#sentiocentrism

[attemptatthought]

Another update to my view on abortion

What should be allowed

          Aborting a non-sentient unborn

                    Aborting prior to the 3 weeks

                    Aborting an already dead unborn

What definitely should not be allowed

          Aborting a sentient unborn

                    Aborting after 3 weeks

Addressing proposed exceptions to the 3 week rule that I see as worth discussing:

Danger to the life of the pregnant person but not to the child

Aborting for this reason, though easy to sympathize with, ultimately seems like too much of a selfish act. I believe the more moral thing to do would be to accept your own death by allowing the child to be born. It is a hard thing, but we should be putting the lives of children ahead of our own. This is altruism.

Danger to the life of the pregnant person and to the child

This situation is truly nightmarish. It may be the only time when I think it would actually be justified [I shudder to use that word even now] to kill an unborn child. This is purely a “lesser of two evils” scenario. The two evils are as follows. Do not abort, and both the pregnant person and their child will die. Do abort, and only the child will die. In the former evil, two people die. In the latter evil, one person dies. Even though the latter evil is something as horrific as the death of a child, I am forced to admit it is the lesser of two evils in this extreme situation. But having said that, I emphasize extreme caution and proactiveness. We should never be loose with our definition of “danger”. These are sentient lives we are talking about. And if the truth, however obscured, of a situation is that no sentient life needs to die, not the pregnant person or the child, then we are without excuse to insist or allow that one or both die.

[attemptatthought]

Slight update to my view on abortion

Life is directly morally relevant when that life is sentient

Sentience is the most honest basis for personhood

This is why I view other animals as people, as they are sentient as well

Even if something is non-living but sentient, like an AI, they are morally relevant and a person

But hypothetical artificial intelligence and non-human animals is not why I am musing this

I am writing this about the unborn humans

If life is morally relevant upon having sentience, then the question of the morality of abortion rests on the sentience or lack thereof of the unborn

A newborn child, or neonate, is sentient and will continue to be

Logically, this means that not long before birth the child was also sentient

But the further we go back, the more debatable the question of sentience becomes

The biological basis of sentience, and by extension personhood, is the nervous system

Among humans, the nervous system begins to form at 3 weeks of gestation

The human nervous system completes development around 25 years after birth

This is why I believe that 25 years is the beginning of adulthood, rather than 18 years

But by this logic, I am forced to acknowledge that the beginning of childhood is 3 weeks of gestation

The beginning of life is conception, the creation of the zygote

However, this life does not become sentient until 3 weeks later

If a human life is truly not sentient prior to 3 weeks, than I have little excuse to call that life being destroyed for the sake of sentient life immoral

Life that will, if uninterrupted, eventually become sentient is not something I see as trivial, but I don’t see how eventual sentience can take priority over current sentience

So if I was to choose a form of abortion that I believe could be morally permissible and as a result legal would be abortions that take place before 3 weeks of gestation

For the same reason, lack of current sentience, I would allow the abortion of an already dead unborn [this technically counts as abortion but I seriously doubt this is what most people think about when they hear that word]

[soycrates]

Do you believe that plants deserve moral consideration in and of themselves or only in that they provide value for humans and other animals?

I would describe a greater aspect of my ethical considerations as “sentiocentric” (as opposed to anthropocentric - meaning that humans are the center of moral concern - which is a rather predominant basis for classical ethics and morality). I think moral consideration is something created on the basis that there are beings who can experience pain, discomfort, and sadness. Without these beings alive on earth, there would just be an unfeeling, unthinking nature that develops and changes. Without sentient creatures, the destruction of a forest or the decimation of a microbial species has no moral significance because what they are made of will always exist. They cannot care what state of being they exist in. It doesn’t cause them pain or sadness to change from one state of being to another. They cannot experience. 

If I said I would change you into a different state of being but it would not hurt, you wouldn’t think about it, it wouldn’t cause you sadness or be impractical to you in any way, why should you consider it a moral issue. But if I said I would take away your very ability to feel and think itself, I should wager that you would consider this a moral issue. Morality is about intentions, decisions, and actions; nature does not intend or decide, and it does not act of any personal will. It exists, and that existence escapes the confines of moral decision making.

In short: non-sentient beings such as plants do not have desires or will. I am an environmentalist because the environment is the combined habitats of thinking and feeling beings. Without it functioning in a healthy manner, we suffer.