The value of a human life (and why abortion, economics, pulling the plug and triage)

[rjh4 is back]

I am uncertain where the disconnect is. I define a set up that if the lump of flesh inside of a woman were to be removed and magically kept simply alive, then if it were to develop thought, much like an infant, than it is an infant. The thing the is different between an infant and a simple fetus is the capability, when all physical needs are taken care of, to develop a mind close to, equal, or greter than it's forebears.

This situation is set up to define when a fetus becomes an infant. Quite possibly one can empirically determine in vitro the transition from fetus to infant. However, in vivo, the mother is constantly putting in resource, hormones and providing the environment to continue growth of the fetus, where by then making the potential of a human being concrete.

If we were to stop those instructions, the commands to build and the fetus were to still have the potential for thought (brain activity is a loose measure of such, but not one I'd appreciate as the capability once "out of the womb", implying a functional individual, to develop a mind is still undefined except through observation and time). In a sense, as the infant approaches completeness, the rate of which it takes resource approaches zero (as a direct vampiric or parasitical resource drain on the mothers body) - what we want to know is, how early is early?.

The way biology grows in stages, in leaps and bounds, makes it quite possible that there exists a point where the fetus could recover (assuming ALL bodily needs are taken care of ideally)(read italicized) being removed from the womb and develop into a capable individual. We want to preserve that.

What I mean ideally is, were we to have technology to provide all life support for a fetus but none of the external commands that the mother provides to cause development, there would be a slight gradient of time where a fetus becomes an infant. In this motion, we are testing for self-hosting (It's a CS term, but quite useful in my opinion), testing the current growth of the mind to see if it can grow into an individual.

Thanks for responding, Syn.

I understand your position as far as you explained it. What I do not understand is why your analysis begins with what would happend if the fetus/unborn child is taken from the mother's womb. That does not seem like a logical place to start, especially when you take the postition that the analysis for infants is such that you consider that all the infants needs are being met. We all know that a newborn would die if left to themselves (nobody providing their needs for them) but if their needs are provided then they have the potential to reach maximum development. I think we also know that for a child to develop properly there needs to be more than just a meeting of physical needs (food and water), there must be a meeting of emotional needs, etc (which could be considered as providing their needs also). For the fetus/unborn child it is the same thing with the external commands that the mother provides for development being part of their provided needs. So what is the basis for using an analysis that excludes the external commands that the mother provides for development being part of their provided needs? That seems pretty arbitrary.

Ah, but the maturity of the adults in case of their completeness, of their growth as an individual is at the maximum. Soon after adulthood, the degeneration and age of the body and mind begin slowly dominating in a growing rate - hence what is the 'person' is slowly being whittled away by dementia et al.

While children and infants are valuable, the prior is more valuable over the latter as the child has lived longer and has had more time to develop into a thinking individual. To sum it up bluntly, he [the child] has already shown he has gotten this far (lived that long and developed that long), so we already know the potential up to that point in present time has been attained. The infant, however, is still a crap shoot - it has simply not endured the ravages of time long enough to now to show that it will live even that long.

It's a matter of knowing that we all die one day, that we have a steady decline in abilities after adulthood, that those younger than adults grow in spurts and endure the growth of their minds also in brief periods before plateauing slightly. Here is a chart to explain:



I never stated that this is a catch all or absolute system. In fact, the more one knows about the intellectual development of a single human, that shifts the axis of value to the left or right. For example, a supreme genius child would shift and change the very graph by warping the value during those early years to be of greater value, ideally making it symmetrical (of the right side).

But now it seems that you have abandoned the idea of potentiality for a standard of comparing the actual achieved level or current level of development. The latter seems much different than the former and the analysis for each would probably give different results.