re: #475 Nyet

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”.

I may be dense, but I’m not understanding what is being argued here. Is a fetus human? At what point does a fetus become an independent person? Is abortion moral at a particular point? The whole conversation seems to be moving around.

Most of it is irrelevant since the question isn’t whether a fetus is a person, but whether a person can claim the right to use someone else’s body.