JDG said: > An a honest question for you, but its a doozy, if you choose to > accept it: How is this position morally different from being > "personally opposed to the killing of Jews and counseling against > it" but ultimately not standing in the way of it?
Whilst these are not morally different if one is working from the axiom that foetuses are people, but it clearly is if one does not accept said axiom. If, for the sake of argument, one considers sufficiently undeveloped foetuses to be morally akin to non-human animals rather than people then the position would be analogous to being an evangelical vegetarian but not standing in the way of people eating meat should they choose. One might even reasonably choose a position that placed foetuses further down the scale of things worthy of moral consideration. As there is no discernible essence of human-ness, I think that any reasonable position would accept that there is *some* position along the developmental process before which abortion should not be banned. (Of course, the Nazis considered Jews to be sub-human so they would presumably make a similar argument. The difference is that foetuses are clearly not functionally equivalent to adults or even children, whereas Jews are indistinguishable except for cultural factors [and in some cases, perhaps, certain genetic markers] from other people.) I have a counter-question (or rather some counter-questions!). You clearly believe in a form of essentialism that makes human life sacrosanct. Let me assume, for the moment, that you do not believe that chimpanzees should have the same rights as people. (If you differ from this position, I can rebuild the thought experiment along slightly different lines.) Now, let's suppose that some dastardly scientist has created a whole series of foetuses that have varying amounts of human and chimpanzee genes. At one end, there's one that's 99% human and 1% chimpanzee. At the other end, there's one that's 1% human and 99% chimp. Between these extremes they vary in 1% increments. Now, which of these (if any) do you consider should be worthy of the same protection that fully human foetuses should be accorded? Which of the adults derived from these foetuses should have full human rights? What determines the position of the boundary? If you consider the answer depends on exactly which human and chimp genes are included, which factors are most important? If you say that none are worthy of being considered human, is there any degree of chimp genome (perhaps one gene or a section of introns) that could be spliced in without removing the essence of humanity? Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
