Sloth, I am curious what you would say to someone who says that maybe human life is not all that valuable, and that convenience of not having to raise an unwanted child is worth the price.
It’s not exactly the same, but many animals have cognition greater than even a new born baby, yet we are okay with killing them. Most, basically put almost zero value on an animal’s life, but humans are infinity valuable?
I am not sure if it has come up, but do you believe evolution? If so, it seems hard not to place value on animals, as they would be at least in some way a relative to us.
I would say thank you for the honest discussion. We’re arguing it as adults willing to embrace the full gravity of it. Which is that we are talking about killing an existing individual human life already set upon its own life cycle. At least we’re having a big boy talk and not fooling ourselves about the nature of the act.
As to the value of human life…THAT is outside of empiricism. You can rely only on faith to argue inherent rights and moral obligations. I am totally fine admitting an impasse. Though I can use science to demonstrate an already existing human life, it can’t be similarily used to demonstrate the inherent value of human life.
But if ones argument is going to be that there is no inherent value/right to human life, than there is no inherent right to abortion either (or to anything else). We agree there is no inherent right to abortion. And agree it is in fact not objectively wrong/evil to prohibit abortion. We just arrive at it from two very different paths.
I think rights could be figured out without faith. Various countries around the world that have different faiths, or majority of non-faith individuals, seem to have rights and laws that although different share many attributes. Murder, robbery, rape are pretty much illegal everywhere, even in countries where there really are not many religious people. It seems people figure out how to act socially without faith.
If no one argued about fetuses being innocent human beings, meaning everyone agreed that they were, then abortion would be illegal and we would all be OK with that.
If flat earthers didn’t argue against the earth being a sphere, then they wouldn’t be flat earthers.
Many of the rights we do have run contrary to religious faith. For example: Freedom of speech? There’s a commandment against that. The Bible is full of people getting smote for thinking they had rights.
Non-religious people very frequently operate on faith. Like, that it would be evil to murder their elderly parents. Not just illegal, or inconvenient, but morally evil.
They believe it isn’t INARGUABLY an innocent human being. In fact, you have called a fetus that in one post and then in a following post called it human life.
Irrational. No skin off my nose. Rofl. Call it whatever you wish (believing murdering someone’s elderly parents IS morally evil). Thanks for seconding my point, though.
That isn’t what I said. I said faith is irrational. Not believing it’s OK to kill my parents is a perfectly reasonable belief that does not require faith.