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From: flink@umcp-cs.UUCP (Paul Torek)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: the "human life" fallacy
Message-ID: <8144@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22-Aug-84 05:23:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.8144
Posted: Wed Aug 22 05:23:42 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Aug-84 00:15:26 EDT
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Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 48

Scott Anderson, quoting Laura Creighton: 
>>	>    if the fetus is a human being then the
>>	>    fetus should have the right to life.  if the fetus is not a
>>	>    human being then it never had any rights in the first place.
>>	You state this as if it were unarguable.  I disagree.  Why should a
>>	fetal human being necessarily have a right to life?

Exactly.  (And conversely, why should a non-human have no rights?)  The
standard "pro-life" argument says that the fetus is human, and all humans
have a right to life, therefore the fetus has a right to life.  There is a
fallacy of equivocation in the argument, however.  In the first premise, the
word "human" is taken to be a biological term.  In the second premise,
however, "human" is taken as a moral term.  

If the equivocation is avoided by taking the first occurrence of "human" as
a moral term, then it is no longer open to the pro-lifer to argue that the
humanity of the fetus is a biological fact.  If the equivocation is avoided
by taking the second occurrence as a biological term, then the second
premise can be doubted.  For what it then says is "All members of the
species Homo Sapiens have a right to life."  That statement is essentially
question-begging, unless some argument can be given for it.

From Brian Peterson:  
	Sperm, ova, and random body parts (if cloning) all have the
	"potential" to become a human being.  Pure "potential" to be a human
	being is not enough.  What is different with a fertilized ovum?

I think this represents a common mistake.  There is a difference here.  A
fetus has more than "potential", it has time-dispositional capacities of
adult humans.  The difference is that the fetus is the same creature as the
one who (later, as an adult) writes articles to netnews.  It is the same
animal.  So, assuming that if we let it live it will come to have these
properties, we can say that "viewed four-dimensionally" (3-d + time), it has
these capacities.  This is not true of the ova or body part, because it is
something else (the animal that takes over the material) that will have the
adult-human properties.

Now, how important is this difference?  Therein lies the real question.
Here are two ways to answer this.  One way is to construct numerous
analogies and hypothetical cases to test our moral intuitions on the
subject.  Another way is to work from the fundamentals, asking what kinds of
creatures ought we to care about, how much, and in what way.  I think that
the latter approach leads to a radically different position from either of
the two popular sides of the controversy.  But that's a matter for another
day.
				"The worth of an idea is inversely
				proportional to its popularity"
				--Paul Torek, umcp-cs!flink