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Path: utzoo!watmath!watdaisy!cbostrum
From: cbostrum@watdaisy.UUCP (Calvin Bruce Ostrum)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Whats so morally relevant about humans?
Message-ID: <220@watdaisy.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 1-Jul-83 04:26:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: watdaisy.220
Posted: Fri Jul  1 04:26:45 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Jul-83 08:25:04 EDT
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 62

From liz@umcp-cs.UUCP :
	
	I think more freedoms are risked by defining a fetus as not entirely
	human -- it narrows the definition of what is human.  
	
	But on the pro-life side, abortion is viewed as killing.  It is
	hard to view that a person has the right to kill anything human...
	
	PS  I'm probably stiring up a hornet's nest...

An awful lot of loose talking takes place in the abortion debate.
This goes a lot farther than just abortion in its implications, down to
the very basis of morality.

Particular confusion seems to occur over the following pairs of
terms:  and .

The first term in each pair is more or less a scientific one. 
There are fairly well agreed upon definitions for each of these.
And yes, abortion is the killing of humans by these definitions.
Big deal! There is no normative weight to these terms on their own.
A human is a certain sort of **organism**, and killing is what A does
to B when A causes B to die.

So get off the "when is a foetus human?" and "is it killing or not?" already!
Abortion is killing a human, simple. NOW, is this WRONG?

Murder is a very special kind of killing. Unjustified killing.
So its obviously wrong. So far so good. But what makes an act of
killing murder? This is the question.
Actually, is all unjustified killing murder? of course not. Accidental
killing is not murder, although it is unjustified. Killing someone's
pet is not murder (most of us think), but it is unjustified too (unless
it is one of those noisy dogs that chases you when you are cycling).
It seems that the "right to life" is pretty important here, so as a
tentative definition:
	Murder of X is infringing upon the right to life of X 
	by taking X's life.

Finally we get to the issue. What are the necessary morally relevant
criteria for possessing a right to life? (I take it that it is rather
simple to decide what a right to life is. Similar to a property right,
with one's body and continued health as property).
Further, what do they have to do with merely being human? I fail to
see a necessary connection here. So we are human? BIG DEAL! How does
this make us morally special?

Try this line. The possession of a right seems to involve that everyone
else be required to honor your will with respect to certain items. If
I have a property right to X, for example, this means that you have to
(within certain restrictions) respect whatever I will the future of
that piece of property X to be. *** What possible sense can this make if
I am not a being who is capable of willing anything at all? ***

Now the big question. Can a foetus will in this morally relevant sense?
I dont think it can, so I do not feel that abortion is murder and I am
not against abortion on those grounds. 
But there may be other grounds. Maybe a foetus is like someone's pet.
It's still wrong to kill it. But I doubt even that, I'm afraid. 

		Calvin Ostrum, Dept Computer Science, University of Waterloo
		...{decvax,allegra,utzoo}!watmath!watdaisy!cbostrum