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Embryos are alive. Can you find an embroyotologist who would deny that?
by ImJamal 1y ago
Embryos are alive. Can you find an embroyotologist who would deny that?
- Elle_Benjamin 1y agoAlive and conscious/sentient are not the same. Something must be sentient to be harmed. Plants are alive. You eat salad, right?
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoMaybe they're a breatharian. You don't know.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI think you're defining harm based on sentience where as my definition of harm would include damage to not sentient objects.
- const_cast 1y agoBut if we follow that definition of harm we get to an untenable place. Big boys gotta eat, and broccoli is good for you. We have to draw the line somewhere, and I see no reason to draw the line so far back that we're considering clumps of cells on the same level as us. We can do that, sure, but what do we gain? More heartache, harder decisions, more prison time? What's the benefit?
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI wouldn’t use ‘harm’ as the moral delineator, depending on the context it’s very much ok to do harm. It isn’t sufficient context on its own. I think it’s the attempt to be moral by a simplistic definition of ‘doing no harm’ that leads to the contortions to the definition of harm. In this context we’re talking about if it’s ok to harm a small set of cells, and again it depends on context. Consider the act of assaulting a pregnant woman to harm the fetus, it’s the same fetus that has come to the same harm the only thing that is different is who made the choice.
- bobmcnamara 1y ago> Plants are alive. You eat salad, right? Yes. But I don't wander around saying that harvesting it doesn't harm the plant.
- ImJamal 1y agoWhat does harm have anything to do with it? The person I was responding to said you wouldn't have existed which is false.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoThe medical and scientific consensus is that embryos are cells capable of creating personhood rather than consisting of actual personhood. Not to mention the obvious difference between something that has lived experience and something that has none.
- ImJamal 1y agoFirst, things can be alive, but not persons. Second, personhood is a philosophical thing so the medical and scientific communities' opinions are not relevant Third, I looked up lived experience on wiki and it is talking about knowledge gained from the experience. A baby who was born yesterday doesn't have lived experiences so are they not a person?
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago> First, things can be alive, but not persons. Non-persons cannot be me, a person. A precursor is a precursor is a precursor.
- ImJamal 1y agoHuman embryos are human. Are you suggesting there are human nonpersons?
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoHuman embryos are special human tissue that may become human, not human. Category boundaries and specificity exist for a reason. > Are you suggesting there are human nonpersons? We quite often use the word "human" as an indicator of future or past potential or characteristic without meaning that the thing itself is a human. My dad's ashes are "human remains", but they're definitely not a person.
- ImJamal 1y agoYou are missing the key point. A fetus is part of human development just like toddlers and adults. Ashes are not. Just like how a sapling is a tree even if it is still in a container. You don't have to wait for the tree to be transplanted to the ground for it to be a tree.
- LadyCailin 1y agoThis is such a baity statement. This is literally the heart of the “personhood” debate, so you can’t sit here and pretend like this is a clear cut scenario. If you want to make a falsifiable statement, go for it, but don’t make a metaphysical statement and then assume it’s well established physics.
- ImJamal 1y agoWhy are you conflating personhood with being alive? Things can be alive without being a person. As far as I can tell no embryologist would deny that embryos are alive. The only debate is if they are a person. If you kill a dog then the dog died. If you kill an embryo then the embryo is dead. It is irrelevant if either of those two are persons.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoQuestion to understand the baseline you're coming from: Are you declaring a moral equivalence in this thread between destroying a non-person thing and a person thing?
- ImJamal 1y agoNo. I'm saying three things. First, embryos are alive. Second, you were once an embryo (it is a stage in human development). Third, destroying an embryo means you ceased to exist, not that you never existed like the original person I responded to said. I'm not taking a position on if an embryo has personhood.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoI was also once the molecules from the outgassing of Napoleon's corpse and the cheesecake my dad had for dinner, and burying Napoleon differently or my dad being on a diet might have caused someone else to be born instead of me, but it's curious that I don't see us debating weight loss and the burial practices of exiled monarchs. Maybe causal chains of branching paths and being grown from cells aren't actually useful metrics for being "me" after all. > Third, destroying an embryo means you ceased to exist, not that you never existed like the original person I responded to said. Something that eventually became me ceased to exist. It wasn't anywhere close to being me yet, just a precursor, like Napoleon's chest hair.