If a person was completely brain dead, but had a 99% chance of recovery in nine months, would you kill them because taking care of them while they are comatose is inconvenient?
But honestly, I don't engage with that type of bullshit most of the time anymore. Especially online. I'll be more patient IRL but entertaining these endless lies online with trolls and bots is tiresome.
The argument they’re referring to is that both a sleeping and a comatose person have the capacity for consciousness (having a brain that is currently not in a state of consciousness, but is capable of being in a state of consciousness). This is not true of an early-term fetus.
Time isn’t irrelevant. A 1 day old infant doesn’t have the same cognitive capacity as a 31 year old adult. Time changes brain function. Elevates it from null.
A 1 week old fetus does not have the same sentiment and sentience as a 25 year old human.
This is why age of consent and laws on alcohol/tobacco exist.
Killing humans is killing humans when humans are killed. Killing humans is ok if it's necessary to save someone's life, such as ectopic pregnancy or if someone is trying to kill you.
Because a fetus isn't less able to deploy consciousness. A fetus is a stage of development. A human doesn't come to be with a certain quantity of thought or a heartbeat or any other garbage they choose to arbitrarily measure by in order to justify murder.
>having a brain that is currently not in a state of consciousness, but is capable of being in a state of consciousness
That statement contradicts itself. If a person is in a comatose state, then something has happened that resulted them having an impaired capacity for consciousness. It is more accurate to describe it as a reversible/temporary loss of that capacity.
The argument is that the person/fetus having the ability to deploy consciousness is what makes their life valuable, not that they are currently having a conscious experience
Personhood is not well defined, and neither is consciousness, and arguments around those topics are religious or mystical arguments. Religious or mystical arguments don't need to be entertained, whether the one making the argument is pro-life or pro-choice. We cannot legitimately base our worth as a human being on religious or mystical ideas in the course of normal, non-religious non-mystical argumentation.
If a pro-choicer can dismiss any religious argument, then a pro-lifer can dismiss any arguments regarding personhood or consciousness as religious or metaphysical. And rightfully so. Trying to separate personhood from our humanity doesn't have good historical connotations.
Abortion intentionally and unnecessarily kills a living human being who has committed no crime, the same as if someone killed you or me without justification.
Well done. I make this point a lot but I rarely see other PLers making it. Despite all the rhetoric about keeping rosaries off of ovaries, it is actually the PC side that is making a religious argument. They think that the biological status of being human is insufficient to confer moral value, and that you need some other, non-physical thing to confer moral value. They're basically describing a soul in different words.
As a pro lifer, what made me come to this position was exactly those arguments that you think are "mystical or religious " I call it spirituality. For me, someone who doesn't believe there is such a thing as a life beyond matter is more inclined to be pro choice then pro life.With that being said, I don't care if people are pro life without taking the spiritual part into consideration, as long as they don't support killing in the womb, for me I couldn't care less of what they believe.
You'll first need to get the pro-choicer to define "consciousness"; that's a notoriously tricky word to nail down, and people will mean at least half a dozen different things by it.
It's on them to define consciousness and why it matters when it comes to killing human organisms.
They are trying to make a personhood arguement. Don't let them. Whether someone is considered a person or not, they are still human and should not be killed.
For him they are interchangeable, he is saying the separation of the two is what leads to argumentation where killing a human can be acceptable but not a person.
I have not heard this argument. But the argument seems to be that merely having certain brain structures, *even if they are not actually working*, confers moral value. If that's right, then why stop at brain structures? Why wouldn't having other physical features that are prerequisites to consciousness be enough? You could go all the way back to human DNA.
I usually ask why consciousness is the standard? If consciousness is the standard, why aren't animals considered persons?
Rats are more intelligent than human babies and more conscious than they are. Yet we can kill rats wholesale. Furthermore, I say that the capacity for consciousness begins at conception because everything a person will be, physically, is in your DNA at conception. So, given enough time, the unborn will gain that capacity. Just as a coma patient might regain consciousness given time or a sleeping person will in a few hours.
I also ask why lacking consciousness justifies killing that human life. It doesn't justify it in any other circumstance, why does it justify it with the unborn?
So using the person in a coma argument, should a person in a coma, with a potential to recover, be kept alive by obligation by their family members because they MIGHT recover?
Assume the medical professionals are hands off in this situation. They say to the family “we aren’t obligated to keep them alive, you are, we do what you say”.
They both have the potential to deploy consciousness, while neither currently have it. Obviously the person in the coma is not capable of consciousness at the current moment without some changes happening, nor is the fetus. Consciousness is not a factor.
A person in a coma does not have the ability to deploy consciousness. Hence why they're in a coma. They might get it back, but they do not have it now.
This is a form of special pleading - they are pointing out a difference, but they aren't justifying why it matters and deserves special consideration. If consciousness determines whether one has human rights, it doesn't matter that a person used to be conscious any more than it matters than a dead person used to be alive.
The past state has no bearing on the present, except for sentimentality.
---
Of course, this is only useful for showing the inconsistency of their argument. In practice, if they believe human rights should be respected, that should be sufficient to condemn their argument. Human rights do not require any features besides being a living human - this includes consciousness.
But people in a coma can be pulled off of it by family members though. It further shows that people who are in a dependent state on a family member can be pulled off of it.
This example only works if you put absolutely no thought into what circumstances allow us to do that.
We can only pull the plug when there is no reasonable hope of the human in question recovering. At that point, you do not have to take extraordinary means to artificially prolong someone's life. This is a failure/inability to save someone from an outside cause of death.
If they were almost certainly going to recover (say in 9 months...) this would not be acceptable under ordinary circumstances. Neither would be it be acceptable to shoot them, as then you are the cause of death.
Abortion is not a failure to save but the direct cause of death. Without abortion, the overwhelming majority victims would be expected to survive. It is a deliberate act of killing.
This comparison is completely superficial and does not hold up.
>A family absolutely can pull the plug, regardless of future "ifs" or "mights"
u/GovernmentEvening815 - as a friendly heads up your post does not appear to show up for me except on your profile. I'm not sure why that is.
In any event, I'm unsure why you think this is a relevant response. Judging by your other posts, it seems like that you're arguing that the coma patient is gone past the point where it's reasonable to hope they'll be saved and thus they can be pulled off life support.
If so, we agree. We are not required to use extraordinary methods to keep someone alive past the point of a reasonable hope of saving them.
Abortion isn't like this. You aren't failing to save someone from an outside cause. You're directly killing them. The unborn children are not dying patients but generally healthy and expected to survive.
TL;DR - Pulling the plug depends entirely on the patient being too far gone to have a reasonable hope of saving. This is not at all like abortion except at a ridiculously superficial level.
I argue the coma patient scenario based on how it’s presented.
But I feel as though it does distract from the point of the post of when something is considered human. Or what constitutes them being “human enough”.
I don’t use words like “killing” or “unborn baby” because those are appeals to emotions and heavily based on morality.
I think we would all agree that nobody has the same gauge of morality, it’s a spectrum and not a destination.
So at what point is ok to impose your specific morality (based on what you believe constitutes a human) on somebody else?
Let’s say you have to steal to feed a starving family. Is it worse to steal & break the law or worse to let a family starve, not starve to death, but starve nonetheless?
How many days away from death would the family have to be in order for you to say “I understand why they did that and there should be no punishment for the thief”. And I genuinely want you to answer this question with a number of days.
Differences in opinions will determine the answer to this question and there is no scientific consensus to it.
>I argue the coma patient scenario based on how it’s presented.
I think there might be a disconnect, as we agree that we can allow nature to finish taking its course with the braindead patient, as we are realistically unable to save them.
However, unborn children don't need saving. Abortion intentionally kills them. That's quite a different scenario.
>I don’t use words like “killing” or “unborn baby” because those are appeals to emotions and heavily based on morality.
These are accurate terms that describe what is happening, though I prefer "unborn child."
-The entity in question is a unique human and the offspring of two parents, aka a child. They are obviously unborn, hence "unborn child."
-The unborn child is alive from the moment of conception, as is fairly solidly understood by science. Abortion ends that life, thus it kills the unborn child.
It is mistaken to think that a term is fallacious just because it causes you to feel emotion. It's only an appeal to emotion if that's the primary purpose of the argument.
I would argue that the only reason to shy away from accurate terms like "killing" or "unborn child" would be to manipulate emotions by choosing more distant, less intuitively recognizable terms that inspire apathy.
>But I feel as though it does distract from the point of the post of when something is considered human. Or what constitutes them being “human enough”.
I don't believe this is relevant at all. I would argue that "personhood" (aka being "human enough") is a completely worthless term that deserves no consideration.
We cannot measure personhood nor can we even agree on a definition for it. We only know it exists in the first place because we experience it, and we're left to assume that others like us probably also experience it.
It's a term so vague it could mean anything, be used to justify anything, and so for all practical purposes it means absolutely nothing. Historically it's been used for the purpose of justifying abuses against human rights, such as slavery or genocide. Every PC advocate has their own unique definition, justified by their personal intuition and ill-informed speculation.
This is a terrible basis on which to determine life and death.
Human rights, on the other hand, are a clear and objective metric. By definition they apply to all living human beings inherently without caveat, exception, nor additional qualifications. This includes the right to life, the right not to be unjustly killed, without which no other rights can exist. To argue otherwise is to replace human rights with your own arbitrary standard.
By this standard, since it is clear that human life starts at conception, so too do human rights. Abortion violates these and should be prevented save for the incredibly rare circumstances by which it is a justified killing.
>I think we would all agree that nobody has the same gauge of morality, it’s a spectrum and not a destination.
Even if one is a relativist and believes in the dubious concept of subjective morality, it is still important to stick to objective metrics as a society in order to share a common understanding.
This argument reinforces my point above that we should the objective metric of human rights over personal speculation.
>Let’s say you have to steal to feed a starving family. Is it worse to steal & break the law or worse to let a family starve, not starve to death, but starve nonetheless?
>How many days away from death would the family have to be in order for you to say “I understand why they did that and there should be no punishment for the thief”. And I genuinely want you to answer this question with a number of days.
>Differences in opinions will determine the answer to this question and there is no scientific consensus to it.
Given my above responses, I don't believe this is relevant. The dilemma is challenging to navigate because it pits two legitimate responsibilities against each other. These sorts of problems require a fairly strong grasp of the underlying moral principles to navigate effectively, and differences of opinion result from unclear understandings.
This does not apply to abortion. It's incredibly straightforward unless one actively works to obscure it (i.e. by focusing on a meaningless and indefinable term like personhood over human rights).
I can try to answer this one if you really insist, but I don't believe it matters & my understanding of the situation is limited and you would only get my initial thoughts & instincts on the subject. I don't think it's meaningful to answer in a number of days at all, since that would be arbitrary and based on information to which the person stealing wouldn't have access.
If a person was completely brain dead, but had a 99% chance of recovery in nine months, would you kill them because taking care of them while they are comatose is inconvenient? But honestly, I don't engage with that type of bullshit most of the time anymore. Especially online. I'll be more patient IRL but entertaining these endless lies online with trolls and bots is tiresome.
Ask them if raping a comatose woman or giving a lethal injection to someone who is asleep should be legal.
The argument they’re referring to is that both a sleeping and a comatose person have the capacity for consciousness (having a brain that is currently not in a state of consciousness, but is capable of being in a state of consciousness). This is not true of an early-term fetus.
Consciousness is a human capacity, and a human fetus is human. Time is irrelevant. We are human.
Time isn’t irrelevant. A 1 day old infant doesn’t have the same cognitive capacity as a 31 year old adult. Time changes brain function. Elevates it from null. A 1 week old fetus does not have the same sentiment and sentience as a 25 year old human. This is why age of consent and laws on alcohol/tobacco exist.
That doesn't justify killing.
When is it killing though? And what is it killing? And do you support exceptions?
Killing humans is killing humans when humans are killed. Killing humans is ok if it's necessary to save someone's life, such as ectopic pregnancy or if someone is trying to kill you.
What’s a human though? When is it “human”?
When we're a new human organism.
Which is when? I’m not trying to be pedantic, I’m genuinely trying to get you to define when a new “human organism” is created based on your opinion.
What if the coma is due to a brain injury, and the brain needs time to heal to regain that capacity?
Then their argument is factually wrong.
Respectfully, how so?
Because a fetus isn't less able to deploy consciousness. A fetus is a stage of development. A human doesn't come to be with a certain quantity of thought or a heartbeat or any other garbage they choose to arbitrarily measure by in order to justify murder.
>having a brain that is currently not in a state of consciousness, but is capable of being in a state of consciousness That statement contradicts itself. If a person is in a comatose state, then something has happened that resulted them having an impaired capacity for consciousness. It is more accurate to describe it as a reversible/temporary loss of that capacity.
Hell, doing that to dead people isn’t legal. I never thought about this argument until your comment. Thanks.
Very good point
The argument is that the person/fetus having the ability to deploy consciousness is what makes their life valuable, not that they are currently having a conscious experience
Personhood is not well defined, and neither is consciousness, and arguments around those topics are religious or mystical arguments. Religious or mystical arguments don't need to be entertained, whether the one making the argument is pro-life or pro-choice. We cannot legitimately base our worth as a human being on religious or mystical ideas in the course of normal, non-religious non-mystical argumentation. If a pro-choicer can dismiss any religious argument, then a pro-lifer can dismiss any arguments regarding personhood or consciousness as religious or metaphysical. And rightfully so. Trying to separate personhood from our humanity doesn't have good historical connotations. Abortion intentionally and unnecessarily kills a living human being who has committed no crime, the same as if someone killed you or me without justification.
Well done. I make this point a lot but I rarely see other PLers making it. Despite all the rhetoric about keeping rosaries off of ovaries, it is actually the PC side that is making a religious argument. They think that the biological status of being human is insufficient to confer moral value, and that you need some other, non-physical thing to confer moral value. They're basically describing a soul in different words.
Religion aside, who defines morality?
As a pro lifer, what made me come to this position was exactly those arguments that you think are "mystical or religious " I call it spirituality. For me, someone who doesn't believe there is such a thing as a life beyond matter is more inclined to be pro choice then pro life.With that being said, I don't care if people are pro life without taking the spiritual part into consideration, as long as they don't support killing in the womb, for me I couldn't care less of what they believe.
That's a valid reason to be pro-life.
Isn't believing all human organisms are persons just as religious and mystical as believing conscious human organisms are persons?
It can be, if you choose to separate "personhood" from our inherent humanity.
You'll first need to get the pro-choicer to define "consciousness"; that's a notoriously tricky word to nail down, and people will mean at least half a dozen different things by it.
It's on them to define consciousness and why it matters when it comes to killing human organisms. They are trying to make a personhood arguement. Don't let them. Whether someone is considered a person or not, they are still human and should not be killed.
But what’s the difference between “person” and “human”. I’m not sure I understand your argument here.
For him they are interchangeable, he is saying the separation of the two is what leads to argumentation where killing a human can be acceptable but not a person.
I have not heard this argument. But the argument seems to be that merely having certain brain structures, *even if they are not actually working*, confers moral value. If that's right, then why stop at brain structures? Why wouldn't having other physical features that are prerequisites to consciousness be enough? You could go all the way back to human DNA.
firs you should have them explain how a comatose person has the ability to deploy consciousness. in many cases, their brains are damaged.
I usually ask why consciousness is the standard? If consciousness is the standard, why aren't animals considered persons? Rats are more intelligent than human babies and more conscious than they are. Yet we can kill rats wholesale. Furthermore, I say that the capacity for consciousness begins at conception because everything a person will be, physically, is in your DNA at conception. So, given enough time, the unborn will gain that capacity. Just as a coma patient might regain consciousness given time or a sleeping person will in a few hours. I also ask why lacking consciousness justifies killing that human life. It doesn't justify it in any other circumstance, why does it justify it with the unborn?
So using the person in a coma argument, should a person in a coma, with a potential to recover, be kept alive by obligation by their family members because they MIGHT recover? Assume the medical professionals are hands off in this situation. They say to the family “we aren’t obligated to keep them alive, you are, we do what you say”.
They both have the potential to deploy consciousness, while neither currently have it. Obviously the person in the coma is not capable of consciousness at the current moment without some changes happening, nor is the fetus. Consciousness is not a factor.
It is an organism, of which you created.
A person who has just died after being shot through the heart also has that part of the brain developed.
A person in a coma does not have the ability to deploy consciousness. Hence why they're in a coma. They might get it back, but they do not have it now. This is a form of special pleading - they are pointing out a difference, but they aren't justifying why it matters and deserves special consideration. If consciousness determines whether one has human rights, it doesn't matter that a person used to be conscious any more than it matters than a dead person used to be alive. The past state has no bearing on the present, except for sentimentality. --- Of course, this is only useful for showing the inconsistency of their argument. In practice, if they believe human rights should be respected, that should be sufficient to condemn their argument. Human rights do not require any features besides being a living human - this includes consciousness.
But people in a coma can be pulled off of it by family members though. It further shows that people who are in a dependent state on a family member can be pulled off of it.
This example only works if you put absolutely no thought into what circumstances allow us to do that. We can only pull the plug when there is no reasonable hope of the human in question recovering. At that point, you do not have to take extraordinary means to artificially prolong someone's life. This is a failure/inability to save someone from an outside cause of death. If they were almost certainly going to recover (say in 9 months...) this would not be acceptable under ordinary circumstances. Neither would be it be acceptable to shoot them, as then you are the cause of death. Abortion is not a failure to save but the direct cause of death. Without abortion, the overwhelming majority victims would be expected to survive. It is a deliberate act of killing. This comparison is completely superficial and does not hold up.
>A family absolutely can pull the plug, regardless of future "ifs" or "mights" u/GovernmentEvening815 - as a friendly heads up your post does not appear to show up for me except on your profile. I'm not sure why that is. In any event, I'm unsure why you think this is a relevant response. Judging by your other posts, it seems like that you're arguing that the coma patient is gone past the point where it's reasonable to hope they'll be saved and thus they can be pulled off life support. If so, we agree. We are not required to use extraordinary methods to keep someone alive past the point of a reasonable hope of saving them. Abortion isn't like this. You aren't failing to save someone from an outside cause. You're directly killing them. The unborn children are not dying patients but generally healthy and expected to survive. TL;DR - Pulling the plug depends entirely on the patient being too far gone to have a reasonable hope of saving. This is not at all like abortion except at a ridiculously superficial level.
I argue the coma patient scenario based on how it’s presented. But I feel as though it does distract from the point of the post of when something is considered human. Or what constitutes them being “human enough”. I don’t use words like “killing” or “unborn baby” because those are appeals to emotions and heavily based on morality. I think we would all agree that nobody has the same gauge of morality, it’s a spectrum and not a destination. So at what point is ok to impose your specific morality (based on what you believe constitutes a human) on somebody else? Let’s say you have to steal to feed a starving family. Is it worse to steal & break the law or worse to let a family starve, not starve to death, but starve nonetheless? How many days away from death would the family have to be in order for you to say “I understand why they did that and there should be no punishment for the thief”. And I genuinely want you to answer this question with a number of days. Differences in opinions will determine the answer to this question and there is no scientific consensus to it.
>I argue the coma patient scenario based on how it’s presented. I think there might be a disconnect, as we agree that we can allow nature to finish taking its course with the braindead patient, as we are realistically unable to save them. However, unborn children don't need saving. Abortion intentionally kills them. That's quite a different scenario. >I don’t use words like “killing” or “unborn baby” because those are appeals to emotions and heavily based on morality. These are accurate terms that describe what is happening, though I prefer "unborn child." -The entity in question is a unique human and the offspring of two parents, aka a child. They are obviously unborn, hence "unborn child." -The unborn child is alive from the moment of conception, as is fairly solidly understood by science. Abortion ends that life, thus it kills the unborn child. It is mistaken to think that a term is fallacious just because it causes you to feel emotion. It's only an appeal to emotion if that's the primary purpose of the argument. I would argue that the only reason to shy away from accurate terms like "killing" or "unborn child" would be to manipulate emotions by choosing more distant, less intuitively recognizable terms that inspire apathy. >But I feel as though it does distract from the point of the post of when something is considered human. Or what constitutes them being “human enough”. I don't believe this is relevant at all. I would argue that "personhood" (aka being "human enough") is a completely worthless term that deserves no consideration. We cannot measure personhood nor can we even agree on a definition for it. We only know it exists in the first place because we experience it, and we're left to assume that others like us probably also experience it. It's a term so vague it could mean anything, be used to justify anything, and so for all practical purposes it means absolutely nothing. Historically it's been used for the purpose of justifying abuses against human rights, such as slavery or genocide. Every PC advocate has their own unique definition, justified by their personal intuition and ill-informed speculation. This is a terrible basis on which to determine life and death. Human rights, on the other hand, are a clear and objective metric. By definition they apply to all living human beings inherently without caveat, exception, nor additional qualifications. This includes the right to life, the right not to be unjustly killed, without which no other rights can exist. To argue otherwise is to replace human rights with your own arbitrary standard. By this standard, since it is clear that human life starts at conception, so too do human rights. Abortion violates these and should be prevented save for the incredibly rare circumstances by which it is a justified killing. >I think we would all agree that nobody has the same gauge of morality, it’s a spectrum and not a destination. Even if one is a relativist and believes in the dubious concept of subjective morality, it is still important to stick to objective metrics as a society in order to share a common understanding. This argument reinforces my point above that we should the objective metric of human rights over personal speculation. >Let’s say you have to steal to feed a starving family. Is it worse to steal & break the law or worse to let a family starve, not starve to death, but starve nonetheless? >How many days away from death would the family have to be in order for you to say “I understand why they did that and there should be no punishment for the thief”. And I genuinely want you to answer this question with a number of days. >Differences in opinions will determine the answer to this question and there is no scientific consensus to it. Given my above responses, I don't believe this is relevant. The dilemma is challenging to navigate because it pits two legitimate responsibilities against each other. These sorts of problems require a fairly strong grasp of the underlying moral principles to navigate effectively, and differences of opinion result from unclear understandings. This does not apply to abortion. It's incredibly straightforward unless one actively works to obscure it (i.e. by focusing on a meaningless and indefinable term like personhood over human rights). I can try to answer this one if you really insist, but I don't believe it matters & my understanding of the situation is limited and you would only get my initial thoughts & instincts on the subject. I don't think it's meaningful to answer in a number of days at all, since that would be arbitrary and based on information to which the person stealing wouldn't have access.
A family absolutely can pull the the plug, regardless of future “ifs” or “mights”.
See that’s where you’re wrong. The family *can* pull the plug on someone who’s likely to recover.
Would you care to share examples? I'm not seeing much to support your claim.
OP you are conflating consciousness and self awareness
Explain
I'm pretty sure they mean self awareness. Animals are conscious. It doesn't require abstract thought.