And yet Science Daily has an article indicating that fetuses can recognize mom's voice in the womb.Warren Dew wrote:As you stipulated in the original question, our definitions of "human being" is not necessarily the same as the legal definition of "person", so we do not yet have a basis to impute the existence or nonexistence of "human rights".Seth wrote:From the "personhood" perspective, this is very Singer-like in that it would deny human rights to born infants as much as several months old. I cannot agree. But the definition is consistent with secondary and tertiary definitions of "being" in the dictionaries, which allude to a degree of cognitive ability.I wrote:For what it's worth, my definition of "human being" is a genetically and phenotypically human animal which can reason about spatial relationships and understand language. Note that, as Seth noted might be possible, this is different from what the definition of a legal person is, or even what it should be.
I agree that my definition, as with Seraph's definition, excludes most newborn infants from the category of "human being". That is consistent with my experience with newborn infants, including at least one of my own. Now, it's true that newborns have a hard wired mechanism of making eye contact with adults and convincing them, through the cuteness of the infants' huge eyes, that they are human beings. If you actually observe their behavior and reactions, though, you can't really conclude that there's a mind inside that brain anywhere near as complex as even a mouse has. Even reactions to pain take a couple of seconds to occur, if they occur at all. That's consistent with what's known about the biology of their nervous systems - most of the nerves in the central nervous system are not yet myelinated, and conduct nerve impulses slowly and erratically, which seems to make more complex sequences and patterns of nerve impulses impossible.
However, the point at which an infant comes to meet my definition - or Seraph's - is difficult to determine and varies from infant to infant. I would therefore argue that the appropriate line to draw is not such a scientifically justified line, but rather a simpler, and conservative, legal line, for defining what legally constitutes a "person". Many traditional societies draw the line from a few days to a month after the birth. To me, given the availability of abortion before birth, attaching legal personhood at birth seems to draw a very clear line that is adequately conservative.
This is not to say that unborn fetuses should have no rights at all. Nonhuman animals have rights; we're allowed to kill them, but we aren't allowed to vivisect them, or torture them for our entertainment, for example. I'd suggest that those rights are the appropriate rights to attach at the point where the fetus has a central nervous system. It's okay to abort them, but the method shouldn't be unnecessarily inhumane, and we shouldn't be able to remove a live fetus for experimentation.
For me, people who have actually lost higher brain function are not "human beings", although I question whether that situation really applies to many of the people who are classified as being in persistent vegetative states. I would still classify them as legal "persons", for simplicity and conservatism. Still, it's generally legal to remove them from life support and deny them extraordinary care, and I agree with that approach.hadespussercats wrote:Are people in persistent vegetative states not actually people, then? I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with this (I support euthanasia, as well), but it does introduce a bit of slippery-slope to your sentience=personhood distinction.
This indicates that there is cognition, and substantive cognition including long-term memory. Other research indicates that infants come "pre-wired" with a huge number of neural interconnections, and have an ability to learn that actually diminishes with time, as multiple neuronal connections "compete" and are winnowed down for a particular stimulus. This "rewiring" takes place in the months after birth, which is why children can learn multiple languages at an early age, but have greater difficulty as they mature.
This indicates that the fetus's brain is a wide-open neural network hungry for stimulus and input, which debunks the notion that there is no cognition going on. Remember, cognition and response are two different things, and the fetus may be inputting and processing information without the present ability to communicate that this is occurring. Obviously a child learns language skills long before it's able to express those skills vocally. First comes the input, then the internal processing, then the external manifestation. This means that it's probably incorrect to assume that just because a newborn infant doesn't say "Hi Dad, how are you today" that it's not thinking.
) - which seems like an utterly ignoble and twisted rationale. Or I could go out and deliberately sucker a nice wealthy man into impregnating me. Or I could somehow make myself the surrogate mother of an embryo whose biological parents I knew, or could try impregnating myself in front of a sperm donor, with his cuppy cup without the usual procedures - and see to harrassing the respective biological parents the minute pregnancy occurs. And in either case I cite my bodily autonomy and there's little real argument to be had on that basis. You can question my head, my integrity, my principles - but the argument about the use of my body is always pretty much over at the outset.
