Untitled

[quicklyseverebird]

Moved discussion here from notes

@aridara I hate the limited note format.

Okay, I'm going to do you a favor and steel man your argument to show you that no matter how you parse it, your "experiment" only validates my position, not your own.  I'm trying to be fair. If I have misrepresented something you said, let me know and I will correct it.

Starting positions: You: Sex is biological and separate from gender, which is culturally determined. Me: Sex is biological and corresponds to gender, which is a historically interchangeable term.

Both of us: Treating someone as the opposite biological sex is wrong and abusive.  See David Reimer.

Your argument: What you SAID: Take 100 children, and raise the ones with biologically-determined sex organs as the opposite biological sex, punishing them if they act against what is considered culturally appropriate to that biological sex and see how they turn out.

We both agree that doing this is abuse, and what happened to David.  So I'm baffled why you think this is a "gotcha."  

What I think you MEANT to say (steel man argument): Take 100 children and raise them as the opposite gender from what they identify as (how you determine that with non-sexual beings like children is baffling, but anywho), punishing them if they act in a way contrary to what is considered culturally appropriate to that gender and see how they turn out.

You are the one who believes gender is culturally determined, so this experiment assumes your position a priori.  But if gender is culturally determined, then these kids and David would be culturally adapted to the appropriate gender and should be fine.  Unless gender isn't culturally determined?  Do you believe in a third category or source of gender?

The fact that you tried to make use of biological sex when the only coherent way your experiment holds together in a way I would disagree with is if you meant to use your definition of gender, seems to indicate that even you can't keep track of your terminology and slip up between using gender and sex interchangeably.

Let me know if I represented anything incorrectly.

Now I'm not saying that treatments are perfect.  Just treating someone like they are doesn't help a lot of mental illnesses, especially those with body dysmorphia.  Simply telling an anorexic that they are thin and skinny, and treating them as such doesn't change how they view themselves.  The insistence without anything else might even exacerbate the problem.  I'm not proposing a cure.  I'm simply saying lying to children (or to mentally ill people), about reality is bad.  You seem to think validating an incorrect view of reality is beneficial so long as it...what...makes them happy?

Tell me, would you support and validate the view of someone who believes they are a child when they are really 50 years old?  Would you support and validate Rachel Dolezol's view that she's black because she believes she is?  Would you support the view of a man who believes he is a quadriplegic and insists that his limbs be amputated?  Would you support such an operation?  Doing so would certainly make them happy, right? So if you wouldn't support these views or surgical actions, but would support the gender dysmorphic individual and their surgical actions, when all have a delusional sense of reality, how do you justify that and remain morally and logically consistent?

Your studies never isolated any variables, so they are very deceptive.  They lumped in a huge helping of things that increase suicide risk in ANY child, then included "they weren't supported in their personal view of their sexual identity" and claimed all these items contributed to suicide equally.  In such a model, I could have added "and they all drank water," and come to the conclusion that drinking water contributed to their deaths.  Did they have any situations where the parents disagreed with their children's view of their gender, sought psychiatric help and still loved on them?  Bad treatment plans don't invalidate all treatments, or the need for treatment.  

"His premise was that you could easily turn kids into trans or not-trans by educating them. His one attempt with David Reimer shows that he was incredibly wrong."

His premise was that gender and sex were separate things, with the former being culturally determined.  The same thing you believe, correct?  Now how he thought that worked out was proved wrong, certainly.  His "experimental model" was proved invalid.  He still continued to believe his premise and encouraged it, until it became an established view in the literature and academia.  You still believe the same premise, though you structure it differently.  Rather than your nazi analogy, I would compare it to Darwin and modern evolutionary theorists.  The latter believe Darwin was wrong on a lot of his arguments and theories, and even some math, while still agreeing with his fundamental premise, which gave birth to their own views, changed though they are.  They can't deny Darwin's influence on the field.  You can't deny Money's influence on your beliefs.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

[goat-yells-at-everything]

Kids do NOT belong in sexualized spaces.

Fucking PERIOD.

[quicklyseverebird]

Too tired to continue

@kirby-ybrik

Okay, I think this has gone on long enough that we've learned the limits of how much we can accomplish.

In summation, you have consistently shown that you don't understand what logic is, or how it works, so you can't be rational.  You conflate "true" with "logical," as I have shown repeatedly and you continue to prove in your latest notes.

Your response when your views are challenged is just to insist and repeat that they are right rather than addressing any concerns.  And when you are approached with a counter-argument or fault in your reasoning, even under the assumption that your beliefs are correct, you refuse to acknowledge or engage with them, then claim you did address them, so you can't be reasoned with.

BTW, ignoring repeated challenges and offers of counter arguments isn't refuting them.  Making a claim, then reneging on it and saying you mean something completely different isn't refuting them either.  (though you do, in your last set of notes, finally accept my challenge, which is a bit frustrating.  I will present the "non-physical characteristic" of "potential" for your later rumination.  not that I think you will consider it since it would indicate that your position is wrong, and that's what matters to you.)

When your own views are stated back to you, your self awareness is so poor you address them as an attack, then try and pretend that you were responding to a straw man attack when your response and how you initially reacted clearly shows that was not the case.

Heck you don't even seem to understand what a strawman argument is, otherwise you would know this wasn't the case.  Nor the other times you throw the term out.  I will address something you say and then you claim "you just misrepresent me and straw man me!"  Maybe the truth is, you're only working with a straw man then.

When shown, repeatedly, that every group in human history that has tried to do what you are doing, namely making a distinction between humanity and personhood, has been proved to be bad people, your response boils down to "well they just did it wrong, but I'm doing it right" or "that didn't happen" without any proof.

Posting literally absurd claims about the Bible and God that NO ONE IN CHRISTIANITY believes is just...well, sad.  Doubling down on it in the face of literal references and evidence that disproves your claims just makes it worse. Repeating your point over and over in lieu of a discussion doesn't make you right.  It makes you dogmatic.

This doesn't make you a debater.  This doesn't make you reasonable.  This doesn't make you rational.  This doesn't make you right.  This DOES, however, make you a demagogue.  And a dangerous one, as those before you who followed your path have shown.

I will give you the props though in posting that insane statement though.  I didn't see it in your feed, but I'll choose to believe you when you said you did it.  I think you will look at it in a few years and be horrified by it.  I know most reasonable, rational people will.

I'm calling an end to this.  Going on vacation and don't want to have this discussion in the back of my head bothering me.  Claim victory if you want.  It's just too exhausting to try and discuss something reasonably with someone not using reason apart from sophistry.

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik “Number 1 is wrong. Connections between nerves are not fully understood and therefore cannot be labeled as physical.” Simply, factually wrong.  These are understood.  As someone who literally is a biologist and who took a human anatomy course, I can say with certainty that you are wrong.  Unless you are going to posit the idea that nerves communicate through non-physical means like “magic” or the “ether” then just accept the fact that you will have to abandon this argument.  Find a new one. “Number 2 is wrong. The picture was a metaphor to show how comparing 2 things with different nonphysical characteristics is equivalent to comparing 2 things that share no physical characteristics. A fetus has as much in common with a person as the appearance of an embryo has in common with a person” I’ll give you this one in the name of fairness.  Maybe I misunderstood the point of your example.  But this doesn’t get you out of any of the other difficulties.  Let’s see how you do with those.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik Just got back on here to see your response. May I state at the outset that I am glad it seems we are past the personal insult stage and discussing things rationally. “Not factually wrong. The connections between nerves give rise to intelligence in a way we can’t understand. You cannot prove that intelligence is a physical characteristic. The ability to process pain isn’t understood. We don’t know how the brain manages to do anything.” “Pain transmission isn’t understood. We literally have no idea how the brain processes pain. We don’t know what goes on in the brain to produce the sensation we call pain. Self awareness and pain are metaphysical. The human brain is a black box. Signals go in, nonphysical traits like self awareness, pain, understanding of time, and other things come out” You’re moving the goalpost here.  You went from “we don’t know how pain is transmitted” to “the rise of intelligence.”  Those are quantum steps from eachother.  It is not a mystery how pain or nerve impulses are transmitted.  That is a matter of common knowledge and observed in the simplest multicellular organisms that have nerves at all, but no brain.  Now if you want to go to the point where and now intelligence or conciousness arises, that’s an interesting discussion, but not relevant to your original point.  We know how nerve impulses work.  We can see unborn babies respond to pain stimuli earlier than 20 weeks.  We can detect their nerve impulses. We know they feel pain.  If you are going to mark the start at which babies feel pain, then that is something quantifiable, but I don’t think it helps your case, especially when you are then going to use it to draw an arbitrary line in the sand on child development.  But I will address that in my conclusion. “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. At one time it isn’t a person. The next time it is a person. You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” I can and do say that they became a person at conception.  You are the one making the (imho false dichotomy) distinction between humanity and personhood.  Again, I don’t think you are making the case you think you are. ““when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not”. We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion. Your point is moot” ““There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion”. There is. If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person. I can feel pain, am conscious, and self aware. That is literally a quantifiable difference” So you’re making my point for me.  Cool.  So you’re just saying it just doesn’t matter if they feel pain because you can’t know that they are a person or not?  Your point seems confused, because it seems on one hand that you are saying pain=consciousness, which isn’t true, but even if it was, then pain=humanity/personhood.  So…is it bad to kill them once they feel pain?  So you’re against abortions after 20 weeks?  You’re making the ability to feel pain your litmus test to determine whether abortion is acceptable or not, yet at the same time you’re insisting that there is no point that you can see whether a fetus is a person or not?  Are they a person when they feel pain, or not?  If they can feel pain, we can detect that as you yourself have agreed with me, so that means there is a point in time when even by your definition a baby can be shown to be a person.  Which contradicts what you say elsewhere. ““it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it?”. In real life we can tell for a fact whether or not a fetus can feel pain, so your metaphor isn’t accurate.” You’re misinterpreting the point of my metaphor.  It’s not about feeling pain or not.  It’s about the comparative morality of terminating a life with foreknowledge or with ignorance.  Is there a distinction between the two?  Is one worse than the other? ““Not sure what you tried to prove there.” As soon as your fetus is replaced with a pot of water, your personhood is replaced with the act of boiling, your idea of “it’s immoral if we don’t know when they become a person” falls apart” I think you are confusing your own position with mine.  My position is they are a human being and a person at conception.  You are the one drawing arbitrary lines and then saying at the same time those lines don’t exist.  You’re responding to my attempt to understand your position, not my actual position. ““What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject”. There will never be. Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!” So, to confirm, you are again making the claim that at the point of feeling pain, a child is a person, so….to kill them then would be wrong? “Me “this isn’t a person because saying it is a person is illogical as it goes against abductive reasoning””

*Sighs and rubs eyes*  Only because you chose that arbitrary point of feeling pain as your litmus test for personhood, even though feeling pain doesn’t determine personhood in adults who can’t feel it, nor in animals who respond to pain but don’t have a brain at all.  I still think you would be better off listing some more of these many “non-physical traits.” Okay, I am going to try and draw up a conclusion based on your arguments thus far.  Feel free to correct me. On one hand you seem to be saying that a fetus is a person at the point it feels pain.  I disagree, but let’s just roll with this here.  You would, presumably, be against abortion after this point, correct?  This ability to feel pain would take place at a quantifiable point in time.  A binary system.  On or off.  Non-person at one point, a person at the next at the flick of the pain switch.  Killing one would be killing a person = murder? On the other hand you seem to be insisting that you can’t make any distinction between one point in time and another in the development of the infant.  There is no one point, no binary point that you can point to to say “at this point a child is a person.”  So in such a situation where there is no determinate point, you must then say that abortion is either wrong the entire time, or not wrong at all, if you can’t point to a point in time to determine personhood it’s an either/or conclusion. The fact that I disagree with your entire pain=personhood premise is a separate issue here.  I’m trying to deal with what I see as you contradicting your own premise. Perhaps this can be best answered by flat out answering these two questions, repeated from above: 1. Is your position that the ability to feel pain = personhood? 2. if yes, then is abortion wrong once they reach this point?  3. If no, then why is it not wrong when they reach this point?

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik I apologize for the late reply. This has been the busiest week I’ve had since starting this job. Okay, deep breath.  Your argument boils down to one of two conclusions: 1. it is a self-contradicting, self-defeating, logically incoherent mess or 2. it is an exercise in pure sophism along the same lines of a witty person at a party arguing that the actual distance of a sandy beach approaches infinity because as you magnify the scope and have to trace around individual grains of sand making up the edge of the shoreline in every increasing fractal complexity, the distance continues to grow exponentially. This is not an ad hominin.  I mean this literally.  Let me show you. For case #1: You: “There is no observable moment at which a fetus becomes a person. I’d like to see you find the exact moment that a fetus can begin to feel pain.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens…” “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. … You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” Also you: “It’s physically impossible for a fetus to feel pain before at least 24 weeks.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED” “Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” “We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion.” “If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person.” “Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!“So to sum up, you’re stating with equal authority that you CAN’T tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person, and that you CAN tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person.” Do you see the dilemma that you are creating here?  Logical and cognitive dissonance.   Case #2: All your arguments are moot and irrelevant regardless of which of the two options you choose to go with, or even if you try to combine them.  I refute and deny both equally, and both miss the point and fail to get you out of the hole you dug.   You’re so busy feeling clever at your Schrodinger’s cat equivalent of human personhood being defined by the indeterminate start of pain and personhood that you fail to answer any of the questions this poses for real world application.  For example, the moral dilemma I posed to you twice and both times you seemed to have missed the point. In your most recent reply you said: "Killing something that doesn’t feel pain with or without the knowledge that it doesn’t feel pain are both equally moral. Morality isn’t based on beliefs, but the effects of actions. If a fetus can’t feel pain then killing it can always be moral” You defined personhood by the ability to feel pain, while acknowledging (half the time) that you can not tell when this point happens without–presumably–inflicting it and seeing the results.   As to morality, you are setting up a false dichotomy between belief and results (or what you call effects of actions).  Your argument devolves into “the ends justify the means.”  This is wrong.  We can absolutely judge the morality of a person by their actions, not just the effects.  We do so all the time.  If a demolition team blows up a building without checking to see if anyone is inside, we call that irresponsible and they will be punished, even if there is no one inside.  If a man fires a gun into the air, not knowing if it will fall and hit someone, he is charged and punished.  The effects are irrelevant, their actions show that they acted immorally and with indifference to the possible consequences of their actions. So to your point, if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, but choose to kill them in your ignorance anyway, that is immoral. “It’s not arbitrary. Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” This is opinion, not fact.  Your choice of the ability to feel pain, or any other physical or non-physical characteristic as the defining characteristic of what grants a human being rights are ABSOLUTELY arbitrary, by the simple fact that you can find instances and examples of these lacking in born humans as well. Even your choice of “personhood” as a criteria is arbitrary, not only because you can’t (or can, depending on which of your quotes we select) point to when that change happens, but because your choice of what defines personhood is selected for convenience.  And this is what gets you into the same camp as nazis and slavers.  They had just as “valid” reasons for defining personhood as you do.  They were equally arbitrary.  You just don’t happen to like theirs and think yours are better, but there is nothing intrinsically better about your position.  They too admitted the jew, the black, the slav, the mentally ill, the crippled were all “humans,” but they weren’t full “persons.”  You are doing the same: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” You are admitting the unborn fetus is human, but it’s not a “person” because it doesn’t meet <insert characteristic>.  Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.  This is why I say that you are putting yourself in their camp.  Your argument is fundamentally the same.  You just happen to like your choice of defining characteristics, where I–and all previous advocates of “non-persons” –maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood. We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "There is no dilemma and their is no dissonance. Those two things can be true at the same time. We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain, but we do know if they can feel pain. We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks. We can tell if a fetus can feel pain. We cannot pinpoint or observe the exact moment a fetus begins to feel pain.”

Your own statement here proves the logical contradiction.  Read it.   You state “We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain” and then state with confidence, “We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks.” You’re asserting your inability to make a claim, then making that very claim.  So even pretending that your criteria were real, it doesn’t work.  Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That’s not how logic works.  "A” can not be “A” and “non-A” at the same time.  Logic 101. But your point is moot, at least by this criteria.

“It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary.” You can keep repeating this but it’s not true. I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren’t conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You’ve never once addressed these points that I’ve made repeatedly.   “As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person.” Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that’s been proven wrong.  So try again? “Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people.” Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren’t people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don’t think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you’re just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: “the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person.” Me: “here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. ““Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse.” Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to “defend” their ethnic “rights.” You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I’m trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I’m in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” ““Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical.” First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi’s used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is “logical”, but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I’ve already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.  Saying what amounts to “nuh uh!” doesn’t count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it’s right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn’t count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. ““maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay” Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. ““We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights” You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the “women’s rights” nonsense is just silly.  A woman’s “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“"We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain” and then state with confidence, “We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks."” That’s not a contradiction. Both of those statements are factually correct.”“ "“Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That’s not how logic works.  "A” can not be “A” and “non-A” at the same time.  Logic 101.” I’m not claiming A and non-A are true at the same time. I’m claiming A and B are true at the same time. They are not opposite claims.“” I’m not sure we’re working from the same understanding of logic. But again, this is a side issue.  Your argument from this POV has been refuted and is moot, but I’ve been trying to get you to see how your logic falls apart since you tie everything else to it.  You can not logically say, “we don’t know when something starts, but it does start here. ”““I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.” There are hundreds of criteria that determine personhood. Pain is just the simplest one and first one. You have no point.”“ But you’ve never mentioned any of these other criteria.  So my point is, since this pain one is moot due to the reasons given before, you would be better off choosing another one as your hobby horse. "“Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.” And consciousness. And self awareness. And rationality. And reciprocity. And communication. And autonomy. And you get the idea.” Finally some fresh material!  And…just as wrong.  Every, single, one.  Since every one has exceptions to them in adults.  Sleeping people, comatose people, insane people, children born without pre-frontal cortexes, handicapped people… Now I do understand what you’re trying to argue here, I really do.  I just don’t think it works.  You’re saying that so long as a person has one of these criteria you have arbitrarily decided determines personhood, then they are a person.  The sleeping person will wake, the insane person might have been well, the brainless child might be able to function to some degree, and so on.  Where one criteria falls through, you rely on one of the others to buffer your argument. But it all falls apart in the womb. Obviously most of these are impossible for an unborn child, so you try to find the lowest common denominator, pain, since the rest don’t work.  The problem is, that won’t work either.  All of these criteria you talk about exist on a gradient or spectrum from conception to death.  I could list my own criteria, even non-physical ones that prove that the unborn child is also a person/human (since I don’t make the false distinction you do), but you would refute them, *not because they are any weaker than your criteria*, but because you don’t like them since they disagree with yours.  Your criteria are arbitrary.  Self-selected.  Cherry-picked.  They have no justification past the point whereby YOU want them to bolster your pre-determined conclusion, and you ignore any criteria that doesn’t meet that goal. Just as did the you-know-who. “No it hasn’t. You’ve yet to give a valid reason why pain or any other characteristic I have mentioned should be considered arbitrary.” I have, repeatedly.  You just don’t like the reasons.  If you want to argue this, then I will list a bunch of criteria that bolster my opinion and you can tell me why they are invalid or not just as arbitrary as your own.  Want to take that challenge?  You’ve shown me some of yours, I’ve said they are arbitrary.  I can give some of mine and you can try to say why you believe they aren’t just as valid as yours.  Spoiler alert, you will wind up arguing over opinions, just like you are over your own. ““Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own.” No, not even close. Nazis- Jews aren’t people, we have no proof of this, but we will believe it anyway. Me- fetuses aren’t people because if they were then they would be similar to people in some nonphysical way.”“

Identical.  The nazi’s had lots of "proof” of their claims.  You are confusing “proofs” with “truth/facts.”  The fact that you think YOUR proofs are better and don’t like their claims doesn’t mean they didn’t have any.  I disagree with your proofs too, so by your standard of dismissal, I guess you have no proof either.  You’re just choosing to believe it anyway. ““You: "the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person."” 1. Not my argument. 2. That’s still deductive reasoning.”“ Literally is your argument in a nutshell, insofar as "pain” is a representation/place holder of your “criteria.”  Replace “pain” with any of these, and it holds true to your position. Also, you cut out the rest of what I said (note limitations I know) or you would be showing that I agree this is deductive reasoning, but my response–which was also deductive reasoning, shows it to be logically incorrect.  Again, don’t confuse “logic” with “fact/truth.”  There are lots of logical statements that are untrue.  See previous and below discussion of false premises. ““Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to "defend” their ethnic “rights."” Not even close to right. They weren’t trying to defend anything. They were using authoritarian to mindless and senselessly kill and enslave people because they saw it as a beneficial for society. Nazis didn’t see the final solution as a defense of anything.”“

The fact that we don’t LIKE their reasons, and the fact that we both find their reasons abhorrent doesn’t change the fact that they DID believe these false things.  We know they did because they used them as propaganda and repeated them over and over, drumming up these very fears in the minds of those they were trying to reach.  You touch on it in your own reply.  They saw it as "beneficial to society.”  WHOSE society?  WHY would they think it beneficial?   I’m sorry, your response is just an (understandable) knee jerk reaction, not an acknowledgment of facts.  You don’t like the implications so you are just blindly denying them.  "“You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing.”” You can’t de-personalize something that isn’t a person. Fetuses are not and should not be considered people unless they fit the criteria for personhood”

And they are only a “non-person” because you have chosen a set of imaginary criteria to bolster this opinion.  We’ve covered this.  In logic you don’t get to use your conclusion to argue your premise.  Making up criteria to define “personhood” didn’t work out for the bad groups pointed out before.  You believing that YOUR justifications are just BETTER than theirs doesn’t change the fact you are doing the same thing they did and following the same pattern of logic.   I’m saying doing anything to separate personhood from humanity to justify killing them is wrong.  I call that murder.  As I did for nazi’s and slavers killing their “de-personalized” humans.You keep insisting that what you are doing is different from them, but the only thing you have to argue for that is “my opinion is better than theirs.”   Here is what it all boils down to, and why I’m lumping you in with Nazi’s and slavers:  I’m saying the very act of trying to make that distinction is the root evil.  You trying to make this argument in the first place is the Wrong. ““First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell.” Anything that has human dna is by definition human. Tumors, fecal matter, hair and nail clippings, teeth. These are all human.” That is utterly nonsensical and no reasonable person could take that seriously.  The only way anyone could make that argument without rolling their eyes is if they had an axe to grind.  Human-derived is not the same as human.  That’s like saying every pebble or grain of sand is a mountain.  

““Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”” NONPHYSICAL TRAITS. BECOME LITERATE ALREADY” I was using that as an example of your logical argument.  Whether its physical or non-physical is irrelevant.  You know this.  Stop ignoring the point and feigning outrage to justify doing so. ““Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.” The nazis didn’t use logic. Their beliefs were not logically sound. This is the reason why Mein Kampf is read by German schoolchildren today. To show how devoid of logic and reason it is.“

I’ll select this note to stand in for all the other notes where you complain that "nazi’s didn’t  use the same logic I do because they were wrong and I don’t like their reasons.  That means they didn’t use logic!” Nope.  Sorry.  You can’t escape this fact.  The logic used by them, by you, and by yes, as you point out, people characterizing animals are all the same.  The logical framework is identical.  When conclusions are wrong, its because of the premises they plug into it.  The nazi’s premises were wrong.  Your premises are wrong.  The anthropologist plugging Piltdown man into the taxonomic tree were wrong.  Your logic is all the same though. ““Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted.” It’s not illogical nor an opinion. Being human and being a person have different criteria. They do not perfectly overlap.”“ “I have decided that these two groups are different things because of reasons I chose, while ignoring others that disprove it, to deem as right and logical, so that means this is not illogical or an opinion.” Yeah…that’s a personal opinion, not a fact. “1. Fetuses aren’t people 2. Fetuses aren’t children in the same sense as actual children 3. The Bible literally mentions and supports inducing miscarriages” 1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.  In the same vein of reasoning, I declare that the sky is green.  Or if you’re going to raise complaints about non-physical traits, then fine.  I declare that anyone who can’t enjoy music isn’t a person.  Because I said so.  Declaring something doesn’t make it true. 2. and adults of 21 aren’t adults in the same sense as adults of 61.  adults in a coma arent adults in the same sense as conscious adults.  still adults.  still children.  all human and people.  Your point is irrelevant. 3. yeah nope.  better back that one up with references if you expect me to buy that.  spoiler alert, I know this is not true. “A woman’s right to control their own body. Until a fetus becomes a person it’s part of the woman’s body and she should have full authority over it. Even a dead body has more bodily autonomy than a woman denied an abortion.” Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.  They are so glaringly obvious that I can only think that you are trying to troll me. But important things to focus on in any reply: *The importance of the difference between “logic” and “truth” aka the fact that something can be logical but untrue if the premise is incorrect. *The above highlighted issue that I see as the core evil and what ties you most directly with every other nasty group that tried to make a distinction between people and humanity.  Namely that they tried to do so in the first place.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“You can not logically say, "we don’t know when something starts, but it does start here.” You can though. It’s impossible to tell exactly when a fetus starts to feel pain, but it’s entirely possible to tell if they are able to feel pain.”

I feel we are beating a dead horse here.  You are using sophistry, not logic, parsing the extreme definitions of words to say something and then claim you mean something else by using a different definition of the word when this is pointed out, but I believe its a moot point at this juncture.  And in this particular instance, unless you’re willing to test the unborn child to see if it has pain before performing an abortion (are you?) then its functionally meaningless as well.  After all, maybe a baby can feel pain at 23 weeks, or maybe it doesn’t at 25.  Unless you’re willing to test… ““But it all falls apart in the womb.” My argument doesn’t fall apart at the womb because fetuses aren’t people, regardless of my argument. Facts are true regardless of your belief in them.” You’re begging the question here, not making an argument.  You can’t say, “fetuses aren’t people because of these reasons” and then say, “the reasons don’t matter because the fetuses aren’t people.” Plus you didn’t even understand what I was doing there.  The point I was making in the quote you referenced is that as the child is less developed, you run out of these “non-physical characteristics” you’ve selected, making them a non person by your understanding.  I WAS REPEATING YOUR OWN POINT BACK AT YOU TO SHOW YOU I UNDERSTOOD!  The fact that you didn’t understand your own argument and used it to attempt a quip about facts being true regardless of belief becomes a bit ironic and outright comical then.  Weren’t you the one talking about being literate? ““Your criteria are arbitrary.  Self-selected.  Cherry-picked.” Not even close. These characteristics are agreed upon by academics to be the defining traits of personhood.” Right, right, because no academic was ever wrong, never change their minds, and they always agree with one another…  *rolls eyes*   Argument from authority fallacy. Do I really need to trot out images of textbooks made by “academics” to explain how some races were inferior to others?  Do I?  Or do you realize how laughable this point is?  Oh but yeah, because YOU disagree with THOSE academics, that is the standard by which we judge all things.  *rolls eyes again*  yeah.  You cherry-picked, me bucko.  In 50 years academics may well look back on your opinion and your hand-selected “academics” in the same way we look upon the eugenicists. ““I have, repeatedly.” No you didn’t. You called them arbitrary because certain people don’t have them, despite the fact that I both know and have acknowledged that. You only need to be in possession of one characteristic to be a person.” Did you read my post?  Because when I presented you your own argument to show that I understood what you are trying to say, but disagree with it, you saw it as an argument against your point…  Are you even reading my replies?  I addressed this claim of yours multiple times, and showed how they are arbitrary. Heck, YOU have even shown how they are arbitrary, though you would deny that. ““Identical.” I don’t know how to explain this to you, but an argument not based on logic (nazis) is inherently different from an argument based on logic (mine).” I don’t know how to explain this to you, but just because you disagree with the conclusion of someone else’s application of your logic doesn’t mean they didn’t use logic, especially when elsewhere you admitted that your logical structure was the same.  Kinda undermining yourself here.  I admit you’re using logic.  So did the nazi’s.  You’re both wrong because your premises are wrong. ““They saw it as "beneficial to society.”  WHOSE society?  WHY would they think it beneficial?” Beneficial to humanity because they didn’t see Jews as humans.“ So then…work out the rest of the logical process…come on now, you can do it.   And because they didn’t view fetsuses…I mean Jews…as human, they saw getting rid of them as defending themselves/their values/their worldview/their bodies… So you wind up with the point I was making.  Congradulations, I’m glad we agreed on something.  Same logic, same effect.  Dead people. "“And they are only a “non-person” because you have chosen a set of imaginary criteria to bolster this opinion.” THEY LITERALLY DO NOT SHARE ANY NONPHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS. In order for 2 things to be classified as the same thing they must both share characteristics! And because personhood is a nonphysical trait, and fetuses share no nonphysical traits with people. FETUSES ARE NOT PEOPLE.” Begging the question again.  See above.   Convenient to say two groups don’t share the same defining characteristics to make them both equal, when you cherry pick what those characteristics are to come to your pre-determined conclusion.  Who else did that?  you can use as many caps as you like, but you’ve yet to prove that your characteristics aren’t arbitrary.  All you’ve ever done so far is say “they are not!” or make an argument from authority about select “academics” who agree with you.  you’re not helping your case here.  Will you listen to some “non-physical characteristics” I can come up with that disagree with your selected ones? “A human is anything with human dna.” I’m just going to let this little gem stand on its own for my amusement’s sake.  I’m going to laugh now and spray hundreds of humans across my desk.   ““Yeah…that’s a personal opinion, not a fact.” It’s not. People and humans are separate things. You cannot deny that. They are 2 separate groups. That’s a fact.” Literally not a fact as my previous amused reply shows and as any reasonable, logical person on planet earth would agree.  Very easy to deny this opinion of yours unless you want to rework the very definition of what a human is.  Good grief, the dictionary doesn’t even agree with you, so you’re standing on your own two feet here.  Literally the definition of personal opinion. ““1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.” I believe it because it’s a fact”

No, you believe it, so you think it is a fact.

“Your point is irrelevant.” You chastise my for arguing from emotion, yet you still call fetuses children in order to make taking woman’s rights away sound better.

Don’t think I ever criticized you for arguing from emotion (reference?).  I’ve pointed out the error of your logic in this section, but if you want to play that game then okay, lets play: you still call children fetuses in order to justify de-personalizing them so you can kill them.   See, cuts both ways there.  And you still didn’t address my point, only threw in this red herring. ““3. yeah nope.” Numbers 5:11–31 Basically if a woman is pregnant and suspected of adultery, she needs to drink an herbal water to force her to miscarry” Okay, in the name of fairness, I have to partially give you this.  I had to flip through a couple different translations before I found one that had the wording that makes this point.  The NKJV, which is the more literal translation, doesn’t say this, where the NIV, a more dynamic equivalent text, does, if you’re going to believe that drinking ashes mixed with water will make you miscarry.  I’d have to do a more in-depth study of this passage to come to a better understanding of what it is saying, and which is the better translation. But do I need to point out that this is a punishment? The Bible doesn’t generally condone killing either, but does mete out death as a penalty.  I can also point out texts in the same literature there that treat an unborn baby as a human life, the taking of which is punishable by death of the offender.  Exodus 21:22  The unborn baby is given the same weight as an adult. ““Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.” So you disagree with the idea that women should have control over their own bodies?” No, I disagree with the idea that women should be considered to have a “right” to kill the body of the child inside them.  That the fact that it is an individual life means that doing so is murder.  So you disagree with the idea that babies shouldn’t be murdered? “Humanity and people are 2 separate classifications. They didn’t “try” to make a distinction. Those distinctions already existed, but they chose the wrong ones and killed actual people.” Begging the question again, but even if I agreed with it in principal, then my point is that you are making the same mistake they did.  YOU’RE EVEN AGREEING WITH THEM IN PRINCIPAL, JUST DISAGREEING ON THE GROUP IN QUESTION BEING KILLED!  Listen to yourself! “It’s okay to kill a human so long as it isn’t a person. These groups over here are bad because they chose the wrong kind of human to kill.”  That’s what you are saying here.  Listen to yourself! The fact that you are even trying to make that distinction places you in the same category as every other group that did that.  The very fact that you make the same type of argument but have to explain why your justified murder is better than their justified murder is disturbing. If you are making a distinction between “human” and “person”, you’ve already fallen into bad company.  After all this time saying nazi logic was wrong, and your logic was different, or that they didn’t use logic and you did…you yourself admit that you agree with it, you just disagree on the individual human group that its okay to kill. If you honestly can’t see that, then there’s little hope for you until you do.  

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“Plus you didn’t even understand what I was doing there.” You were implying that my argument didn’t work because of a point we already went over.” No, I was restating your argument.  Accurately I might add.  Your idea that the number of non-physical traits that define personhood continue to diminish as development becomes less until they end…or start depending on your view, at the point in which the baby feels pain.  That was your argument.  I repeated it.  The fact that you don’t even recognize your own argument when repeated back to you does not bode well for your view.  And…nothing’s changed.  You can scroll up and read it right now in black and white and see that I’m right. “"“Right, right, because no academic was ever wrong, never change their minds, and they always agree with one another…  *rolls eyes*  Argument from authority fallacy.” That’s now how the appeal to authority fallacy works. I’m not saying my argument is right because a higher authority agrees with it, I’m saying some of your criticisms of it being “cherry picked, arbitrary, and self selected” are invalid because of the fact that a higher authority came to the same conclusion. I honestly don’t care what higher authorities think” Look up the definition of argument from authority fallacy: “A formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true. This is also known as an appeal to authority.” That is literally what you did there, otherwise there was no point in bringing up authority.  Again, I give you your own words: “These characteristics are agreed upon by academics to be the defining traits of personhood” ergo argument from authority.  If you “honestly don’t care what higher authorities think” then you wouldn’t have invoked them.  I’m starting to see a pattern here and that is you tend to just lie and just say whatever you have to say to try and win, then try to move the goalpost and deny that’s what you said, all while ignoring or evading any point that challenges your position where you can’t just repeat your premise ad nauseum without actually proving it.  You’ve done this over and over.  Something isn’t true just because you say it is, or because some academic says it is.  You need to prove your point by answering actual challenges, not ignoring them.

“1. . There was no logic behind the nazis actions as everything they did wasn’t in their best interests. Hitler could have taken over the world and then killed every Jew but he didn’t because his beliefs were not logical I never admitted that. I’ve been saying since the beginning that the nazis were illogical”

No, you’ve been demonstrating repeatedly that you don’t understand what logic is.  You are confusing “logic” with “truth.”  You continue to do so here.  A logical statement doesn’t have to be correct.  Your position is just as logical as the nazi’s.  You just maintain that it’s right, where I maintain that you are both equally wrong.

“Fetuses aren’t people.”

You continue in your circular argument.  Repeating this without addressing contrary arguments doesn’t make you right, just tiresome. “I’m not cherry picking anything. Personhood is nonphysical. Even if I was cherry picking traits (which I’m not), there still wouldn’t a single trait of personhood that fetuses have until roughly 24 weeks. Fetuses don’t have the same traits as people. Fetuses do not belong in the category of people.”

You are cherry picking because you ignore any other criteria that fall outside your predetermined selection, even other non-physical characteristics that disprove it within your own framework of argument.  It’s like me saying, “all animals that have four legs are cows,” and refusing to acknowledge the fact that there are other forms of quadrupeds.

““I’m just going to let this little gem stand on its own for my amusement’s sake.  I’m going to laugh now and spray hundreds of humans across my desk.” 1. Yeah basic facts are funny sometimes. 2. Cooming? 😳”

Don’t be crude.  Epithelial cells that fly out of my mouth when I laugh.  According to you they are human.  This is why I know you’re lying and why I posted that challenge.  I don’t think you actually believe your own position.  I think you’re just a sophist.  if you want me to believe you actually hold to this position then post on your blog, “It’s okay to kill humans so long as they are not people.”  You won’t do it because you know this “basic fact” is wrong, and anyone reading it will recognize it as such.  If it’s such a “basic fact” then you should have no problem doing this.  Honestly, unless you can actually do this, I see no reason to take you seriously at all.

“No it’s a basic fact. They are two separate groups. So they don’t perfectly overlap. There are humans that are not people and people that are not humans.”

Prove you actually stand by this insane statement with above challenge and maybe I’ll at least acknowledge you’re crazy enough to believe it.

““No, you believe it, so you think it is a fact.” No. It’s a fact. So I believe it.”

Round and round the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. You are making statements of opinion, then declaring them fact, while ignoring any contrary position or data, then repeating that your opinion is fact.

““you still call children fetuses in order to justify de-personalizing them so you can kill them.” Fetuses aren’t children in the normal way we talk about children. Fetuses aren’t people regardless of what they are called. The only reason I don’t call fetuses children is because the term children is hardly ever used when referring to fetuses.”

Thus proving you didn’t actually read what I wrote with that quote you pulled out since I pointed out that variability exists within any term like child, adult, etc. Also incorrect by the way.  The only people who routinely refer to unborn babies as fetuses are people who believe they aren’t babies in the first place.  You’re using  your own position to argue the validity of your position. “People who agree with me don’t use that term, therefore it’s the proper term and any use of a different one is misleading.” pot meet kettle.  I can say the same thing to you.

“The passage is clearly about miscarriages. What else would the “thigh” falling away be referring to?”

…are you serious?  I know you’ve said you believe cells are human, but you think…“thighs” are babies now too?  How confused are you?

“The Bible also implies that anything that hasn’t taken its first breath isn’t alive.”

Nope.  Wrong again.  Rather than write up all the obvious fallacies of this statement, here:  https://www.str.org/w/does-bible-teach-life-begins-first-breath Oh and…fun fact: Luke 1:41–43 clearly teaches that unborn babies—even in the first trimester—are valuable persons. It says, And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” The third trimester John (who was already “filled with the Holy Spirit” according to Luke 1:15) leaped for joy in the presence of the first trimester Jesus, who was even called “Lord” in His first trimester. How can a “clump of cells” be Lord? Needless to say, there is nothing in scripture to back up your position at all.  Quite the contrary.

“The right to bodily autonomy supersedes any right to life. (But fetuses don’t have rights because they aren’t people, so killing then wouldn’t be murder). Also the right to bodily autonomy is literally above the right to life because of how the right to bodily autonomy works. One cannot have a right to life if they have no right to control their own body.”

A mountain built out of a fallacious molehill.  Even you admit by your own argument that as soon as you recognize the unborn child as a human person, killing them becomes “by definition” murder because it goes against their own bodily autonomy.  To you it’s only not murder because you don’t recognize them as human persons.  That’s our point of disagreement.  I think your definition is a mere exercise in sophistry to justify actions you already want to allow.  A case of building your argument on your conclusion. “I know exactly what I said. There’s a distinction between people and humans. There’s a difference between killing someTHING because it’s not a person, and killing someONE because you don’t think it’s a person.”

And I am saying you are a liar and don’t believe this, and have offered you a chance to prove me wrong.  Again.  Want me to take you seriously, post on your blog “it’s okay to kill humans so long as they aren’t people.”  Until you do this, I’m not going to acknowledge you believe your own argument.  You won’t do it because you know anyone who sees that will recognize it for what it is.  The same argument/logic used by Nazi’s and slavers.  It’s a catch-22 I admit.  Post it and you will advertise your psychosis, don’t and you admit you’re a liar.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“No, I was restating your argument.” Via a strawman" Actually a iron man argument if anything, giving you the benefit of the doubt.  You didn't respond with a critique of my summation of your view, you responded to it as if it were an attack on it.  The fact that you couldn't even recognize your own argument when stated back to you and tried to refute is places you in the same camp as Amber Heard's lawyer objecting to his own question.

"“That is literally what you did there, otherwise there was no point in bringing up authority.”Wrong. You made some claims about my argument, and I showed you that they were untrue because academics agree with me. I’m not not saying that my argument is true because some authority agrees with me."

Wrong.  I said your attributes are cherry picked to defend your position and you responded with  "a bunch of "academics" that I cherry-picked myself and won't mention by name agree with me on a topic that has no consensus at all in the scientific world, but because I agree with these select ones, I'm invoking their authority to claim I'm right."   If you doubt me, here are your exact words: "Not even close. These characteristics are agreed upon by academics to be the defining traits of personhood.""I invoked them because their mere existence debunked all the things you said about my argument." And how exactly does claiming that some unnamed, hand-picked "academics" agree with you disprove my point that you are cherry-picking your arguments?  I could find an academic somewhere that will hold just about any view under the sun.  Their existence is irrelevant.  You invoked them because you wanted to claim their nebulous authority to give your argument weight.

"1. Haven’t lied 2. Haven’t moved any goalposts 3. I only deny when you misquote me 4. I’ve literally refuted all your points 5. I’ve already proved myself right. Your last defense was claiming I was being arbitrary, which I’ve since refuted"

You are aware that just because you claim you've refuted me, doesn't mean you actually did. repeating your claim and invoking some nebulous, unnamed authority figures, pointing to them and saying, "see, see, THEY agree with me!" isn't a refutation.  It's an argument from authority.   You do lie and move goalposts because whenever I point out a logical inconsistency or a gap in your logic, or challenge your points, you respond with "well you're misquoting me" and shift what you were saying to claim you mean something else.  When I offer to point out other criteria that fall within your same framework that counter your point, you ignore it.  When I literally point out logic 101 facts you deny them.  You don't seem to know the difference between logic and facts, and you seem to be unwilling to back up the implications of your own position, even when its as sample as if A=B and B=C then A=C.  You do a lot of posturing.  case in point: "“No, you've been demonstrating repeatedly that you don't understand what logic is.  You are confusing "logic" with "truth."  You continue to do so here.  A logical statement doesn't have to be correct.” The Nazis never used logic. Deal with it. They had absolutely no reason to believe Jews weren’t humans or people. Their entire ideology stems from the the fact that Hitler’s mother died under a Jewish doctor’s care and that he was denied entry into the Vienna School of Art by a Jew."

You keep demonstrating over and over that You.  Don't. Understand. What. Logic. Is. Logic =/= truth. Plus you're not even historically correct. Whatever Hitler's beef with Jews was, anti-semeticism was wide spread and not limited to just him. Pointing out his personal reasons for not liking them proves nothing in this case. The Nazi's used logic.  Deal with it.  Sure it was bad logic, but the fact that we don't AGREE with their logic is irrelevant.  The fact that you refuse to recognize that your logic follows the same structure is likewise moot.  Denying this doesn't change anything.  Your logic is just as wrong as theirs.  I'll repeat for the umpteeth time since you keep ignoring it. logic =/= truth

"“You continue in your circular argument.” Yeah the argument that I’ve already proven right."

Thus proving my point beautifully. you: "My point is right" me: "what about XYZ that disprove it" you: "I proved my point" me: "but...what about...these things...that you're not addressing or answering" you: "I proved my point." me: "you are making a circular argument" you: "because I've proven myself right!"

"“You are cherry picking because you ignore any other criteria that fall outside your predetermined selection” Personhood is NONPHYSICAL. I’m not cherry picking just because I’m using NONPHYSICAL traits to define a NONPHYSICAL status!" You are literally ignoring or deliberately misinterpreting my points here AGAIN. Let's go through your list of assumptions, shall we? 1. that personhood is separate from humanity - you haven't proven this, only claimed/assumed it (like other bad people have). 2. that personhood determines whether you have value - same 3. choosing to pick THIS criteria when there are others isn't cherry picking - same 4. your selected non-physical criteria are the only valid non-physical criteria, even when there are others that counter your position - same 5. that personhood is nonphysical - same repeating your claim over and over and declaring yourself right without addressing actual challenges to your position doesn't make you right.

"“It's like me saying, "all animals that have four legs are cows," and refusing to acknowledge the fact that there are other forms of quadrupeds.” My argument is literally nothing like that. There’s only one form of person. And there are more criteria than one."

goal post moving.

Before you stated that there are all sorts of different kinds of persons.  now you are saying there's only one. When discussing this, you have chosen to focus on ONE criteria to determine the exact point at which a human becomes a person.  When I make a similar argument by way of making a comparison, to show you the fallacy of this...an EXAMPLE...you just ignore it by way of claiming "there are more criteria!"  and then when we discuss that, you go back to pointing out the singular point once more. "“Prove you actually stand by this insane statement with above challenge and maybe I'll at least acknowledge you're crazy enough to believe it.” Sure thing."

Okay, I was prepared to be impressed but I looked on your blog and...saw nothing?  Will give you the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe I missed it?

"“You are making statements of opinion, then declaring them fact, while ignoring any contrary position or data, then repeating that your opinion is fact.” No I’m making factual statements and then basing my opinions on those facts."

Until you can counter facts that disagree with your opinion, they remain opinion.

"“Also incorrect by the way.  The only people who routinely refer to unborn babies as fetuses are people who believe they aren't babies in the first place.” Because they aren’t. Babies historically and currently only refer to things that have been born."

Factually untrue.  This is a recent development only arising after the modern push for abortion.

"Thighs is a metaphor for a fetus you twat! “Thigh falls away” is a metaphor for miscarriage!"

Literally....no.  You "twat."  That was an assumption you made. Simple proof: what in that text makes you think the trial of the water was limited to pregnant women?  It's not.  That was your assumption.  Because, like your whole premise, you just wanted to believe it! It's for women suspected of adultery.  Unless you believe every adulterous woman gets pregnant? But don't take my word for it.  Wikipedia isn't known for its conservative, right-leaning, orthodox-supporting views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal_of_the_bitter_water "“Luke 1:41–43 clearly teaches that unborn babies—even in the first trimester—are valuable persons.” No it doesn’t." "1. Holy Spirit enters the body at first breath. The Bible is contradicting itself" So you're making it very clear that you don't know the first thing about the Bible, which doesn't help your claims at all.   Where does the Bible say the Holy Spirit enters at first breath?  It doesn't.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, it can go wherever it wants.  It entered Elizabeth in Luke 1:41 for instance.  She was an old lady. It’s shown entering into kings, prophets, and many other grown adults in the Bible.  It says it was with John before his birth in Luke 1:15.  Have anything showing that this is a contradiction? Now if you mean spirit/personhood/soul, that’s a different story.  Have any proof?  Reference?  Quote?  So far you've shown that you don't actually know the first thing about what the Bible says.  Bring the receipts if you're going to make these claims.  We’ve already established that just “because you said it” doesn’t mean a whole lot in the evidence department.  And if you're going to say Genesis 2, I've already disproven that claim in my last post. "2. Jesus wasn’t being called lord, Mary was being called the mother of my lord. There’s a difference. It was in future tense. A woman can’t be a mother until after she gives birth."

Wow, talk about sophistry... Mary greets Elizabeth Baby INSIDE Elisabeth which was filled with the HS, jumps in recognition of this. Elisabeth is filled with HS and prophesizes/praises Mary and the child, "my Lord." You: "well she means in the FUTURE tense...  Clearly there is no value of the child unborn because it's in the first trimester..." *facepalm* Holy cow, dude.  Does your brain hurt after those mental contortions?

"“I think your definition is a mere exercise in sophistry to justify actions you already want to allow.” Actually I came to this definition BEFORE I came to an opinion on abortion." Okay, and ever since then, as evidenced by our discussion, you have ignored every challenge or fact that disagrees with you in favor of just repeating "I'm right." Would you change your mind if you were given a non-physical trait that exists before the end of the first trimester, according to your own definition of what defines personhood? Will you acknowledge the fact that every other group in history that tried to make a distinction between "human" and "person" was deemed to be "very bad?" the answer, we have seen, is no.  You have made up your own mind and refuse to see or acknowledge anything that disagrees with it.  You have made it a dogma, not a statement of fact. "“And I am saying you are a liar and don't believe this” I 100% do." I will believe this when you post that statement on your blog.  Please feel free to send me the link to show me wrong.  Until you put up, shut up. Edit:  Okay, I saw the link, but it’s not in your feed.  Can anyone else see it but me?  *suspicious*  The challenge is for you to say it where everyone can see it, not whisper it to someone.

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik “Number 1 is wrong. Connections between nerves are not fully understood and therefore cannot be labeled as physical.” Simply, factually wrong.  These are understood.  As someone who literally is a biologist and who took a human anatomy course, I can say with certainty that you are wrong.  Unless you are going to posit the idea that nerves communicate through non-physical means like “magic” or the “ether” then just accept the fact that you will have to abandon this argument.  Find a new one. “Number 2 is wrong. The picture was a metaphor to show how comparing 2 things with different nonphysical characteristics is equivalent to comparing 2 things that share no physical characteristics. A fetus has as much in common with a person as the appearance of an embryo has in common with a person” I’ll give you this one in the name of fairness.  Maybe I misunderstood the point of your example.  But this doesn’t get you out of any of the other difficulties.  Let’s see how you do with those.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik Just got back on here to see your response. May I state at the outset that I am glad it seems we are past the personal insult stage and discussing things rationally. “Not factually wrong. The connections between nerves give rise to intelligence in a way we can’t understand. You cannot prove that intelligence is a physical characteristic. The ability to process pain isn’t understood. We don’t know how the brain manages to do anything.” “Pain transmission isn’t understood. We literally have no idea how the brain processes pain. We don’t know what goes on in the brain to produce the sensation we call pain. Self awareness and pain are metaphysical. The human brain is a black box. Signals go in, nonphysical traits like self awareness, pain, understanding of time, and other things come out” You’re moving the goalpost here.  You went from “we don’t know how pain is transmitted” to “the rise of intelligence.”  Those are quantum steps from eachother.  It is not a mystery how pain or nerve impulses are transmitted.  That is a matter of common knowledge and observed in the simplest multicellular organisms that have nerves at all, but no brain.  Now if you want to go to the point where and now intelligence or conciousness arises, that’s an interesting discussion, but not relevant to your original point.  We know how nerve impulses work.  We can see unborn babies respond to pain stimuli earlier than 20 weeks.  We can detect their nerve impulses. We know they feel pain.  If you are going to mark the start at which babies feel pain, then that is something quantifiable, but I don’t think it helps your case, especially when you are then going to use it to draw an arbitrary line in the sand on child development.  But I will address that in my conclusion. “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. At one time it isn’t a person. The next time it is a person. You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” I can and do say that they became a person at conception.  You are the one making the (imho false dichotomy) distinction between humanity and personhood.  Again, I don’t think you are making the case you think you are. ““when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not”. We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion. Your point is moot” ““There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion”. There is. If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person. I can feel pain, am conscious, and self aware. That is literally a quantifiable difference” So you’re making my point for me.  Cool.  So you’re just saying it just doesn’t matter if they feel pain because you can’t know that they are a person or not?  Your point seems confused, because it seems on one hand that you are saying pain=consciousness, which isn’t true, but even if it was, then pain=humanity/personhood.  So…is it bad to kill them once they feel pain?  So you’re against abortions after 20 weeks?  You’re making the ability to feel pain your litmus test to determine whether abortion is acceptable or not, yet at the same time you’re insisting that there is no point that you can see whether a fetus is a person or not?  Are they a person when they feel pain, or not?  If they can feel pain, we can detect that as you yourself have agreed with me, so that means there is a point in time when even by your definition a baby can be shown to be a person.  Which contradicts what you say elsewhere. ““it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it?”. In real life we can tell for a fact whether or not a fetus can feel pain, so your metaphor isn’t accurate.” You’re misinterpreting the point of my metaphor.  It’s not about feeling pain or not.  It’s about the comparative morality of terminating a life with foreknowledge or with ignorance.  Is there a distinction between the two?  Is one worse than the other? ““Not sure what you tried to prove there.” As soon as your fetus is replaced with a pot of water, your personhood is replaced with the act of boiling, your idea of “it’s immoral if we don’t know when they become a person” falls apart” I think you are confusing your own position with mine.  My position is they are a human being and a person at conception.  You are the one drawing arbitrary lines and then saying at the same time those lines don’t exist.  You’re responding to my attempt to understand your position, not my actual position. ““What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject”. There will never be. Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!” So, to confirm, you are again making the claim that at the point of feeling pain, a child is a person, so….to kill them then would be wrong? “Me “this isn’t a person because saying it is a person is illogical as it goes against abductive reasoning””

*Sighs and rubs eyes*  Only because you chose that arbitrary point of feeling pain as your litmus test for personhood, even though feeling pain doesn’t determine personhood in adults who can’t feel it, nor in animals who respond to pain but don’t have a brain at all.  I still think you would be better off listing some more of these many “non-physical traits.” Okay, I am going to try and draw up a conclusion based on your arguments thus far.  Feel free to correct me. On one hand you seem to be saying that a fetus is a person at the point it feels pain.  I disagree, but let’s just roll with this here.  You would, presumably, be against abortion after this point, correct?  This ability to feel pain would take place at a quantifiable point in time.  A binary system.  On or off.  Non-person at one point, a person at the next at the flick of the pain switch.  Killing one would be killing a person = murder? On the other hand you seem to be insisting that you can’t make any distinction between one point in time and another in the development of the infant.  There is no one point, no binary point that you can point to to say “at this point a child is a person.”  So in such a situation where there is no determinate point, you must then say that abortion is either wrong the entire time, or not wrong at all, if you can’t point to a point in time to determine personhood it’s an either/or conclusion. The fact that I disagree with your entire pain=personhood premise is a separate issue here.  I’m trying to deal with what I see as you contradicting your own premise. Perhaps this can be best answered by flat out answering these two questions, repeated from above: 1. Is your position that the ability to feel pain = personhood? 2. if yes, then is abortion wrong once they reach this point?  3. If no, then why is it not wrong when they reach this point?

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik I apologize for the late reply. This has been the busiest week I’ve had since starting this job. Okay, deep breath.  Your argument boils down to one of two conclusions: 1. it is a self-contradicting, self-defeating, logically incoherent mess or 2. it is an exercise in pure sophism along the same lines of a witty person at a party arguing that the actual distance of a sandy beach approaches infinity because as you magnify the scope and have to trace around individual grains of sand making up the edge of the shoreline in every increasing fractal complexity, the distance continues to grow exponentially. This is not an ad hominin.  I mean this literally.  Let me show you. For case #1: You: “There is no observable moment at which a fetus becomes a person. I’d like to see you find the exact moment that a fetus can begin to feel pain.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens…” “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. … You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” Also you: “It’s physically impossible for a fetus to feel pain before at least 24 weeks.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED” “Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” “We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion.” “If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person.” “Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!"So to sum up, you’re stating with equal authority that you CAN’T tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person, and that you CAN tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person.” Do you see the dilemma that you are creating here?  Logical and cognitive dissonance.   Case #2: All your arguments are moot and irrelevant regardless of which of the two options you choose to go with, or even if you try to combine them.  I refute and deny both equally, and both miss the point and fail to get you out of the hole you dug.   You’re so busy feeling clever at your Schrodinger’s cat equivalent of human personhood being defined by the indeterminate start of pain and personhood that you fail to answer any of the questions this poses for real world application.  For example, the moral dilemma I posed to you twice and both times you seemed to have missed the point. In your most recent reply you said: "Killing something that doesn’t feel pain with or without the knowledge that it doesn’t feel pain are both equally moral. Morality isn’t based on beliefs, but the effects of actions. If a fetus can’t feel pain then killing it can always be moral” You defined personhood by the ability to feel pain, while acknowledging (half the time) that you can not tell when this point happens without–presumably–inflicting it and seeing the results.   As to morality, you are setting up a false dichotomy between belief and results (or what you call effects of actions).  Your argument devolves into “the ends justify the means.”  This is wrong.  We can absolutely judge the morality of a person by their actions, not just the effects.  We do so all the time.  If a demolition team blows up a building without checking to see if anyone is inside, we call that irresponsible and they will be punished, even if there is no one inside.  If a man fires a gun into the air, not knowing if it will fall and hit someone, he is charged and punished.  The effects are irrelevant, their actions show that they acted immorally and with indifference to the possible consequences of their actions. So to your point, if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, but choose to kill them in your ignorance anyway, that is immoral. “It’s not arbitrary. Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” This is opinion, not fact.  Your choice of the ability to feel pain, or any other physical or non-physical characteristic as the defining characteristic of what grants a human being rights are ABSOLUTELY arbitrary, by the simple fact that you can find instances and examples of these lacking in born humans as well. Even your choice of “personhood” as a criteria is arbitrary, not only because you can’t (or can, depending on which of your quotes we select) point to when that change happens, but because your choice of what defines personhood is selected for convenience.  And this is what gets you into the same camp as nazis and slavers.  They had just as “valid” reasons for defining personhood as you do.  They were equally arbitrary.  You just don’t happen to like theirs and think yours are better, but there is nothing intrinsically better about your position.  They too admitted the jew, the black, the slav, the mentally ill, the crippled were all “humans,” but they weren’t full “persons.”  You are doing the same: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” You are admitting the unborn fetus is human, but it’s not a “person” because it doesn’t meet <insert characteristic>.  Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.  This is why I say that you are putting yourself in their camp.  Your argument is fundamentally the same.  You just happen to like your choice of defining characteristics, where I–and all previous advocates of “non-persons” –maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood. We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "There is no dilemma and their is no dissonance. Those two things can be true at the same time. We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain, but we do know if they can feel pain. We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks. We can tell if a fetus can feel pain. We cannot pinpoint or observe the exact moment a fetus begins to feel pain.”

Your own statement here proves the logical contradiction.  Read it.   You state “We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain” and then state with confidence, “We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks.” You’re asserting your inability to make a claim, then making that very claim.  So even pretending that your criteria were real, it doesn’t work.  Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That’s not how logic works.  "A” can not be “A” and “non-A” at the same time.  Logic 101. But your point is moot, at least by this criteria.

“It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary.” You can keep repeating this but it’s not true. I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren’t conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You’ve never once addressed these points that I’ve made repeatedly.   “As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person.” Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that’s been proven wrong.  So try again? “Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people.” Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren’t people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don’t think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you’re just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: “the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person.” Me: “here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. ““Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse.” Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to “defend” their ethnic “rights.” You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I’m trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I’m in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” ““Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical.” First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi’s used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is “logical”, but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I’ve already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.  Saying what amounts to “nuh uh!” doesn’t count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it’s right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn’t count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. ““maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay” Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. ““We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights” You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the “women’s rights” nonsense is just silly.  A woman’s “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“"We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain” and then state with confidence, “We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks."” That’s not a contradiction. Both of those statements are factually correct.”“ "“Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That’s not how logic works.  "A” can not be “A” and “non-A” at the same time.  Logic 101.” I’m not claiming A and non-A are true at the same time. I’m claiming A and B are true at the same time. They are not opposite claims.“” I’m not sure we’re working from the same understanding of logic. But again, this is a side issue.  Your argument from this POV has been refuted and is moot, but I’ve been trying to get you to see how your logic falls apart since you tie everything else to it.  You can not logically say, “we don’t know when something starts, but it does start here. ”““I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.” There are hundreds of criteria that determine personhood. Pain is just the simplest one and first one. You have no point.”“ But you’ve never mentioned any of these other criteria.  So my point is, since this pain one is moot due to the reasons given before, you would be better off choosing another one as your hobby horse. "“Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.” And consciousness. And self awareness. And rationality. And reciprocity. And communication. And autonomy. And you get the idea.” Finally some fresh material!  And…just as wrong.  Every, single, one.  Since every one has exceptions to them in adults.  Sleeping people, comatose people, insane people, children born without pre-frontal cortexes, handicapped people… Now I do understand what you’re trying to argue here, I really do.  I just don’t think it works.  You’re saying that so long as a person has one of these criteria you have arbitrarily decided determines personhood, then they are a person.  The sleeping person will wake, the insane person might have been well, the brainless child might be able to function to some degree, and so on.  Where one criteria falls through, you rely on one of the others to buffer your argument. But it all falls apart in the womb. Obviously most of these are impossible for an unborn child, so you try to find the lowest common denominator, pain, since the rest don’t work.  The problem is, that won’t work either.  All of these criteria you talk about exist on a gradient or spectrum from conception to death.  I could list my own criteria, even non-physical ones that prove that the unborn child is also a person/human (since I don’t make the false distinction you do), but you would refute them, *not because they are any weaker than your criteria*, but because you don’t like them since they disagree with yours.  Your criteria are arbitrary.  Self-selected.  Cherry-picked.  They have no justification past the point whereby YOU want them to bolster your pre-determined conclusion, and you ignore any criteria that doesn’t meet that goal. Just as did the you-know-who. “No it hasn’t. You’ve yet to give a valid reason why pain or any other characteristic I have mentioned should be considered arbitrary.” I have, repeatedly.  You just don’t like the reasons.  If you want to argue this, then I will list a bunch of criteria that bolster my opinion and you can tell me why they are invalid or not just as arbitrary as your own.  Want to take that challenge?  You’ve shown me some of yours, I’ve said they are arbitrary.  I can give some of mine and you can try to say why you believe they aren’t just as valid as yours.  Spoiler alert, you will wind up arguing over opinions, just like you are over your own. ““Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own.” No, not even close. Nazis- Jews aren’t people, we have no proof of this, but we will believe it anyway. Me- fetuses aren’t people because if they were then they would be similar to people in some nonphysical way.”“

Identical.  The nazi’s had lots of "proof” of their claims.  You are confusing “proofs” with “truth/facts.”  The fact that you think YOUR proofs are better and don’t like their claims doesn’t mean they didn’t have any.  I disagree with your proofs too, so by your standard of dismissal, I guess you have no proof either.  You’re just choosing to believe it anyway. ““You: "the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person."” 1. Not my argument. 2. That’s still deductive reasoning.”“ Literally is your argument in a nutshell, insofar as "pain” is a representation/place holder of your “criteria.”  Replace “pain” with any of these, and it holds true to your position. Also, you cut out the rest of what I said (note limitations I know) or you would be showing that I agree this is deductive reasoning, but my response–which was also deductive reasoning, shows it to be logically incorrect.  Again, don’t confuse “logic” with “fact/truth.”  There are lots of logical statements that are untrue.  See previous and below discussion of false premises. ““Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to "defend” their ethnic “rights."” Not even close to right. They weren’t trying to defend anything. They were using authoritarian to mindless and senselessly kill and enslave people because they saw it as a beneficial for society. Nazis didn’t see the final solution as a defense of anything.”“

The fact that we don’t LIKE their reasons, and the fact that we both find their reasons abhorrent doesn’t change the fact that they DID believe these false things.  We know they did because they used them as propaganda and repeated them over and over, drumming up these very fears in the minds of those they were trying to reach.  You touch on it in your own reply.  They saw it as "beneficial to society.”  WHOSE society?  WHY would they think it beneficial?   I’m sorry, your response is just an (understandable) knee jerk reaction, not an acknowledgment of facts.  You don’t like the implications so you are just blindly denying them.  "“You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing.”” You can’t de-personalize something that isn’t a person. Fetuses are not and should not be considered people unless they fit the criteria for personhood”

And they are only a “non-person” because you have chosen a set of imaginary criteria to bolster this opinion.  We’ve covered this.  In logic you don’t get to use your conclusion to argue your premise.  Making up criteria to define “personhood” didn’t work out for the bad groups pointed out before.  You believing that YOUR justifications are just BETTER than theirs doesn’t change the fact you are doing the same thing they did and following the same pattern of logic.   I’m saying doing anything to separate personhood from humanity to justify killing them is wrong.  I call that murder.  As I did for nazi’s and slavers killing their “de-personalized” humans.You keep insisting that what you are doing is different from them, but the only thing you have to argue for that is “my opinion is better than theirs.”   Here is what it all boils down to, and why I’m lumping you in with Nazi’s and slavers:  I’m saying the very act of trying to make that distinction is the root evil.  You trying to make this argument in the first place is the Wrong. ““First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell.” Anything that has human dna is by definition human. Tumors, fecal matter, hair and nail clippings, teeth. These are all human.” That is utterly nonsensical and no reasonable person could take that seriously.  The only way anyone could make that argument without rolling their eyes is if they had an axe to grind.  Human-derived is not the same as human.  That’s like saying every pebble or grain of sand is a mountain.  

““Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”” NONPHYSICAL TRAITS. BECOME LITERATE ALREADY” I was using that as an example of your logical argument.  Whether its physical or non-physical is irrelevant.  You know this.  Stop ignoring the point and feigning outrage to justify doing so. ““Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.” The nazis didn’t use logic. Their beliefs were not logically sound. This is the reason why Mein Kampf is read by German schoolchildren today. To show how devoid of logic and reason it is.“

I’ll select this note to stand in for all the other notes where you complain that "nazi’s didn’t  use the same logic I do because they were wrong and I don’t like their reasons.  That means they didn’t use logic!” Nope.  Sorry.  You can’t escape this fact.  The logic used by them, by you, and by yes, as you point out, people characterizing animals are all the same.  The logical framework is identical.  When conclusions are wrong, its because of the premises they plug into it.  The nazi’s premises were wrong.  Your premises are wrong.  The anthropologist plugging Piltdown man into the taxonomic tree were wrong.  Your logic is all the same though. ““Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted.” It’s not illogical nor an opinion. Being human and being a person have different criteria. They do not perfectly overlap.”“ “I have decided that these two groups are different things because of reasons I chose, while ignoring others that disprove it, to deem as right and logical, so that means this is not illogical or an opinion.” Yeah…that’s a personal opinion, not a fact. “1. Fetuses aren’t people 2. Fetuses aren’t children in the same sense as actual children 3. The Bible literally mentions and supports inducing miscarriages” 1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.  In the same vein of reasoning, I declare that the sky is green.  Or if you’re going to raise complaints about non-physical traits, then fine.  I declare that anyone who can’t enjoy music isn’t a person.  Because I said so.  Declaring something doesn’t make it true. 2. and adults of 21 aren’t adults in the same sense as adults of 61.  adults in a coma arent adults in the same sense as conscious adults.  still adults.  still children.  all human and people.  Your point is irrelevant. 3. yeah nope.  better back that one up with references if you expect me to buy that.  spoiler alert, I know this is not true. “A woman’s right to control their own body. Until a fetus becomes a person it’s part of the woman’s body and she should have full authority over it. Even a dead body has more bodily autonomy than a woman denied an abortion.” Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.  They are so glaringly obvious that I can only think that you are trying to troll me. But important things to focus on in any reply: *The importance of the difference between “logic” and “truth” aka the fact that something can be logical but untrue if the premise is incorrect. *The above highlighted issue that I see as the core evil and what ties you most directly with every other nasty group that tried to make a distinction between people and humanity.  Namely that they tried to do so in the first place.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“You can not logically say, "we don’t know when something starts, but it does start here.” You can though. It’s impossible to tell exactly when a fetus starts to feel pain, but it’s entirely possible to tell if they are able to feel pain.”

I feel we are beating a dead horse here.  You are using sophistry, not logic, parsing the extreme definitions of words to say something and then claim you mean something else by using a different definition of the word when this is pointed out, but I believe its a moot point at this juncture.  And in this particular instance, unless you’re willing to test the unborn child to see if it has pain before performing an abortion (are you?) then its functionally meaningless as well.  After all, maybe a baby can feel pain at 23 weeks, or maybe it doesn’t at 25.  Unless you’re willing to test… ““But it all falls apart in the womb.” My argument doesn’t fall apart at the womb because fetuses aren’t people, regardless of my argument. Facts are true regardless of your belief in them.” You’re begging the question here, not making an argument.  You can’t say, “fetuses aren’t people because of these reasons” and then say, “the reasons don’t matter because the fetuses aren’t people.” Plus you didn’t even understand what I was doing there.  The point I was making in the quote you referenced is that as the child is less developed, you run out of these “non-physical characteristics” you’ve selected, making them a non person by your understanding.  I WAS REPEATING YOUR OWN POINT BACK AT YOU TO SHOW YOU I UNDERSTOOD!  The fact that you didn’t understand your own argument and used it to attempt a quip about facts being true regardless of belief becomes a bit ironic and outright comical then.  Weren’t you the one talking about being literate? ““Your criteria are arbitrary.  Self-selected.  Cherry-picked.” Not even close. These characteristics are agreed upon by academics to be the defining traits of personhood.” Right, right, because no academic was ever wrong, never change their minds, and they always agree with one another…  *rolls eyes*   Argument from authority fallacy. Do I really need to trot out images of textbooks made by “academics” to explain how some races were inferior to others?  Do I?  Or do you realize how laughable this point is?  Oh but yeah, because YOU disagree with THOSE academics, that is the standard by which we judge all things.  *rolls eyes again*  yeah.  You cherry-picked, me bucko.  In 50 years academics may well look back on your opinion and your hand-selected “academics” in the same way we look upon the eugenicists. ““I have, repeatedly.” No you didn’t. You called them arbitrary because certain people don’t have them, despite the fact that I both know and have acknowledged that. You only need to be in possession of one characteristic to be a person.” Did you read my post?  Because when I presented you your own argument to show that I understood what you are trying to say, but disagree with it, you saw it as an argument against your point…  Are you even reading my replies?  I addressed this claim of yours multiple times, and showed how they are arbitrary. Heck, YOU have even shown how they are arbitrary, though you would deny that. ““Identical.” I don’t know how to explain this to you, but an argument not based on logic (nazis) is inherently different from an argument based on logic (mine).” I don’t know how to explain this to you, but just because you disagree with the conclusion of someone else’s application of your logic doesn’t mean they didn’t use logic, especially when elsewhere you admitted that your logical structure was the same.  Kinda undermining yourself here.  I admit you’re using logic.  So did the nazi’s.  You’re both wrong because your premises are wrong. ““They saw it as "beneficial to society.”  WHOSE society?  WHY would they think it beneficial?” Beneficial to humanity because they didn’t see Jews as humans.“ So then…work out the rest of the logical process…come on now, you can do it.   And because they didn’t view fetsuses…I mean Jews…as human, they saw getting rid of them as defending themselves/their values/their worldview/their bodies… So you wind up with the point I was making.  Congradulations, I’m glad we agreed on something.  Same logic, same effect.  Dead people. "“And they are only a “non-person” because you have chosen a set of imaginary criteria to bolster this opinion.” THEY LITERALLY DO NOT SHARE ANY NONPHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS. In order for 2 things to be classified as the same thing they must both share characteristics! And because personhood is a nonphysical trait, and fetuses share no nonphysical traits with people. FETUSES ARE NOT PEOPLE.” Begging the question again.  See above.   Convenient to say two groups don’t share the same defining characteristics to make them both equal, when you cherry pick what those characteristics are to come to your pre-determined conclusion.  Who else did that?  you can use as many caps as you like, but you’ve yet to prove that your characteristics aren’t arbitrary.  All you’ve ever done so far is say “they are not!” or make an argument from authority about select “academics” who agree with you.  you’re not helping your case here.  Will you listen to some “non-physical characteristics” I can come up with that disagree with your selected ones? “A human is anything with human dna.” I’m just going to let this little gem stand on its own for my amusement’s sake.  I’m going to laugh now and spray hundreds of humans across my desk.   ““Yeah…that’s a personal opinion, not a fact.” It’s not. People and humans are separate things. You cannot deny that. They are 2 separate groups. That’s a fact.” Literally not a fact as my previous amused reply shows and as any reasonable, logical person on planet earth would agree.  Very easy to deny this opinion of yours unless you want to rework the very definition of what a human is.  Good grief, the dictionary doesn’t even agree with you, so you’re standing on your own two feet here.  Literally the definition of personal opinion. ““1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.” I believe it because it’s a fact”

No, you believe it, so you think it is a fact.

“Your point is irrelevant.” You chastise my for arguing from emotion, yet you still call fetuses children in order to make taking woman’s rights away sound better.

Don’t think I ever criticized you for arguing from emotion (reference?).  I’ve pointed out the error of your logic in this section, but if you want to play that game then okay, lets play: you still call children fetuses in order to justify de-personalizing them so you can kill them.   See, cuts both ways there.  And you still didn’t address my point, only threw in this red herring. ““3. yeah nope.” Numbers 5:11–31 Basically if a woman is pregnant and suspected of adultery, she needs to drink an herbal water to force her to miscarry” Okay, in the name of fairness, I have to partially give you this.  I had to flip through a couple different translations before I found one that had the wording that makes this point.  The NKJV, which is the more literal translation, doesn’t say this, where the NIV, a more dynamic equivalent text, does, if you’re going to believe that drinking ashes mixed with water will make you miscarry.  I’d have to do a more in-depth study of this passage to come to a better understanding of what it is saying, and which is the better translation. But do I need to point out that this is a punishment? The Bible doesn’t generally condone killing either, but does mete out death as a penalty.  I can also point out texts in the same literature there that treat an unborn baby as a human life, the taking of which is punishable by death of the offender.  Exodus 21:22  The unborn baby is given the same weight as an adult. ““Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.” So you disagree with the idea that women should have control over their own bodies?” No, I disagree with the idea that women should be considered to have a “right” to kill the body of the child inside them.  That the fact that it is an individual life means that doing so is murder.  So you disagree with the idea that babies shouldn’t be murdered? “Humanity and people are 2 separate classifications. They didn’t “try” to make a distinction. Those distinctions already existed, but they chose the wrong ones and killed actual people.” Begging the question again, but even if I agreed with it in principal, then my point is that you are making the same mistake they did.  YOU’RE EVEN AGREEING WITH THEM IN PRINCIPAL, JUST DISAGREEING ON THE GROUP IN QUESTION BEING KILLED!  Listen to yourself! “It’s okay to kill a human so long as it isn’t a person. These groups over here are bad because they chose the wrong kind of human to kill.”  That’s what you are saying here.  Listen to yourself! The fact that you are even trying to make that distinction places you in the same category as every other group that did that.  The very fact that you make the same type of argument but have to explain why your justified murder is better than their justified murder is disturbing. If you are making a distinction between “human” and “person”, you’ve already fallen into bad company.  After all this time saying nazi logic was wrong, and your logic was different, or that they didn’t use logic and you did…you yourself admit that you agree with it, you just disagree on the individual human group that its okay to kill. If you honestly can’t see that, then there’s little hope for you until you do.  

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“Plus you didn't even understand what I was doing there.” You were implying that my argument didn’t work because of a point we already went over." No, I was restating your argument.  Accurately I might add.  Your idea that the number of non-physical traits that define personhood continue to diminish as development becomes less until they end...or start depending on your view, at the point in which the baby feels pain.  That was your argument.  I repeated it.  The fact that you don't even recognize your own argument when repeated back to you does not bode well for your view.  And...nothing's changed.  You can scroll up and read it right now in black and white and see that I'm right. ""“Right, right, because no academic was ever wrong, never change their minds, and they always agree with one another...  *rolls eyes*  Argument from authority fallacy.” That’s now how the appeal to authority fallacy works. I’m not saying my argument is right because a higher authority agrees with it, I’m saying some of your criticisms of it being “cherry picked, arbitrary, and self selected” are invalid because of the fact that a higher authority came to the same conclusion. I honestly don’t care what higher authorities think" Look up the definition of argument from authority fallacy: "A formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true. This is also known as an appeal to authority." That is literally what you did there, otherwise there was no point in bringing up authority.  Again, I give you your own words: "These characteristics are agreed upon by academics to be the defining traits of personhood" ergo argument from authority.  If you "honestly don’t care what higher authorities think" then you wouldn't have invoked them.  I'm starting to see a pattern here and that is you tend to just lie and just say whatever you have to say to try and win, then try to move the goalpost and deny that's what you said, all while ignoring or evading any point that challenges your position where you can't just repeat your premise ad nauseum without actually proving it.  You've done this over and over.  Something isn't true just because you say it is, or because some academic says it is.  You need to prove your point by answering actual challenges, not ignoring them.

"1. . There was no logic behind the nazis actions as everything they did wasn’t in their best interests. Hitler could have taken over the world and then killed every Jew but he didn’t because his beliefs were not logical I never admitted that. I’ve been saying since the beginning that the nazis were illogical"

No, you've been demonstrating repeatedly that you don't understand what logic is.  You are confusing "logic" with "truth."  You continue to do so here.  A logical statement doesn't have to be correct.  Your position is just as logical as the nazi's.  You just maintain that it's right, where I maintain that you are both equally wrong.

"Fetuses aren’t people."

You continue in your circular argument.  Repeating this without addressing contrary arguments doesn't make you right, just tiresome. "I’m not cherry picking anything. Personhood is nonphysical. Even if I was cherry picking traits (which I’m not), there still wouldn’t a single trait of personhood that fetuses have until roughly 24 weeks. Fetuses don’t have the same traits as people. Fetuses do not belong in the category of people."

You are cherry picking because you ignore any other criteria that fall outside your predetermined selection, even other non-physical characteristics that disprove it within your own framework of argument.  It's like me saying, "all animals that have four legs are cows," and refusing to acknowledge the fact that there are other forms of quadrupeds.

"“I'm just going to let this little gem stand on its own for my amusement's sake.  I'm going to laugh now and spray hundreds of humans across my desk.” 1. Yeah basic facts are funny sometimes. 2. Cooming? 😳"

Don't be crude.  Epithelial cells that fly out of my mouth when I laugh.  According to you they are human.  This is why I know you're lying and why I posted that challenge.  I don't think you actually believe your own position.  I think you're just a sophist.  if you want me to believe you actually hold to this position then post on your blog, "It's okay to kill humans so long as they are not people."  You won't do it because you know this "basic fact" is wrong, and anyone reading it will recognize it as such.  If it's such a "basic fact" then you should have no problem doing this.  Honestly, unless you can actually do this, I see no reason to take you seriously at all.

"No it’s a basic fact. They are two separate groups. So they don’t perfectly overlap. There are humans that are not people and people that are not humans."

Prove you actually stand by this insane statement with above challenge and maybe I'll at least acknowledge you're crazy enough to believe it.

"“No, you believe it, so you think it is a fact.” No. It’s a fact. So I believe it."

Round and round the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. You are making statements of opinion, then declaring them fact, while ignoring any contrary position or data, then repeating that your opinion is fact.

"“you still call children fetuses in order to justify de-personalizing them so you can kill them.” Fetuses aren’t children in the normal way we talk about children. Fetuses aren’t people regardless of what they are called. The only reason I don’t call fetuses children is because the term children is hardly ever used when referring to fetuses."

Thus proving you didn't actually read what I wrote with that quote you pulled out since I pointed out that variability exists within any term like child, adult, etc. Also incorrect by the way.  The only people who routinely refer to unborn babies as fetuses are people who believe they aren't babies in the first place.  You're using  your own position to argue the validity of your position. "People who agree with me don't use that term, therefore it's the proper term and any use of a different one is misleading." pot meet kettle.  I can say the same thing to you.

"The passage is clearly about miscarriages. What else would the “thigh” falling away be referring to?"

...are you serious?  I know you've said you believe cells are human, but you think..."thighs" are babies now too?  How confused are you?

"The Bible also implies that anything that hasn’t taken its first breath isn’t alive."

Nope.  Wrong again.  Rather than write up all the obvious fallacies of this statement, here:  https://www.str.org/w/does-bible-teach-life-begins-first-breath Oh and...fun fact: Luke 1:41–43 clearly teaches that unborn babies—even in the first trimester—are valuable persons. It says, And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” The third trimester John (who was already “filled with the Holy Spirit” according to Luke 1:15) leaped for joy in the presence of the first trimester Jesus, who was even called “Lord” in His first trimester. How can a “clump of cells” be Lord? Needless to say, there is nothing in scripture to back up your position at all.  Quite the contrary.

"The right to bodily autonomy supersedes any right to life. (But fetuses don’t have rights because they aren’t people, so killing then wouldn’t be murder). Also the right to bodily autonomy is literally above the right to life because of how the right to bodily autonomy works. One cannot have a right to life if they have no right to control their own body."

A mountain built out of a fallacious molehill.  Even you admit by your own argument that as soon as you recognize the unborn child as a human person, killing them becomes "by definition" murder because it goes against their own bodily autonomy.  To you it's only not murder because you don't recognize them as human persons.  That's our point of disagreement.  I think your definition is a mere exercise in sophistry to justify actions you already want to allow.  A case of building your argument on your conclusion. "I know exactly what I said. There’s a distinction between people and humans. There’s a difference between killing someTHING because it’s not a person, and killing someONE because you don’t think it’s a person."

And I am saying you are a liar and don't believe this, and have offered you a chance to prove me wrong.  Again.  Want me to take you seriously, post on your blog "it's okay to kill humans so long as they aren't people."  Until you do this, I'm not going to acknowledge you believe your own argument.  You won't do it because you know anyone who sees that will recognize it for what it is.  The same argument/logic used by Nazi's and slavers.  It's a catch-22 I admit.  Post it and you will advertise your psychosis, don't and you admit you're a liar.

[quicklyseverebird]

A challenge to kirby-ybrik

To the worthy opposition, @kirby-ybrik I would like to propose a challenge.

I don’t think you actually believe your position.  I would like to offer you the chance to prove me wrong.  I think you’re enjoying the rhetoric, the debate, the sophistry of it all, but I don’t think you actually believe your own thesis.

If you do, I would challenge you to write this on your own page.  Every word is something you have said outright or the logical conclusion from what you have said.  If you do so, even if I disagree with you, I will at least have to admit you hold fast to your conviction.  If you do not, then I will know that this is all just words to you, and not real belief.

Post these words on your page:

“It’s fine to kill humans, so long as they are not people.”

If your claims are as widely believed, held and as obvious as you claim, then surely everyone will understand what you mean.  Every word is true, by your own definitions.  Nothing I said is something you disagree with.  Go on, I dare you.  And none of this wishy-washy nonsense about “I have nothing to prove to you, blagh blagh blagh.”  Own up to your thesis.  Either you believe that, or you don’t, which puts to question every word you’ve said up till now.  I don’t think you will do it.

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik “Number 1 is wrong. Connections between nerves are not fully understood and therefore cannot be labeled as physical.” Simply, factually wrong.  These are understood.  As someone who literally is a biologist and who took a human anatomy course, I can say with certainty that you are wrong.  Unless you are going to posit the idea that nerves communicate through non-physical means like “magic” or the “ether” then just accept the fact that you will have to abandon this argument.  Find a new one. “Number 2 is wrong. The picture was a metaphor to show how comparing 2 things with different nonphysical characteristics is equivalent to comparing 2 things that share no physical characteristics. A fetus has as much in common with a person as the appearance of an embryo has in common with a person” I’ll give you this one in the name of fairness.  Maybe I misunderstood the point of your example.  But this doesn’t get you out of any of the other difficulties.  Let’s see how you do with those.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik Just got back on here to see your response. May I state at the outset that I am glad it seems we are past the personal insult stage and discussing things rationally. “Not factually wrong. The connections between nerves give rise to intelligence in a way we can’t understand. You cannot prove that intelligence is a physical characteristic. The ability to process pain isn’t understood. We don’t know how the brain manages to do anything.” “Pain transmission isn’t understood. We literally have no idea how the brain processes pain. We don’t know what goes on in the brain to produce the sensation we call pain. Self awareness and pain are metaphysical. The human brain is a black box. Signals go in, nonphysical traits like self awareness, pain, understanding of time, and other things come out” You’re moving the goalpost here.  You went from “we don’t know how pain is transmitted” to “the rise of intelligence.”  Those are quantum steps from eachother.  It is not a mystery how pain or nerve impulses are transmitted.  That is a matter of common knowledge and observed in the simplest multicellular organisms that have nerves at all, but no brain.  Now if you want to go to the point where and now intelligence or conciousness arises, that’s an interesting discussion, but not relevant to your original point.  We know how nerve impulses work.  We can see unborn babies respond to pain stimuli earlier than 20 weeks.  We can detect their nerve impulses. We know they feel pain.  If you are going to mark the start at which babies feel pain, then that is something quantifiable, but I don’t think it helps your case, especially when you are then going to use it to draw an arbitrary line in the sand on child development.  But I will address that in my conclusion. “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. At one time it isn’t a person. The next time it is a person. You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” I can and do say that they became a person at conception.  You are the one making the (imho false dichotomy) distinction between humanity and personhood.  Again, I don’t think you are making the case you think you are. ““when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not”. We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion. Your point is moot” ““There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion”. There is. If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person. I can feel pain, am conscious, and self aware. That is literally a quantifiable difference” So you’re making my point for me.  Cool.  So you’re just saying it just doesn’t matter if they feel pain because you can’t know that they are a person or not?  Your point seems confused, because it seems on one hand that you are saying pain=consciousness, which isn’t true, but even if it was, then pain=humanity/personhood.  So…is it bad to kill them once they feel pain?  So you’re against abortions after 20 weeks?  You’re making the ability to feel pain your litmus test to determine whether abortion is acceptable or not, yet at the same time you’re insisting that there is no point that you can see whether a fetus is a person or not?  Are they a person when they feel pain, or not?  If they can feel pain, we can detect that as you yourself have agreed with me, so that means there is a point in time when even by your definition a baby can be shown to be a person.  Which contradicts what you say elsewhere. ““it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it?”. In real life we can tell for a fact whether or not a fetus can feel pain, so your metaphor isn’t accurate.” You’re misinterpreting the point of my metaphor.  It’s not about feeling pain or not.  It’s about the comparative morality of terminating a life with foreknowledge or with ignorance.  Is there a distinction between the two?  Is one worse than the other? ““Not sure what you tried to prove there.” As soon as your fetus is replaced with a pot of water, your personhood is replaced with the act of boiling, your idea of “it’s immoral if we don’t know when they become a person” falls apart” I think you are confusing your own position with mine.  My position is they are a human being and a person at conception.  You are the one drawing arbitrary lines and then saying at the same time those lines don’t exist.  You’re responding to my attempt to understand your position, not my actual position. ““What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject”. There will never be. Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!” So, to confirm, you are again making the claim that at the point of feeling pain, a child is a person, so….to kill them then would be wrong? “Me “this isn’t a person because saying it is a person is illogical as it goes against abductive reasoning””

*Sighs and rubs eyes*  Only because you chose that arbitrary point of feeling pain as your litmus test for personhood, even though feeling pain doesn’t determine personhood in adults who can’t feel it, nor in animals who respond to pain but don’t have a brain at all.  I still think you would be better off listing some more of these many “non-physical traits.” Okay, I am going to try and draw up a conclusion based on your arguments thus far.  Feel free to correct me. On one hand you seem to be saying that a fetus is a person at the point it feels pain.  I disagree, but let’s just roll with this here.  You would, presumably, be against abortion after this point, correct?  This ability to feel pain would take place at a quantifiable point in time.  A binary system.  On or off.  Non-person at one point, a person at the next at the flick of the pain switch.  Killing one would be killing a person = murder? On the other hand you seem to be insisting that you can’t make any distinction between one point in time and another in the development of the infant.  There is no one point, no binary point that you can point to to say “at this point a child is a person.”  So in such a situation where there is no determinate point, you must then say that abortion is either wrong the entire time, or not wrong at all, if you can’t point to a point in time to determine personhood it’s an either/or conclusion. The fact that I disagree with your entire pain=personhood premise is a separate issue here.  I’m trying to deal with what I see as you contradicting your own premise. Perhaps this can be best answered by flat out answering these two questions, repeated from above: 1. Is your position that the ability to feel pain = personhood? 2. if yes, then is abortion wrong once they reach this point?  3. If no, then why is it not wrong when they reach this point?

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik I apologize for the late reply. This has been the busiest week I’ve had since starting this job. Okay, deep breath.  Your argument boils down to one of two conclusions: 1. it is a self-contradicting, self-defeating, logically incoherent mess or 2. it is an exercise in pure sophism along the same lines of a witty person at a party arguing that the actual distance of a sandy beach approaches infinity because as you magnify the scope and have to trace around individual grains of sand making up the edge of the shoreline in every increasing fractal complexity, the distance continues to grow exponentially. This is not an ad hominin.  I mean this literally.  Let me show you. For case #1: You: “There is no observable moment at which a fetus becomes a person. I’d like to see you find the exact moment that a fetus can begin to feel pain.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens…” “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. … You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” Also you: "It’s physically impossible for a fetus to feel pain before at least 24 weeks.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED” “Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” “We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion.” “If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person.” “Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!"So to sum up, you’re stating with equal authority that you CAN’T tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person, and that you CAN tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person.” Do you see the dilemma that you are creating here?  Logical and cognitive dissonance.   Case #2: All your arguments are moot and irrelevant regardless of which of the two options you choose to go with, or even if you try to combine them.  I refute and deny both equally, and both miss the point and fail to get you out of the hole you dug.   You’re so busy feeling clever at your Schrodinger’s cat equivalent of human personhood being defined by the indeterminate start of pain and personhood that you fail to answer any of the questions this poses for real world application.  For example, the moral dilemma I posed to you twice and both times you seemed to have missed the point. In your most recent reply you said: "Killing something that doesn’t feel pain with or without the knowledge that it doesn’t feel pain are both equally moral. Morality isn’t based on beliefs, but the effects of actions. If a fetus can’t feel pain then killing it can always be moral” You defined personhood by the ability to feel pain, while acknowledging (half the time) that you can not tell when this point happens without–presumably–inflicting it and seeing the results.   As to morality, you are setting up a false dichotomy between belief and results (or what you call effects of actions).  Your argument devolves into “the ends justify the means.”  This is wrong.  We can absolutely judge the morality of a person by their actions, not just the effects.  We do so all the time.  If a demolition team blows up a building without checking to see if anyone is inside, we call that irresponsible and they will be punished, even if there is no one inside.  If a man fires a gun into the air, not knowing if it will fall and hit someone, he is charged and punished.  The effects are irrelevant, their actions show that they acted immorally and with indifference to the possible consequences of their actions. So to your point, if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, but choose to kill them in your ignorance anyway, that is immoral. “It’s not arbitrary. Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” This is opinion, not fact.  Your choice of the ability to feel pain, or any other physical or non-physical characteristic as the defining characteristic of what grants a human being rights are ABSOLUTELY arbitrary, by the simple fact that you can find instances and examples of these lacking in born humans as well. Even your choice of “personhood” as a criteria is arbitrary, not only because you can’t (or can, depending on which of your quotes we select) point to when that change happens, but because your choice of what defines personhood is selected for convenience.  And this is what gets you into the same camp as nazis and slavers.  They had just as “valid” reasons for defining personhood as you do.  They were equally arbitrary.  You just don’t happen to like theirs and think yours are better, but there is nothing intrinsically better about your position.  They too admitted the jew, the black, the slav, the mentally ill, the crippled were all “humans,” but they weren’t full “persons.”  You are doing the same: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” You are admitting the unborn fetus is human, but it’s not a “person” because it doesn’t meet <insert characteristic>.  Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.  This is why I say that you are putting yourself in their camp.  Your argument is fundamentally the same.  You just happen to like your choice of defining characteristics, where I–and all previous advocates of “non-persons” –maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood. We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "There is no dilemma and their is no dissonance. Those two things can be true at the same time. We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain, but we do know if they can feel pain. We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks. We can tell if a fetus can feel pain. We cannot pinpoint or observe the exact moment a fetus begins to feel pain.”

Your own statement here proves the logical contradiction.  Read it.   You state “We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain” and then state with confidence, “We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks.” You’re asserting your inability to make a claim, then making that very claim.  So even pretending that your criteria were real, it doesn’t work.  Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That’s not how logic works.  "A” can not be “A” and “non-A” at the same time.  Logic 101. But your point is moot, at least by this criteria.

“It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary.” You can keep repeating this but it’s not true. I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren’t conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You’ve never once addressed these points that I’ve made repeatedly.   “As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person.” Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that’s been proven wrong.  So try again? “Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people.” Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren’t people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don’t think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you’re just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: “the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person.” Me: “here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. ““Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse.” Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to “defend” their ethnic “rights.” You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I’m trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I’m in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” ““Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical.” First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi’s used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is “logical”, but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I’ve already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.  Saying what amounts to “nuh uh!” doesn’t count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it’s right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn’t count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. ““maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay” Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. ““We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights” You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the “women’s rights” nonsense is just silly.  A woman’s “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“"We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain” and then state with confidence, “We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks."” That’s not a contradiction. Both of those statements are factually correct.”“ "“Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That’s not how logic works.  "A” can not be “A” and “non-A” at the same time.  Logic 101.” I’m not claiming A and non-A are true at the same time. I’m claiming A and B are true at the same time. They are not opposite claims.“” I’m not sure we’re working from the same understanding of logic. But again, this is a side issue.  Your argument from this POV has been refuted and is moot, but I’ve been trying to get you to see how your logic falls apart since you tie everything else to it.  You can not logically say, “we don’t know when something starts, but it does start here. ”““I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.” There are hundreds of criteria that determine personhood. Pain is just the simplest one and first one. You have no point.”“ But you’ve never mentioned any of these other criteria.  So my point is, since this pain one is moot due to the reasons given before, you would be better off choosing another one as your hobby horse. "“Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.” And consciousness. And self awareness. And rationality. And reciprocity. And communication. And autonomy. And you get the idea.” Finally some fresh material!  And…just as wrong.  Every, single, one.  Since every one has exceptions to them in adults.  Sleeping people, comatose people, insane people, children born without pre-frontal cortexes, handicapped people… Now I do understand what you’re trying to argue here, I really do.  I just don’t think it works.  You’re saying that so long as a person has one of these criteria you have arbitrarily decided determines personhood, then they are a person.  The sleeping person will wake, the insane person might have been well, the brainless child might be able to function to some degree, and so on.  Where one criteria falls through, you rely on one of the others to buffer your argument. But it all falls apart in the womb. Obviously most of these are impossible for an unborn child, so you try to find the lowest common denominator, pain, since the rest don’t work.  The problem is, that won’t work either.  All of these criteria you talk about exist on a gradient or spectrum from conception to death.  I could list my own criteria, even non-physical ones that prove that the unborn child is also a person/human (since I don’t make the false distinction you do), but you would refute them, *not because they are any weaker than your criteria*, but because you don’t like them since they disagree with yours.  Your criteria are arbitrary.  Self-selected.  Cherry-picked.  They have no justification past the point whereby YOU want them to bolster your pre-determined conclusion, and you ignore any criteria that doesn’t meet that goal. Just as did the you-know-who. “No it hasn’t. You’ve yet to give a valid reason why pain or any other characteristic I have mentioned should be considered arbitrary.” I have, repeatedly.  You just don’t like the reasons.  If you want to argue this, then I will list a bunch of criteria that bolster my opinion and you can tell me why they are invalid or not just as arbitrary as your own.  Want to take that challenge?  You’ve shown me some of yours, I’ve said they are arbitrary.  I can give some of mine and you can try to say why you believe they aren’t just as valid as yours.  Spoiler alert, you will wind up arguing over opinions, just like you are over your own. ““Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own.” No, not even close. Nazis- Jews aren’t people, we have no proof of this, but we will believe it anyway. Me- fetuses aren’t people because if they were then they would be similar to people in some nonphysical way.”“

Identical.  The nazi’s had lots of "proof” of their claims.  You are confusing “proofs” with “truth/facts.”  The fact that you think YOUR proofs are better and don’t like their claims doesn’t mean they didn’t have any.  I disagree with your proofs too, so by your standard of dismissal, I guess you have no proof either.  You’re just choosing to believe it anyway. ““You: "the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person."” 1. Not my argument. 2. That’s still deductive reasoning.”“ Literally is your argument in a nutshell, insofar as "pain” is a representation/place holder of your “criteria.”  Replace “pain” with any of these, and it holds true to your position. Also, you cut out the rest of what I said (note limitations I know) or you would be showing that I agree this is deductive reasoning, but my response–which was also deductive reasoning, shows it to be logically incorrect.  Again, don’t confuse “logic” with “fact/truth.”  There are lots of logical statements that are untrue.  See previous and below discussion of false premises. ““Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to "defend” their ethnic “rights."” Not even close to right. They weren’t trying to defend anything. They were using authoritarian to mindless and senselessly kill and enslave people because they saw it as a beneficial for society. Nazis didn’t see the final solution as a defense of anything.”“

The fact that we don’t LIKE their reasons, and the fact that we both find their reasons abhorrent doesn’t change the fact that they DID believe these false things.  We know they did because they used them as propaganda and repeated them over and over, drumming up these very fears in the minds of those they were trying to reach.  You touch on it in your own reply.  They saw it as "beneficial to society.”  WHOSE society?  WHY would they think it beneficial?   I’m sorry, your response is just an (understandable) knee jerk reaction, not an acknowledgment of facts.  You don’t like the implications so you are just blindly denying them.  "“You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing.”” You can’t de-personalize something that isn’t a person. Fetuses are not and should not be considered people unless they fit the criteria for personhood"

And they are only a “non-person” because you have chosen a set of imaginary criteria to bolster this opinion.  We’ve covered this.  In logic you don’t get to use your conclusion to argue your premise.  Making up criteria to define “personhood” didn’t work out for the bad groups pointed out before.  You believing that YOUR justifications are just BETTER than theirs doesn’t change the fact you are doing the same thing they did and following the same pattern of logic.   I’m saying doing anything to separate personhood from humanity to justify killing them is wrong.  I call that murder.  As I did for nazi’s and slavers killing their “de-personalized” humans.You keep insisting that what you are doing is different from them, but the only thing you have to argue for that is “my opinion is better than theirs.”   Here is what it all boils down to, and why I’m lumping you in with Nazi’s and slavers:  I’m saying the very act of trying to make that distinction is the root evil.  You trying to make this argument in the first place is the Wrong. ““First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell.” Anything that has human dna is by definition human. Tumors, fecal matter, hair and nail clippings, teeth. These are all human.” That is utterly nonsensical and no reasonable person could take that seriously.  The only way anyone could make that argument without rolling their eyes is if they had an axe to grind.  Human-derived is not the same as human.  That’s like saying every pebble or grain of sand is a mountain.  

““Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”” NONPHYSICAL TRAITS. BECOME LITERATE ALREADY” I was using that as an example of your logical argument.  Whether its physical or non-physical is irrelevant.  You know this.  Stop ignoring the point and feigning outrage to justify doing so. ““Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than "well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.” The nazis didn’t use logic. Their beliefs were not logically sound. This is the reason why Mein Kampf is read by German schoolchildren today. To show how devoid of logic and reason it is.“

I’ll select this note to stand in for all the other notes where you complain that "nazi’s didn’t  use the same logic I do because they were wrong and I don’t like their reasons.  That means they didn’t use logic!” Nope.  Sorry.  You can’t escape this fact.  The logic used by them, by you, and by yes, as you point out, people characterizing animals are all the same.  The logical framework is identical.  When conclusions are wrong, its because of the premises they plug into it.  The nazi’s premises were wrong.  Your premises are wrong.  The anthropologist plugging Piltdown man into the taxonomic tree were wrong.  Your logic is all the same though. ““Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted.” It’s not illogical nor an opinion. Being human and being a person have different criteria. They do not perfectly overlap.”“ “I have decided that these two groups are different things because of reasons I chose, while ignoring others that disprove it, to deem as right and logical, so that means this is not illogical or an opinion.” Yeah…that’s a personal opinion, not a fact. “1. Fetuses aren’t people 2. Fetuses aren’t children in the same sense as actual children 3. The Bible literally mentions and supports inducing miscarriages” 1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.  In the same vein of reasoning, I declare that the sky is green.  Or if you’re going to raise complaints about non-physical traits, then fine.  I declare that anyone who can’t enjoy music isn’t a person.  Because I said so.  Declaring something doesn’t make it true. 2. and adults of 21 aren’t adults in the same sense as adults of 61.  adults in a coma arent adults in the same sense as conscious adults.  still adults.  still children.  all human and people.  Your point is irrelevant. 3. yeah nope.  better back that one up with references if you expect me to buy that.  spoiler alert, I know this is not true. “A woman’s right to control their own body. Until a fetus becomes a person it’s part of the woman’s body and she should have full authority over it. Even a dead body has more bodily autonomy than a woman denied an abortion.” Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.  They are so glaringly obvious that I can only think that you are trying to troll me. But important things to focus on in any reply: *The importance of the difference between “logic” and “truth” aka the fact that something can be logical but untrue if the premise is incorrect. *The above highlighted issue that I see as the core evil and what ties you most directly with every other nasty group that tried to make a distinction between people and humanity.  Namely that they tried to do so in the first place.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“You can not logically say, "we don't know when something starts, but it does start here.” You can though. It’s impossible to tell exactly when a fetus starts to feel pain, but it’s entirely possible to tell if they are able to feel pain."

I feel we are beating a dead horse here.  You are using sophistry, not logic, parsing the extreme definitions of words to say something and then claim you mean something else by using a different definition of the word when this is pointed out, but I believe its a moot point at this juncture.  And in this particular instance, unless you're willing to test the unborn child to see if it has pain before performing an abortion (are you?) then its functionally meaningless as well.  After all, maybe a baby can feel pain at 23 weeks, or maybe it doesn't at 25.  Unless you're willing to test... "“But it all falls apart in the womb.” My argument doesn’t fall apart at the womb because fetuses aren’t people, regardless of my argument. Facts are true regardless of your belief in them." You're begging the question here, not making an argument.  You can't say, "fetuses aren't people because of these reasons" and then say, "the reasons don't matter because the fetuses aren't people." Plus you didn't even understand what I was doing there.  The point I was making in the quote you referenced is that as the child is less developed, you run out of these "non-physical characteristics" you've selected, making them a non person by your understanding.  I WAS REPEATING YOUR OWN POINT BACK AT YOU TO SHOW YOU I UNDERSTOOD!  The fact that you didn't understand your own argument and used it to attempt a quip about facts being true regardless of belief becomes a bit ironic and outright comical then.  Weren't you the one talking about being literate? "“Your criteria are arbitrary.  Self-selected.  Cherry-picked.” Not even close. These characteristics are agreed upon by academics to be the defining traits of personhood." Right, right, because no academic was ever wrong, never change their minds, and they always agree with one another...  *rolls eyes*   Argument from authority fallacy. Do I really need to trot out images of textbooks made by "academics" to explain how some races were inferior to others?  Do I?  Or do you realize how laughable this point is?  Oh but yeah, because YOU disagree with THOSE academics, that is the standard by which we judge all things.  *rolls eyes again*  yeah.  You cherry-picked, me bucko.  In 50 years academics may well look back on your opinion and your hand-selected "academics" in the same way we look upon the eugenicists. "“I have, repeatedly.” No you didn’t. You called them arbitrary because certain people don’t have them, despite the fact that I both know and have acknowledged that. You only need to be in possession of one characteristic to be a person." Did you read my post?  Because when I presented you your own argument to show that I understood what you are trying to say, but disagree with it, you saw it as an argument against your point...  Are you even reading my replies?  I addressed this claim of yours multiple times, and showed how they are arbitrary. Heck, YOU have even shown how they are arbitrary, though you would deny that. "“Identical.” I don’t know how to explain this to you, but an argument not based on logic (nazis) is inherently different from an argument based on logic (mine)." I don't know how to explain this to you, but just because you disagree with the conclusion of someone else's application of your logic doesn't mean they didn't use logic, especially when elsewhere you admitted that your logical structure was the same.  Kinda undermining yourself here.  I admit you're using logic.  So did the nazi's.  You're both wrong because your premises are wrong. "“They saw it as "beneficial to society."  WHOSE society?  WHY would they think it beneficial?” Beneficial to humanity because they didn’t see Jews as humans." So then...work out the rest of the logical process...come on now, you can do it.   And because they didn't view fetsuses...I mean Jews...as human, they saw getting rid of them as defending themselves/their values/their worldview/their bodies... So you wind up with the point I was making.  Congradulations, I'm glad we agreed on something.  Same logic, same effect.  Dead people. "“And they are only a “non-person” because you have chosen a set of imaginary criteria to bolster this opinion.” THEY LITERALLY DO NOT SHARE ANY NONPHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS. In order for 2 things to be classified as the same thing they must both share characteristics! And because personhood is a nonphysical trait, and fetuses share no nonphysical traits with people. FETUSES ARE NOT PEOPLE." Begging the question again.  See above.   Convenient to say two groups don't share the same defining characteristics to make them both equal, when you cherry pick what those characteristics are to come to your pre-determined conclusion.  Who else did that?  you can use as many caps as you like, but you've yet to prove that your characteristics aren't arbitrary.  All you've ever done so far is say "they are not!" or make an argument from authority about select "academics" who agree with you.  you're not helping your case here.  Will you listen to some “non-physical characteristics” I can come up with that disagree with your selected ones? "A human is anything with human dna." I'm just going to let this little gem stand on its own for my amusement's sake.  I'm going to laugh now and spray hundreds of humans across my desk.   "“Yeah...that's a personal opinion, not a fact.” It’s not. People and humans are separate things. You cannot deny that. They are 2 separate groups. That’s a fact." Literally not a fact as my previous amused reply shows and as any reasonable, logical person on planet earth would agree.  Very easy to deny this opinion of yours unless you want to rework the very definition of what a human is.  Good grief, the dictionary doesn't even agree with you, so you're standing on your own two feet here.  Literally the definition of personal opinion. "“1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.” I believe it because it’s a fact"

No, you believe it, so you think it is a fact.

“Your point is irrelevant.” You chastise my for arguing from emotion, yet you still call fetuses children in order to make taking woman’s rights away sound better.

Don't think I ever criticized you for arguing from emotion (reference?).  I've pointed out the error of your logic in this section, but if you want to play that game then okay, lets play: you still call children fetuses in order to justify de-personalizing them so you can kill them.   See, cuts both ways there.  And you still didn't address my point, only threw in this red herring. "“3. yeah nope.” Numbers 5:11–31 Basically if a woman is pregnant and suspected of adultery, she needs to drink an herbal water to force her to miscarry" Okay, in the name of fairness, I have to partially give you this.  I had to flip through a couple different translations before I found one that had the wording that makes this point.  The NKJV, which is the more literal translation, doesn't say this, where the NIV, a more dynamic equivalent text, does, if you’re going to believe that drinking ashes mixed with water will make you miscarry.  I’d have to do a more in-depth study of this passage to come to a better understanding of what it is saying, and which is the better translation. But do I need to point out that this is a punishment? The Bible doesn't generally condone killing either, but does mete out death as a penalty.  I can also point out texts in the same literature there that treat an unborn baby as a human life, the taking of which is punishable by death of the offender.  Exodus 21:22  The unborn baby is given the same weight as an adult. "“Wrong in so many many ways.  I don't think there's a single sentence in this note that was true.” So you disagree with the idea that women should have control over their own bodies?" No, I disagree with the idea that women should be considered to have a "right" to kill the body of the child inside them.  That the fact that it is an individual life means that doing so is murder.  So you disagree with the idea that babies shouldn't be murdered? "Humanity and people are 2 separate classifications. They didn’t “try” to make a distinction. Those distinctions already existed, but they chose the wrong ones and killed actual people." Begging the question again, but even if I agreed with it in principal, then my point is that you are making the same mistake they did.  YOU'RE EVEN AGREEING WITH THEM IN PRINCIPAL, JUST DISAGREEING ON THE GROUP IN QUESTION BEING KILLED!  Listen to yourself! "It's okay to kill a human so long as it isn't a person. These groups over here are bad because they chose the wrong kind of human to kill."  That's what you are saying here.  Listen to yourself! The fact that you are even trying to make that distinction places you in the same category as every other group that did that.  The very fact that you make the same type of argument but have to explain why your justified murder is better than their justified murder is disturbing. If you are making a distinction between "human" and "person", you've already fallen into bad company.  After all this time saying nazi logic was wrong, and your logic was different, or that they didn't use logic and you did...you yourself admit that you agree with it, you just disagree on the individual human group that its okay to kill. If you honestly can't see that, then there's little hope for you until you do.  

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik “Number 1 is wrong. Connections between nerves are not fully understood and therefore cannot be labeled as physical.” Simply, factually wrong.  These are understood.  As someone who literally is a biologist and who took a human anatomy course, I can say with certainty that you are wrong.  Unless you are going to posit the idea that nerves communicate through non-physical means like “magic” or the “ether” then just accept the fact that you will have to abandon this argument.  Find a new one. “Number 2 is wrong. The picture was a metaphor to show how comparing 2 things with different nonphysical characteristics is equivalent to comparing 2 things that share no physical characteristics. A fetus has as much in common with a person as the appearance of an embryo has in common with a person” I’ll give you this one in the name of fairness.  Maybe I misunderstood the point of your example.  But this doesn’t get you out of any of the other difficulties.  Let’s see how you do with those.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik Just got back on here to see your response. May I state at the outset that I am glad it seems we are past the personal insult stage and discussing things rationally. “Not factually wrong. The connections between nerves give rise to intelligence in a way we can’t understand. You cannot prove that intelligence is a physical characteristic. The ability to process pain isn’t understood. We don’t know how the brain manages to do anything.” “Pain transmission isn’t understood. We literally have no idea how the brain processes pain. We don’t know what goes on in the brain to produce the sensation we call pain. Self awareness and pain are metaphysical. The human brain is a black box. Signals go in, nonphysical traits like self awareness, pain, understanding of time, and other things come out” You’re moving the goalpost here.  You went from “we don’t know how pain is transmitted” to “the rise of intelligence.”  Those are quantum steps from eachother.  It is not a mystery how pain or nerve impulses are transmitted.  That is a matter of common knowledge and observed in the simplest multicellular organisms that have nerves at all, but no brain.  Now if you want to go to the point where and now intelligence or conciousness arises, that’s an interesting discussion, but not relevant to your original point.  We know how nerve impulses work.  We can see unborn babies respond to pain stimuli earlier than 20 weeks.  We can detect their nerve impulses. We know they feel pain.  If you are going to mark the start at which babies feel pain, then that is something quantifiable, but I don’t think it helps your case, especially when you are then going to use it to draw an arbitrary line in the sand on child development.  But I will address that in my conclusion. “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. At one time it isn’t a person. The next time it is a person. You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” I can and do say that they became a person at conception.  You are the one making the (imho false dichotomy) distinction between humanity and personhood.  Again, I don’t think you are making the case you think you are. ““when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not”. We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion. Your point is moot” ““There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion”. There is. If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person. I can feel pain, am conscious, and self aware. That is literally a quantifiable difference” So you’re making my point for me.  Cool.  So you’re just saying it just doesn’t matter if they feel pain because you can’t know that they are a person or not?  Your point seems confused, because it seems on one hand that you are saying pain=consciousness, which isn’t true, but even if it was, then pain=humanity/personhood.  So…is it bad to kill them once they feel pain?  So you’re against abortions after 20 weeks?  You’re making the ability to feel pain your litmus test to determine whether abortion is acceptable or not, yet at the same time you’re insisting that there is no point that you can see whether a fetus is a person or not?  Are they a person when they feel pain, or not?  If they can feel pain, we can detect that as you yourself have agreed with me, so that means there is a point in time when even by your definition a baby can be shown to be a person.  Which contradicts what you say elsewhere. ““it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it?”. In real life we can tell for a fact whether or not a fetus can feel pain, so your metaphor isn’t accurate.” You’re misinterpreting the point of my metaphor.  It’s not about feeling pain or not.  It’s about the comparative morality of terminating a life with foreknowledge or with ignorance.  Is there a distinction between the two?  Is one worse than the other? ““Not sure what you tried to prove there.” As soon as your fetus is replaced with a pot of water, your personhood is replaced with the act of boiling, your idea of “it’s immoral if we don’t know when they become a person” falls apart” I think you are confusing your own position with mine.  My position is they are a human being and a person at conception.  You are the one drawing arbitrary lines and then saying at the same time those lines don’t exist.  You’re responding to my attempt to understand your position, not my actual position. ““What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject”. There will never be. Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!” So, to confirm, you are again making the claim that at the point of feeling pain, a child is a person, so….to kill them then would be wrong? “Me “this isn’t a person because saying it is a person is illogical as it goes against abductive reasoning””

*Sighs and rubs eyes*  Only because you chose that arbitrary point of feeling pain as your litmus test for personhood, even though feeling pain doesn’t determine personhood in adults who can’t feel it, nor in animals who respond to pain but don’t have a brain at all.  I still think you would be better off listing some more of these many “non-physical traits.” Okay, I am going to try and draw up a conclusion based on your arguments thus far.  Feel free to correct me. On one hand you seem to be saying that a fetus is a person at the point it feels pain.  I disagree, but let’s just roll with this here.  You would, presumably, be against abortion after this point, correct?  This ability to feel pain would take place at a quantifiable point in time.  A binary system.  On or off.  Non-person at one point, a person at the next at the flick of the pain switch.  Killing one would be killing a person = murder? On the other hand you seem to be insisting that you can’t make any distinction between one point in time and another in the development of the infant.  There is no one point, no binary point that you can point to to say “at this point a child is a person.”  So in such a situation where there is no determinate point, you must then say that abortion is either wrong the entire time, or not wrong at all, if you can’t point to a point in time to determine personhood it’s an either/or conclusion. The fact that I disagree with your entire pain=personhood premise is a separate issue here.  I’m trying to deal with what I see as you contradicting your own premise. Perhaps this can be best answered by flat out answering these two questions, repeated from above: 1. Is your position that the ability to feel pain = personhood? 2. if yes, then is abortion wrong once they reach this point?  3. If no, then why is it not wrong when they reach this point?

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik I apologize for the late reply. This has been the busiest week I’ve had since starting this job. Okay, deep breath.  Your argument boils down to one of two conclusions: 1. it is a self-contradicting, self-defeating, logically incoherent mess or 2. it is an exercise in pure sophism along the same lines of a witty person at a party arguing that the actual distance of a sandy beach approaches infinity because as you magnify the scope and have to trace around individual grains of sand making up the edge of the shoreline in every increasing fractal complexity, the distance continues to grow exponentially. This is not an ad hominin.  I mean this literally.  Let me show you. For case #1: You: "There is no observable moment at which a fetus becomes a person. I’d like to see you find the exact moment that a fetus can begin to feel pain.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens…” “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. … You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” Also you: "It’s physically impossible for a fetus to feel pain before at least 24 weeks.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED” “Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” “We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion.” “If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person.” “Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!"So to sum up, you’re stating with equal authority that you CAN’T tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person, and that you CAN tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person.” Do you see the dilemma that you are creating here?  Logical and cognitive dissonance.   Case #2: All your arguments are moot and irrelevant regardless of which of the two options you choose to go with, or even if you try to combine them.  I refute and deny both equally, and both miss the point and fail to get you out of the hole you dug.   You’re so busy feeling clever at your Schrodinger’s cat equivalent of human personhood being defined by the indeterminate start of pain and personhood that you fail to answer any of the questions this poses for real world application.  For example, the moral dilemma I posed to you twice and both times you seemed to have missed the point. In your most recent reply you said: "Killing something that doesn’t feel pain with or without the knowledge that it doesn’t feel pain are both equally moral. Morality isn’t based on beliefs, but the effects of actions. If a fetus can’t feel pain then killing it can always be moral” You defined personhood by the ability to feel pain, while acknowledging (half the time) that you can not tell when this point happens without–presumably–inflicting it and seeing the results.   As to morality, you are setting up a false dichotomy between belief and results (or what you call effects of actions).  Your argument devolves into “the ends justify the means.”  This is wrong.  We can absolutely judge the morality of a person by their actions, not just the effects.  We do so all the time.  If a demolition team blows up a building without checking to see if anyone is inside, we call that irresponsible and they will be punished, even if there is no one inside.  If a man fires a gun into the air, not knowing if it will fall and hit someone, he is charged and punished.  The effects are irrelevant, their actions show that they acted immorally and with indifference to the possible consequences of their actions. So to your point, if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, but choose to kill them in your ignorance anyway, that is immoral. “It’s not arbitrary. Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” This is opinion, not fact.  Your choice of the ability to feel pain, or any other physical or non-physical characteristic as the defining characteristic of what grants a human being rights are ABSOLUTELY arbitrary, by the simple fact that you can find instances and examples of these lacking in born humans as well. Even your choice of “personhood” as a criteria is arbitrary, not only because you can’t (or can, depending on which of your quotes we select) point to when that change happens, but because your choice of what defines personhood is selected for convenience.  And this is what gets you into the same camp as nazis and slavers.  They had just as “valid” reasons for defining personhood as you do.  They were equally arbitrary.  You just don’t happen to like theirs and think yours are better, but there is nothing intrinsically better about your position.  They too admitted the jew, the black, the slav, the mentally ill, the crippled were all “humans,” but they weren’t full “persons.”  You are doing the same: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” You are admitting the unborn fetus is human, but it’s not a “person” because it doesn’t meet <insert characteristic>.  Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.  This is why I say that you are putting yourself in their camp.  Your argument is fundamentally the same.  You just happen to like your choice of defining characteristics, where I–and all previous advocates of “non-persons” –maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood. We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "There is no dilemma and their is no dissonance. Those two things can be true at the same time. We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain, but we do know if they can feel pain. We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks. We can tell if a fetus can feel pain. We cannot pinpoint or observe the exact moment a fetus begins to feel pain.”

Your own statement here proves the logical contradiction.  Read it.   You state “We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain” and then state with confidence, “We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks.” You’re asserting your inability to make a claim, then making that very claim.  So even pretending that your criteria were real, it doesn’t work.  Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That’s not how logic works.  "A" can not be “A” and “non-A” at the same time.  Logic 101. But your point is moot, at least by this criteria.

“It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary.” You can keep repeating this but it’s not true. I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren’t conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You’ve never once addressed these points that I’ve made repeatedly.   “As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person.” Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that’s been proven wrong.  So try again? “Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people.” Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren’t people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don’t think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you’re just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: “the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person.” Me: “here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. "“Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse.” Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to “defend” their ethnic “rights.” You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I’m trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I’m in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” ““Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical.” First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi’s used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is “logical”, but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I’ve already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.  Saying what amounts to “nuh uh!” doesn’t count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it’s right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn’t count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. ““maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay” Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. ““We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights” You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the “women’s rights” nonsense is just silly.  A woman’s “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "“"We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain" and then state with confidence, "We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks."” That’s not a contradiction. Both of those statements are factually correct."" "“Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That's not how logic works.  "A" can not be "A" and "non-A" at the same time.  Logic 101.” I’m not claiming A and non-A are true at the same time. I’m claiming A and B are true at the same time. They are not opposite claims."" I'm not sure we're working from the same understanding of logic. But again, this is a side issue.  Your argument from this POV has been refuted and is moot, but I've been trying to get you to see how your logic falls apart since you tie everything else to it.  You can not logically say, "we don't know when something starts, but it does start here. ""“I've already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.” There are hundreds of criteria that determine personhood. Pain is just the simplest one and first one. You have no point."" But you've never mentioned any of these other criteria.  So my point is, since this pain one is moot due to the reasons given before, you would be better off choosing another one as your hobby horse. "“Yet you've only ever mentioned one.  Pain.” And consciousness. And self awareness. And rationality. And reciprocity. And communication. And autonomy. And you get the idea." Finally some fresh material!  And...just as wrong.  Every, single, one.  Since every one has exceptions to them in adults.  Sleeping people, comatose people, insane people, children born without pre-frontal cortexes, handicapped people... Now I do understand what you're trying to argue here, I really do.  I just don't think it works.  You're saying that so long as a person has one of these criteria you have arbitrarily decided determines personhood, then they are a person.  The sleeping person will wake, the insane person might have been well, the brainless child might be able to function to some degree, and so on.  Where one criteria falls through, you rely on one of the others to buffer your argument. But it all falls apart in the womb. Obviously most of these are impossible for an unborn child, so you try to find the lowest common denominator, pain, since the rest don't work.  The problem is, that won't work either.  All of these criteria you talk about exist on a gradient or spectrum from conception to death.  I could list my own criteria, even non-physical ones that prove that the unborn child is also a person/human (since I don't make the false distinction you do), but you would refute them, *not because they are any weaker than your criteria*, but because you don't like them since they disagree with yours.  Your criteria are arbitrary.  Self-selected.  Cherry-picked.  They have no justification past the point whereby YOU want them to bolster your pre-determined conclusion, and you ignore any criteria that doesn't meet that goal. Just as did the you-know-who. "No it hasn’t. You’ve yet to give a valid reason why pain or any other characteristic I have mentioned should be considered arbitrary." I have, repeatedly.  You just don't like the reasons.  If you want to argue this, then I will list a bunch of criteria that bolster my opinion and you can tell me why they are invalid or not just as arbitrary as your own.  Want to take that challenge?  You've shown me some of yours, I've said they are arbitrary.  I can give some of mine and you can try to say why you believe they aren't just as valid as yours.  Spoiler alert, you will wind up arguing over opinions, just like you are over your own. "“Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own.” No, not even close. Nazis- Jews aren’t people, we have no proof of this, but we will believe it anyway. Me- fetuses aren’t people because if they were then they would be similar to people in some nonphysical way.""

Identical.  The nazi's had lots of "proof" of their claims.  You are confusing “proofs” with “truth/facts.”  The fact that you think YOUR proofs are better and don't like their claims doesn't mean they didn't have any.  I disagree with your proofs too, so by your standard of dismissal, I guess you have no proof either.  You're just choosing to believe it anyway. "“You: "the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn't feel pain, it's not a person."” 1. Not my argument. 2. That’s still deductive reasoning."" Literally is your argument in a nutshell, insofar as "pain" is a representation/place holder of your "criteria."  Replace "pain" with any of these, and it holds true to your position. Also, you cut out the rest of what I said (note limitations I know) or you would be showing that I agree this is deductive reasoning, but my response--which was also deductive reasoning, shows it to be logically incorrect.  Again, don’t confuse “logic” with “fact/truth.”  There are lots of logical statements that are untrue.  See previous and below discussion of false premises. "“Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi's were trying to "defend" their ethnic "rights."” Not even close to right. They weren’t trying to defend anything. They were using authoritarian to mindless and senselessly kill and enslave people because they saw it as a beneficial for society. Nazis didn’t see the final solution as a defense of anything.""

The fact that we don't LIKE their reasons, and the fact that we both find their reasons abhorrent doesn't change the fact that they DID believe these false things.  We know they did because they used them as propaganda and repeated them over and over, drumming up these very fears in the minds of those they were trying to reach.  You touch on it in your own reply.  They saw it as "beneficial to society."  WHOSE society?  WHY would they think it beneficial?   I'm sorry, your response is just an (understandable) knee jerk reaction, not an acknowledgment of facts.  You don't like the implications so you are just blindly denying them.  "“You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing.”” You can’t de-personalize something that isn’t a person. Fetuses are not and should not be considered people unless they fit the criteria for personhood"

And they are only a “non-person” because you have chosen a set of imaginary criteria to bolster this opinion.  We've covered this.  In logic you don't get to use your conclusion to argue your premise.  Making up criteria to define "personhood" didn't work out for the bad groups pointed out before.  You believing that YOUR justifications are just BETTER than theirs doesn't change the fact you are doing the same thing they did and following the same pattern of logic.   I'm saying doing anything to separate personhood from humanity to justify killing them is wrong.  I call that murder.  As I did for nazi's and slavers killing their "de-personalized" humans.You keep insisting that what you are doing is different from them, but the only thing you have to argue for that is "my opinion is better than theirs."   Here is what it all boils down to, and why I’m lumping you in with Nazi’s and slavers:  I'm saying the very act of trying to make that distinction is the root evil.  You trying to make this argument in the first place is the Wrong. "“First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn't a human.  Do tell.” Anything that has human dna is by definition human. Tumors, fecal matter, hair and nail clippings, teeth. These are all human." That is utterly nonsensical and no reasonable person could take that seriously.  The only way anyone could make that argument without rolling their eyes is if they had an axe to grind.  Human-derived is not the same as human.  That's like saying every pebble or grain of sand is a mountain.  

"“Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”” NONPHYSICAL TRAITS. BECOME LITERATE ALREADY" I was using that as an example of your logical argument.  Whether its physical or non-physical is irrelevant.  You know this.  Stop ignoring the point and feigning outrage to justify doing so. "“Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than "well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn't because....I say so...."  you can't refute this.” The nazis didn’t use logic. Their beliefs were not logically sound. This is the reason why Mein Kampf is read by German schoolchildren today. To show how devoid of logic and reason it is."

I'll select this note to stand in for all the other notes where you complain that "nazi's didn't  use the same logic I do because they were wrong and I don't like their reasons.  That means they didn't use logic!" Nope.  Sorry.  You can't escape this fact.  The logic used by them, by you, and by yes, as you point out, people characterizing animals are all the same.  The logical framework is identical.  When conclusions are wrong, its because of the premises they plug into it.  The nazi's premises were wrong.  Your premises are wrong.  The anthropologist plugging Piltdown man into the taxonomic tree were wrong.  Your logic is all the same though. "“Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted.” It’s not illogical nor an opinion. Being human and being a person have different criteria. They do not perfectly overlap."" “I have decided that these two groups are different things because of reasons I chose, while ignoring others that disprove it, to deem as right and logical, so that means this is not illogical or an opinion." Yeah...that's a personal opinion, not a fact. "1. Fetuses aren’t people 2. Fetuses aren’t children in the same sense as actual children 3. The Bible literally mentions and supports inducing miscarriages" 1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.  In the same vein of reasoning, I declare that the sky is green.  Or if you're going to raise complaints about non-physical traits, then fine.  I declare that anyone who can't enjoy music isn’t a person.  Because I said so.  Declaring something doesn't make it true. 2. and adults of 21 aren't adults in the same sense as adults of 61.  adults in a coma arent adults in the same sense as conscious adults.  still adults.  still children.  all human and people.  Your point is irrelevant. 3. yeah nope.  better back that one up with references if you expect me to buy that.  spoiler alert, I know this is not true. "A woman’s right to control their own body. Until a fetus becomes a person it’s part of the woman’s body and she should have full authority over it. Even a dead body has more bodily autonomy than a woman denied an abortion." Wrong in so many many ways.  I don't think there's a single sentence in this note that was true.  They are so glaringly obvious that I can only think that you are trying to troll me. But important things to focus on in any reply: *The importance of the difference between “logic” and “truth” aka the fact that something can be logical but untrue if the premise is incorrect. *The above highlighted issue that I see as the core evil and what ties you most directly with every other nasty group that tried to make a distinction between people and humanity.  Namely that they tried to do so in the first place.

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik “Number 1 is wrong. Connections between nerves are not fully understood and therefore cannot be labeled as physical.” Simply, factually wrong.  These are understood.  As someone who literally is a biologist and who took a human anatomy course, I can say with certainty that you are wrong.  Unless you are going to posit the idea that nerves communicate through non-physical means like “magic” or the “ether” then just accept the fact that you will have to abandon this argument.  Find a new one. “Number 2 is wrong. The picture was a metaphor to show how comparing 2 things with different nonphysical characteristics is equivalent to comparing 2 things that share no physical characteristics. A fetus has as much in common with a person as the appearance of an embryo has in common with a person” I’ll give you this one in the name of fairness.  Maybe I misunderstood the point of your example.  But this doesn’t get you out of any of the other difficulties.  Let’s see how you do with those.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik Just got back on here to see your response. May I state at the outset that I am glad it seems we are past the personal insult stage and discussing things rationally. "Not factually wrong. The connections between nerves give rise to intelligence in a way we can’t understand. You cannot prove that intelligence is a physical characteristic. The ability to process pain isn’t understood. We don’t know how the brain manages to do anything.” “Pain transmission isn’t understood. We literally have no idea how the brain processes pain. We don’t know what goes on in the brain to produce the sensation we call pain. Self awareness and pain are metaphysical. The human brain is a black box. Signals go in, nonphysical traits like self awareness, pain, understanding of time, and other things come out” You’re moving the goalpost here.  You went from “we don’t know how pain is transmitted” to “the rise of intelligence.”  Those are quantum steps from eachother.  It is not a mystery how pain or nerve impulses are transmitted.  That is a matter of common knowledge and observed in the simplest multicellular organisms that have nerves at all, but no brain.  Now if you want to go to the point where and now intelligence or conciousness arises, that’s an interesting discussion, but not relevant to your original point.  We know how nerve impulses work.  We can see unborn babies respond to pain stimuli earlier than 20 weeks.  We can detect their nerve impulses. We know they feel pain.  If you are going to mark the start at which babies feel pain, then that is something quantifiable, but I don’t think it helps your case, especially when you are then going to use it to draw an arbitrary line in the sand on child development.  But I will address that in my conclusion. “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. At one time it isn’t a person. The next time it is a person. You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” I can and do say that they became a person at conception.  You are the one making the (imho false dichotomy) distinction between humanity and personhood.  Again, I don’t think you are making the case you think you are. ““when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not”. We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion. Your point is moot” ““There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion”. There is. If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person. I can feel pain, am conscious, and self aware. That is literally a quantifiable difference” So you’re making my point for me.  Cool.  So you’re just saying it just doesn’t matter if they feel pain because you can’t know that they are a person or not?  Your point seems confused, because it seems on one hand that you are saying pain=consciousness, which isn’t true, but even if it was, then pain=humanity/personhood.  So…is it bad to kill them once they feel pain?  So you’re against abortions after 20 weeks?  You’re making the ability to feel pain your litmus test to determine whether abortion is acceptable or not, yet at the same time you’re insisting that there is no point that you can see whether a fetus is a person or not?  Are they a person when they feel pain, or not?  If they can feel pain, we can detect that as you yourself have agreed with me, so that means there is a point in time when even by your definition a baby can be shown to be a person.  Which contradicts what you say elsewhere. ““it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it?”. In real life we can tell for a fact whether or not a fetus can feel pain, so your metaphor isn’t accurate.” You’re misinterpreting the point of my metaphor.  It’s not about feeling pain or not.  It’s about the comparative morality of terminating a life with foreknowledge or with ignorance.  Is there a distinction between the two?  Is one worse than the other? ““Not sure what you tried to prove there.” As soon as your fetus is replaced with a pot of water, your personhood is replaced with the act of boiling, your idea of “it’s immoral if we don’t know when they become a person” falls apart” I think you are confusing your own position with mine.  My position is they are a human being and a person at conception.  You are the one drawing arbitrary lines and then saying at the same time those lines don’t exist.  You’re responding to my attempt to understand your position, not my actual position. ““What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject”. There will never be. Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!” So, to confirm, you are again making the claim that at the point of feeling pain, a child is a person, so….to kill them then would be wrong? “Me “this isn’t a person because saying it is a person is illogical as it goes against abductive reasoning””

*Sighs and rubs eyes*  Only because you chose that arbitrary point of feeling pain as your litmus test for personhood, even though feeling pain doesn’t determine personhood in adults who can’t feel it, nor in animals who respond to pain but don’t have a brain at all.  I still think you would be better off listing some more of these many “non-physical traits.” Okay, I am going to try and draw up a conclusion based on your arguments thus far.  Feel free to correct me. On one hand you seem to be saying that a fetus is a person at the point it feels pain.  I disagree, but let’s just roll with this here.  You would, presumably, be against abortion after this point, correct?  This ability to feel pain would take place at a quantifiable point in time.  A binary system.  On or off.  Non-person at one point, a person at the next at the flick of the pain switch.  Killing one would be killing a person = murder? On the other hand you seem to be insisting that you can’t make any distinction between one point in time and another in the development of the infant.  There is no one point, no binary point that you can point to to say “at this point a child is a person.”  So in such a situation where there is no determinate point, you must then say that abortion is either wrong the entire time, or not wrong at all, if you can’t point to a point in time to determine personhood it’s an either/or conclusion. The fact that I disagree with your entire pain=personhood premise is a separate issue here.  I’m trying to deal with what I see as you contradicting your own premise. Perhaps this can be best answered by flat out answering these two questions, repeated from above: 1. Is your position that the ability to feel pain = personhood? 2. if yes, then is abortion wrong once they reach this point?  3. If no, then why is it not wrong when they reach this point?

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik I apologize for the late reply. This has been the busiest week I’ve had since starting this job. Okay, deep breath.  Your argument boils down to one of two conclusions: 1. it is a self-contradicting, self-defeating, logically incoherent mess or 2. it is an exercise in pure sophism along the same lines of a witty person at a party arguing that the actual distance of a sandy beach approaches infinity because as you magnify the scope and have to trace around individual grains of sand making up the edge of the shoreline in every increasing fractal complexity, the distance continues to grow exponentially. This is not an ad hominin.  I mean this literally.  Let me show you. For case #1: You: "There is no observable moment at which a fetus becomes a person. I’d like to see you find the exact moment that a fetus can begin to feel pain.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens…” “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. … You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” Also you: "It’s physically impossible for a fetus to feel pain before at least 24 weeks.” “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED” “Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” “We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion.” “If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person.” “Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!"So to sum up, you’re stating with equal authority that you CAN’T tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person, and that you CAN tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person.” Do you see the dilemma that you are creating here?  Logical and cognitive dissonance.   Case #2: All your arguments are moot and irrelevant regardless of which of the two options you choose to go with, or even if you try to combine them.  I refute and deny both equally, and both miss the point and fail to get you out of the hole you dug.   You’re so busy feeling clever at your Schrodinger’s cat equivalent of human personhood being defined by the indeterminate start of pain and personhood that you fail to answer any of the questions this poses for real world application.  For example, the moral dilemma I posed to you twice and both times you seemed to have missed the point. In your most recent reply you said: "Killing something that doesn’t feel pain with or without the knowledge that it doesn’t feel pain are both equally moral. Morality isn’t based on beliefs, but the effects of actions. If a fetus can’t feel pain then killing it can always be moral” You defined personhood by the ability to feel pain, while acknowledging (half the time) that you can not tell when this point happens without–presumably–inflicting it and seeing the results.   As to morality, you are setting up a false dichotomy between belief and results (or what you call effects of actions).  Your argument devolves into “the ends justify the means.”  This is wrong.  We can absolutely judge the morality of a person by their actions, not just the effects.  We do so all the time.  If a demolition team blows up a building without checking to see if anyone is inside, we call that irresponsible and they will be punished, even if there is no one inside.  If a man fires a gun into the air, not knowing if it will fall and hit someone, he is charged and punished.  The effects are irrelevant, their actions show that they acted immorally and with indifference to the possible consequences of their actions. So to your point, if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, but choose to kill them in your ignorance anyway, that is immoral. “It’s not arbitrary. Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware.” This is opinion, not fact.  Your choice of the ability to feel pain, or any other physical or non-physical characteristic as the defining characteristic of what grants a human being rights are ABSOLUTELY arbitrary, by the simple fact that you can find instances and examples of these lacking in born humans as well. Even your choice of “personhood” as a criteria is arbitrary, not only because you can’t (or can, depending on which of your quotes we select) point to when that change happens, but because your choice of what defines personhood is selected for convenience.  And this is what gets you into the same camp as nazis and slavers.  They had just as “valid” reasons for defining personhood as you do.  They were equally arbitrary.  You just don’t happen to like theirs and think yours are better, but there is nothing intrinsically better about your position.  They too admitted the jew, the black, the slav, the mentally ill, the crippled were all “humans,” but they weren’t full “persons.”  You are doing the same: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” You are admitting the unborn fetus is human, but it’s not a “person” because it doesn’t meet <insert characteristic>.  Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.  This is why I say that you are putting yourself in their camp.  Your argument is fundamentally the same.  You just happen to like your choice of defining characteristics, where I–and all previous advocates of “non-persons” –maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood. We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "There is no dilemma and their is no dissonance. Those two things can be true at the same time. We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain, but we do know if they can feel pain. We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks. We can tell if a fetus can feel pain. We cannot pinpoint or observe the exact moment a fetus begins to feel pain."

Your own statement here proves the logical contradiction.  Read it.   You state "We don’t know exactly when a fetus begins to feel pain" and then state with confidence, "We know that it’s impossible for it to feel pain before 24 weeks." You're asserting your inability to make a claim, then making that very claim.  So even pretending that your criteria were real, it doesn't work.  Two opposite things can not be true at the same time.  That's not how logic works.  "A" can not be "A" and "non-A" at the same time.  Logic 101. But your point is moot, at least by this criteria.

"It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary." You can keep repeating this but it's not true. I've already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren't conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You've never once addressed these points that I've made repeatedly.   "As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person." Yet you've only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that's been proven wrong.  So try again? "Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people." Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren't people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don't think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you're just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: "the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn't feel pain, it's not a person." Me: "here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. "“Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse." Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi's were trying to "defend" their ethnic "rights." You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I'm trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I'm in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: "The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people." "“Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical." First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn't a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi's used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is "logical", but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I've already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than "well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn't because....I say so...."  you can't refute this.  Saying what amounts to "nuh uh!" doesn't count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it's right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn't count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. "“maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay" Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. "“We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights" You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the "women's rights" nonsense is just silly.  A woman's “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "Number 1 is wrong. Connections between nerves are not fully understood and therefore cannot be labeled as physical.” Simply, factually wrong.  These are understood.  As someone who literally is a biologist and who took a human anatomy course, I can say with certainty that you are wrong.  Unless you are going to posit the idea that nerves communicate through non-physical means like “magic” or the “ether” then just accept the fact that you will have to abandon this argument.  Find a new one. “Number 2 is wrong. The picture was a metaphor to show how comparing 2 things with different nonphysical characteristics is equivalent to comparing 2 things that share no physical characteristics. A fetus has as much in common with a person as the appearance of an embryo has in common with a person” I’ll give you this one in the name of fairness.  Maybe I misunderstood the point of your example.  But this doesn’t get you out of any of the other difficulties.  Let’s see how you do with those.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik Just got back on here to see your response. May I state at the outset that I am glad it seems we are past the personal insult stage and discussing things rationally. "Not factually wrong. The connections between nerves give rise to intelligence in a way we can’t understand. You cannot prove that intelligence is a physical characteristic. The ability to process pain isn’t understood. We don’t know how the brain manages to do anything.” “Pain transmission isn’t understood. We literally have no idea how the brain processes pain. We don’t know what goes on in the brain to produce the sensation we call pain. Self awareness and pain are metaphysical. The human brain is a black box. Signals go in, nonphysical traits like self awareness, pain, understanding of time, and other things come out” You’re moving the goalpost here.  You went from “we don’t know how pain is transmitted” to “the rise of intelligence.”  Those are quantum steps from eachother.  It is not a mystery how pain or nerve impulses are transmitted.  That is a matter of common knowledge and observed in the simplest multicellular organisms that have nerves at all, but no brain.  Now if you want to go to the point where and now intelligence or conciousness arises, that’s an interesting discussion, but not relevant to your original point.  We know how nerve impulses work.  We can see unborn babies respond to pain stimuli earlier than 20 weeks.  We can detect their nerve impulses. We know they feel pain.  If you are going to mark the start at which babies feel pain, then that is something quantifiable, but I don’t think it helps your case, especially when you are then going to use it to draw an arbitrary line in the sand on child development.  But I will address that in my conclusion. “When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. At one time it isn’t a person. The next time it is a person. You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” I can and do say that they became a person at conception.  You are the one making the (imho false dichotomy) distinction between humanity and personhood.  Again, I don’t think you are making the case you think you are. ““when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not”. We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion. Your point is moot” ““There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion”. There is. If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person. I can feel pain, am conscious, and self aware. That is literally a quantifiable difference” So you’re making my point for me.  Cool.  So you’re just saying it just doesn’t matter if they feel pain because you can’t know that they are a person or not?  Your point seems confused, because it seems on one hand that you are saying pain=consciousness, which isn’t true, but even if it was, then pain=humanity/personhood.  So…is it bad to kill them once they feel pain?  So you’re against abortions after 20 weeks?  You’re making the ability to feel pain your litmus test to determine whether abortion is acceptable or not, yet at the same time you’re insisting that there is no point that you can see whether a fetus is a person or not?  Are they a person when they feel pain, or not?  If they can feel pain, we can detect that as you yourself have agreed with me, so that means there is a point in time when even by your definition a baby can be shown to be a person.  Which contradicts what you say elsewhere. ““it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it?”. In real life we can tell for a fact whether or not a fetus can feel pain, so your metaphor isn’t accurate.” You’re misinterpreting the point of my metaphor.  It’s not about feeling pain or not.  It’s about the comparative morality of terminating a life with foreknowledge or with ignorance.  Is there a distinction between the two?  Is one worse than the other? ““Not sure what you tried to prove there.” As soon as your fetus is replaced with a pot of water, your personhood is replaced with the act of boiling, your idea of “it’s immoral if we don’t know when they become a person” falls apart” I think you are confusing your own position with mine.  My position is they are a human being and a person at conception.  You are the one drawing arbitrary lines and then saying at the same time those lines don’t exist.  You’re responding to my attempt to understand your position, not my actual position. ““What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject”. There will never be. Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!” So, to confirm, you are again making the claim that at the point of feeling pain, a child is a person, so….to kill them then would be wrong? “Me “this isn’t a person because saying it is a person is illogical as it goes against abductive reasoning””

*Sighs and rubs eyes*  Only because you chose that arbitrary point of feeling pain as your litmus test for personhood, even though feeling pain doesn’t determine personhood in adults who can’t feel it, nor in animals who respond to pain but don’t have a brain at all.  I still think you would be better off listing some more of these many “non-physical traits.” Okay, I am going to try and draw up a conclusion based on your arguments thus far.  Feel free to correct me. On one hand you seem to be saying that a fetus is a person at the point it feels pain.  I disagree, but let’s just roll with this here.  You would, presumably, be against abortion after this point, correct?  This ability to feel pain would take place at a quantifiable point in time.  A binary system.  On or off.  Non-person at one point, a person at the next at the flick of the pain switch.  Killing one would be killing a person = murder? On the other hand you seem to be insisting that you can’t make any distinction between one point in time and another in the development of the infant.  There is no one point, no binary point that you can point to to say “at this point a child is a person.”  So in such a situation where there is no determinate point, you must then say that abortion is either wrong the entire time, or not wrong at all, if you can’t point to a point in time to determine personhood it’s an either/or conclusion. The fact that I disagree with your entire pain=personhood premise is a separate issue here.  I’m trying to deal with what I see as you contradicting your own premise. Perhaps this can be best answered by flat out answering these two questions, repeated from above: 1. Is your position that the ability to feel pain = personhood? 2. if yes, then is abortion wrong once they reach this point?  3. If no, then why is it not wrong when they reach this point?

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik I apologize for the late reply. This has been the busiest week I've had since starting this job. Okay, deep breath.  Your argument boils down to one of two conclusions: 1. it is a self-contradicting, self-defeating, logically incoherent mess or 2. it is an exercise in pure sophism along the same lines of a witty person at a party arguing that the actual distance of a sandy beach approaches infinity because as you magnify the scope and have to trace around individual grains of sand making up the edge of the shoreline in every increasing fractal complexity, the distance continues to grow exponentially. This is not an ad hominin.  I mean this literally.  Let me show you. For case #1: You: "There is no observable moment at which a fetus becomes a person. I’d like to see you find the exact moment that a fetus can begin to feel pain." "It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens..." "When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. ... You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain.” Also you: "It’s physically impossible for a fetus to feel pain before at least 24 weeks." "It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED" "Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware." "We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion." "If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person." "Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!"So to sum up, you're stating with equal authority that you CAN'T tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person, and that you CAN tell when someone feels pain and becomes a person.” Do you see the dilemma that you are creating here?  Logical and cognitive dissonance.   Case #2: All your arguments are moot and irrelevant regardless of which of the two options you choose to go with, or even if you try to combine them.  I refute and deny both equally, and both miss the point and fail to get you out of the hole you dug.   You're so busy feeling clever at your Schrodinger's cat equivalent of human personhood being defined by the indeterminate start of pain and personhood that you fail to answer any of the questions this poses for real world application.  For example, the moral dilemma I posed to you twice and both times you seemed to have missed the point. In your most recent reply you said: "Killing something that doesn’t feel pain with or without the knowledge that it doesn’t feel pain are both equally moral. Morality isn’t based on beliefs, but the effects of actions. If a fetus can’t feel pain then killing it can always be moral" You defined personhood by the ability to feel pain, while acknowledging (half the time) that you can not tell when this point happens without--presumably--inflicting it and seeing the results.   As to morality, you are setting up a false dichotomy between belief and results (or what you call effects of actions).  Your argument devolves into "the ends justify the means."  This is wrong.  We can absolutely judge the morality of a person by their actions, not just the effects.  We do so all the time.  If a demolition team blows up a building without checking to see if anyone is inside, we call that irresponsible and they will be punished, even if there is no one inside.  If a man fires a gun into the air, not knowing if it will fall and hit someone, he is charged and punished.  The effects are irrelevant, their actions show that they acted immorally and with indifference to the possible consequences of their actions. So to your point, if you don't know when someone becomes a person, but choose to kill them in your ignorance anyway, that is immoral. "It’s not arbitrary. Whether or not something can feel pain is the most simple to determine whether or not it is conscious and self aware." This is opinion, not fact.  Your choice of the ability to feel pain, or any other physical or non-physical characteristic as the defining characteristic of what grants a human being rights are ABSOLUTELY arbitrary, by the simple fact that you can find instances and examples of these lacking in born humans as well. Even your choice of "personhood" as a criteria is arbitrary, not only because you can't (or can, depending on which of your quotes we select) point to when that change happens, but because your choice of what defines personhood is selected for convenience.  And this is what gets you into the same camp as nazis and slavers.  They had just as "valid" reasons for defining personhood as you do.  They were equally arbitrary.  You just don't happen to like theirs and think yours are better, but there is nothing intrinsically better about your position.  They too admitted the jew, the black, the slav, the mentally ill, the crippled were all "humans," but they weren't full "persons."  You are doing the same: "The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people." You are admitting the unborn fetus is human, but it's not a "person" because it doesn't meet <insert characteristic>.  Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.  This is why I say that you are putting yourself in their camp.  Your argument is fundamentally the same.  You just happen to like your choice of defining characteristics, where I--and all previous advocates of “non-persons” --maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood. We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The "non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "Number 1 is wrong. Connections between nerves are not fully understood and therefore cannot be labeled as physical.” Simply, factually wrong.  These are understood.  As someone who literally is a biologist and who took a human anatomy course, I can say with certainty that you are wrong.  Unless you are going to posit the idea that nerves communicate through non-physical means like “magic” or the “ether” then just accept the fact that you will have to abandon this argument.  Find a new one. “Number 2 is wrong. The picture was a metaphor to show how comparing 2 things with different nonphysical characteristics is equivalent to comparing 2 things that share no physical characteristics. A fetus has as much in common with a person as the appearance of an embryo has in common with a person” I’ll give you this one in the name of fairness.  Maybe I misunderstood the point of your example.  But this doesn’t get you out of any of the other difficulties.  Let’s see how you do with those.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik Just got back on here to see your response. May I state at the outset that I am glad it seems we are past the personal insult stage and discussing things rationally. "Not factually wrong. The connections between nerves give rise to intelligence in a way we can’t understand. You cannot prove that intelligence is a physical characteristic. The ability to process pain isn’t understood. We don’t know how the brain manages to do anything." "Pain transmission isn’t understood. We literally have no idea how the brain processes pain. We don’t know what goes on in the brain to produce the sensation we call pain. Self awareness and pain are metaphysical. The human brain is a black box. Signals go in, nonphysical traits like self awareness, pain, understanding of time, and other things come out" You're moving the goalpost here.  You went from "we don't know how pain is transmitted" to "the rise of intelligence."  Those are quantum steps from eachother.  It is not a mystery how pain or nerve impulses are transmitted.  That is a matter of common knowledge and observed in the simplest multicellular organisms that have nerves at all, but no brain.  Now if you want to go to the point where and now intelligence or conciousness arises, that's an interesting discussion, but not relevant to your original point.  We know how nerve impulses work.  We can see unborn babies respond to pain stimuli earlier than 20 weeks.  We can detect their nerve impulses. We know they feel pain.  If you are going to mark the start at which babies feel pain, then that is something quantifiable, but I don't think it helps your case, especially when you are then going to use it to draw an arbitrary line in the sand on child development.  But I will address that in my conclusion. "When I say there is no point when a fetus becomes a person I mean there is no point in time where you can say a fetus “became” a person. At one time it isn’t a person. The next time it is a person. You’re never going to be able to witness the moment that a fetus begins to feel pain." I can and do say that they became a person at conception.  You are the one making the (imho false dichotomy) distinction between humanity and personhood.  Again, I don't think you are making the case you think you are. "“when you don't know if they can feel pain or not”. We can literally tell if a fetus can feel pain. We can tell for a fact if they are able to process pain at the time of abortion. Your point is moot" "“There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion”. There is. If they can’t feel pain then they aren’t conscious, which means that they can’t experience self awareness and cannot be called a person. I can feel pain, am conscious, and self aware. That is literally a quantifiable difference" So you're making my point for me.  Cool.  So you're just saying it just doesn't matter if they feel pain because you can't know that they are a person or not?  Your point seems confused, because it seems on one hand that you are saying pain=consciousness, which isn't true, but even if it was, then pain=humanity/personhood.  So...is it bad to kill them once they feel pain?  So you're against abortions after 20 weeks?  You're making the ability to feel pain your litmus test to determine whether abortion is acceptable or not, yet at the same time you're insisting that there is no point that you can see whether a fetus is a person or not?  Are they a person when they feel pain, or not?  If they can feel pain, we can detect that as you yourself have agreed with me, so that means there is a point in time when even by your definition a baby can be shown to be a person.  Which contradicts what you say elsewhere. "“it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it?”. In real life we can tell for a fact whether or not a fetus can feel pain, so your metaphor isn’t accurate." You're misinterpreting the point of my metaphor.  It's not about feeling pain or not.  It's about the comparative morality of terminating a life with foreknowledge or with ignorance.  Is there a distinction between the two?  Is one worse than the other? "“Not sure what you tried to prove there.” As soon as your fetus is replaced with a pot of water, your personhood is replaced with the act of boiling, your idea of “it’s immoral if we don’t know when they become a person” falls apart" I think you are confusing your own position with mine.  My position is they are a human being and a person at conception.  You are the one drawing arbitrary lines and then saying at the same time those lines don't exist.  You're responding to my attempt to understand your position, not my actual position. "“What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject”. There will never be. Fetal electroencephalography is already as advanced as it needs to be to always accurate. No brain waves? No pain!" So, to confirm, you are again making the claim that at the point of feeling pain, a child is a person, so....to kill them then would be wrong? "Me “this isn’t a person because saying it is a person is illogical as it goes against abductive reasoning”"

*Sighs and rubs eyes*  Only because you chose that arbitrary point of feeling pain as your litmus test for personhood, even though feeling pain doesn't determine personhood in adults who can't feel it, nor in animals who respond to pain but don't have a brain at all.  I still think you would be better off listing some more of these many "non-physical traits." Okay, I am going to try and draw up a conclusion based on your arguments thus far.  Feel free to correct me. On one hand you seem to be saying that a fetus is a person at the point it feels pain.  I disagree, but let's just roll with this here.  You would, presumably, be against abortion after this point, correct?  This ability to feel pain would take place at a quantifiable point in time.  A binary system.  On or off.  Non-person at one point, a person at the next at the flick of the pain switch.  Killing one would be killing a person = murder? On the other hand you seem to be insisting that you can't make any distinction between one point in time and another in the development of the infant.  There is no one point, no binary point that you can point to to say "at this point a child is a person."  So in such a situation where there is no determinate point, you must then say that abortion is either wrong the entire time, or not wrong at all, if you can't point to a point in time to determine personhood it’s an either/or conclusion. The fact that I disagree with your entire pain=personhood premise is a separate issue here.  I'm trying to deal with what I see as you contradicting your own premise. Perhaps this can be best answered by flat out answering these two questions, repeated from above: 1. Is your position that the ability to feel pain = personhood? 2. if yes, then is abortion wrong once they reach this point?  3. If no, then why is it not wrong when they reach this point?

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building."  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The "non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quicklyseverebird]

@kirby-ybrik "Number 1 is wrong. Connections between nerves are not fully understood and therefore cannot be labeled as physical." Simply, factually wrong.  These are understood.  As someone who literally is a biologist and who took a human anatomy course, I can say with certainty that you are wrong.  Unless you are going to posit the idea that nerves communicate through non-physical means like "magic" or the "ether" then just accept the fact that you will have to abandon this argument.  Find a new one. "Number 2 is wrong. The picture was a metaphor to show how comparing 2 things with different nonphysical characteristics is equivalent to comparing 2 things that share no physical characteristics. A fetus has as much in common with a person as the appearance of an embryo has in common with a person" I'll give you this one in the name of fairness.  Maybe I misunderstood the point of your example.  But this doesn't get you out of any of the other difficulties.  Let's see how you do with those.

"There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that." So...a fetus never “becomes” a person...  You're going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So...you're not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can't have it both ways. I think I know what you're trying to say, but you're not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don't know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. "Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all" Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you're going to have to provide me with more of these "hundreds of examples of non-physical traits" for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with "Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)" that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn't an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven't dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don't know is a person or not.  You've only strengthened my case. "Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain" First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. "There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain" What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don't know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I'll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your "traits" are "better" than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a "non-physical trait" (pain) to give me something more to work with here. "“If you don't know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?" I don't think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn't begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it's not illegal.  Because it hasn't started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. "It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?" So your argument is...what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn't then it's not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980's, doctors didn't think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don't know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

[quicklyseverebird]

Discussion about abortion and when a human baby becomes a person

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I'm wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of "non-physical" traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these "non-physical traits" include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but...nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. "non-physical traits" that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits--all of which a fetus doesn't possess--you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn't be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that's not sufficient, or that these traits don't count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of "non-physical" traits aren't merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn't apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and "intelligence," that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a "person".  Something that could "be told at a glance by looking at a photo" and comparing it to the "average" person.  The Nazi's did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of "traits" that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because...X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn't serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say "a minute ago this wasn't a person, but now it is."  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like "trimesters" and a list of nebulous traits you've selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don't.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it's binary, show me when this takes place.  You don't get to say "We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens," to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That's like saying, "we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we're not sure, but we're still going to bomb the building."  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi's and slavers.  And you aren't even consistent in those.  The "non-physical traits" you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can't say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don't know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

[quonunc]

I'm a woman, I'm prolife

"but what if you were pregnant from rape?"

I will not murder my child for the sins of their father.

"but what if the fetus has a terminal condition?"

My child deserves to live their natural life. I will not unnecessarily hasten their death.

"but what if you can't afford to raise a child?"

I will not murder my child for the sake of money.

"you can't make that choice for other people!"

If I see parents beating their child to death in the street I'm going to try to stop them. A person being your child does not give you a right to murder them.

"but what if - "

I will not murder my child. I will not support facilitating the murder of other people's children.

[houstontiger]

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

My favorite part about Elon Musk buying twitter is how, the moment it happened, literally everyone who’s been saying for years that social media isn’t suppressing conservative voices or pushing narratives or controlling the flow of information are screeching about how they’re not going to be able to suppress conservative voices and push narratives and control the flow of information. If Republicans have any balls they need to drag every single one of these people into a congressional hearing and use this to strip all social media sites of section 230 protections.

[praise-the-lord-im-dead]

Another thing to consider with the whole pro-life/pro-abortion debate is the staggering amount of people who genuinely don't think that their own life is worth living? There's a lot of near-suicidal ideation going on these days as a kind of commonplace, so a lot of people consider bringing another life into the world a kind of cruelty, even in the best of circumstances, and it shows in a lot of their arguments.

It's crazy how you dig deeper and deeper and it really comes clear how loving people unconditionally is really the only thing you can do. The pain and the hopelessness runs so damn deep.