Tex Democrats begin 13 hour filibuster

[JDHURF]

[uebermann]

[fstarcstar]

[lnrw]

[The Comrade]

yet we have the death penalty.

[JDHURF]

fstarcstar, your argument is a terrifically uninformed argument. The concept of being human is not equivalent to having the attributes of personhood. That is a lazy and uneducated conflation. As absurd a conflation as your conflation of personhood and personality (chickens have personalities, are chickens protected with your concept of "right to life"?). Being human is simply to be a member of the species homo sapiens, it says nothing of developed attributes, the actually ethically relevant criteria.

Personhood is defined by such features as sentience, consciousness, self-awareness, rationality and so on. This understanding has existed in philosophy for ages. John Locke, who as we all know was a major influence on the drafting of the Constitution, defined a person as "[a] thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places." It is understood within bioethics that the two most important aspects of personhood are the attributes of rationality and self-consciousness (the characteristic of being autonomous is highly regarded as of near equal relevance as well), attributes which are by no means unique to human beings.

If one argues, as do you, that simply being a human being is an ethically important fact one has departed from a rational inquiry into bioethics and leaped into an irrational religious fantasy that is not bound by logic or reasoned argument. Being a member of a certain species does not necessarily indicate anything of any real ethical importance. It is not too far removed from the arguments of white supremacist racists who argue fallaciously that there are various races within the human species and that white humans have certain rights that blacks do not simply because they are a member of the "white race," while the blacks are not. That is not a rational distinction of any ethical importance. It is a superficial distinction that easily dissolves when turning to the ethically relevant criteria. In the same way that your speciesist distinction that places an ethically illusionary importance on being a member of the species homo sapiens while denigrating all other related species (the great apes, other highly evolved mammals, such as elephants and dolphins and so on) dissolves when critically reviewed.

A fetus is a human, but it is not a person and is therefore not accorded the rights of persons. Your false analogy between a woman's right to choose whether to carry to term a pregnancy or to instead abort the fetus to you going to a disabled home and murdering the residents is clearly, well, hysterically idiotic. There is without a doubt a vast gulf of a difference for many reasons: the fetus is biologically attached to the mother while the disabled individuals are biologically autonomous, the parents of the aborted fetus chose to abort it while the parents of the disabled individuals chose to give birth to and continue care for the individuals in whatever capacity that decision implied, etc. The only analogy that would hold for your mass murder scenario would be were you to run around hospitals and perform abortions without the consent of the pregnant women. That is analogous to your scenario and equally ethically monstrous and illegal.

What ueber is referring to when he argues that there is no inherent right to life is that such rights are not naturally imbued into the universe such as the laws of physics. Such rights do not exist independently of reasoned thought, they are a product of reasoned thought. Such rights cannot be discovered through science. While scientific understanding clearly informs the process of ethical reasoning, one does not look through a microscope and spontaneously discover the right to the pursuit of happiness. Such a right does not independent of reasoned thought exist in the universe like a carbon atom waiting to be discovered with the right technology.

The right to life is an ethical proposition that has been developed by persons through reasoned argument. Through reason it is found that this right to life, in order to be consistent, must be extended beyond the mere sphere of the human species and that it does not apply to a fetus in the same way that it does not apply to a chicken or a fish (both capable of showing more signs of the ethically relevant criteria of consciousness than a fetus).

[lnrw]

[uebermann]

[The Comrade]

[phosphide]