So if the unborn is not human what is it? A Tomato? Who determines what human life deserves protection and what does not? Why should ANYONE have that right???
The question is: does something being human automatically make it a person? Again, on the face of it, you are capable of noticing that a collection of human skin cells, by themselves, are not a person. You can notice that a leg, or an arm, is not a person, even though there are plenty of human cells in them. Someone can even lose their legs and their arms and they could still be a person. Why? Obviously, there is something else that makes us into a person, and it seems like it is our minds. As long as the mind is there, there is a person there. This is why people are taken off life-support if brain-dead.
Now, in the early stages of pregnancy, the embryo does not have a brain, so we can presume that there is no person there to kill.
Wow that’s a grand stretch. So you presume reading Ayn Rand makes me feel good about being selfish and self righteous?
I do. After all, it is the central message. Be selfish and feel self-righteous about it. Still, the most important problem is the bad arguments.
As to your worship of the opinions of “academics,” having been raised by them and spending my life as a faculty brat I am not the slightest bit impressed by alphabet soup following someone’s name.
Sure. Anti-intellectuliasm rears its ugly head again.
With respect to my appreciation of Ayn Rand’s books, remember these are fiction but I think contain some real truths. One of them is that Rand understands human nature.
What is human nature then?
Most Leftists are woefully out of touch with reality on that score. They base their approach to societal problems on intentions, not results. Rand’s premise is that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Our many perhaps well intentioned progams reward bad behavior…thus they fail.
They fail. Ok. Let’s look at the evidence. I will give absolute poverty rates (1960-1991) (40% of U.S. Median household income) pre-welfare and post-welfare (relative poverty rates are similar):
Sweden: 23.7 to 5.8, Norway: 9.2 to 1.7, Netherlands: 22.1 to 7.3, Finland: 11.9 to 3.7, Denmark: 26.4 to 5.9, Germany: 15.2 to 4.3, Switzerland: 12.5 to 3.8, Canada: 22.5 to 6.5, France: 36.1 to 9.8, Belgium: 26.8 to 6.0, Australia: 23.3 to 11.9, United Kingdom: 16.8 to 8.7, United States: 21.0 to 11.7, Italy: 30.7 to 14.3
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27s_effect_on_poverty
You can also notice that the welfare states consistently perform at the top of every socioeconomic index that matters. Denmark has the highest welfare expenditure as GDP per capita, and has consistently been performing at the top of the newly developed indexes on happiness and well-being. Norway, with a similar, and perhaps even more generous system, has been topping both the HDI-index and the inequality adjusted HDI-index (which is probably more relevant to people’s well-being) for 9 out of the last 11 years, only beaten out by Iceland for two of those years (another generous welfare state).
I no longer wonder why we have generational welfare, a majority of minority babies born to single women. We reward that behavior and it increases. Do the math.
I just did. But you are right. Even if it improves poverty rates, there are issues with welfare, and supporters will acknowledge this. They know very well that people are influenced by their environment. Conservatives love to say that liberals blame the environment for the misfortunes of individuals, when they want to be self-rightheous and blame individuals instead.
But what is the answer? You can try to improve welfare, but if you take it away, you lose the positive effects, which I have already alluded to with the numbers on poverty.
And that line of reasoning would justify killing people who are in (perhaps) temporary comas or who have severe mental impairments or dementia.
It could justify killing people in permanent comas, which we do already. Temporary? To much like sleeping. When it comes to mental impairments and dementia, it would depend on what we can reasonably conclude about their mental states. Even the mentally impaired and demented have mental states, and it can be difficult to judge the kinds of mental states they are capable of, so I don’t see this argument justifiying killing these people. But in reality, people with severe dementia and other severe impairments are sometimes allowed to die.
There is no line of argument to promote abortion that doesn’t fall on its face when applied consistently to other human beings who are dependent, challenged, or physically disabled. We are more than brains with legs Persuader.
So you have looked into it then? I don’t think there is a person without a mind. I do think that the brain seats our mind. So when the brain is destroyed or haven’t developed yet, there is no person with a mind. This is pretty basic stuff, I would think.