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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (20802)	7/1/2005 11:55:37 AM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

The arguments so far have centered around markers that are 'arbitrary', 'developmental', 'biological', 'potential', and 'scriptural'. I believe we eliminated scriptural (even though there occassional reference to religion seems to keep popping up) arguments for the sake of establishing materially, definable qualifications. The notion of property seems to be getting wedged in as a matter of when and how rights could be considered. Are we not able to define what qualifies as human prior to when or how that human would be naturally entitled to rights, or are these concepts entangled?

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (20802)	7/1/2005 3:11:51 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

then your picking any point prior to that does not logically follow from your standard. There are plenty of arbitrary legal milestones, for example turning 21 in my state lets you buy drinks, but even 1 hour earlier lands you in jail. Statutory rape laws have an even more extreme distinction in milestones. One of the reasons that birth is a good milestone to pick is that it does come before the self awareness. So, a severely mentally disabled, but otherwise apparently human, being who never develops the mental capacity for some vague notion of self-awareness (you never did say how you define that) is not, by your standard, human? I think the Terry Schievo case covered the issue pretty well. Even after self-awareness develops, if it later goes away then so does the rights and privledges that come with self awareness. It's too easy to dance around words to try to say that this person was human but is not now human, that is not a useful approach. Too many people try to "trick" the argument by using differing implied definitions for human (is it the soul or the dna that makes us human) or different definitions for life. I believe this fallacy of argument is called Equivocation and is just a waste of effort. TP