(February 17, 2012 at 7:53 pm)Tiberius Wrote: I care not if that human life is just a bunch of mindless cells; technically speaking, we are made up of nothing but mindless cells. I do not see why our consciousness is grounds for having human rights. Do we take human rights away from brain dead people, or people in comas? No. Human rights apply to all humans.
That is a complete bullshit misrepresentation of what we are. "We" are defined as the abstraction formed by a group of those cells working in tandem, ergo you cannot grant rights to something just because it possesses genetic strain Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
And last I checked, rights were something we granted to each other haltingly.
And yes, braindead people actually have comparatively less to no rights -- Terri Schiavo comes to mind as an interesting case; in her case, her "rights" were ignored in favor of her husband and her parent's right to duke it out in court over who get's to be her representative.
So much for rights for human vegetables.
You cannot infringe on rights if someone is fundamentally incapable of using them. Take for example Schiavo -- the argument was over to unplug and kill the comatose organism or not. You can't get anymore basic than that.
I cannot infringe on your (Tiberius') abortion rights (at least as far as I know). That's probably because you are incapable of having an abortion.
So yea, long story short, "rights" are quite fluid.
And comatose people don't have equivalent in rights to you. Nor can they enjoy the privileges that come with such rights.
Slave to the Patriarchy no more