Comment

Active Shooter Reported at Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood Office, Right Wing Twitter Applauds

475
Nyet11/27/2015 5:31:10 pm PST

re: #434 kirkspencer

Really? So, at what point does the developing embryo become a person - when the first brain cell is developed? If not, have you a harder criteria?

In fairness I think I see what you’re trying to say. But you’re using a sloppy term: “person”. It’s quite as vague as “human” in Campbell’s context.

We are dealing with an objectively vague process - continuous development. With vague processes you can’t take a specific point and say “it was A before and B after”. Hence the notion of a time point at which a person appears doesn’t make sense, unless you’re using a weird def. of a person. Yet we can look from sufficiently big “distances” and see that A has, indeed, changed into B. Think “childhood” and “adulthood” - legal fictions aside, there is not a time quantum at which you suddenly become an adult. Just as well, when you have three grains of sand, it’s not a heap. But add grains one by one, and you will have a heap of sand. Yet there is not a single moment at which “many grains” turn into a “heap”.