When do a sperm and egg begin to have rights?
Just wondering what the general consensus of everyone is. Feel free to explain your choice if yuo’d like.
The most reasonable decision is this: when it has a functioning nervous system. This theory eliminates all the esoteric bullshit questions like “when does the spirit enter it” and “when is it a human being.” These questions are difficult to answer so they shouldn’t be asked.
We could also argue “philosophically” that shared languaged is what determines a mutual “moral” awareness with another animal. That the extent of the ethical possibilites between two animals consists of the limits of the known and shared terms. Because of this stipulation, this shouldn’t be asked either.
It is only safe to assume that sentient life begins when it can experience pain and pleasure, and we get as close as we can to determining that with our sciences. When the brain and spinal cord develops in the fetus…it should be considered “alive” and granted moral rights, because it has awareness of external stimuli that cause sensations in it. Despite our inability to communicate in language with it or know when a “spirit” enters the body, we can assume it feels things similiar to us.
That’s about all you can do in politics right now. If reproduction was controlled, I might add, the majority of abortion wouldn’t be happening. Hey, there’s an idea. Stop allowing the possibility of the dilemma itself.
We need a new eugenics program.
All those in favor?
Word.
…and a good response from Mr. Mears. Thought provoking, exciting, informative, and sincere.
Thank you Scott. You may sit down.
…
Would anyone else like to offer a response?
Oh wait, I forgot. American freedom and the right to be sexually active as soon as possible and start your own family whenever you want, is something we cherish:
Detrop, let me know if you’re not actually laughing yet. I’ll work harder if not, (like the horse in animal farm).
I know a guy who has had around six kids with two seperate wives, and he gets welfare checks of a certain amount for each child. He does this on purpose so he can spend the money conservatively and use the rest for entertainment or things not related to his children directly.
So essentially he is having children to get money from the government because he doesn’t have enough money to responsibly have children?
K, that makes a lotta sense. How innovative for democracy, to fix its own problems like that. I jest.
I’m sure this is done frequently in lower-class parents, and I think the system is not successful in discouraging this from happening. If anything, it promotes it, because the amount of money recieved can exceed what is necessary, since bills and living costs differ significantly among classes, and even equal an average wage which would be made by a person of that class. Shit, its cheaper and easier for this guy to just keep having kids then actually get a job.
He owns a broken down house near my father’s land in Virginia. It needs several repairs. Whenever I drive by, there are at least four dirty little kids playing in the yard. He has ty-vek over a few windows and some rooms in the house are dirt-floors.
Cases like this make me supportive of the idea of regulating reproduction.
I saw a bumper sticker that said “If you can’t feed em, don’t breed em.” Brilliant. I’m all about some forced sterilization. What about this…
When a person applies for welfare, they can list the dependents that they have at the time of application, but they can never add another dependent after that. Make TV commercials so that everyone can know that this is the rule. No excuses. You can either get the money and take care of the ones that you have, or you can have more kids then suffer and be poor.
I am always laughing, if even with tears.
If I may speak with Fritz for a moment: “he who laughs last, wins.”
Agree?
There are three central metaphorical themes which were created in the first Greek arts and literature. The tragedy, the comedy, and the absurd. The philological history of art and aesthetic culture is based around these three metaphors in drama.
It is my opinion that the greatest of the three is the comedy, because it is a synthesis of the former two. The last phase after passing through a tragic reaction to existence and mortality, the melancholic respite to the humorous with the attempt of saving face. The tragic is right behind the comical because the sarcastic and ironic elements involved in the expression of humor are a result of being bothered with a fate of some kind…a tragic fate, a mistake, accident, a folly…the things that are “funny” to us if we gain control of them with the synthesis of the absurd.
The absurd is the simultaneous awareness of meaninglessness, the attempt at justifying it, and the final movement into poetic romantic skepticism, or the comedian.
The comedian is the last stage or disposition toward existence. It represents the greatest intellectual position in theory and in philosophy because it is not a struggling phase, or a reactionary phase, or a passive phase.
The comedian wins over everyone, because the former two classes are always dialectic and in opposition to each other. The comedian has no opposer because each other class is his subject, and the content of the subject is the satirical emphasis and parody of the afflictions of the other classes. Mockery, in this form, is excellent for seducing the tragic into the comic.
So the comedian is like a synthesis of humiliation and hermeneutic strength.
There can only be at the end, a last laugh. Everyone alive deserves that right.
When it is viable outside the womb, untill then it is a parasite on the mother, and she can do whatever she wants with it.
[ahem]
The fetus did not ask to be evolved into a pain feeling creature which could be terminated by the creator on a whim who made him/her without their permission.
That’s a deontological ethical fallacy. Or it is now, since I made it up. No. The animal must be granted rights, per the creators mistake in having the child, at the expense of the mother’s well being.
The fetus must live on if it has a functioning nervous system. I’m sorry.
You are murderers. All of you. And you should be ashamed of failing to observe the deontological ethical principle present in the conditions of being born without contract, and as a result of another living things mistakes.
Murder seems like a strong word. I doubt the fetus could testify against you anyway. I mean, why not just get it taken care of in a basement somewhere by a mad scientist who performs abortions in exchange for stem cells. Everyone wins! (as long as you don’t count the fetus)
If functioning nervous system is the end all be all of ethical status, then every mammal on earth fits the bill.
Anyway, the ethical status of the fetus is irrelevant untill it is viable, as the mothers right to control her body fiats it.
So your premise is as I suspected. Moral evaluations and judgements can only be made where there is a shared language?
If a moral truth is merely a matter of agreement, there will always be difficulties because of its reliance on opinions and preferences which parade as intersubjective moral truths. You can’t do this. I keep telling the Davidsons that triangulation cannot validate real truth.
We must depend solely on our science, Mr. Mears, and we must cease from using the authority of nonsensical dilemmas such as “what is the context of murder”.
When a living thing experiences external stimuli, it is granted universal rights as a living thing. If it is not, I think the decision is irrational when the people who caused it were not responsible. There is an unspoken contract between fetus and mother; she owes him life because she is throwing him into it as an act of her choice and will, without his/her consent.
I stand by my decision.
I was thinking of the legal definition of murder, (from Black’s dictionary).
Who grants these universal rights to living things?
Doesn’t a contract require an exchange of promises (to simplify) between the parties involved?
Are unenforcable rights real?
I disagree. It is up to the state to control individual bodies. Where there is no regulation of the quality of reproduction, citizens of a lower and therefore dangerous class have a right to reproduce when the conditions for it are not appropriate.
When a person becomes pregnant, both parties involved are responsible, and this responsibility should be enforced on the individuals by the state. By providing a means to solve the problem at the expense of unknown speculation in philosophy concerning when it becomes an ethical issue, the system is in effect “cheating” since it is responsibile for the “having to risk” making that decision, a decision that is passed as ethically sound.
The deciding feature is not “if and when the fetus is no longer dependent on the mother’s body”, because this neglects to acknowledge that the fetus can feel pain, and therefore shares the same characteristic as the mother.
The qualification, then, of “alive” is not a matter of one body or two, but of which bodies are feeling pain and are therefore “ethical.”
All ethics begin in the mutual agreement to spare another pain if possible. It was always easier to prevent conflict than it was to be successful by it. This was noticed after a degree of suffering; the first axiom is to avoid pain of any form. Politics centers around this mutual respect between species related animals and language speakers.
The government should have the power to grant those rights. Rights are determined by power, not by consent or agreement on “moral objectivity.”
A contract is supposedly an agreement to exchange services or commodites, but its history is contraversial. After a feudalism period, citizens lose their property and are forced to sell their labour to the king, to survive. This is the first form of real capitalization from class labor force, but it isn’t democratic, it is monarchistic.
Next nationalities buy, or barter, from a king, land plots and resources. This is imperialism. The lower class, which consists of workers who lost their private resources to a king, are used by the new monopoly system for competing with markets. The demographic statistics change, people move around the world, and finally a true capitalism begins with the advent of technology.
The history of the contract always revolved around property agreements first, then around “units of labor” once labor force became a commodity and was represented by currency. Currency is the symbolic representation of surplus labor power…profit which exists from something previously produced as a commodity.
No, nothing ethical is a prior to the historical circumstances. They are always a matter of political decision and the judge of rights is the group with the most power.
Given how thin the line between human and animal is (if such a line can be said to exist at all), I think that talking about how developed the nervous system is or the ability to suffer, ect. ends up creating more problems that it solves unless the advocate is a radical member of PETA.
It is incredibly difficult to provide a scientific definition of ‘life’ within the abortion debate, since our sperm and eggs are quite alive. They are the haploid portion of human existence. Ours is a short period, but in brewer’s yeast (for example) that paradigm is reversed and they spend most of their lives in the haploid portion and a very brief portion in the diploid state. So, if we are to talk about ‘life’ then we are all murderers by our very existence. Not just through male masterbation, nor through menstruation. No. Even successfully reproductive sex itself is murder on a grand scale since millions of sperm die, and eggs exist in a cohort where roughly twenty of them die so that one may live.
So, I think it is better instead to turn our sights to philosophy to answer this question since scientific explanations invite far more problems than they solve. That means we need a (philosophical) definition of humanity as opposed to life that happens to be human. Now, philosophies are like assholes, but I’ll present this dude’s asshole:
As understood by this dude (who, despite how this picture makes him look, is not only not mentally retarded, but is actually one of the greatest philosophers alive):
And define the self as a: “Social, relational self: we are nothing apart from our social relations, and our interdependency extends into the immediate world and beyond.”
Now, (here is where I get to moon you guys. I hope my butt looks younger, if nothing else, than my predecessors) if I were to apply this to the abortion debate, I would say that even if we consider the foetus to have a social relationship with the mother (kicking as communication?), an abortion is no more serious than ending a friendship with someone.
And if the government tells me who I can and cannot be friends with . . . well, my totalitarian dreams will have come true, but unless that happens, it would suggest that something was very, very rotten in the state of Denmark.
As for the issue of ‘rights’, I agree with Henry Rosemont Jr., “My own skepticism is directed not toward any particular moral or political theory in which rights play a role, but toward the more foundational view of human beings as free, autonomous individuals on which all such theories more or less rest. The study of classical Confucianism has suggested to me that rights-oriented moral and political theories based on this view are flawed, and that a different vocabulary for moral and political discourse is needed. The concept of human rights and related concepts clustered around it, like liberty, the individual, property, autonomy, freedom, reason, choice, and so on, do not capture what it is we [Confucians] believe to be the inherent sociality of human beings . . .”
If a right cannot be enforced, then it most certainly doesn’t exist.
I’m quite certain that if a fetus feels pain during an abortion, it will be significantly less pain that it would feel over it’s lifetime had it not been aborted.
As for this sentient thing, if you’re going to use it, you need to recognize that the same arguments can be used for any animal.
As for this biological imperative thing, reproduction is no longer biologically necessary for any given human, we are at an advanced enough stage with our societies that we can maintain the popluation based off choice reproduction or luxury reproduction.
Infact, perhaps it is reversed, we should be urging people to not have children. Yes, if there was an organization that promoted abortion to people who were not ready or did not want children, I would join. I would not at all be opposed to parents giving their children Hormone-releasing intrauterine devices when they turn 16 or so.
Well just, on a similar note.
many belief that the upon the instant of fertilization of the egg by the sperm, a soul is created. a single soul.
What happens with identicle twins?
do they posses half a soul each?