Writing, not Writting; English, not english; Christian, not christian; flawed, not flaved; one “comma” still survives uncorrected.
I’d definitely not kill a coma patient (not fully human being since not thinking) whose chances of becoming a human are 10% but I’d definitely kill a fetus (also not thinking and not living on his own), whose chances of becoming a human being are greater than 10%.
I am pretty certain that I would kill a coma patient in some circumstances. If a person was expected to either kill a coma patient, or let the patient use the person’s organs for nine months, I would not condemn the person for whatever decision she made.
Also note that most defenders of abortion agree that abortion is not fully acceptable during the last months of pregnancy. I certainly don’t accept that there must be a single significant moment when the being’s moral status is suddenly switched from nothing to full person. I don’t have a definite opinion about what makes killing a person bad, but I am pretty sure that killing a morula is morally neutral.
From legal point of view, it may be necessary to define a single moment when a person gains protection against being killed, but there is no reason why this should coincide with some significant biological event. People are legally able to drink and drive and vote at the age of 18, when nothing biologically significant happens. What’s wrong with abortion being legal up to third month of pregnancy or so? In fact, in many countries this is how it actually works.
Ok, you said that killing a morula is morally neutral, but after some time and development killing it definitely is wrong. There has to be a function that assigns moral evil of killing it through the time. The point of this article is to wonder whether this function is correlated with the fetus’ probability of becoming a fully functional human being since it seems reasonable to me.
It is clearly correlated, since the probability of the fetus’ survival increases as it develops, as the evilness of killing does. However I don’t think the probability of becoming a fully functional human is what determines the moral condemnation of killing. To illustrate my intuition, consider:
Babies are clearly not fully functional humans. I doubt we can acknowledge full functionality earlier than in age when humans are capable of reproduction. In Sierra Leone a newborn baby has a 26% chance of dying before age of five, and probably further non-trivial chances of dying until puberty. If the probability argument holds, killing a one year old child in Sierra Leone would be about 30% less evil than killing an adult. Yet many people hold that killing children is actually worse than killing adults.
Imagine a world where after conception the embryo had almost 100% probability of survival until adulthood. Would that mean that killing a morula in such hypothetical world would equal a full-fledged murder?
Writing, not Writting; English, not english; Christian, not christian; flawed, not flaved; one “comma” still survives uncorrected.
I am pretty certain that I would kill a coma patient in some circumstances. If a person was expected to either kill a coma patient, or let the patient use the person’s organs for nine months, I would not condemn the person for whatever decision she made.
Also note that most defenders of abortion agree that abortion is not fully acceptable during the last months of pregnancy. I certainly don’t accept that there must be a single significant moment when the being’s moral status is suddenly switched from nothing to full person. I don’t have a definite opinion about what makes killing a person bad, but I am pretty sure that killing a morula is morally neutral.
From legal point of view, it may be necessary to define a single moment when a person gains protection against being killed, but there is no reason why this should coincide with some significant biological event. People are legally able to drink and drive and vote at the age of 18, when nothing biologically significant happens. What’s wrong with abortion being legal up to third month of pregnancy or so? In fact, in many countries this is how it actually works.
Thanks for correcting.
Ok, you said that killing a morula is morally neutral, but after some time and development killing it definitely is wrong. There has to be a function that assigns moral evil of killing it through the time. The point of this article is to wonder whether this function is correlated with the fetus’ probability of becoming a fully functional human being since it seems reasonable to me.
It is clearly correlated, since the probability of the fetus’ survival increases as it develops, as the evilness of killing does. However I don’t think the probability of becoming a fully functional human is what determines the moral condemnation of killing. To illustrate my intuition, consider:
Babies are clearly not fully functional humans. I doubt we can acknowledge full functionality earlier than in age when humans are capable of reproduction. In Sierra Leone a newborn baby has a 26% chance of dying before age of five, and probably further non-trivial chances of dying until puberty. If the probability argument holds, killing a one year old child in Sierra Leone would be about 30% less evil than killing an adult. Yet many people hold that killing children is actually worse than killing adults.
Imagine a world where after conception the embryo had almost 100% probability of survival until adulthood. Would that mean that killing a morula in such hypothetical world would equal a full-fledged murder?