Expertise.
So basically we're going back to consciousness = rights as a value system?
No. It is a component. So they correlate and the coefficient is not 1
So let's say they all couldn't care less if you died. Then would you lose the right to life?
Possibly.
Congratuations, you manage to contrive a situation that would never happen in the real world to break an ethical system.
The clincher is that my want to stay alive is probably stronger than your want to kill me. But if you were to define the situation such that it was not, then the answer is yes.
But of course, it is a contrived situation that any sort of consequentialist ethical system was never designed to handle.
-Slavery (who cares if the slave that's separated from family dies, and those abolitionists just have a "non-specific" angst, so they count less then the slave owners who actually knows them)
The slave cares. The slave I imagine cares very much. Their family cares that they have been enslaved. The abolitionists have a non-specific angst. Oh and *gasp* there is typically more than one slave per slave holder.
-Genocide (if they were already hated by society then who cares if you kill them)
The people being genocided care. So do their friends and loved ones.
-Drug rape (if the girl doesn't remember it, then it's like it never happened, right).
Um... no? Because there is a non-specific angst that is rather strong, and a pre-existing very strong preference not to be raped. It does not matter that she would not know she was raped, only that she prefer it not happen. Same with the slavery thing. Just because the family does not know, does not mean they do not count. The preference that their loved one not be enslaved still exists.
Additionally, I am a non-specific utilitarian. I take into account a lot of different moral values when determining the moral status of an action. Preferences, pleasure vs pain, etc. Just so you know that before you continue to make an ass of yourself
But let's say you couldn't adopt your child away fast enough. Could you just kill them in the mean time? Let's say you just wanted the child to die, if it really has no value then there should be no moral question about whether you can kill it or not.
First off. In any consequentialist ethical system, you have a list of options. You are only to take the most ethical one given your parameters.
So, say you have a baby you to not want. You have a few options.
1) You can strangle it to death (or kill it some other way) causing it suffering, causing others who might value it suffering, violating the preferences of the entire society in which you live, which while non-specific is extremely intense and explicitly thought out, that not kill it. The plus side? If your preference to get rid of it outweighs its preference to live which it does have, then killing it is probably merciful.
2) You can drop it off at the local police station, school, fire station, church, or hospital, no questions asked. Your preference to get rid of it is met albeit delayed, society doesnt care and has specifically given you legal and ethical permission to do this, and it gets to live.
3) option three is keeping it, which in the long run might even be worse than option 1
And prove that a new born baby has thought but a baby one second before birth doesn't. Does the passage through the birth canal magically confer a soul or something (sarcasm)?
I might dignify the question with answer if it was not one of these.
All the straw, just as flammable, and just as fucking stupid.
So if you're a consequentialist then do you just adjust current and future values to account for time differences? I.e, you realize that $10 today is worth more than $10 tomorrow, and a lizard today is better than a lizard tomorrow?
It depends on what you are trying to do. For example:
I have an egg. I want a hard boiled egg. This means I am going to boil the egg alive.
If I have a chicken, and need boiled chicken for a stew or something, I do not toss the living chicken into boiling water and quickly slam the lid of the pot shut.
I treat the egg differently than I treat the chicken because they have different properties.
Now, say I have two 18 year olds. One lives now, one will live 18 years 8 months and 22 days from now(he is presently a blastocyst)
When dealing with ethical questions regarding the 18 year olds, I would treat them the same (all things behind held constant). To use an example, if I was making a decision that would effect today, AND would also effect this other 18 year old that regardless of my decision, will exist. Say, a question regarding global climate change.
On the other hand, I would not treat the blastocyst the same. Because it is not yet that 18 year old. If it dies, no one will ever know the difference. The people who come later will never know what they missed, or didnt. The place of best friend, lover, husband, daughter, would be taken by someone else in the lives of every person in his life. The extraordinary results like the Mozart V Hitler stuff cancels eachother out. The result of the decision is null.
Yes but they don't realize that.
The majority do not have to, they are pawns. The ones calling the shots however have seen the same statistics I have.
Prove that these programs work and that outcome differences are not just the result of differences in how much g is inherited.
I am not going to go through the consensus of the entirety of the fields of social work and child psych with you in this thread. You want me to deal with questions of poverty and child upbringing, crime, etc, then start a new thread.
