[ookdatnog]

> If we were to survey those biologists, what would they say? Same regarding an infertile person, and cancer. I think scientists have already resolved the questions you're posing.

If a definition exists that avoids all these edge cases, please provide it. I am not aware of a definition of "organism" that would resolve all the problems in your stance.

> Most pro choice people won't use it, because it means abortions would have to be very restricted.

The most common pro-choice argument is based on bodily autonomy, for which the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant. It suffices to observe that there is no other situation where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy, so even if the fetus is a person, the state cannot force you to carry them to term.

So you are technically correct in stating that it is rarely used as a defense for the pro-choice position, but not "because it means abortions would have to be very restricted". In the bodily autonomy argument, the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant.

I agree with the bodily autonomy argument and the broader pro-choice position, but in this case I'm not really making a political argument, but a philosophical one, which is: it's a mistake to strongly identify personhood with the property of "being an organism" / "being alive".

[Thorrez]

>If a definition exists that avoids all these edge cases, please provide it. I am not aware of a definition of "organism" that would resolve all the problems in your stance.

One way to define a human is any living entity that is either an adult human, or will/would grow into an adult human as long as no problem has happened or will happen to the entity.

> It suffices to observe that there is no other situation where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy

The draft. And a lot of other military rules.

Another example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_captain_goes_down_with_the... . The captain has a duty to save passengers first before saving self.

>In the bodily autonomy argument, the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant.

I don't think that's right. Let's say there are 2 people: A and B. Both are innocent. Person A has some bodily suffering. The only way to solve it is to kill person B. So the options are to restore person A to full bodily health and completely destroy person B's bodily health (violating person B's bodily autonomy completely) or to leave the situation as-is, where person A has has only partial bodily health but person B has full bodily health (violating person A's bodily autonomy partially). I think the correct option is to leave the situation as-is, because that violates bodily autonomy the least.

Of course even better is for other people to give aid to person A to reduce the suffering as much as possible without hurting person B.

[ookdatnog]

> One way to define a human is any living entity that is either an adult human, or will/would grow into an adult human as long as no problem has happened or will happen to the entity.

A few posts back you complained about "tail-wagging-the-dog" thinking, where one reasons backwards from the conclusions one wishes to reach. Your definition is obviously a product of that style of thinking: instead of clarifying what is or isn't a human, you will use the natural elasticity of terms like "problem" and "entity" to draw your boundary however you wish, based on pre-existing notions, when confronted with a challenge.

For example, if a child dies from starvation, therefore not growing into adulthood, you will of course say that the lack of nutrients is a problem that prevented this child from reaching adulthood, so it's still a human.

But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.

Or imagine a child that is born with a mutation that prevents it from reaching adulthood. Clearly we both want to consider this child human. But I would argue that no problem ever "happened" to this entity: the mutation is part of what defines the entity, there is no alternative hypothetical future where it could reach adulthood. According to your definition I could not call this child a human.

> The draft. And a lot of other military rules.

The draft is an example of the state overruling an individual's bodily autonomy, but I specifically said "[...] where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy". The draft is not an example of that: it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.

> The captain has a duty to save passengers first before saving self.

Yes, you can enter an agreement with another party where you make a legally binding promise to perform some duty that overrides your bodily autonomy. This is not an example of the law overriding your bodily autonomy, it's an example of how you can use the law to relinquish your own right to bodily autonomy. Getting pregnant does not require such a legally binding promise.

> I don't think that's right [...]

I'm irrefutably correct that the bodily autonomy argument does not depend on the fetus being a person or not. It's a sufficiently prominent argument that it has a section on the "abortion debate" page on wikipedia [0]. Perhaps the argument does not convince you, but that was not my point. I only wished to show that you are mistaken about the pro-choice position being dependent on the non-personhood of the fetus.

At present I'm not interested in starting a parallel discussion about the validity of the bodily autonomy argument. I can leave a video link [1] if you're interested in how it responds to the most obvious challenges, but I will not return to it unless, maybe, the personhood thread is resolved (to avoid a branching tree discussion).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate#Bodily_rights

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2PAajlHbnU

[Thorrez]

>But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.

I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.

>it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.

What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state. My response is (1) mandating citizens protect the state is protecting the people in the state, and (2) if there was some hypothetical case where citizens protecting the state didn't protect the people in the state, I don't see how it would be morally ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.

[ookdatnog]

> I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.

The difference is "clear" to you because you are reasoning backwards from a desired conclusion. You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you.

But this boundary just doesn't work very well. To begin with you ignored the "child with deadly mutation" challenge I presented: the only way the child reaches adulthood is if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.

And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.

I'm not sure even adult humans would qualify for being human in your worldview, come to think of it. Some people have had their brain halves separated during their lifetime, and this seems to lead to two separate persons locked in one body, at least in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain).

At this point, you can start overfitting your definition to draw an absurdly jagged boundary exactly around these counterexamples, but at that point I'd appreciate if you just admit that personhood starting at fertilization is just an axiom for you and everything else follows from it.

> What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.

That is very much not what I am saying, but I wasn't very explicit about the point I was making, so I shall clarify.

Two people can disagree about what they think the law should say, but one thing that all decent people would agree on, is that the law should be consistent. We want it to apply evenly to all, without strange exceptions. We don't want any laws that say "everyone is free, except people born in May, they have to do slave labor in the mines."

I was not making an argument about what the law should be, I was arguing that abortion laws make the law inconsistent, as there is no other case where the state violates the bodily autonomy of one person to force them to care for another. For example, if we are in a remote area and I get badly injured, and you are the only person with a compatible blood type nearby, the state can't force you to donate your blood to me.

My point was that it's inconsistent to say that the state can violate one person's bodily autonomy to keep another alive specifically in the case of pregnancy. If you want to make this consistent, you need to allow the state to do this in all cases, implying among other things forced blood transfusions and forced kidney donations. Perhaps you agree that the state should be able to force people to donate blood or a kidney, and in that case your opinion is consistent.

I wasn't expressing agreement or disagreement with the draft. I was stating that it is irrelevant as a counterexample. That's because the justification for the draft rests on a moral principle that's distinct from the one that justifies abortion laws (ie "citizens' bodily autonomy can be violated to defend the state" vs "citizens' bodily autonomy can be violated to save any individual's life"). Again, I deliberately offer no opinion on whether the draft is justified; for my purposes it's enough to show that it is not relevant as a counterexample.

[Thorrez]

>The difference is "clear" to you because you are reasoning backwards from a desired conclusion. You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you.

I'm not making up this boundary. This is the scientific definition of an organism.

>To begin with you ignored the "child with deadly mutation" challenge I presented:

The deadly mutation would be the "problem [that] has happened or will happen to the entity." So it doesn't contradict my previous definition. Regardless of whether the deadly mutation could be fixed by gene modification or not, the child is still a person.

>if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.

I don't think I said that.

>And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.

I'm not sure either of those contradict my previous definition. The chimerism can be considered a problem that will happen. Regarding identical twins, we could argue whether "grow into an adult human" covers "grow into 2 adult humans" or not.

We can modify the definition slightly to avoid these ambiguities: "Any living entity that is either an adult human, or will/would grow into an adult human as long as no problem has happened or will happen to the entity and the typical development process proceeds."

>I'm not sure even adult humans would qualify for being human in your worldview, come to think of it. Some people have had their brain halves separated during their lifetime, and this seems to lead to two separate persons locked in one body, at least in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain).

I'm not sure how that situation in any way would lead to a strange interaction with my definition (old or new definitions). My definition would classify that person as a person.

>but at that point I'd appreciate if you just admit that personhood starting at fertilization is just an axiom for you and everything else follows from it.

The axiom for me is that there's no such thing as a partial person. From that axiom, the only logical conclusion I can see is that personhood begins at fertilization.

>as there is no other case where the state violates the bodily autonomy of one person to force them to care for another.

What about child neglect laws? Those restrict the parents' autonomy.

>For example, if we are in a remote area and I get badly injured, and you are the only person with a compatible blood type nearby, the state can't force you to donate your blood to me.

Generally the state's laws forbid one person from taking actions that would violate the rights of another person. For example, if I'm dying and need a kidney, it's not legal for me to forcefully take a kidney from someone else, even if that's the only way to preserve my bodily rights (avoiding death).

I think that is consistent to the state making it not legal for a mother to kill a fetus (assuming the state views the fetus as a person), even if that's the only way for the mother to preserve her bodily rights.

[ookdatnog]

> I'm not making up this boundary. This is the scientific definition of an organism.

To begin with, you did not volunteer a definition for the term "organism"; you limited yourself to attempting defining "human". This was rhetorically a good move, because defining the term "organism" is significantly harder.

You keep repeating that your definition is scientific, but offer no evidence of this. I argue that no such definition exists. The wikipedia page for the term "organism" starts as follows:

> An organism is any living thing that functions as an individual. Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Several criteria, few of which are widely accepted, have been proposed to define what constitutes an organism.

> > if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.

> I don't think I said that.

> >And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.

> I'm not sure either of those contradict my previous definition. The chimerism can be considered a problem that will happen. Regarding identical twins, we could argue whether "grow into an adult human" covers "grow into 2 adult humans" or not.

You forget that my statement was a reply to something you said after you stated your definition. You argued that an unfertilized egg cannot be considered a person because it is "clearly" a different entity from the fertilized egg. That does not follow from your definition, because you don't define the term "entity" anywhere.

All my counterexamples were further attempts to divine what you mean by "entity" (which is an absolutely load-bearing concept in your definition which, again, you leave undefined). If you object to the unfertilized egg being the same entity as the fertilized egg, my hypotheses about your understanding of "entity" are that either changing the genome means that it becomes a different entity (generating the deadly mutation challenge), or merging two entities makes them a distinct entity from either original (generating the chimerism example).

My reasoning was a bit loose regarding the identical twins and split-brain examples: I implicitly generalized your potential objection to mergers to an objection to changes in cardinality. I personally don't see why one would reject mergers but accept splits, but that's not an inconsistent position.

At the moment I still don't know why you believe the unfertilized egg is necessarily a different entity from the zygote. Your response to the chimerism example provides no clarification on this: I was clearly challenging your notion of entity, but you responded only with that it "can be considered a problem that can happen".

> The axiom for me is that there's no such thing as a partial person. From that axiom, the only logical conclusion I can see is that personhood begins at fertilization.

I strongly disagree with this axiom. At some point in the distant past, our ancestors were non-human (and, possibly but not necessarily at the same time, not persons). The logical conclusion from your axiom is that there was, at some point, a hard boundary where an entirely nonperson animal gave birth to a "full person" human (and that first human then presumably had to reproduce through bestiality, unless through some amazing fortune another full 100% human being was born and fertile during their fertile years).

This seems to me a significantly less reasonable reading of reality than describing this as a gradual process towards personhood/humanity, where each successive generation is "more personlike". I find this also a more moral reading of reality: to me clearly an ape or an octopus is more personlike than a cockroach, which is in turn a bit more personlike than a jellyfish, which is a tiny tiny bit more personlike than a sea sponge.

> What about child neglect laws? Those restrict the parents' autonomy.

Correct. But it does not restrict their bodily autonomy. I don't think parents can be forced to donate blood or organs to their offspring. Of course most would without a second thought, but not because it is obligated by law.

> Generally the state's laws forbid one person from taking actions that would violate the rights of another person [...] I think that is consistent to the state making it not legal for a mother to kill a fetus [...]

There's a contrived "standard thought experiment" that responds to this: suppose A kidnaps B, ties them down, and connects B's bloodstream to an entirely innocent C with kidney failure, so that B's kidneys process C's blood. Disconnecting B from C will result in the death of C (assume there is no way around this). In this case the status quo is that B is keeping C alive, and it requires active intervention to change this situation. Does B now have a moral duty to remain physically connected to C at all times? Does B "kill" C if they disconnect the bloodstreams?

If you believe that it is, your opinion is consistent. If it's not, then you must at least permit abortion in the case of rape, even if the fetus is a person.