Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 beta 3/9/83; site uf-csg.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!uf-csv!uf-csg!mark From: mark@uf-csg.UUCP (mark fishman [fac]) Newsgroups: net.flame Subject: Re: Beginning of Personhood Message-ID: <207@uf-csg.UUCP> Date: Sun, 7-Oct-84 06:34:01 EDT Article-I.D.: uf-csg.207 Posted: Sun Oct 7 06:34:01 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 11-Oct-84 05:55:28 EDT References: <345@hou2b.UUCP>, <2716@ucbcad.UUCP> Organization: Univ of Fla, Computer and Information Science Lines: 25 <> >...the only way is to take a poll. The question of what constitutes a person is not empirical, but definitional. Hence your poll can manage relevantly to elicit only the tautologous observation that a "person" is that in which the "right to life" inheres. Those who want to bestow that right on insentient fetuses will define them as "people." Others won't. It isn't a scientific question. It is, however, worth pointing out that Occam's razor mandates the simplest explanation for the constellation of beliefs typically exhibited by so-called "right-to-lifers." If that simplest explanation were, in fact, that these people were pre-eminently concerned with the preservation of life, then they would be protesting also the increasing propensity in the world to starve and to kill human beings who've already been born. This clearly isn't the case, since most "right-to-lifers" enthusiastically endorse a right-wing, militaristic political stance, that steals from the poor and enshrines weapons of destruction as a great good. A simpler explanation (that accounts for otherwise seemingly contradictory beliefs amore economically, and thus satisfies Occam's razor) is that such people want to control the minds, and especially the bodies, of other human beings. This is a scientifically more economical theory that accounts both for right-wing ideology and for the desire to control the bodies of inadvertently pregnant women.