Seems awfully unfair and arbitrary to require “a desire to live and not feel pain” in order to avoid be killed. At 8 weeks plus one day, is your 1-day fetus capable of doing those things, really? And, if so, then it shouldn’t be killed at that time, but two days earlier it’d be OK to scrape it out? I think you’re trying to draw an imaginary line here, to allow yourself the wiggle room to feel OK about the killing of human beings.

You make no distinction between cells and organisms, which strikes me as disingenuous; that handy little omission allows you to conflate the destruction of human organisms with the destruction of individual cells, and therefore approve them both. On a related note, I never stated that the haploid gamete is not human, but simply that it does not represent a human organism. Again, one is a cell, the other is an organism (I’ll leave it as an excercise for you to figure out which is which). I cannot understand how you can assert that “whether something is an organism does not matter in terms of moral personhood”. Connecting the organism concept to, e.g., insects is specious reasoning; I did not say that no organism should ever be killed. The issue here is human beings, not bugs. The human organism appears at conception; unless it dies en route, it will develop into a mature human being, going through numerous developmental phases. It takes many years for all of its capabilities to develop, but you arbitrarily define 8 weeks as the point at which it becomes something different than it was before. But, biologically, that difference is just two points on a developmental continuum. At 8 weeks, any moral sense is years off. And why should the ability to respond to noxious stimuli (”pain”, although not consciously experienced by embryo or fetus, as far as anyone knows) make any difference whatsoever? What sort of a criterion is that? All animals experience pain, but you have no problem killing them.

Which reduces your argument down to the “moral personhood issue”, so let’s go with that for a moment. You emphasize “cognition and mental capabilities” as your criterion for permitting a human being to live. What cutoff point do you declare? How much cognition? How advanced the mental capabilities? An IQ of 100? 80? 50? How will you decide? And, if you do find a way to decide, then why not implement it at any age, not just in utero? Just cull the defectives wherever, whenever. Why not, if they don’t meet your standards.

I do apologize for not adding a little winking smiley face after my ‘babies as poop machines’. Maybe I should have used tags. You are correct that babies “have a wide variety of cognitive capacities”. So do puppies, chickens, and pretty much any other animal you’d care to name. But they can “even reason morally!”? Do you really mean they can make moral distinctions? As in “right” and “wrong”, whatever those terms mean? You might want to ask your girlfriend for some documentation on that one. I wonder what newborns think about abortion?

By the way, the notion that “identical” twins are truly identical is a common lay misconception. Their genetic composition is identical at the first cell division in the blastocyst stage, although, from that point on, DNA copying errors will inevitably occur, so the twins will drift apart in that way. In addition, they have different environments, which will cause subtle developmental differences. That effect is clearer to see in the case of higher-order multiple births, such as sextuplets (e.g. the one on the bottom of the pile has a disadvantage due to pressure; also, variations in the anatomy of the placenta can cause differences in oxygenation from one kid to another, etc.). With a pair of twins, the differences are there, but are often subtle.

I think you’re trying very hard to intellectualize a solution to a very basic problem - that we want to be able to kill unborn babies for the sake of convenience, but we don’t want any of those annoying guilt feelings. That requires a lot of cognitive hoop-jumping, and it’s only possible because we can’t see any part of the process (the whole first few months of development, as well as the abortion). So, it’s a bit abstract, and therefore fairly easy to think about and to justify, because no blood, no pain, no visible carcass (this, of course, is the motivation behind those who display pictures of aborted fetuses, i.e. to bring the process into view). I’m not necessarily against abortion, just conflicted, because I do see it as a struggle between the life of a quite helpless organism and the convenience of the mother, and I think we need to be more honest about what actually takes place after that speculum gets inserted, rather than pontificate about abstract notions of “moral personhood” and “cognitive capacities”. Those arguments strike me as relatively desperate (and inappropriately glib) attempts to deny that, during an abortion, a human being dies.

A couple of simpler, alternative questions: If a murderer kills a pregnant woman, should he be tried for two murders, or one? If a pregnant woman is attacked and survives, but the child in her uterus dies, should the assailant be charged with simple assault, or murder?

If a murderer kills a woman and the child is not a fetus, it is a single murder. If a man attacks a pregnant woman and the baby dies, he should be charged with murder (or manslaughter depending on the intention) if the baby is not an embryo. These questions are not difficult to address with my clear demarcation, whereas your intuitions about my thought questions are clearly riddled with hemming and hawing about irrelevancies.

So you can kill anyone as long as they’re asleep.

Someone who is asleep can still feel pain, and is obviously still a moral person. They presumably have a desire to live and not feel pain that an embryo has never had, and so there is a huge distinction there.

I pointed out that my system coheres with our treatment of animals because it correlates with the cognitive abilities of those animals. Those with greater cognitive abilities are generally treated better than those with lesser abilities (mammals versus insects, dogs versus lizards, etc.).

And the argument is not that “life begins at conception”. What begins is the life of a unique human being, who will continue to develop (if not scraped out of the uterus) for seven or eight decades. The germ cells are alive, of course, as are all of the supporting cells. It’s not life that begins, it’s the life of an individual.

The idea that the human being is “unique” or an “individual” is a silly distinction with no merit. You can have unique and individual cells that differ from others, but we don’t treat them as entities deserving of moral rights. What makes a human unique and invidual but not a germ cell? Because there are multiple germ cells that are all the same? Well, it’s untrue that they are all the same, and presumably your reasoning would lead you to conclude that identical twins are those not moral beings because they are not “unique” and individual, which is absurd.

You need to work a bit harder at understanding human development and reproduction. Human beings never exist in a haploid stage, only our germ cells do. A unique human being results from the combination of two haploid cells, a sperm and an egg; the result is a (diploid) human being.

You arbitrarily assert that the haploid gamets of a human are not “human”, but this reasoning is faulty if you understand biology. As my examples show, life progresses through stages, and many organisms exist in multicellular haploid stages (fungus, social insects, etc.). This just goes to show that the haploid stage AND the diploid stage are relevant to development and part of the life cycle of any organism, and to rule out one stage because it is not multicellular seems arbitrary and of no moral worth.

So what? The issue here is not the termination of defective, non-functional organisms, but of normal, fully-functional ones. “Fully functional”, in this context, doesn’t mean “having reached the developmental stage at which some of us will now benificently deem them worthy of living”. It means moving along the normal human developmental path.

But you provide no reasons as to why “moving along the normal human developmental path” is morally relevant. My own system, that emphasizes cognition and mental capabilities, explains the way we treat insects, our moral intuitions in the thought experiments I gave, and why babies born without brains are not treated as moral entities. Your own system is completely arbitrary and cannot answer these dilemmas satisfactorially, hence it is probably wrong or inconsistent.

A skin cell is not an organism. The owner of the crotch, on the other hand, is. It is the assembly of cells into an organism that defines us, not our individual component cells, many of which are expendable by design.

Again, you bring up a worthless moral distinction. Whether something is an organism does not matter in terms of moral personhood, unless you concede that plants and insects should also be treated as humans. Many humans are also “expendable by design”, if you take a broad enough view of nature and genetics.

Have you ever seen an aborted fetus? They are quite obviously human. And dead. And they were alive a few minutes ago, just before the abortion. It’s quite sobering, and I’d be worried about any human being who, on seeing one, didn’t react in that way.

My argument is expressly applied to fetuses. Have you ever seen an aborted embryo? They are NOT quite obviously human, and you’d be hard pressed to differentiate a cow embryo from a human embryo unless you had biological training of some sort. Pointing out the grossness of the procedure is not an argument.

See the above comment on your complete misunderstanding of the whole haploid-diploid concept. What’s special is not the gametes - after all, the male ejaculate contains about 250 million sperm, only one of which manages to transfer its genetic material into the egg, so 249,999,999 sperm die as part of the normal fertilization process. So, you can keep jerking off without guilt (unless you’re Catholic).

Why does it matter that many die? As a thought experiment, suppose that humans could have litters of millions of children at once. Suppose also that only one of these millions would end up surviving past 8-months in the uterus, while the rest die precisely at the 8-month mark. Would this make you think it is then acceptable to perform abortions? I don’t see how the differential survival is relevant at all.

Ever try to make moral-personhood contact with a newborn? Give it up! They’re just poop machines! Obviously OK to kill them. And, while you’re at it, take care of the two-year-old having a tantrum at the next table. Please. Clearly, the only people we must avoid killing are the adults, the ones who have risen to full, morally complete personhood. Although it’s not clear how they’ll make it to that stage, since incomplete (i.e. young) humans seem to have no value in your moral construct.

Babies are not just poop machines. This is a common lay misconception, but babies actually have a wide variety of cognitive capacities. They don’t even have to be a year old and they can develop preferences, process social information, and even reason morally! (There are a variety of studies showing these facts in infants; one of the reasons I know this is because my girlfriend studies infants!)

“the organism without the proper cognitive status for this consideration (worthiness) is not clear-cut and absolute…”

So, then, “cognitive status” defines whether a human can be killed? At what stage of development, exactly, does the transformation to “worthiness” occur? At birth? Six months after conception? Three months? Two months after birth? How do you propose to measure this characteristic, and who gets to decide on the cutoff point? That’s a slippery slope, if ever there was one. And does one human being really get to decide on another’s “worthiness”? That’s a little creepy.

“A zygote, blastocyst, or early embryo clearly do not possess the sorts of characteristics that qualify it for moral consideration…”

You don’t define those characteristics, so what, exactly, do you mean here? A fetus (or zygote, or blastocyst) is a human being at an early stage of development. Morality is an abstract concept, but you don’t really define that, either.

“…if one asks a pro-lifer how an abortion doctor, or a researcher studying embryonic stem cells, should be punished…”

Documentation required here; otherwise it sounds like you made this part up. The burning building scenario does pose an interesting problem, although it’s a bit of a Sophie’s choice. It’s also a bit apples and oranges, because a real, live kid is… well, is already here, while the status of blastocysts removed from women and stored in liquid nitrogen is unclear. Except for the fire, will they all develop into term babies? They are produced artificially (in vitro), and the whole process intertwines technology with the natural process of development. A couple of simpler, alternative questions: If a murderer kills a pregnant woman, should he be tried for two murders, or one? If a pregnant woman is attacked and survives, but the child in her uterus dies, should the assailant be charged with simple assault, or murder?

“…it becomes apparent that we should not harm others because they do not desire such treatment, because they dislike or fear the pain it would cause, and because we are capable of empathizing and understanding their point of view by considering our own reactions to the situation… we can reason that theft is unfair and would produce displeasure in ourselves and others. That is, we recognize acts as immoral or wrong based upon the cognitive states they can induce in others (i.e., fear, pain, pleasure, etc.)…the capacity to have these cognitive states — to fear a potential outcome, to feel pain and displeasure, to reciprocate, and so on — is a necessary requirement for moral personhood.”

So you can kill anyone as long as they’re asleep. It’s OK - they won’t feel a thing. I’m guessing that this bogus argument comes from years of trying to defend against the classic anti-atheist argument “how can you be a moral person without religion to guide you?” You’re trying to develop morality through logic, but morality, which is an abstract, human-only concept, is too free-floating for that. Should you shoot an enemy soldier who’s trying to kill you? Clearly not, by your argument, because that might cause them some unpleasant feelings. I would argue that humans show the same sorts of behaviour towards one another as do other mammals. Watch the squirrels in your back yard; they hang out together, fight with each other, copulate with each other, gang up against intruders, etc. In other words, they operate by a set of rules that evolution has provided for them, rules which they’re programmed to follow, and that ensure the survival of their species. If they didn’t follow those rules, their species wouldn’t survive - natural selection at work. Humans are no different, although our cerebral cortex works to trick us into thinking we are.

“This distinction… also neatly accounts for our moral treatment of animals, who are not treated as our moral equals presumably because we don’t think they are our cognitive equals, with those creatures that are less cognitive (e.g., insects) being given little moral regard while those that are more cognitive (e.g., dolphins, apes, and dogs) being frequently empathized with and cited as creatures deserving of rights.”

Not sure where you’re going with this. Do you look down on other animals as not deserving of rights because of their limited cognition? If so, then you’ve just said that you support abortion for the same reason. Do you respect other living things, even those with limited cognition? Then you’ve just said that you oppose abortion for the same reason.

“Life begins at conception! Such is the cry of the angsty pro-lifer in response to irrefutable reason.”

Your reasoning is “irrefutable”? I think it takes a fair bit of arrogance to blithely (”angsty pro-lifers”) dismiss the concerns that hundreds of millions of your fellow humans have over the termination of what they see as human life.

And the argument is not that “life begins at conception”. What begins is the life of a unique human being, who will continue to develop (if not scraped out of the uterus) for seven or eight decades. The germ cells are alive, of course, as are all of the supporting cells. It’s not life that begins, it’s the life of an individual.

“Humans have a diploid stage, which is the stage in which we have sets of chromosomes from both parents, and we have a haploid stage, which is when the human gametes (the sperm and egg) have chromosomes from only one parent.”

You need to work a bit harder at understanding human development and reproduction. Human beings never exist in a haploid stage, only our germ cells do. A unique human being results from the combination of two haploid cells, a sperm and an egg; the result is a (diploid) human being.

“Even the most ardent pro-lifers, for instance, would acknowledge that a baby born without a brain should not be treated as if it is worthy of a right to life, and few would say it must be connected to a life support system for the duration of its empty, nonsensory life.”

So what? The issue here is not the termination of defective, non-functional organisms, but of normal, fully-functional ones. “Fully functional”, in this context, doesn’t mean “having reached the developmental stage at which some of us will now benificently deem them worthy of living”. It means moving along the normal human developmental path.

“Similarly, a human skin cell is living and human, but few pro-lifers would be willing to assert that my continual scratching of my crotch, which results in the continual death of the skin cells down there, is tantamount to murder. Clearly, something more is needed than merely being living and human.”

A skin cell is not an organism. The owner of the crotch, on the other hand, is. It is the assembly of cells into an organism that defines us, not our individual component cells, many of which are expendable by design.

“How could a pro-lifer possibly overcome these impenetrable objections?”

Not only ‘irrefutable”, but now “impenetrable”! Impressive self-analysis.

“Perhaps the favorite tactic when cornered in such a dispute is to make the argument from grossness…”

Another mis-characterization. Nobody is making the argument that “eew, it’s gross, so we shouldn’t do it”. The gross pictures are shown because otherwise, due to the structure of the female reproductive system, the entire process of abortion is invisible. As a result, it’s much easier to stomach. In fact, it’s almost abstract, like your arguments in this essay. You manage to ignore the fact that abortion results in a dead body. In fact, you impugn those who recognize that fact, which strikes me as unfair. Have you ever seen an aborted fetus? They are quite obviously human. And dead. And they were alive a few minutes ago, just before the abortion. It’s quite sobering, and I’d be worried about any human being who, on seeing one, didn’t react in that way.

“The last refuge of the pro-life scoundrel, for some strange reason, is the beating heart…”

The human heart argument is a bit maudlin, it’s true, but again serves to expose the reality of abortion to those who are otherwise completely insulated from it. The pregnant woman doesn’t see anything, and only experiences some cramping, which is effectively medicated away by modern pharmaceutical science. Why do you have such a hard time dealing with the reality of the procedure? Is the fetal carcass really so irrelevant to you?

“…the argument states that because the embryo has the potential to develop into a normal human being, it should be treated as such. But the problem with this formulation is that even a single sperm or single egg has this potential, so masturbation could be seen as mass genocide, and a woman who has her menstrual period could be sued for neglect of her children.”

See the above comment on your complete misunderstanding of the whole haploid-diploid concept. What’s special is not the gametes - after all, the male ejaculate contains about 250 million sperm, only one of which manages to transfer its genetic material into the egg, so 249,999,999 sperm die as part of the normal fertilization process. So, you can keep jerking off without guilt (unless you’re Catholic).

“…a more potent argument because it accounts for the probability of full cognitive development, and so sperm would not qualify, as a single sperm’s chance of becoming an adult human being is rather tiny. The problem with the argument, of course, is that the possibility of having the qualities relevant for moral personhood is an overt admission that the entity currently does not possess these qualities, and therefore should not be treated as if it does.”

Ever try to make moral-personhood contact with a newborn? Give it up! They’re just poop machines! Obviously OK to kill them. And, while you’re at it, take care of the two-year-old having a tantrum at the next table. Please. Clearly, the only people we must avoid killing are the adults, the ones who have risen to full, morally complete personhood. Although it’s not clear how they’ll make it to that stage, since incomplete (i.e. young) humans seem to have no value in your moral construct.

“…like self-righteous clowns without grease paint.”

They’re easy to spot - they’re the irrefutable and impenetrable ones…

If the whole reaction is not a rational one, then explanations and rationale will make no difference in changing attitudes. Not, that one shouldn’t try, just that the approach might need to change.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/opinion/28kristof.html