subbie - When Does Personhood Begin?

[_EAllusion]

Sure, if we define morality as something that is healthy.

Any statement of oughtness - anything that says or implies that you are obligated to do something - is a moral statement. For instance, any thought you have that the law should be this way instead of that or any politician you favor over another because of those preferences, is a moral issue. You can say that ethics is the study of statements and thoughts that carry this sense of obligation.

Morality isn't defined as healthy. Morality doesn't tell you to be healthy. The idea that you ought to be healthy itself is a moral thought.

How do you do it well? There is no consensus on anything in philosophy. Is there a well-established philosophical idea? and how do we know that it is true? Is it possible to know anything in philosophy? Perhaps our world is just a computer simulation experiment or someone's dream.

I really don't know how to answer this in a message board post because it's such a broad question presuming zero entry-level knowledge.

Please tell me when can a human have rights? Why? Is it before 24 weeks? in third trimester? After birth? After two years old? Please don't ignore my questions.

What this thread is about, in theory, is asking subgenius your question to see what he thinks. What I recommend in your case, rather than me telling you what I think, is reading up on how different people defend stances on this.

Some people argue that anything that has the conscious ability to experience pain is a person. Many animals have this, and if you think this, you ought to be a vegan and probably also ought to view our society as incredibly morally abhorrent and in need of drastic reform. Have you ever heard someone argue this? I bet you have. And surely you recognize here that merely asserting this does no good. This isn't self-evidently so. It might appeal to some people's emotions when they think about other people and animals, but more than this is needed.

One route to arguing this is to say that when you think about some moral thoughts, and specifically thoughts about things that are morally wrong, what you really are saying is that they cause things to experience pain. At least some statements of moral wrongness, when you closely analyze them, are really talking about inducement of pain to anyone that can experience it. Therefore, anything that can experience pain can be morally wronged. From there, it follows that rights associated with preventing moral wrongs should apply to anything that can experience pain. Fetuses that can experience pain are people. But so are cows, pigs, cats, etc.

Another route to arguing this is that morality consists of subjective intuitions about what produces a sense of moral disgust and satisfaction in us, and the thought of causing others pain is inherently a morally disgusting to us in general, ergo it's proper to say that it is bad. And you can probably see how the rest follows from there.

I'm not saying these arguments are right. I don't think they are, mainly because I don't think moral statements reduce into statements about pain or base intuitions like that. But it's instructive to think about how people reason their way to these positions.

The idea that morality applies to a shared human community of genetically similar beings is a sucktastic position whose justifications leave a lot to be desired. That's easier to see when you've sampled from different schools of thought and how they go about defending themselves.

[_EAllusion]

Honor brings up a point that subgenius probably won't answer, but if you define personhood - or let's just say flibbleflarb - in terms of being homo sapiens, how do you deal with the fact that there probably isn't a clear line between homo sapiens and species homo sapiens had a close evolutionary relationship with? How do you have a clean cut off point between persons and non-persons then? Maybe you don't. Maybe it is a continuum where you can't say when hot becomes cold on a thermometer, but you know that a large enough gap does eventually produce that difference. That's how many people think of fetuses becoming persons as their mental traits gradually come on line in development. It doesn't happen all in an instant.

But is that what subs thinks? And if so, why? I suspect most of the people who go with the biologically human = person position are also the types to be biological essentialists who reject evolutionary theory, so their scientific ignorance creates an impasse. Assuming that isn't the case, how does this relate to why being human in a biological sense matters in the first place?

[_honorentheos]

I see! Yes I understand what you are telling me. Thanks. At least you are much better than honorentheos.

[_subgenius]

Just as a footnote, and to fir in with the hair fire theme du jour...Hitler and his crew used lack of "personhood" with his considerations for Jewish people.

[_honorentheos]

Just as a footnote, and to fir in with the hair fire theme du jour...Hitler and his crew used lack of "personhood" with his considerations for Jewish people.

Exactly. Which is why it's so critical to be explicit in defining it. Bad things happen when one relies on loose intuited ideas about who deserves to be recognized as having rights and who does not.

[_subgenius]

Exactly. Which is why it's so critical to be explicit in defining it. Bad things happen when one relies on loose intuited ideas about who deserves to be recognized as having rights and who does not.

So, what bad things will happen if we intuit "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." ?

[_honorentheos]

Women won't get the vote until about a century and a half later.

[_EAllusion]

So, what bad things will happen if we intuit "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." ?

Slavery?

Do you think the person who wrote that passage did not appreciate that black men were men in a biological sense? He did. He wrote about it. He believed in a sort of early race science where blacks and whites had different predisposed traits, but he thought they were all humans. He still held them in bondage. There was contemporary debate around the time about what was meant by "men" in that passage with critics noting the hypocrisy of the colonists' supposed concern for the equality of man while being slave drivers. Southern states echoing the phrase adopted "freemen" in state constitutional language because they understood this. Others were fine noting that blacks weren't really men, but rather inferior beings who did not possess the same rights.

Reducing this into confusion about the biological status of blacks and other enslaved people is ahistorical and wrong. A correct understanding of what makes something human in a biological sense wasn't even on the table at that point. To think this was over a simple misunderstanding about the genetic identity of blacks that could've been fixed with genetic knowledge is comic. It was a dispute over personhood. "Men" in that passage is an archaic phrasing that means "people" in more contemporary use. All people have unalieable rights. This opens up the question of "what are people?" You need to have a firmer understanding of why you think just who has rights and why. You skip that question entirely, resting it on raw assertion, because you can't and really don't know how to do that.

What you are doing is cloaking yourself in a founding document phrase that people have grown up to have warm regard for so you don't have to defend what you think or even what it asserts.

[_subgenius]

So, what bad things will happen if we intuit "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." ?

Slavery?

Do you think the person who wrote that passage did not appreciate that black men were men in a biological sense? He did. He wrote about it. He believed in a sort of early race science where blacks and whites had different predisposed traits, but he thought they were all humans. He still held them in bondage. There was contemporary debate around the time about what was meant by "men" in that passage with critics noting the hypocrisy of the colonists' supposed concern for the equality of man while being slave drivers. Southern states echoing the phrase adopted "freemen" in state constitutional language because they understood this. Others were fine noting that blacks weren't really men, but rather inferior beings who did not possess the same rights.

Reducing this into confusion about the biological status of blacks and other enslaved people is ahistorical and wrong. A correct understanding of what makes something human in a biological sense wasn't even on the table at that point. To think this was over a simple misunderstanding about the genetic identity of blacks that could've been fixed with genetic knowledge is comic. It was a dispute over personhood. "Men" in that passage is an archaic phrasing that means "people" in more contemporary use. All people have unalieable rights. This opens up the question of "what are people?" You need to have a firmer understanding of why you think just who has rights and why. You skip that question entirely, resting it on raw assertion, because you can't and really don't know how to do that.

What you are doing is cloaking yourself in a founding document phrase that people have grown up to have warm regard for so you don't have to defend what you think or even what it asserts.

I feel like your "reasoned" response here runs contrary to how I understand the definition of "intuit".

And my question still remains since all you have done is illustrate how bad things happen when we do not intuit the phrase noted.

So, the whole "skip that question" condemnation is laughable/ironic at this point....truly.

[_honorentheos]

I feel like your "reasoned" response here runs contrary to how I understand the definition of "intuit".

And my question still remains since all you have done is illustrate how bad things happen when we do not intuit the phrase noted.

So, the whole "skip that question" condemnation is laughable/ironic at this point....truly.

subbie believes that intuit means to know a true, justifiable fact and omits that it is about the means of "knowing" not the truth value of the thing intuited.

Go figure.