The reason religion is so powerful

[John 6IX Breezy]

This is where your thinking leads.

"Following an incomplete miscarriage on the grounds that granting her request would be illegal." -Wikipedia

Sounds like the type of thinking displayed by the forum—an overemphasis on law coupled by a disregard for biology and medicine. In Kohlberg terms this is pre-conventional moral thinking. In contrast, statements I've made previously more closely resemble post-conventional thinking:

"We are not slaves to rules—even the Bible asks us to break them when better outcomes can be achieved (e.g. Jesus healing on the Sabbath, or David eating bread from the Temple). As such, I have no issues with abortion being justified under some scenarios but not under others."

[The Grand Nudger]

Pretty sure you've already burnt that lie down John. If all you want to say is that you find abortions distasteful..that's a single sentence, and has nothing to do with medicine or biology.

Nope, you want to talk about rights, and you want to tell us that science and medicine say something relevant to abortion.

[John 6IX Breezy]

...and you want to tell us that science and medicine say something relevant to abortion.

Right; there's a worrisome catchphrase in moral psychology: Moral intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

This behavior has been exemplified by the thread. People are willing to rationalize all sorts of peculiar views in order to bring embryology into harmony with their moral intuitions about abortion.

Science, which does it's best to carve nature at her joints, ought to inform our moral views on the subject, not the other way around. I stand by that.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's nice, but it has nothing to do with your or anyone else's opinions on abortion, so who cares? You may as well have said that you stand by sunshine and rainbows.

Shit or get off the pot.

[Angrboda]

...and you want to tell us that science and medicine say something relevant to abortion.

Right; there's a worrisome catchphrase in moral psychology: Moral intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

This behavior has been exemplified by the thread. People are willing to rationalize all sorts of peculiar views in order to bring embryology into harmony with their moral intuitions about abortion.

Science, which does it's best to carve nature at her joints, ought to inform our moral views on the subject, not the other way around. I stand by that.

How can science inform an intuition? That seems like an obvious stolen concept where you're trying to apply reasoning after the fact after asserting you can't reason after the fact.

[John 6IX Breezy]

How can science inform an intuition [emphasis added]?

*Inform our moral views

Rationalizing our intuitions is what people do naturally and automatically; it's also something you override naturally when you actually put in the effort.

[The Grand Nudger]

Can we expect to see any of that effort this side of judgement day?

[Angrboda]

How can science inform an intuition [emphasis added]?

*Inform our moral views

Rationalizing our intuitions is what people do naturally and automatically; it's also something you override naturally when you actually put in the effort.

What's the difference? You've already said intuitions come first. You seem to be trying to unring that bell.

[John 6IX Breezy]

You've already said intuitions come first.

Right; see Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow. And also Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind.

[Mister Agenda]

Neo's reasoning was that the embryo is biologically human from conception. Any undamaged human cell is biologically human. Being biologically human doesn't make something a human being.

Right; he is using human as a noun—the embryo is a human being from conception. You're referring to human as an adjective—human hair.

Here's a word I learned from vulcanlogician: totipotency. It's the power of a cell to produce an entirely new organism.

So human genetics + totipotency + any other relevant factor = New Human (noun) organism.

Human zygotes meet this criteria. But without the cells in your cheeks achieving totipotency, for example, we cannot compare them to zygotes or call them human beings. Once they do that's another story.

An embryo being a human being from conception is your claim, that claim is not supported by biology. 'Being' is not a biological term, it's a philosophical term with the relevant meaning of 'the nature or essence of a person'. It's absurd to think that a cheek cell becomes a human being as soon as we can competenly clone a person from one.

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3. Psychologists use animals ranging from mice to macaques in the study of behavior because we share many traits with them. I don't know how rabbits compare, but I suspect you've set a deceptively high bar. (Consider that you've potentially removed consciousness as a criteria for personhood.)

It's almost like there's a transition where a human organism goes from depending on a human host to survive and being able to survive without that host, and then we set the bar differently.