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I read about a case of a woman who got a late-term abortion because her husband committed suicide. Do pro-lifers have any sympathy for her?
A good rule of thumb to predict a pro-life person's opinion on something is to mentally replace the fetus with a 1 week old (post birth) baby. Or, if you don't think babies should have rights either, maybe a two or three year old. That is the logical implication of believing fetuses are people.
Would you have sympathy for a mother who killed her 1 week old baby because her husband committed suicide? Would that sympathy extend far enough to excuse the act?
Yes, if she really believed that the fetus wasn't really a person yet and no harm would occur by aborting it.
What does 'person' mean here?
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.
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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