I would like to give an example that I think fits here. (Do you think it fits?) It has to do with the common practice of summarizing the whole abortion debate with whether or not “life begins at conception”. Putting the debate entirely aside (of course!) this is my favorite example of words that have no meaning outside of identifying yourself with this group or that group, and thus is the beginning and the end of terribly sloppy thinking.
Does life begin at conception? We need to define “life” first. OK, anything that is composed of cells and metabolizes is some sort of common definition. For simplicity, let’s call the unit of life an “organism”. So we are asking if an organism first begins living at conception. Sort of obviously “yes” and totally irrelevant when you think about what the words actually mean, yet somehow this frames the debate for many people.
I agree. This is part of the problem someone (maybe Phil Goetz?) was mentioning before about how our society has this very binary mode of thinking where taking life is always automatically bad. The solution here is taboo “life” and find the disguised query you’re really wondering about. In my case, the question is whether the abortion causes suffering to an entity capable of feeling suffering. In the case of a fetus, arguably yes; in the case of an egg, very likely no.
I would like to give an example that I think fits here. (Do you think it fits?) It has to do with the common practice of summarizing the whole abortion debate with whether or not “life begins at conception”. Putting the debate entirely aside (of course!) this is my favorite example of words that have no meaning outside of identifying yourself with this group or that group, and thus is the beginning and the end of terribly sloppy thinking.
Does life begin at conception? We need to define “life” first. OK, anything that is composed of cells and metabolizes is some sort of common definition. For simplicity, let’s call the unit of life an “organism”. So we are asking if an organism first begins living at conception. Sort of obviously “yes” and totally irrelevant when you think about what the words actually mean, yet somehow this frames the debate for many people.
I agree. This is part of the problem someone (maybe Phil Goetz?) was mentioning before about how our society has this very binary mode of thinking where taking life is always automatically bad. The solution here is taboo “life” and find the disguised query you’re really wondering about. In my case, the question is whether the abortion causes suffering to an entity capable of feeling suffering. In the case of a fetus, arguably yes; in the case of an egg, very likely no.