aei_haruko said:
OH, allright, I think i understand. my apologies. i wasnt quite sure, so i made an assumption, silly me ^^;
wait, so I am confused. you admit ( from what I gather) that a fetus is life, but that ending said life isnt murder? If the fetus would live and not harm anyone, I cant possibly see how ending it's life isnt murder. Could you explain how ending a life thats only crime is existing is muder? I honestly cant see your viewpoint, and I genuinely would love to understand what makes somebody, who i presume is wonderfully intelligent, hold a view that I cant quite understand.
To me, 'taking a life' isn't the equivalent of murder. For example, while i do oppose the death penalty (but that's mostly because i consider it an act of cowardice, not because i think life is sacred), i don't necessarily consider it murder. I also don't consider shutting down a medical ventilator murder, nor assisted suicide (as long as is it approved as necessary).
Taking a life for the welfare of others (or yourself) isn't a practice that is unknown to humans. We kill animals so we can eat them. If attacked, we sometimes kill people in self defense. Death penalty is a way of getting rid of criminals. Casualties of war is a necessary side effect of settling disputes or solving problems that can't be solved through diplomacy (although the use of the word 'necessary' is one that is debatable in this case. Not all casualties of war are necessary sadly, and it's arguable whether or not wars are necessary in the first place, but lets not get into that).
To me, abortion is just another product of ending life that is born out of necessity. If a women feels like she can't go through a pregnancy or can't care for the child (or the worst case scenarios of rape or some other complication), then i consider abortion a great solution, although you of course shouldn't discard other solutions like adoption just because you have that option. Like i said, society has evolved into a state where women have to stand on their own instead of relying on the man to care for her, and since lone mothers can't always acquire the necessary capital to feed a child and pregnant women can't work, this means that the rest of us either needs to pay for her child (at least that's the case in a welfare state like Denmark where i live), or she needs to have an abortion. In addition, like i argued, i don't consider an abortion cruel to the child, since it's not in a state to understand it, fear it or react to it. It's just another bump on the road of life.
I would disagree, because of a hypothetical situation. Lets say That eventually humanity ccreates a computer capable of perfect reasoning, and it is fully sentient, and could make choices, and function quite well, would it be wrong to destroy it? Because if sentiencce is wha makes something have value as life, then would it be wrong to kill the computer? I know that sounds odd, and if you are confused by my point I could try to phrase it better, however, i dont believe sentience matters in determining weather or not something has a right to live. Which to me shouldnt be the determining factor in deciding life.
In that case i would argue that since we gave the computer sentience, we could also take it away from it, and it wouldn't be "sorry" and miss the good old days where it had feelings. In addition, computers can be backed up, meaning that they aren't reliant on a physical body like ours to sustain. If you for any reason need to dismantle a computer, you can back up it's "personality".
On the other hand, the only foolproof way to take away sentience from a living being that has achieved that state is for it to die.
I point i made earlier was that if you scratch your skin, then skin cells fall off and die. That doesn't necessarily mean it's murder, because they aren't sentient. Sentience DEFINES cruelty, because it's impossible to be cruel to a being that isn't sentient.
allright, as for the mothers ultimte choice, do you believe that your life should be up to anybody if your only detriment is existence?
If I'm inside my mothers womb, then what i believe can basically be summed up as "...", because in that state I'm not capable of believing anything.
If i was aborted as opposed to being born (and sitting here today arguing on the Escapist), then nobody would be the wiser about it besides my parents. All my friends wouldn't miss me because they didn't knew i existed. I wouldn't regret being an abortion because i wouldn't be capable of that, and i wouldn't be capable of being happy or sad about it either.
The question you are basically asking is
"What would a non-sentient being think about something IF it was sentient." That's the equivalent of someone else asking me
"If your chair was sentient, what do you think it would think about you sitting on it?" My response to that would be
"It would probably think I'm a fat bastard and that i should go to find something else to sit on."
But who cares, it's a chair. It's not sentient. To paraphrase Yahtzee: It's like asking us to feel sorry for a floor lamp because someone knocked it over.