Dumb fucks who switch from pro to anti abortion in 30min

[AndroAsc]

I'm curious though... for those who are really involved in this. Has there been any convincing scientific studies to show when does sapience first emerge in a human baby? 1 yr old? 2 yr old? More? Less?

[Simon_Jester]

I'm curious though... for those who are really involved in this. Has there been any convincing scientific studies to show when does sapience first emerge in a human baby? 1 yr old? 2 yr old? More? Less?

"Sapience" is too complicated for this question to have an easy answer.

There's a mountain of evidence and studies on when infants first develop features which are part of basic intelligence, like object permanence. But there's no switch in a baby's head that goes from "non-intelligent life form" to "intelligent life form" during a short, well defined period of time.

[Samuel]

If robots have the ability to replicate or make copies of themselves, it has fulfilled the criteria of reproduction and growth.

Reproduction, not growth. A machine can change parts and purchase upgrades, but it cannot grow unless it has some weird duplicate of how living things work.

As for reproduction, your going to need some crazy technology for robots to be able to make more of themselves. I don't think industrial smelters are something you can make man-portable.

[HMS Conqueror]

No, it's not murder.

It's easy to state, much harder to "prove". What attribute of people gives them the right to life, that fetuses presumably do not possess? If you can answer this question convincingly, you've solved a major philosophical conundrum. Here are some that don't work:

- Lack of consciousness - it's not considered ok to kill people who are asleep either.
- Lack of feeling of pain - it's not considered ok to kill people provided it's painless.
- Lack of capacity for rational thought - 1yo babies lack this capacity, but it's again not ok to kill them.
- Lack of viability outside the womb - getting better, but still problematic: first, babies aren't viable either unless you look after them, but it's not considered ok to leave them to die on the hospital floor, and second, whether fetuses are viable is largely probabilistic, with no clear cut-off time.

The most convincing argument I've heard for abortion abandoned this nonsense and took a hard-line property rights view: the mother owns her womb and so can expel whatever she likes from it. But this also leads to awkward reductios. Suppose someone washes up on my desert island. Is it ok to throw him into the sea where he is certain to be eaten by sharks rather than wait 9 months for a supply ship to rescue him? Most people would say no, even if it's inconvenient for me to put up with him in that time. Maybe you can get a fruitbat libertarian to bite the bullet here, but not most people and certainly not the vast majority of people who actually support abortion, who tend to be rather more communitarian.

HMS Retard

That's a lousy effort. At least think of something that rhymes.

[Korto]

Sapient is "the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment, a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence, since displaying sound judgment in a complex, dynamic environment is a hallmark of wisdom.", and as such only (adult) human beings can be called sapient.

Are people really comfortable with this definition?
We're smarter than chimpanzees, but chimpanzees think, they plan, they feel. This is taking something which is a field of grey, drawing an arbitarary line in the sand (at a rather convenient place for ourselves, I might add), and then declaring it black and white.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

It's easy to state, much harder to "prove". What attribute of people gives them the right to life, that fetuses presumably do not possess? If you can answer this question convincingly, you've solved a major philosophical conundrum. Here are some that don't work:

- Lack of consciousness - it's not considered ok to kill people who are asleep either.
- Lack of feeling of pain - it's not considered ok to kill people provided it's painless.
- Lack of capacity for rational thought - 1yo babies lack this capacity, but it's again not ok to kill them.
- Lack of viability outside the womb - getting better, but still problematic: first, babies aren't viable either unless you look after them, but it's not considered ok to leave them to die on the hospital floor, and second, whether fetuses are viable is largely probabilistic, with no clear cut-off time.

Are you seriously fucking retarded, HMS? Seriously?

That lack of consciousness one is a complete fucking non-sequitor. A person who is sleeping still has a sapient, sentient mind. It is merely on stand-by mode so to speak. It is still quite active, and you are still ending an intelligent mind. The ability to feel pain is merely something I listed as a quality of human beings, non-sequitur. Babies are certainly sentient and borderline sapient, a fetus is neither during the stages that abortion commonly occurs. Viability outside the womb isn't even a point I raised, but it's also a complete distortion of the position. A human baby is definitely sentient and borderline sapient. They experience things, their lives have value, they will grow as long as they're fed and taken care of. A fetus requires nine months of using a human body to incubate, it has little to zero capacity for any sort of sentience and no capacity for sapience during much of that time. It's more a parasite than a human.

My point is that human MINDS are what society generally places value in. Nobody would place any worth in an adult that had zero consciousness and zero sentience, who had also NEVER had consciousness or sapience. The human body is just a sack of meat. It's a bunch of chemicals tossed together in a complex arrangement that is ultimately no different from any other animals. Something that has no mind, and never has had a consciousness can only be called a human in the strictest biological sense, and most fetuses don't even have fully developed brains. This is my point. You can only address it with bullshit non-sequiturs and distortions.

Sapient is "the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment, a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence, since displaying sound judgment in a complex, dynamic environment is a hallmark of wisdom.", and as such only (adult) human beings can be called sapient.

Are people really comfortable with this definition?
We're smarter than chimpanzees, but chimpanzees think, they plan, they feel. This is taking something which is a field of grey, drawing an arbitarary line in the sand (at a rather convenient place for ourselves, I might add), and then declaring it black and white.

I'd say there are a few animals that qualify for a reasonable amount of sapience, enough so that I find killing them to be as abhorrent as killing a human. Corvids, dolphins and most of the great apes, actually. They're all very definitely sentient to a high degree and show some signs of sapience.

[AniThyng]

I understand and accept the argument of how absurd it is to consider sperm and eggs to have any value. But call me a dumb fuck if you want because I think that a late trimester fetus has far more value than an arbitrary valueless parasite. Do we tell parents who intend to have the child to go wild and drink and smoke? No, we accept that that has consequences for the baby when it is born. So no, I don't think we can dismiss the potentiality when we talk abortion. Yes I will support the right for first trimester abortions for practical reasons but I do not accept that we can extend that further. The sapience argument is no less grey. Someone extended it to only adult humans in this thread ffs.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I understand and accept the argument of how absurd it is to consider sperm and eggs to have any value. But call me a dumb fuck if you want because I think that a late trimester fetus has far more value than an arbitrary valueless parasite.

By late trimester, do you mean third trimester, or late first trimester? I agree with the latter, and to an extent agree with the former. Late in the first trimester is about the late I would support abortion for reasons other than the mother's health. Second trimester abortions are really only tennable when the mother's life is at risk, because then your options are "abortion, or the mother dies and the fetus will too anyway."

Do we tell parents who intend to have the child to go wild and drink and smoke? No, we accept that that has consequences for the baby when it is born. So no, I don't think we can dismiss the potentiality when we talk abortion.

But the point of abortion is that it won't be born. You are ending that potentiality. If you intend to keep a child, then of course you shouldn't drink or smoke, as you will subject what will eventually become a sentient, sapient person to potential health problems. Abortion stops the potential person from ever existing. It's a seperate issue.

Yes I will support the right for first trimester abortions for practical reasons but I do not accept that we can extend that further. The sapience argument is no less grey. Someone extended it to only adult humans in this thread ffs.

The person who extended it only to adult humans is an idiot. And yes, there are certainly grey areas. It seems we largely agree on most points anyway.

[Korto]

The sapience argument is no less grey. Someone extended it to only adult humans in this thread ffs.

The person who extended it only to adult humans is an idiot.

Well, apparently it was a wikipedia definition. I suspect the person who came up with it set it that high because to put the bar any lower may have run the risk of critters like chimpanzees creeping in, and that wouldn't have suited at all.

[NoXion]

Well, apparently it was a wikipedia definition. I suspect the person who came up with it set it that high because to put the bar any lower may have run the risk of critters like chimpanzees creeping in, and that wouldn't have suited at all.

I don't see how. Chimps can learn to sign but they don't seem to have anywhere near the grasp of grammar that even an 6-year-old child can demonstrate.

[Akhlut]

I don't see how. Chimps can learn to sign but they don't seem to have anywhere near the grasp of grammar that even an 6-year-old child can demonstrate.

If you show a chimp how to open up a locked, opaque box via pushing around several sticks into various holes in the box, they will do it and open up the box.

If you then get a transparent, locked box and do the same thing, but instead clearly show that pushing one of the sticks in does absolutely nothing, the chimps will ignore that step and just do the steps necessary to open a box.

Young human children will still go through all the motions, even the ones that clearly have no bearing on unlocking the box.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIAoJsS9Ix8

I'd say that shows a lot more of "the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment, a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence, since displaying sound judgment in a complex, dynamic environment is a hallmark of wisdom," than human children.

[AniThyng]

So the logical conclusion to your line of reasoning is that killing babies and children is less of a crime than killing an adult since they aren't "sapient"? I'd hope that isn't an actual common pro abortion argument.

I never said anything about children, don't twist my words. "Killing" fetuses is as much as a crime as killing a chimpanzee. Both organisms are non-sapient. Sometime between birth to preschool, the infant develops sapient. I am not qualified to determine when that point is. But if we can determine this "sapient threshold", I would not find it objectionable to kill off non-sapient life is there is a good reason. To conform to societal norms, I do adopt the standard that a born child is sapient (although it is technically unlikely). Granted, I admit this is an extremely arbitary division, cause one could always argue there is not much a difference between a 8-mth fetus and a born child, but the line has to be draw somewhere. So unless there is conclusive research out there that proves a fetus is sapient (I strongly doubt it), pro-life people are just dumb fucks.

And if you have problem with killing non-sapient life, perhaps you should not be eating that hamburger. Oh, don't step on that ant too. Oh wait... you just killed millions of bacteria. OOPS.

I didn't have to twist anything - you accepted Someone_Else's definition of "sapience" as a property of only "adult" humans without modifying your argument that it is less of a crime to kill "non-(sapient)" life, so I simply pointed out that that implies it's also less of a crime to kill children, which is obviously a socially untenable positon. Anyway glad you might begin to see that it's not a "dumb fuck" position to be ambiavalent or outright opposed to aborting 8-month (or earlier) old fetuses. A line does have to be drawn somewhere, but where you choose to draw it is nowhere near as clearcut a position as you seem to think it is?

And yes, I am clearly a terrible hypocrite because I don't really care about the fact that an animal had to die to make my hamburger or that my body is constantly embroiled in mortal combat with bacteria. I even think it's ethically justifiable to kill sapient life sometimes!

@Seraph: Yeah, pretty much I'd say at any point where the fetus has a chance of surviving on its own is too late for my personal moral comfort. Arguably though the definition of "surviving on its own" is debatable given what determined modern medical care can acheive for premature births, but yes, I don't have any issues with your stand following your last post. With regards to the potentiality argument, if we're agreed 1st trimester abortions then yeah it's not relevent anymore, but if we're talking 3rd trimester (this thread seems to not make the distinction, in fact, Androsac seems to think we can put the cutoff even *after birth* if society didn't think it was a henious crime to do that) then I think its still very relevent.

[Surlethe]

No, it's not murder.

It's easy to state, much harder to "prove". What attribute of people gives them the right to life, that fetuses presumably do not possess? If you can answer this question convincingly, you've solved a major philosophical conundrum. Here are some that don't work:

- Lack of consciousness - it's not considered ok to kill people who are asleep either.
- Lack of feeling of pain - it's not considered ok to kill people provided it's painless.
- Lack of capacity for rational thought - 1yo babies lack this capacity, but it's again not ok to kill them.
- Lack of viability outside the womb - getting better, but still problematic: first, babies aren't viable either unless you look after them, but it's not considered ok to leave them to die on the hospital floor, and second, whether fetuses are viable is largely probabilistic, with no clear cut-off time.

How about existence of a functioning human central nervous system?

Mind, perhaps this whole conundrum merely serves to illustrate that human moral intuitions are inconsistent. After all, what is morality but an attempt to create a model to capture moral sentiments? If we can't find a consistent model, perhaps we should entertain the notion that our sentiments are simply not rational.

[Alyrium Denryle]

A fast nitpick. Not changing the substance but perfecting a bit the form. (text from wikipedia)
Sentient is "the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences.", as such any moderately complex animal can be defined sentient (all mammals for sure). Babies should be sentient too. Unborn are not properly sentient until the most rudimentary parts of their nervous system go online and they start to actually react to some stimuli, which happens sometime after the first month and increases dramatically from that.

Actually no. It takes a lot longer than that. The nerves might be able to carry the signal before this, but a fetus cannot actually perceive and process stimuli until the 26th week or slightly after.

Abortion is the archetypal cloudy ethical issue.

The issue is only cloudy if you are operating on a set of false assumptions the size of the state of virginia regarding things like brain development, the soul (and even then... theologically), and the moral status of human genetic code.

Views are easily changed, because most people implicitly hold these false assumptions, and have insufficient knowledge of neuroscience, ethics, and human development to make an informed decision in the first place.

Abortion boils down to deciding when life starts, or at least when we start assigning legal rights to living things, and there's simply no clear dividing line.

Yeah... Yeah there is. That point is when the life possesses the characteristics in which we place moral value, and particularly when these are developed to a point that surpasses the degree to which they are developed in organisms we have determined it is OK to kill. Before ANY moral consideration is imparted on the fetus, it at least must be (depending on what ethical system you use, it turns out that it happens around the same time) capable of feeling pain and pleasure so that a utilitarian calculation may apply, or when it becomes a being capable of forming the most basic of wants and desires if you use more Kantian reasoning.


That point is 26 weeks into the pregnancy.

In particular, the womens' rights argument is utterly question-begging: being a woman doesn't give you the right to murder someone because they're inconveniencing you, and if you rejoinder that abortion isn't murder, then you've begged the question.

Only if you commit massive strawmen, like you just did. If we are going to use rights ethics (a dubious proposition at best, as rights theory is not coherent for a variety of reasons), one is empowered to kill the fetus even if we determine it is a being in possession of rights. Why? Because it requires CONSENT on the part of the mother for it to continue existing, otherwise it is initiating force against her and if she chooses, she has the right to defend herself. And before you use the obvious counter, no, having sex is not consent, and just like a woman can refuse to have sex at any stage in the process of mating and may use lethal force to do so if necessary, so too is she empowered by rights ethics to evict the fetus at any time.

Look up the famous Violinist analogy for a nice formal argument.

Murder is killing a human. A blastocyst isn't a human. An embryo isn't a human. They aren't babies.

This is a bad argument. They are, by the strictest definition, human, and in fact a human. They are an individual and unique entity possessing a human genome. They are just not humans who matter. Murder is also not the killing of a human. If it were, we could kill humanoid aliens with no ethical qualms. No. Murder is the taking of a senient and sapient life. A fetus is neither until a late stage of development, and even then it can be justified.

"Living organisms undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations."

Robots don't fit the definition of life.

No, but "being alive" is not ethically relevant.

I'm curious though... for those who are really involved in this. Has there been any convincing scientific studies to show when does sapience first emerge in a human baby? 1 yr old? 2 yr old? More? Less?

It is a sliding scale. Frankly, even sapience is not the relevant characteristic that determines whether something has moral value. The component parts of it do. The ability to have emotions, wants, desires, and experience (perceive) suffering from the non-fulfillment thereof is what is relevant. Adult humans experience this to a great degree, but so does an infant, and so to, does a lizard. It is a matter of degree, and the extent to which an entity does these things determines the ethical weight in decision making. For example, if I have the choice between saving a field mouse and saving a chimpanzee, I would save the chimpanzee because failure to do so would cause it to suffer more than the field mouse could suffer. This is distinct from simple pain to. While pain is a component part of suffering, it is not the whole of suffering. There are also the held interests of individuals. A being which consciously holds interests has more ethical relevance than one which cannot.

- Lack of consciousness - it's not considered ok to kill people who are asleep either.

For a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is that the person who certainly does exist does not want to die, and because there are others who will suffer due to their death. Doing this would only be acceptable if a greater moral good was served in so doing, and if this option was the ONLY option capable of serving the highest net-good.

- Lack of feeling of pain - it's not considered ok to kill people provided it's painless.

See above. Pain is not the be-all-end-all of suffering. Doing this would only be acceptable if a greater moral good was served in so doing, and if this option was the ONLY option capable of serving the highest net-good.

- Lack of capacity for rational thought - 1yo babies lack this capacity, but it's again not ok to kill them.

See above

Lack of viability outside the womb - getting better, but still problematic: first, babies aren't viable either unless you look after them, but it's not considered ok to leave them to die on the hospital floor, and second, whether fetuses are viable is largely probabilistic, with no clear cut-off time.

Doing this would only be acceptable if a greater moral good was served in so doing, and if this option was the ONLY option capable of serving the highest net-good. There are other options, such as adopting out the baby. Additionally... yes, the point of fetal viability changes. That just means that an abortion can be made non-lethal as technology advances.

No, we accept that that has consequences for the baby when it is born. So no, I don't think we can dismiss the potentiality when we talk abortion.

Yes. We really can. When you tell the mother not to drink and smoke, you are assuming that they carry the baby to term. You are looking out for the well-being of a person who WILL exist. When you abort, that person will not exist, and thus its future state is irrelevant.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

Murder is killing a human. A blastocyst isn't a human. An embryo isn't a human. They aren't babies.

This is a bad argument. They are, by the strictest definition, human, and in fact a human. They are an individual and unique entity possessing a human genome. They are just not humans who matter. Murder is also not the killing of a human. If it were, we could kill humanoid aliens with no ethical qualms. No. Murder is the taking of a senient and sapient life. A fetus is neither until a late stage of development, and even then it can be justified.

Yeah, I phrased my thought process poorly and incorrectly. You more accurately captured my intended meaning.

[someone_else]

Frankly, all this fuss is because of morals, if we used the standard law of force "the stronger takes decisions, the weak fuck off", this is easy to solve. Mother does what it pleases and fetus has no rights until it can survive on its own. [/sociopathicpsychorant]

Actually no. It takes a lot longer than that. The nerves might be able to carry the signal before this, but a fetus cannot actually perceive and process stimuli until the 26th week or slightly after.

If we have to wait for the brain to actually go online yes, but reflexes start much before, at the 6th week at most.
I'm just saying that a modicum of reflexes mean sentience since those are answers to external stimuli, regardless of what is doing the brain at the moment.
26th week is where I'm comfortable to classify it as human too, although it is still very far from sapience anyway.

I'm curious though... for those who are really involved in this. Has there been any convincing scientific studies to show when does sapience first emerge in a human baby? 1 yr old? 2 yr old? More? Less?

By looking at this to confirm my memories I'd say somewhere after 12. That's the age where the subject begins to use abstract thinking, necessary for adult reasoning and required to take more complex decisions than a chimp.
Anything less than that and you have to categorize as sapient most medium-big mammals and butt-loads of birds too, or at least a few primates. And it is my impression that sapient was meant as a human-only term, or it gets pointless too.

Murder is the taking of a senient and sapient life. A fetus is neither until a late stage of development, and even then it can be justified.

This leaves open the door to killing babies/children too since the bulk of reactions is still a reflex for a while and they don't classify as sapient for years (decades?).
Or maybe my definition of sapience is wrong (see answer a few lines above).
What you think?

[Alyrium Denryle]

This leaves open the door to killing babies/children too since the bulk of reactions is still a reflex for a while and they don't classify as sapient for years (decades?).
Or maybe my definition of sapience is wrong (see answer a few lines above).
What you think?

I already answered the question in the initial post.

If we have to wait for the brain to actually go online yes, but reflexes start much before, at the 6th week at most.
I'm just saying that a modicum of reflexes mean sentience since those are answers to external stimuli, regardless of what is doing the brain at the moment.
26th week is where I'm comfortable to classify it as human too, although it is still very far from sapience anyway.

Reflexes circumvent the brain. If you poke me with a needle, the reaction happens before the signal reaches my brain. Reflex arcs are actually processed directly in the spinal cord.

[Rye]

It's easy to state, much harder to "prove". What attribute of people gives them the right to life, that fetuses presumably do not possess? If you can answer this question convincingly, you've solved a major philosophical conundrum.

Rights are social constructs that reflect in the abstract the moral aesthetics of a person or group of people. They are legalese attempts to condition people/society in a desirable way to a desired end. As for what gives people the right to life, it's our desire to keep people alive.

- Lack of consciousness - it's not considered ok to kill people who are asleep either.
- Lack of feeling of pain - it's not considered ok to kill people provided it's painless.
- Lack of capacity for rational thought - 1yo babies lack this capacity, but it's again not ok to kill them.

These don't really apply to potential personalities that have yet to form, just personalities that already exist. We do kill people who end up in such a state forever, kept alive by life support. The gestating human just does not matter as much to us as a real person. Later along when it's interacting with the world like a newborn would, there's a justification for considering it a patient in its own right.

Who do you save from a burning building? 50 foetuses or 1 screaming child? If the anti-abortion side are right, they will say the 50 foetuses are 50 children and should be saved. Let's be honest, though; hardly anyone really does view them as the same things. If a clinic existed down the road that killed real human babies indiscriminately the way abortion clinics abort pregnancies, I would be bombing it. If you're not doing that, I assert you do not really believe what you're saying.

The most convincing argument I've heard for abortion abandoned this nonsense and took a hard-line property rights view: the mother owns her womb and so can expel whatever she likes from it. But this also leads to awkward reductios. Suppose someone washes up on my desert island. Is it ok to throw him into the sea where he is certain to be eaten by sharks rather than wait 9 months for a supply ship to rescue him? Most people would say no, even if it's inconvenient for me to put up with him in that time. Maybe you can get a fruitbat libertarian to bite the bullet here, but not most people and certainly not the vast majority of people who actually support abortion, who tend to be rather more communitarian.

Well, the other example is if you wake up with some dude grafted to you in the night, reliant on you for sustenance. Is it okay to cut him free or be forced to support him for 9 months?

[ComradeClaus]

How do we stop this video and this intolerant moron, before any more damage could be done?

Do what the fundies do to rid youtube of atheist vids.

Flag it. Video goes.

Honest answer; flag for copyright violation. (done on youtube thousands of times a day) Video goes IMMEDIATELY. do it a couple times & boom, no more fundie channel.

At least until he makes a proxy channel. Then flag that bastard too. The fundie/atheist war on youtubez is an attritional one, one that fundies are winning through sheer persistance (& policy abuse). Even James Randi had his channel down for some time. & he was a renowned skeptic (ie mortal foe of fundies)

[SilverWingedSeraph]

How do we stop this video and this intolerant moron, before any more damage could be done?

Do what the fundies do to rid youtube of atheist vids.

Flag it. Video goes.

Honest answer; flag for copyright violation. (done on youtube thousands of times a day) Video goes IMMEDIATELY. do it a couple times & boom, no more fundie channel.

At least until he makes a proxy channel. Then flag that bastard too. The fundie/atheist war on youtubez is an attritional one, one that fundies are winning through sheer persistance (& policy abuse). Even James Randi had his channel down for some time. & he was a renowned skeptic (ie mortal foe of fundies)

You are an idiot for suggesting this even jokingly and SpaceMarine93 is an idiot if he does it. False-flagging is a low and cowardly tactic. Leave it for the fundies and creationists. People with morality should know better than to lie and abuse DMCA and flagging to silence free speech. And honestly, they shouldn't need it. When you're right and can argue the point with facts you don't need to silence people in such a cowardly manner. That's the tactic of the intellectually stunted who cannot support their stance with reason and logic.

Seriously though, fuck you, Claus.

[Torchship]

Who do you save from a burning building? 50 foetuses or 1 screaming child? If the anti-abortion side are right, they will say the 50 foetuses are 50 children and should be saved. Let's be honest, though; hardly anyone really does view them as the same things. If a clinic existed down the road that killed real human babies indiscriminately the way abortion clinics abort pregnancies, I would be bombing it. If you're not doing that, I assert you do not really believe what you're saying.

This isn't a very good way of defining whether people do or do not believe something seriously. For example, huge numbers of people believe that George Bush lied to the US population in order to start an unjust and unnecessary war which killed millions, but throughout the entire Iraq/Afghanistan debacle there were no serious plans to murder Bush. No mass demonstrations, no violence in the streets, no nothing. Is this significant chunk of the population somehow insincere in their beliefs about Bush's culpability in the deaths of millions?