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I am using person to mean the general fuzzy concept of personhood and the rights associated with it. Most of us would agree that a single cell fertilized egg is not a person yet. The concept is fuzzy so you can't really draw a line on at what point the fertilized egg becomes a person.
What is the point of even introducing this personhood concept in the first place? The concept of "personhood" here has no applications other than justifying abortion (or maybe killing people like Terri Schiavo) and is completely independent of the rest of most pro-choicers' moral system. Why introduce an ad-hoc moral concept just for this one purpose? And why should pro-lifers like me find this convincing?
Well whether a life is or is not a person is an important moral factor in deciding how immoral it is to kill that life. Everyone has a concept of personhood. I wouldn't consider it an ad-hoc moral concept. For example, people generally don't consider taking animal lives equally immoral as taking human lives. In the case of a fetus, the concept is fuzzy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I think many people (and pro-lifers) consider late-term unborn fetuses to be people, which is why they find killing them horrifying, so I wouldn't say that it's not a convincing argument. I can see why others may believe otherwise, just like how people wouldn't consider a single-cell fertilized egg to be a person (although they may believe it still has enough moral worth that it should not be killed because it may eventually become a person, which is also valid).
Thanks for the response! I disagree with you that this makes a case for personhood (as a distinct concept from "being a human organism").
I don't agree. in my moral system the only relevant factor is whether it's a human being or not. I can't think of any non-abortion/consistent life ethic issues in which not making this distinction would lead to a conclusion that you'd disagree with.
This issue can be resolved by just deciding axiomatically that human lives are important and animal lives are not. This is what I do in my moral system. There's no need to introduce a concept of personhood separate from being a human organism to resolve this issue normally. Moreover, I think even among animal rights people, the unironic belief that "animals are people too" is pretty fringe.
I'm aware that lots of people use the concept of "personhood" to talk about abortion, including some pro-lifers. I'm just not sure what it gets you outside of the context of the abortion debate, which is what I mean when I say it's an ad-hoc concept. I think you can recover the entirety of most pro-choicers' morality, aside from abortion/consistent life ethic stuff, by just defining "person" to mean the same thing as human organism. I don't even think this runs afoul of what most people who believe in animal rights think. But pro-choicers introduce this extra "personhood" concept that doesn't play any role in their other beliefs to resolve this one issue, rather than taking the simpler route of just defining everything in terms of being a human organism.
I'm not saying the pro-choice position is inconsistent. I'm saying that it requires introducing extra complexity to your moral system that isn't used for anything else. Is there any issue, aside from consistent life ethic/abortion stuff, in which you must appeal to personhood as distinct from being a human being in order to arrive at the normal position?
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I think 'personhood' in this context is mostly nonsense and everything gets circular fast.
Comes down to something like "It's okay to kill him because he's not a person, and he's not a person because it's okay to kill him."
Yeah, I can understand that. It's very subjective as people mostly go off of their moral instincts.
Do you believe that it's actually truly subjective? As in, it's okay for someone to kill someone else as long as they don't consider the victim to be a person? There's absolutely nothing wrong with people slaughtering "non-persons" as long as the non-person is sincerely believed by the slaughterers, and if people go around doing that you will have no complaints?
Or do you perhaps have a more nuanced and less genocidal belief about personhood grounded by something beyond mere subjectivity?
If we accept that personhood is truly subjective, then asking if it's okay to kill someone is an ill-posed question. Because personhood is not an objective quality of a biological entity.
I (and you and @Owlify) all have separate judgements on the morality of any given killing, which depends on whether we morally see the thing being killed as a person (in the most extreme case - I doubt even you would view a fertilized egg as human)
Firstly there is a difference between understanding someone's actions and being okay with them. I also understand why John Wayne Gacy tortured all those young men (he was incapable of human empathy and felt an intense sexual pleasure from his actions)
In the case of genocide, the (honest) argument is that the victims are human - but they are somehow biologically inferior or otherwise harmful to the host society (on the group level - bell curves, etc, etc), so they must be liquidated for the sake of self-preservation. So we have the moral grey area of 2 groups with competing interests.
In the case of abortion - I'm making an even stronger claim. That there is literally no fetus (not even a +4 sigma one) that counts as human, or even comes close to it. I am fine with looking at your side's propaganda photos of an ultrasound of a 24-week-old and saying that that thing is just not human. It has the capacity to grow into a human (like a sperm cell) in the future, but in its current state - it is a mere animal that lacks any kind of thought or self-awareness.
I have a definition of personhood (just like you do), which is that you need some amount of intelligence (in a very weak sense - I'm not asking our prospective personhood-haver to integrate sec(x), I'm asking them to show they are capable of thought at all, are aware of their own existence, etc) - and I accept there is nuance about where we draw the line and how to measure these things. But based on everything I know about fetuses, including what I've heard from the pro-life side, they do not come close to what I've described. Not as a group, not even if we just ask for a single exceptional individual in the far right tail.
I think you agree, under my definition, that I'm right. But then that definition I gave was just based on my own personal moral "vibes". You have your own definition of personhood that makes fetuses people. Neither can prove the other wrong*, because we are looking at the same map. That is why, despite how distasteful it sounds, personhood is just "subjective" (as is genocide, dignity, freedom, etc) - otherwise we just play word games and make contrived analogies that "prove" our morality is objectively correct (this is a good tactic if actually waging the culture war, but it does not help to discuss it)
In case this sounds too glib / edgy, I want to say I do understand the gravity of this disagreement. From your perspective, I am a horrible person advocating for killing left-handed people ("How is this thing a person?"). But this is what I honestly believe, and if there is evidence, even anecdotal, that contradicts my understanding of the mental capacity of fetuses, I'm happy to hear about it.
[*] Unless it's a religious thing. In that case it is a disagreement over the nature of objective reality, and it could (at least in theory) be resolved by logical arguments.
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I didn't say it was ok. The question was if I would be sympathetic.
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