(July 21, 2014 at 11:05 am)Jenny A Wrote:(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.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.
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.
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.
I'm making two arguments.
1. Future expected person-hood is one reason we grant human beings moral protection while past person-hood isn't.
2. A sperm has no expectation of future person-hood unless it fuses with an ovum.
