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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (37162)	11/16/2001 11:21:34 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

Thanks for the rational response. Let me play devil's advocate for a bit, recognizing that my own views on this issue are in flux and development. To be human requires the capacity for independent thought. That's perhaps a bit dangerous -- do you truly think that a three day old baby is really capable of independent thought? If you say "it has the capacity, but hasn't learned how to use it yet," I will question that, but if I accept it I think you also have to accept the same response as to the one week old fetus. And also, we have to worry about people who are born without any capacity for independent thought. Are they not humans? What about people in long term comas -- not human? I think your test is difficult to apply at the fringes, which is where any test really matters. So, life begins only when the foetus is no longer dependent for all its needs on the host. Then, outside the womb, it may beclassed and treated as human. Well, orf course a newborn baby is still totally dependent; if not cared for it will die. The difference is that others can substitute for the mother. But total dependence can't be a criteria of human-ness. (And take the baby who depends on a machine to breathe for it, or maybe even pump its blood. Still completely dependent. Human or non-human???) I admit that I'm working on the edges of your definition. But that is where the defining line of human and non-human always takes place. There has never in the course of history, as far as I am aware, in the minds of genetially "normal" heterosexual free white adult healthy self-reliant males, been any question but that they are fully human. It's when you move away from that group of people that you start to get, at various times throughout history, questions about whether this or that group deserves the full protections of complete humanness. And as you move further from the "center" (I use that term as a convenience, not as a judgment) and get closer to the fringes that the questions get harder and harder for increasing numbers of people.