My views on objective morality

[bennyboy]

With that being said, I think we have always had an inherent understanding that human life has value.

Is this an understanding, or a feeling? I'd say your "inherent understanding" is simply an awareness of the feelings that the majority of people (though not all) have.

The rationalization often was to say that certain groups of people weren't really fully human. That's partially how a lot of civilizations have justified genocide or enslavement. Now a days, many of us justify abortion with the same rationale - that a human being in the womb is not really human.

Nobody said a fetus isn't human. They say that it's not a human being with a mind worth protecting or a nervous system capable of much suffering. If the death of unfeeling cells with DNA is a crime against God, then I need to cut off my fingers to stop the constant murder of fingernail cells.

I think in the future people will look back on it the same way we look back on slavery and the slaughtering of the indians. Of course, that won't begin to happen until we discover a different way of dealing with unwanted pregnancies that don't involve having to kill the fetus. We have a tendency to rationalize a lot of things when committing them is convenient or beneficial to us.

Are you vegetarian? If not, I brand you a hypocrite, since adult mammals are more developed than human fetuses-- more memories to lose, more feelings with which to suffer, and a more advanced nervous system by which to feel pain.

Or do you rationalize the killing of animals because it is convenient and beneficial to you?