(July 21, 2014 at 9:48 am)Heywood Wrote: A fetus isn't by itself unless it is aborted so it is silly to make such an argument. A living fetus in its mother's womb has a future expectation of person-hood.

A sperm isn't by itself unless it is wasted so it is silly to make such an argument. A living sperm in its father's testicles has a future expectation of personhood.

See where this is going? You aren't making any arguments that aren't equally applicable to other things you draw the line at, for some reason.

Not sure any society would be consistent about abortion policies for it to matter, but genetic components to behavior would be selected for or against by the policy.

To the extent there is a 'genetic' propensity towards rape, consistently allowing (or requiring) such offspring to come to term would eventually (and it might be quite a long time) increase prevalence of that genetic component.

To the extent there is a 'genetic' propensity to not abort ones offspring, consistently allowing (or encouraging) abortion will increase the prevalence of the trait to find abortion inappropriate.

Complicating that 'blunt' assessment is abortion in cases of genetic anomalies or environmentally induced malformations (recall thalidomide) and the effects on various deleterious genes and their frequencies in the population.

And a further complication, gross genetic abnormalities, apparent in infancy and/or childhood are already experiencing deselection, but anomalies only appearing after childbearing years aren't.

(July 21, 2014 at 9:48 am)Heywood Wrote: Pro-lifers who are okay with abortions in cases of rape or incest are being inconsistent in my opinion.

Yeah. Totalitarianism hasn't got the word 'total' in it for nothing!

(July 21, 2014 at 10:33 am)Esquilax Wrote:

(July 21, 2014 at 9:48 am)Heywood Wrote: A fetus isn't by itself unless it is aborted so it is silly to make such an argument. A living fetus in its mother's womb has a future expectation of person-hood.

A sperm isn't by itself unless it is wasted so it is silly to make such an argument. A living sperm in its father's testicles has a future expectation of personhood.

See where this is going? You aren't making any arguments that aren't equally applicable to other things you draw the line at, for some reason.

A sperm never has an expectation of person-hood. A sperm ceases to exist at conception. A sperm is something that is consumed in the process of creating an organism which does have a future expectation of person-hood.

Your comparison of a sperm to a fetus is silly because they are quite different things. One is complete organism...the other is gamete. This is high school biology....you should know this.

(July 21, 2014 at 10:51 am)Heywood Wrote:

(July 21, 2014 at 10:33 am)Esquilax Wrote: A sperm isn't by itself unless it is wasted so it is silly to make such an argument. A living sperm in its father's testicles has a future expectation of personhood.

See where this is going? You aren't making any arguments that aren't equally applicable to other things you draw the line at, for some reason.

A sperm never has an expectation of person-hood. A sperm ceases to exist at conception. A sperm is something that is consumed in the process of creating an organism which does have a future expectation of person-hood.

Your comparison of a sperm to a fetus is silly because they are quite different things. One is complete organism...the other is gamete. This is high school biology....you should know this.

You do see how silly it is to talk of any single cell (fertilized or not) having an expectation of anything. Sure it might become a person, but it's really not ready to anticipate anything at all.

Is your argument that once the genetic deck has been shuffled suddenly it's a person? It isn't. It has no brain or sense of self. It's just a little sack of DNA. It's really no more a person than the egg and sperm were before they united. Eggs are not chickens.

(July 21, 2014 at 11:05 am)Jenny A Wrote: You do see how silly it is to talk of any single cell (fertilized or not) having an expectation of anything.

We could do a questionnaire among the cells. Just ask them about their expectations in life, collect the results and take it from there.

Sperm cell's expectation in life?

to get laid, of course!!

(July 21, 2014 at 10:51 am)Heywood Wrote: A sperm never has an expectation of person-hood. A sperm ceases to exist at conception. A sperm is something that is consumed in the process of creating an organism which does have a future expectation of person-hood.

Why make the distinction? According to you, future personhood is what matters, and personhood at all isn't possible without a sperm. Frankly, that makes the sperm even more important than the fetus with respect to future personhood.

And your logic here also makes no sense anyway; you're just making assertions about stuff like this, but I've not seen you even attempt to argue for why this stuff is so, or why we or anyone else should care about what you think on this issue. To follow on from your argument, I could easily just argue that the genetic information within the sperm, which doesn't cease to exist, take the place of the word "sperm" in all my arguments thus far. It might move the subject one step closer in, but if you're willing to simply dismiss the idea of sperm because it "disappears" at conception... well, there are parts of it that by necessity must stick around. So let's just now say I was talking about those parts specifically, and we're back at exactly the same problem you had before.

Quote:Your comparison of a sperm to a fetus is silly because they are quite different things. One is complete organism...the other is gamete. This is high school biology....you should know this.

But you were arguing for future personhood, which doesn't necessarily entail that we exclusively apply it to the gamete. See, I'm asking you to argue for why you think this is so, and so far you've been unable to provide an argument that doesn't apply equally to the sperm, or even just the potential for conception that each fertile woman has. Your definitions apply to abstract concepts just as much as they do what you're talking about, that's how bad you've messed up here.

I recognize that a gamete is different from a sperm. That's not germane to the future personhood argument you're making.

There are diets for men to increase the number of sperm cells able to actually be useful in conception. And some of these extra cells caused by the diet actually cause persons.

So: Is anything in the diet a 'potential person'?

(July 21, 2014 at 11:56 am)Bibliofagus Wrote: There are diets for men to increase the number of sperm cells able to actually be useful in conception. And some of these extra cells caused by the diet actually cause persons.

So: Is anything in the diet a 'potential person'?

The carrots