How does my opinion conflict with reality? Which of these is "in conflict with reality"? 1. The human embryo is human (this is true by definition); 2. The human embryo is innocent; 3. The human embryo is alive; 4. Murder is the intentional killing of an innocent human life.
Although "Murder is the intentional killing of an innocent human life" sounds like a reasonable definition out of context, you've presented a context in which "innocent human life" just means any human cells that you've arbitrarily judged "innocent". I'm going to guess this dodge is here because you support, or at least wish to avoid antagonising, people who believe that killing other people is a legitimate criminal punishment and so somehow it's not "murder" if the state chooses to do it. Although it's also possible you condone extra-judicial killing, with the same dodge, it's OK to torture somebody to death so long as you know, they're bad guys...
Anyway, a more reasonable definition of murder requires the victim to be a _person_ and an embryo is not a person.
Personhood is a strange phenomenon, and there's definitely room for a grey area. But embryos aren't in that grey area, not even close.
> I'm going to guess this dodge is here because you support, or at least wish to avoid antagonising, people who believe that killing other people is a legitimate criminal punishment and so somehow it's not "murder" if the state chooses to do it. Although it's also possible you condone extra-judicial killing, with the same dodge, it's OK to torture somebody to death so long as you know, they're bad guys...
I don't believe killing an embryo is murder, but this comment is a red herring. You're claiming it's possible that ¬innocent ∧ murder. But this is entirely consistent with mjh2539's claim that innocent → murder. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent.
We've drifted far off topic here, but what's happened here is you've (hopefully by mistake) mistaken human natural language for a system of logical statements.
Human utterances in natural languages have a bunch of unspoken rules, breaking the rules is something that happens periodically by accident, and enables some amusing comedy (the late Ronnie Barker's most famous work "Four Candles" is a classic example) but on the whole honest participants in a conversation are not trying to break the rules. So. One of the rules is you mustn't mention things in the utterance that are irrelevant. For example:
"I've never been to Sweden in the summer" doesn't _logically_ preclude having never been to Sweden at all, but the rule means "in the summer" shouldn't appear in this utterance unless it's relevant, so it becomes a reasonable assumption for the listener that the speaker _has_ been to Sweden in some other season.
If a person says they believe "Innocent people should not be hanged" you're correct that _logically_ this offers no opinion on whether it's fine to hang guilty people. But the rule says it _does_ carry such an opinion implicitly, if innocence wasn't important it would not be mentioned.
When somebody is being very careful to define something in terms of other words and phrases they've used, we shouldn't assume they just threw some of them in for a laugh, they must all be part of the meaning intended - otherwise we can't communicate at all, just as we can't communicate with people who insist on Humpty Dumpty's rule (a word means whatever Humpty chooses it to mean).
You were wrong (and were also being uncharitable). The reason why I phrased the definition the way I did was so that I did not preclude the possibility of killing someone who was not innocent. This includes every instance of lack of innocence, but minimally, instances of self-defense.
I found your talking about implicature patronizing.
I agree, we can't communicate with people who insist on Humpty Dumpty's rule; what you fail to recognize is that you're happy to use Humpty Dumpty's rule in regard to 'human'. You have to make recourse to odd language like 'clump of cells'. The human fetus is a human being; that is, it is a human, and it doesn't really matter that you don't want to admit what is obvious to biologists, OB/GYNs, couples trying to conceive, people in parts of the world that haven't been colonized by Westerners and their ideologies, etc.
> an embryo is not a person
> but embryos aren't in that grey area, not even close.
You're begging the question. You haven't provided any reasons or arguments for your position. You've merely re-asserted it. It's akin to saying "It's true that x, because it's true that x".
How is my judgement that an embryo is innocent arbitrary? What crime has the embryo committed? What did it do to warrant being killed?
The trouble with your position is that you have to make an arbitrary judgement. You have to arbitrarily judge the fetus to be a person at some point. Is it at 12 weeks, 6 days, 32 weeks? The day before it is born? When, exactly? What criteria are you using for making that judgement? Why not the day before? Why not a day later?
My position doesn't require making an arbitrary judgement, or answering any of those silly questions. It requires making an intuitive, simple, straightforward observation: from the very moment that the sperm and the ovum meet and the genetic material between the two is exchanged (i.e., the egg is fertilized), a new human life is formed, with its own ends and identity. If nature takes its course, the person either dies naturally and the mother miscarries, or the embryo continues to develop and is subsequently born.
Further, I'm not just designating "any human cells" as innocent. I can't just designate "any human cells" and make them develop in the way that an embryo or a fetus develop. I'm talking about a specific group of spells, easily identifiable as distinct from the cells of the mother, that act in unison and coordination with one another through pregnancy to further develop the human being that has been there from the very beginning. If that is an arbitrary grouping of human cells, then I don't see how the same point can't be made to you, or to me (simply being an arbitrary collection of human cells), but everyone would recognize that this (you are an arbitrary collection of human cells, in contrast to a fully-fledged human 'life') would be absurd.
In addition, you seem to be implying that we need to use different definitions of murder in different contexts, but I don't see that's the case. How isn't the definition I provided inclusive of every instance of murder?
Something that deeply bother me about the "pro-life" stance is its hypocrisy.
They put advertisements about "protecting life" and use "life" and "humanity" all the time in their discourse, but that have nothing to do with what they think. What they think, normally, is in the line of "in the moment of the conception an immaterial entity take hold in the zygote".
For some reason, they refuse to discuss that. They believe in an immaterial soul but they hide their real beliefs in their discussion of the issue.
Of course, I don't know if this is so in your specific case, but I know other cases where it is.
a new human life is formed, with its own ends and identity.
And completely dependent upon the mother whose body it is parasitically feeding off of and canabalizing.
The problem with pro lifers is that they completely dismiss the lives of adult women as being less valuable and less important than a single celled organism incapable of surviving on its own.
If you don't want to talk about souls or spirituality, you are saying the rights of a blob of cells supersedes that of a grown woman. I find this monstrous.
>you are saying the rights of a blob of cells supersedes that of a grown woman.
There are many ways to philosophically argue against a 'life begins at fertilization' position. I don't know why you feel the need to assume things that were not said.
To me, this is not a philosophical argument. That is the de facto outcome of such a position. If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own.
Why? Determining what is and isn't life is based on human reasoning, judgement, and morality. Have you found an alternate approach that was somehow missed by everyone else? :)
>If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own.
Perhaps you missed the stem cell therapy treatment context that was being discussed. We're only talking about embryos, not pregnancy.
Assertion #1 is problematic here. As best I can parse it, you are saying, the human embryo is [of human origin]. That is very different from "the human embryo is a human." Most scientists and non-religious scholars and philosophers would disagree with the latter statement.
Assertion #3 is also problematic. You need a definition of alive that is both non-arbitrary and does not include skin cells, cancer cells (which can reproduce indefinitely), etc.
Assertion #4 is very interesting, and I think has been well-treated by other commentators.
Basically, you have asserted a syllogistic like statement that completely falls apart when examined closely. The attempt to save it by asserting that assertion number 1 is true by definition does not work. Assertion number 1 is only true by definition for trivial interpretations of assertion #1 (i.e., the human embryo is a collection of human cells).
