But 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?
I 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.
This 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.
Why 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.
Question 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?
No. 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.
I 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.
Do you really see these as equivalent in a biological sense? Like, it's not in dispute that every adult human was originally a specific embryo, with the same DNA the adult has. It is truly universal scientific consensus that it is the same organism at every point from fertilization until adulthood, just at different stages of development.
I find it hard to believe you really aren't familiar with this basic truth of biology, which makes the rest of your argument seem disingenuous.
There's nothing special about the embryo that became you that isn't also true of the specific conditions and precursors to that embryo, and the precursors to those precursors, ad infinitum. If not for that exact sperm and egg and conditions, it would have been a different embryo which would have become a different person who isn't you. If not for Napoleon's decaying nipples, that exact sperm would never be. A person altering Napoleon's burial ultimately determined that you got born over someone else. Your selection of gamete fertilization as your starting point and no sooner is arbitrary because it is based on a selection criterion that is arbitrary, so you shouldn't be so surprised that other people might point out how arbitrary it is.
It sounds like you might actually care more about the intention behind the selection than the fact that selection has occurred. That someone might have looked at you specifically and said "no thanks". That objection is completely orthogonal to age. Someone looks at you every day right now and says "no thanks", whether it's for a job or for a sexual partner. Someone every day is deciding that they do not want your sperm or your egg, which means that your hypothetical child together is prevented from being born, the same as it will be prevented by this. And it may feel bad to think about it, but the selection is that person's to make. Life is full of making selections and being or not being selected. This isn't special.
> There's nothing special about the embryo that became you that isn't also true of the specific conditions and precursors to that embryo, and the precursors to those precursors, ad infinitum.
Of course there is. The embryo is the same organism as an adult, just at a different stage of its own life. All it needs is time, nutrition, and safety and it will become an adult. It's the same life form at different stages. It takes an intervention to stop an embryo from becoming an adult.
For any other precursor, something fundamental has to change. For either of the gametes (the immediate precursors), they have to merge with the other gamete to form a whole new organism. That's extremely different. It's even more different the farther back you go.
You're either woefully ignorant of basic biology or just completely philosophically disingenuous. Do you sincerely not know how organisms work at all? What they are? That they go through stages? That they have a clear beginning, a definite first stage of their lifecycle, before which they don't exist and after which they have to die in order to stop existing?
This is some real elementary school science class stuff. It's not just humans. This is basic basic stuff.
> It takes an intervention to stop an embryo from becoming an adult.
Taking intervention isn't as useful a selection criterion as you make it out to be. It also takes intervention to stop teenagers from making babies with each other. And all they need is time. They often don't even need nutrition or safety. That teenagers left to their own devices will make babies is a fundamental and incontrovertible truth. It may as well be considered a force of nature. It's the entire history of all of biology from the very first multi-cellular organism until today. And yet modern society usually succeeds in preventing them from doing it because we recognize the harms caused by it.
> For any other precursor, something fundamental has to change.
This is both arbitrary and covers a lot more than you admit. For a child to become you today it had to change in very fundamental ways, almost exclusively by external social influence. You are not the same as the child. You are dramatically and fundamentally changed. Your ideas are dramatically and fundamentally different. Your feelings are dramatically and fundamentally different. Your behavior is dramatically and fundamentally different.
This notion of fundamental change only holds up if you arbitrarily hold onto one particular kind of change while blithely ignoring all the countless rest.
> For either of the gametes (the immediate precursors), they have to merge with the other gamete.
So? That's not any more fundamental than the fact that external social influences have merged with your frame of mind to change your behaviors, emotions, and views as you've aged. You are as fundamentally changed from the child that became you as the child is from the sperm and egg it came from. You are changing constantly by merging with external influence. Your ideas are as different as ideas can be, your emotions are as different as emotions can be, your behaviors are as different as behaviors can be. You are the culmination of a lot of merging, not alone in a vacuum.
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?
Human 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.
You 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.
> A fetus is part of human development just like toddlers and adults
A fetus is part of human development different from toddlers and adults which are also parts of human development different from each other. A sperm is part of human development. A protein molecule is part of human development. A second glass of wine on a rainy evening is part of human development.
A fetus has the exact same DNA as the adult it will become. That fetus' father's sperm does not.
> A second glass of wine on a rainy evening is part of human development.
You are just being obtuse. We aren't talking about that sort of development and you know it. We are talking about a toddler becoming an adolescent and a teenager becoming an adult.
