Why did Jesus suffer for sinners and not victims

[The Architect Of Fate]

I think the desire here is to find an ontological point of change -- something which isn't subjective but scientific. Then, you're right, the significance we give that change may vary. If people want to acknowledge that the ontological change is at that point but it isn't significant for them, that would be a different argument. 

A desire that will fail. Because there is no starting point and the change is only one of a million with no particular change mattering.

In fact I think that the pro-choice side would do better to acknowledge that scientific issues of ontological change aren't included in their argument, only utilitarian and practical concerns. But I don't think that denying fertilization as a biological change is the best way to justify legal abortion.

They are not as such arguments are a waste of time. Fertilization is no more distinct than another process before or after.

It's obviously true that every event, including making a baby, has multiple causes. The question to me is whether, due to all these causes, we can define a point at which an ontological change occurs. 

We can't.

Sometimes we obviously can't -- as in a Sorites Paradox, some conditions just don't have dividing lines. 

Yup

A better example here might be the construction of an airplane. The causes for the plane are many, including the investors saying to go ahead, and the designs, and the construction of parts, and the transportation and then assembly of parts. I acknowledge that there is no single point in the process at which the thing goes from being a non-plane to a plane. 

Yup

We could make a checklist of factors which make the plane flyable -- viable as a plane. The wings are necessary, but the seats and toilets aren't. So we could identify a day on which the plane went from flyable to non-flyable. And I think that some people want to apply this type of thinking to humans. They have a checklist of factors (self-consciousness, or the ability to survive outside the womb) which they take to be the difference between non-viability and viability. 

Yup

That doesn't, though, mean that the case of the plane and that of people are the same. It doesn't mean that viability and being a human are the same.

It sure does.

Also, we could say that, for example, the causes of my death are already in place. Telomere shortening due to my age, my extreme espresso addiction, etc. But that doesn't mean that I'm dead already. Or that the moment of my death won't be a single, ontological change. Fertilization is this way, I think. The causes may be many, but there is still a single event of change.

You are slowly dying from the moment you're born. Death single event it's the slow decay from start to finish. Fertilization is simply one process in a million with it being a single event of change but millions of tiny changes.

I don't think I said "that which follows naturally from one discrete object." I think I said that a human being is a single discrete object with the necessary genetic material. A person isn't the act of meeting or the act of sex. A person is a thing which is discrete and has the required genetic material. That's what's new at fertilization

A person is all the things that lead to them and all the things that happen over their life. The "New"(which is just a variation of the old) is irrelevant frankly it's no more stands out than anything else that's "new".

But I agree, the debate over legal abortion is about personhood as a legal definition. Which may be different from biology.

Yes and no

If the discrete existence of an individual object with the required genetic material isn't the definition, then by what standards do we judge? I can see that for practical or even moral reasons we might prefer different boundaries. But there we get into milestones that are every bit as arbitrary as (you claim) fertilization is. Does personhood begin with consciousness? Is an unconscious person not a person? etc. etc. Is a slave a person? Could the government revoke personhood for some reason? 

All so-called milestones are arbitrary. This isn't how to solve the abortion debate and is a waste of time.

I stick with my view that biologically, ontologically, the change comes at fertilization, and the rest is development of that thing. The argument that the thing is ontologically different before it's born (a fetus) than it is after it's born (a baby) is nonsense. It doesn't change its state due to location. While it's coming out of the mom it isn't half baby and half fetus. 

Good for you. Too bad fertilization is an unimportant change compared to the millions before and after it , And status does change with location.  

Whether people want to grant legal personhood, with rights, to the thing immediately after its ontological existence has begun, or later, is what the debate is really about.

Too bad its existence doesn't start at fertilization that's just another process. And it's completely divorced from the actual question on abortion.

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I think the simplest response is just to say that fertilization is the creation of a new organism/organisms (singular or plural). If two organisms arise from the same fertilized egg you would be having monozygotic twins. So I think that part of the equation doesn't change, fertilization is just creating more organisms when it comes to twins (I may amend this position later). But I think the issue at the root of your question has more to do with identity. There is a period of time during which there is one organism before there are two. And I think you're asking whether the identity of that organism is lost and replaced, or divided and shared, or perhaps even preserved and added to.

This response does not deal with the issue with this whole line of reasoning.