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Fucking PERIOD.

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

“It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary.” You can keep repeating this but it’s not true. I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren’t conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You’ve never once addressed these points that I’ve made repeatedly.   “As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person.” Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that’s been proven wrong.  So try again? “Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people.” Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren’t people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don’t think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you’re just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: “the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person.” Me: “here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. ““Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse.” Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to “defend” their ethnic “rights.” You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I’m trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I’m in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” ““Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical.” First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi’s used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is “logical”, but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I’ve already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.  Saying what amounts to “nuh uh!” doesn’t count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it’s right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn’t count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. ““maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay” Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. ““We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights” You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the “women’s rights” nonsense is just silly.  A woman’s “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

I’ll select this note to stand in for all the other notes where you complain that "nazi’s didn’t  use the same logic I do because they were wrong and I don’t like their reasons.  That means they didn’t use logic!” Nope.  Sorry.  You can’t escape this fact.  The logic used by them, by you, and by yes, as you point out, people characterizing animals are all the same.  The logical framework is identical.  When conclusions are wrong, its because of the premises they plug into it.  The nazi’s premises were wrong.  Your premises are wrong.  The anthropologist plugging Piltdown man into the taxonomic tree were wrong.  Your logic is all the same though. ““Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted.” It’s not illogical nor an opinion. Being human and being a person have different criteria. They do not perfectly overlap.”“ “I have decided that these two groups are different things because of reasons I chose, while ignoring others that disprove it, to deem as right and logical, so that means this is not illogical or an opinion.” Yeah…that’s a personal opinion, not a fact. “1. Fetuses aren’t people 2. Fetuses aren’t children in the same sense as actual children 3. The Bible literally mentions and supports inducing miscarriages” 1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.  In the same vein of reasoning, I declare that the sky is green.  Or if you’re going to raise complaints about non-physical traits, then fine.  I declare that anyone who can’t enjoy music isn’t a person.  Because I said so.  Declaring something doesn’t make it true. 2. and adults of 21 aren’t adults in the same sense as adults of 61.  adults in a coma arent adults in the same sense as conscious adults.  still adults.  still children.  all human and people.  Your point is irrelevant. 3. yeah nope.  better back that one up with references if you expect me to buy that.  spoiler alert, I know this is not true. “A woman’s right to control their own body. Until a fetus becomes a person it’s part of the woman’s body and she should have full authority over it. Even a dead body has more bodily autonomy than a woman denied an abortion.” Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.  They are so glaringly obvious that I can only think that you are trying to troll me. But important things to focus on in any reply: *The importance of the difference between “logic” and “truth” aka the fact that something can be logical but untrue if the premise is incorrect. *The above highlighted issue that I see as the core evil and what ties you most directly with every other nasty group that tried to make a distinction between people and humanity.  Namely that they tried to do so in the first place.

Don’t think I ever criticized you for arguing from emotion (reference?).  I’ve pointed out the error of your logic in this section, but if you want to play that game then okay, lets play: you still call children fetuses in order to justify de-personalizing them so you can kill them.   See, cuts both ways there.  And you still didn’t address my point, only threw in this red herring. ““3. yeah nope.” Numbers 5:11–31 Basically if a woman is pregnant and suspected of adultery, she needs to drink an herbal water to force her to miscarry” Okay, in the name of fairness, I have to partially give you this.  I had to flip through a couple different translations before I found one that had the wording that makes this point.  The NKJV, which is the more literal translation, doesn’t say this, where the NIV, a more dynamic equivalent text, does, if you’re going to believe that drinking ashes mixed with water will make you miscarry.  I’d have to do a more in-depth study of this passage to come to a better understanding of what it is saying, and which is the better translation. But do I need to point out that this is a punishment? The Bible doesn’t generally condone killing either, but does mete out death as a penalty.  I can also point out texts in the same literature there that treat an unborn baby as a human life, the taking of which is punishable by death of the offender.  Exodus 21:22  The unborn baby is given the same weight as an adult. ““Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.” So you disagree with the idea that women should have control over their own bodies?” No, I disagree with the idea that women should be considered to have a “right” to kill the body of the child inside them.  That the fact that it is an individual life means that doing so is murder.  So you disagree with the idea that babies shouldn’t be murdered? “Humanity and people are 2 separate classifications. They didn’t “try” to make a distinction. Those distinctions already existed, but they chose the wrong ones and killed actual people.” Begging the question again, but even if I agreed with it in principal, then my point is that you are making the same mistake they did.  YOU’RE EVEN AGREEING WITH THEM IN PRINCIPAL, JUST DISAGREEING ON THE GROUP IN QUESTION BEING KILLED!  Listen to yourself! “It’s okay to kill a human so long as it isn’t a person. These groups over here are bad because they chose the wrong kind of human to kill.”  That’s what you are saying here.  Listen to yourself! The fact that you are even trying to make that distinction places you in the same category as every other group that did that.  The very fact that you make the same type of argument but have to explain why your justified murder is better than their justified murder is disturbing. If you are making a distinction between “human” and “person”, you’ve already fallen into bad company.  After all this time saying nazi logic was wrong, and your logic was different, or that they didn’t use logic and you did…you yourself admit that you agree with it, you just disagree on the individual human group that its okay to kill. If you honestly can’t see that, then there’s little hope for you until you do.  

And I am saying you are a liar and don’t believe this, and have offered you a chance to prove me wrong.  Again.  Want me to take you seriously, post on your blog “it’s okay to kill humans so long as they aren’t people.”  Until you do this, I’m not going to acknowledge you believe your own argument.  You won’t do it because you know anyone who sees that will recognize it for what it is.  The same argument/logic used by Nazi’s and slavers.  It’s a catch-22 I admit.  Post it and you will advertise your psychosis, don’t and you admit you’re a liar.

"“I think your definition is a mere exercise in sophistry to justify actions you already want to allow.” Actually I came to this definition BEFORE I came to an opinion on abortion." Okay, and ever since then, as evidenced by our discussion, you have ignored every challenge or fact that disagrees with you in favor of just repeating "I'm right." Would you change your mind if you were given a non-physical trait that exists before the end of the first trimester, according to your own definition of what defines personhood? Will you acknowledge the fact that every other group in history that tried to make a distinction between "human" and "person" was deemed to be "very bad?" the answer, we have seen, is no.  You have made up your own mind and refuse to see or acknowledge anything that disagrees with it.  You have made it a dogma, not a statement of fact. "“And I am saying you are a liar and don't believe this” I 100% do." I will believe this when you post that statement on your blog.  Please feel free to send me the link to show me wrong.  Until you put up, shut up. Edit:  Okay, I saw the link, but it’s not in your feed.  Can anyone else see it but me?  *suspicious*  The challenge is for you to say it where everyone can see it, not whisper it to someone.

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

“It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary.” You can keep repeating this but it’s not true. I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren’t conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You’ve never once addressed these points that I’ve made repeatedly.   “As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person.” Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that’s been proven wrong.  So try again? “Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people.” Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren’t people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don’t think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you’re just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: “the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person.” Me: “here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. ““Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse.” Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to “defend” their ethnic “rights.” You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I’m trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I’m in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” ““Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical.” First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi’s used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is “logical”, but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I’ve already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.  Saying what amounts to “nuh uh!” doesn’t count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it’s right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn’t count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. ““maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay” Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. ““We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights” You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the “women’s rights” nonsense is just silly.  A woman’s “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

I’ll select this note to stand in for all the other notes where you complain that "nazi’s didn’t  use the same logic I do because they were wrong and I don’t like their reasons.  That means they didn’t use logic!” Nope.  Sorry.  You can’t escape this fact.  The logic used by them, by you, and by yes, as you point out, people characterizing animals are all the same.  The logical framework is identical.  When conclusions are wrong, its because of the premises they plug into it.  The nazi’s premises were wrong.  Your premises are wrong.  The anthropologist plugging Piltdown man into the taxonomic tree were wrong.  Your logic is all the same though. ““Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted.” It’s not illogical nor an opinion. Being human and being a person have different criteria. They do not perfectly overlap.”“ “I have decided that these two groups are different things because of reasons I chose, while ignoring others that disprove it, to deem as right and logical, so that means this is not illogical or an opinion.” Yeah…that’s a personal opinion, not a fact. “1. Fetuses aren’t people 2. Fetuses aren’t children in the same sense as actual children 3. The Bible literally mentions and supports inducing miscarriages” 1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.  In the same vein of reasoning, I declare that the sky is green.  Or if you’re going to raise complaints about non-physical traits, then fine.  I declare that anyone who can’t enjoy music isn’t a person.  Because I said so.  Declaring something doesn’t make it true. 2. and adults of 21 aren’t adults in the same sense as adults of 61.  adults in a coma arent adults in the same sense as conscious adults.  still adults.  still children.  all human and people.  Your point is irrelevant. 3. yeah nope.  better back that one up with references if you expect me to buy that.  spoiler alert, I know this is not true. “A woman’s right to control their own body. Until a fetus becomes a person it’s part of the woman’s body and she should have full authority over it. Even a dead body has more bodily autonomy than a woman denied an abortion.” Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.  They are so glaringly obvious that I can only think that you are trying to troll me. But important things to focus on in any reply: *The importance of the difference between “logic” and “truth” aka the fact that something can be logical but untrue if the premise is incorrect. *The above highlighted issue that I see as the core evil and what ties you most directly with every other nasty group that tried to make a distinction between people and humanity.  Namely that they tried to do so in the first place.

Don’t think I ever criticized you for arguing from emotion (reference?).  I’ve pointed out the error of your logic in this section, but if you want to play that game then okay, lets play: you still call children fetuses in order to justify de-personalizing them so you can kill them.   See, cuts both ways there.  And you still didn’t address my point, only threw in this red herring. ““3. yeah nope.” Numbers 5:11–31 Basically if a woman is pregnant and suspected of adultery, she needs to drink an herbal water to force her to miscarry” Okay, in the name of fairness, I have to partially give you this.  I had to flip through a couple different translations before I found one that had the wording that makes this point.  The NKJV, which is the more literal translation, doesn’t say this, where the NIV, a more dynamic equivalent text, does, if you’re going to believe that drinking ashes mixed with water will make you miscarry.  I’d have to do a more in-depth study of this passage to come to a better understanding of what it is saying, and which is the better translation. But do I need to point out that this is a punishment? The Bible doesn’t generally condone killing either, but does mete out death as a penalty.  I can also point out texts in the same literature there that treat an unborn baby as a human life, the taking of which is punishable by death of the offender.  Exodus 21:22  The unborn baby is given the same weight as an adult. ““Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.” So you disagree with the idea that women should have control over their own bodies?” No, I disagree with the idea that women should be considered to have a “right” to kill the body of the child inside them.  That the fact that it is an individual life means that doing so is murder.  So you disagree with the idea that babies shouldn’t be murdered? “Humanity and people are 2 separate classifications. They didn’t “try” to make a distinction. Those distinctions already existed, but they chose the wrong ones and killed actual people.” Begging the question again, but even if I agreed with it in principal, then my point is that you are making the same mistake they did.  YOU’RE EVEN AGREEING WITH THEM IN PRINCIPAL, JUST DISAGREEING ON THE GROUP IN QUESTION BEING KILLED!  Listen to yourself! “It’s okay to kill a human so long as it isn’t a person. These groups over here are bad because they chose the wrong kind of human to kill.”  That’s what you are saying here.  Listen to yourself! The fact that you are even trying to make that distinction places you in the same category as every other group that did that.  The very fact that you make the same type of argument but have to explain why your justified murder is better than their justified murder is disturbing. If you are making a distinction between “human” and “person”, you’ve already fallen into bad company.  After all this time saying nazi logic was wrong, and your logic was different, or that they didn’t use logic and you did…you yourself admit that you agree with it, you just disagree on the individual human group that its okay to kill. If you honestly can’t see that, then there’s little hope for you until you do.  

And I am saying you are a liar and don't believe this, and have offered you a chance to prove me wrong.  Again.  Want me to take you seriously, post on your blog "it's okay to kill humans so long as they aren't people."  Until you do this, I'm not going to acknowledge you believe your own argument.  You won't do it because you know anyone who sees that will recognize it for what it is.  The same argument/logic used by Nazi's and slavers.  It's a catch-22 I admit.  Post it and you will advertise your psychosis, don't and you admit you're a liar.

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

“It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary.” You can keep repeating this but it’s not true. I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren’t conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You’ve never once addressed these points that I’ve made repeatedly.   “As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person.” Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that’s been proven wrong.  So try again? “Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people.” Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren’t people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don’t think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you’re just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: “the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person.” Me: “here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. ““Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse.” Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to “defend” their ethnic “rights.” You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I’m trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I’m in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” ““Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical.” First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi’s used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is “logical”, but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I’ve already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.  Saying what amounts to “nuh uh!” doesn’t count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it’s right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn’t count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. ““maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay” Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. ““We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights” You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the “women’s rights” nonsense is just silly.  A woman’s “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

I’ll select this note to stand in for all the other notes where you complain that "nazi’s didn’t  use the same logic I do because they were wrong and I don’t like their reasons.  That means they didn’t use logic!” Nope.  Sorry.  You can’t escape this fact.  The logic used by them, by you, and by yes, as you point out, people characterizing animals are all the same.  The logical framework is identical.  When conclusions are wrong, its because of the premises they plug into it.  The nazi’s premises were wrong.  Your premises are wrong.  The anthropologist plugging Piltdown man into the taxonomic tree were wrong.  Your logic is all the same though. ““Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted.” It’s not illogical nor an opinion. Being human and being a person have different criteria. They do not perfectly overlap.”“ “I have decided that these two groups are different things because of reasons I chose, while ignoring others that disprove it, to deem as right and logical, so that means this is not illogical or an opinion.” Yeah…that’s a personal opinion, not a fact. “1. Fetuses aren’t people 2. Fetuses aren’t children in the same sense as actual children 3. The Bible literally mentions and supports inducing miscarriages” 1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.  In the same vein of reasoning, I declare that the sky is green.  Or if you’re going to raise complaints about non-physical traits, then fine.  I declare that anyone who can’t enjoy music isn’t a person.  Because I said so.  Declaring something doesn’t make it true. 2. and adults of 21 aren’t adults in the same sense as adults of 61.  adults in a coma arent adults in the same sense as conscious adults.  still adults.  still children.  all human and people.  Your point is irrelevant. 3. yeah nope.  better back that one up with references if you expect me to buy that.  spoiler alert, I know this is not true. “A woman’s right to control their own body. Until a fetus becomes a person it’s part of the woman’s body and she should have full authority over it. Even a dead body has more bodily autonomy than a woman denied an abortion.” Wrong in so many many ways.  I don’t think there’s a single sentence in this note that was true.  They are so glaringly obvious that I can only think that you are trying to troll me. But important things to focus on in any reply: *The importance of the difference between “logic” and “truth” aka the fact that something can be logical but untrue if the premise is incorrect. *The above highlighted issue that I see as the core evil and what ties you most directly with every other nasty group that tried to make a distinction between people and humanity.  Namely that they tried to do so in the first place.

Don't think I ever criticized you for arguing from emotion (reference?).  I've pointed out the error of your logic in this section, but if you want to play that game then okay, lets play: you still call children fetuses in order to justify de-personalizing them so you can kill them.   See, cuts both ways there.  And you still didn't address my point, only threw in this red herring. "“3. yeah nope.” Numbers 5:11–31 Basically if a woman is pregnant and suspected of adultery, she needs to drink an herbal water to force her to miscarry" Okay, in the name of fairness, I have to partially give you this.  I had to flip through a couple different translations before I found one that had the wording that makes this point.  The NKJV, which is the more literal translation, doesn't say this, where the NIV, a more dynamic equivalent text, does, if you’re going to believe that drinking ashes mixed with water will make you miscarry.  I’d have to do a more in-depth study of this passage to come to a better understanding of what it is saying, and which is the better translation. But do I need to point out that this is a punishment? The Bible doesn't generally condone killing either, but does mete out death as a penalty.  I can also point out texts in the same literature there that treat an unborn baby as a human life, the taking of which is punishable by death of the offender.  Exodus 21:22  The unborn baby is given the same weight as an adult. "“Wrong in so many many ways.  I don't think there's a single sentence in this note that was true.” So you disagree with the idea that women should have control over their own bodies?" No, I disagree with the idea that women should be considered to have a "right" to kill the body of the child inside them.  That the fact that it is an individual life means that doing so is murder.  So you disagree with the idea that babies shouldn't be murdered? "Humanity and people are 2 separate classifications. They didn’t “try” to make a distinction. Those distinctions already existed, but they chose the wrong ones and killed actual people." Begging the question again, but even if I agreed with it in principal, then my point is that you are making the same mistake they did.  YOU'RE EVEN AGREEING WITH THEM IN PRINCIPAL, JUST DISAGREEING ON THE GROUP IN QUESTION BEING KILLED!  Listen to yourself! "It's okay to kill a human so long as it isn't a person. These groups over here are bad because they chose the wrong kind of human to kill."  That's what you are saying here.  Listen to yourself! The fact that you are even trying to make that distinction places you in the same category as every other group that did that.  The very fact that you make the same type of argument but have to explain why your justified murder is better than their justified murder is disturbing. If you are making a distinction between "human" and "person", you've already fallen into bad company.  After all this time saying nazi logic was wrong, and your logic was different, or that they didn't use logic and you did...you yourself admit that you agree with it, you just disagree on the individual human group that its okay to kill. If you honestly can't see that, then there's little hope for you until you do.  

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

“It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary.” You can keep repeating this but it’s not true. I’ve already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren’t conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You’ve never once addressed these points that I’ve made repeatedly.   “As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person.” Yet you’ve only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that’s been proven wrong.  So try again? “Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people.” Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren’t people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don’t think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you’re just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: “the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn’t feel pain, it’s not a person.” Me: “here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. "“Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse.” Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi’s were trying to “defend” their ethnic “rights.” You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I’m trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I’m in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: “The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people.” ““Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical.” First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn’t a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi’s used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is “logical”, but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I’ve already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than “well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn’t because….I say so….”  you can’t refute this.  Saying what amounts to “nuh uh!” doesn’t count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it’s right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn’t count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. ““maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay” Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. ““We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights” You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the “women’s rights” nonsense is just silly.  A woman’s “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

I'll select this note to stand in for all the other notes where you complain that "nazi's didn't  use the same logic I do because they were wrong and I don't like their reasons.  That means they didn't use logic!" Nope.  Sorry.  You can't escape this fact.  The logic used by them, by you, and by yes, as you point out, people characterizing animals are all the same.  The logical framework is identical.  When conclusions are wrong, its because of the premises they plug into it.  The nazi's premises were wrong.  Your premises are wrong.  The anthropologist plugging Piltdown man into the taxonomic tree were wrong.  Your logic is all the same though. "“Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted.” It’s not illogical nor an opinion. Being human and being a person have different criteria. They do not perfectly overlap."" “I have decided that these two groups are different things because of reasons I chose, while ignoring others that disprove it, to deem as right and logical, so that means this is not illogical or an opinion." Yeah...that's a personal opinion, not a fact. "1. Fetuses aren’t people 2. Fetuses aren’t children in the same sense as actual children 3. The Bible literally mentions and supports inducing miscarriages" 1. only to you, because you choose to believe it.  In the same vein of reasoning, I declare that the sky is green.  Or if you're going to raise complaints about non-physical traits, then fine.  I declare that anyone who can't enjoy music isn’t a person.  Because I said so.  Declaring something doesn't make it true. 2. and adults of 21 aren't adults in the same sense as adults of 61.  adults in a coma arent adults in the same sense as conscious adults.  still adults.  still children.  all human and people.  Your point is irrelevant. 3. yeah nope.  better back that one up with references if you expect me to buy that.  spoiler alert, I know this is not true. "A woman’s right to control their own body. Until a fetus becomes a person it’s part of the woman’s body and she should have full authority over it. Even a dead body has more bodily autonomy than a woman denied an abortion." Wrong in so many many ways.  I don't think there's a single sentence in this note that was true.  They are so glaringly obvious that I can only think that you are trying to troll me. But important things to focus on in any reply: *The importance of the difference between “logic” and “truth” aka the fact that something can be logical but untrue if the premise is incorrect. *The above highlighted issue that I see as the core evil and what ties you most directly with every other nasty group that tried to make a distinction between people and humanity.  Namely that they tried to do so in the first place.

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

"It’s fact. Pain is the most simple stimulus a brain can process. It’s the simplest and most definitive way to detect consciousness. Also these characteristics still aren’t arbitrary." You can keep repeating this but it's not true. I've already pointed out that there are walking, speaking adults who can not feel pain.  The ability to feel pain does not determine personhood.  And lots of things feel pain that aren't conscious, like flatworms, so you are wrong, conclusively and categorically.  You've never once addressed these points that I've made repeatedly.   "As I have said before their are hundreds of nonphysical characteristics that make a person a person, but a human only needs to possess one of them in order to be a person." Yet you've only ever mentioned one.  Pain.  And that's been proven wrong.  So try again? "Their beliefs didn’t follow any flow of logic. They didn’t have a reason to believe the people they were harming weren’t people. Meanwhile my beliefs are logic as saying a fetus is a person goings against deductive reasoning. And fetuses clearly aren’t people." Their beliefs follow the same logic as your own. You have no more logical reason to believe the people you are harming aren't people than they did, you just differ in the particulars.  And I don't think you know how deductive reasoning works, so you're just as wrong as they were.  Look: You: "the ability to feel pain defines personhood.  Ergo, if it doesn't feel pain, it's not a person." Me: "here are human beings you must admit are persons, that can not feel pain.  Here are a host of creatures that feel pain but are not people.  Ergo your logic is wrong on two counts.  That’s deductive reasoning. "“Every group that tried to make a distinction between humanity and personhood in human history has come out on the wrong side of it.” Incorrect. I’m trying to defend woman’s rights. You’re trying to give women less freedom than a corpse." Your emotional hyperbole has been noted. Slavers and Nazi's were trying to "defend" their ethnic "rights." You are de-personalizing an entire class of human beings to justify their killing. I'm trying to protect human life and justify its preservation. I feel quite safe that I'm in the right here, just as abolitionists were.  Your course is the only one ending in murder. Once again I will show it to you in your own words: "The groups of things that are “people” and the groups of things that are “humans” does not perfectly overlap. There are things that aren’t people but are humans, and things that aren’t humans but are people." "“Your argument is fundamentally the same.” No the difference is my argument is logical." First off, I would LOVE to hear you tell me what category of creature is a person that isn't a human.  Do tell. Second, this is quite literally identical to the reasoning/logic slavers and nazi's used.   LITERALLY. How can you not see this?  “Category A is characterized by item B.  If it does not contain item B, then it can not be A.” That is the logical structure you, nazi’s and slavers used to define personhood.  Just plug in the particulars/premises in question.  You could just as easily say “all dogs are characterized by the presence of a spot over their right eye.  If it does not contain a spot, then it is not a dog.”  All of this reasoning is "logical", but the premises are wrong.   You using logic doesn’t make you right, if you are working on incorrect assumptions.   History has shown that the premises of nazi’s and slavers were wrong.  I've already proven that your premise is wrong too. Unless you can justify how your logic differs from theirs other than "well, my justification is logical and theirs wasn't because....I say so...."  you can't refute this.  Saying what amounts to "nuh uh!" doesn't count as a refutation.  Saying your logic is wrong when they use it, but it's right when you use it because your reasons are better, doesn't count.  That’s not logical.  You are making an argument for the justification of your premises being better than theirs, not the logic. "“maintain there is no distinction between humanity and personhood” That’s a lie but okay" Your personal and illogical opinion has been noted. "“We’ve always been proven right by the course of history.  The opposition has always wound up being seen as the villains.” My brother in Christ you are trying to destroy women’s rights" You are advocating that its a right to kill people.  You hiding behind the "women's rights" nonsense is just silly.  A woman's “right” to do what?  The only right you are advocating for here, the only ACTION you are advocating for here is the “right” to kill a child.  Christ would not approve.  

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The “non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building.“  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The "non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

“There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that.” So…a fetus never “becomes” a person…  You’re going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So…you’re not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can’t have it both ways. I think I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don’t know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. “Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all” Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you’re going to have to provide me with more of these “hundreds of examples of non-physical traits” for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)” that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn’t an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven’t dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don’t know is a person or not.  You’ve only strengthened my case. “Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. “There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain” What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don’t know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I’ll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your “traits” are “better” than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a “non-physical trait” (pain) to give me something more to work with here. ““If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?” I don’t think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn’t begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it’s not illegal.  Because it hasn’t started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. “It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?” So your argument is…what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn’t then it’s not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980’s, doctors didn’t think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don’t know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

We can deal with any other issues after determining your actual position.

Carried over from the notes on https://cisnowflake.tumblr.com/post/683291061841510400/fetuses-arent-people-and-dont-have-any-rights @kirby-ybrik Okay, so I moved my response here to better write a coherent reply than I can manage in twitter-size bits.  Now I want to be fair and try to properly represent your position, so I welcome any corrections if I misrepresented anything. As I understand your position based on your replies (correct me if I’m wrong), you believe a fetus is a human, but not a person.  You say the difference between the two is any number of hundreds of “non-physical” traits that go into making someone a person, all of which a fetus lacks.  You insist that these select traits are not arbitrary.  According to your replies, some of these “non-physical traits” include: 1. the presence of physical nerves to conduct and sense pain. You try and wiggle out of this by talking about nerves firing, but…nerves are physical.  The reactions that motivate, activate, transmit these sensations are literally physical, chemical processes.  What about a nerve firing makes it non-physical?  Does it transmit sensations through spiritual contact? 2. “non-physical traits” that can be observed in a photograph that would allow any viewer to tell the difference at a glance that one is a person, and one is not.  Again you try and wiggle out of you using this literal example by saying it was just used as a metaphor, yet that’s not how you presented it. At the same time that you say that a person is identified by having any one of these traits–all of which a fetus doesn’t possess–you also say that if the fetus DID have one, that wouldn’t be enough to make it a person.  So how many of these non-physical traits would an individual or a fetus require to be considered a person?  You implied one would be enough, yet when some are listed, like genetics, growth, potentiality to become an adult, you say that’s not sufficient, or that these traits don’t count.  Why?  Yet you insist that YOUR list of “non-physical” traits aren’t merely arbitrary and convenient to your position. I will give you another truly non-physical trait, and you can tell me why it doesn’t apply.  Unborn babies and humans both have a shared human nature.  They are conceived with this.  It exists so long as they are alive.  Even if someone is asleep, in a coma, or brain-dead, they still possess this.  It only ends at death. This is all in reference to my point that picking and choosing what traits constitute a person is what allowed slave-owning Democrats in the South to justify slavery.  It was a matter of skin color, appearance and “intelligence,” that they used to claim blacks were inferior and not a “person”.  Something that could “be told at a glance by looking at a photo” and comparing it to the “average” person.  The Nazi’s did the same thing.  Based on a list of arbitrary claims about genetics and race, they justified their treatment of these groups by saying they were less than people. Abortionists do the same thing.  They cherry-pick a group of “traits” that allow them to claim that an unborn baby is not a person because…X,Y,Z, ignoring other traits that are equally applicable, because it doesn’t serve their purpose.  I see you doing this, and it is evident in your own replies. In order to justify, enslave and kill any group of people, those perpetrating the act need to de-humanize or, to use your term of preference, de-personalize them.  If you admitted they were people, you would be wrong in doing this, after all. The problem you run into is that development is a continuous process beginning at conception and ending in old age.  There are no clear boundaries between stages.  You yourself admit that there is no point along this line that you can point to and say “a minute ago this wasn’t a person, but now it is.”  Yet you insist on arbitrary time periods like “trimesters” and a list of nebulous traits you’ve selected to make your claim about when someone is a person.  At the same time you say that these traits (like pain sensing) are binary.  At one point they exist, the next they don’t.  So again I will ask you, at what binary point does an unborn human become a person?  If it’s binary, show me when this takes place.  You don’t get to say “We don’t know exactly when it happens, but we know the timeframe of when it happens,” to justify killing someone who may, by your own standards, be a person.  That’s like saying, “we think the criminal we want is in this building, but we’re not sure, but we’re still going to bomb the building."  In trying to make your case, you fall into the same trap as Nazi’s and slavers.  And you aren’t even consistent in those.  The "non-physical traits” you specifically mention, are all, literally, physical attributes.  Can you list other, truly non-physical traits?  Can you refute the ones I suggest above, that counter yours?  Feel free to correct any misunderstanding I have of your logic.  But most of all, point to your binary point in time when someone becomes a person and the killing them becomes wrong.  If you can’t say or can point to one, then any action you take to kill them becomes at best, criminally negligent homicide.  If you don’t know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong.

"There is no point when a fetus becomes a person. Because that point is unmeasurable. If you left a pot of water on a stove, and came back when it was boiling, you would have no idea when the pot of water started to boil. It’s like that." So...a fetus never “becomes” a person...  You're going to stick with that statement?  You sure?  So...you're not a person?  If you are, then are you saying you were never a fetus?  Is it binary or not?  You seem to be flip-flopping.  Which is it?  A binary system or a steady progression?  You can't have it both ways. I think I know what you're trying to say, but you're not helping yourself.  Your uncertainty principal simply means that if you don't know when someone becomes a person, killing them in your ignorance is wrong. "Non of these non physical traits are physical attributes. They are all functions of the human mind that have arisen out of millions of years of evolution in such a complex organ that it’s physically impossible to tell how they work or properly came to be. None of the non physical traits I gave can be explained physically, as you can’t explain how pain is processed in the mind and how time is experienced, or even how brain activity works at all" Well, beside the fact that the one example you have of a non-physical trait, literally is a physical trait caused by literal physical human cells and physical chemicals, you're going to have to provide me with more of these "hundreds of examples of non-physical traits" for me to understand your argument.  Pain transmission is understood.  We have full-grown adults with "Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA)" that are unable to feel it.   So far as I can remember, those two were the only ones you listed, and you said the second one wasn't an example after all, leaving you with one.   Now if you are making an argument for a soul, that is interesting, and we could probably find some common ground here, as I do believe in such a thing, but you still haven't dug yourself out of the implications of killing something you don't know is a person or not.  You've only strengthened my case. "Dude I’m completely different from the “nazis and slavers”. They had no reason to believe that Jews or Africans were not people as they had the same nonphysical characteristics as them. Meanwhile a fetus has none of these characteristics until an unspecified point in development. There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain" First, I want you to re-read your last sentence. "There’s a difference between harming people that can feel pain and harming things that are not people that are incapable of pain" What is the difference between harming someone that can feel pain and harming someone when you don't know if they can feel pain or not (which is what you are really presenting here), when you yourself admit you can not determine when this point is?  I'll give you an illustration of what I mean. A man is given a button and told that if he presses the button, he will activate an electric chair, which will kill the person in it. Someone else is given the same button and told that if they press the button, it will activate an electric chair that may or may not contain a person who will be killed by it? If both people press the button, please tell me who is more evil? As for the comparison between you and the bad guys, no.  You make the same arguments.  The only difference is that your list of what constitutes a person differs from theirs.  The logic and the argument is the same.  You are just arguing that your "traits" are "better" than their “traits.”  There is no quantifiable difference between you and them apart from your subjective opinion.  Again, list more than this one discredited example of a "non-physical trait" (pain) to give me something more to work with here. "“If you don't know when it becomes a person, then killing them is wrong”. My counter argument. If it’s illegal to dump out boiling water into the sink, is it illegal to dump out water that I put on the stove that hasn’t begun to boil?" I don't think your argument is as persuasive as you think it is.  Your own example states that the water in the second case hasn't begun to boil, so by the terms you set, no, it's not illegal.  Because it hasn't started to boil.  Not sure what you tried to prove there. "It becomes a person when it feels pain. We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens but WE DO KNOW IF IT HAS OCCURRED. Why is it so hard for you to understand such simple concepts?" So your argument is...what?  Test each individual fetus, see if it feels pain and determine whether or not if it feels it?  If it does, its a person, if it doesn't then it's not, so it’s okay to kill it?  What happens when new technology comes along to better measure the ability to detect pain in a subject, pushing back your imagined binary point.  Will all the persons you condemned to death up till then be on your head, making you a murderer?  Do you know that up until the 1980's, doctors didn't think newborns felt pain because their nervous system wasn’t “developed enough.”  They literally performed surgeries on newborns without anesthesia because of this understanding.  Do you want to be among their ranks when you yourself don't know when this point takes place? (remember your own words: “We don’t know exactly WHEN that happens “) All of your argument seems to boil down to a biological or metaphysical Heisenberg uncertainty principal, and uncertainty is a very poor foundation to build a moral case on. “This human isn’t a person because of <insert reason>”  So saith the Nazi’s, slavers, and you.  You all just had different standards of undermining personhood in order to justify treating them as inhuman.  Even if you were uncertain of how to define or identify the moment when something becomes a person, as you seem to be, erring on the side of doubt would lead most people to not perform a possible execution.

I will not murder my child. I will not support facilitating the murder of other people's children.

It's crazy how you dig deeper and deeper and it really comes clear how loving people unconditionally is really the only thing you can do. The pain and the hopelessness runs so damn deep.