Re: The wicked untruths of our church leaders

(Here we have Gareth and Tom debating the reasonableness of
the two sides of a David-Peter discussion. On reflection,
this seems kinda silly -- David and Peter are both capable
of speaking for themselves, after all -- so I propose to
drop the subject after this. Of course I haven't the least
objection if Tom has further comments.)

Tom Higgins wrote:

[Gareth McCaughan said..]
Don't you believe that a single
cell, that could *produce* a person after many many replications,
counts as a human person with human rights in just the same way
as the fully developed person will eventually do? (In so far as
those rights are applicable at all, of course.) That certainly
appears to be David's position, and I think it's pretty much
the standard RC position.

Some cells, yes; some cells, no. I would think that was David's
position, as well as the RC's position. (Saying "a single cell"
isn't specific enough.)

I wasn't clear enough, for which I apologize; but, now I come to
think about it, I realise that I have no idea whether the RCC's
pronouncements on these matters commits it to any particular view
about the moral status of a cell with those properties that
*didn't* arise in the usual way. For instance, suppose someone
works out a method of human cloning where they take a skin cell
or something, do something to it, and the result is a cell that
behaves exactly like a newly fertilized human egg. I expect the
RCC would be opposed to doing that, but let's suppose it done;
what then would be the status (in the RCC's view, in so far as
it has one) of the resulting cell?

[Gareth McCaughan said..]
Anyway. I don't think Peter is saying that "the point" at which
we can say someone is dead can be "moved around", but that there's
no such thing as "the point" where we can do that because the
transition from being alive to being dead is fuzzy and gradual.

It's possible that might have been in Peter's head (though it sounds
rather like a precision Gareth McCaughan would have in his head).
But unfortunately he pushed the fuzziness so far beyond any
reasonable limits that his point became open to David's rather
obvious reply.

Maybe that's so. I would suggest applying the principle of
charity to what he (or anyone else) writes, and trying to
understand it in the least crazy sense that's plausible; it
seems to me that the sort of thing I described is plausible
enough.

Does Peter /really/ think that his own "death" might be usefully
defined as the death of the last cell indirectly descended from any
cell in his body? Or did some point get lost by raising such an
extreme possibility?

I can't help you there; I also feel that Peter overreached
when he suggested that Henrietta Lacks might in some usable
sense not be dead. But even if you and I are right about that,
I don't think that's grounds for dismissing the point he was
(perhaps overenthusiastically) making.

[Tom Higgins had said..]
(He is at pains to do this because he sees David's description,
earlier in the discussion of something as dead, to be somehow
useless.)

[Gareth McCaughan said..]
Maybe that's why. Or maybe he already held that position before
he ever interacted with David.

(Both possibilities were covered by what I said.)

I don't understand how. If Peter thought X before ever
encountering David, then his insistence on X isn't
likely to be best explained by his attitude to some
specific thing David has said. (It still *could* be,
to be sure.)

In either case, had Peter actually described the kind of fuzziness
you describe, it /would have been useless as a counter-argument/ to
what David was saying. And that gives further support to the idea
that Peter hadn't actually fully thought through the implications
of what he was saying.

I approve of the sort of reasoning you're engaging in here,
but I don't think I quite agree with it in this instance.
I conjecture that Peter's thinking was along the following
lines: (1) the every-zygote-is-sacred position is commonly
defended on the basis that there must be a point at which
human life begins, and that fertilization is much the most
credible candidate for that point; (2) but in fact there
needn't be a point at which human life begins; and (3) one
should ask instead something like "to what extent do we
have a human life here?", and then (4) if you ask that
question about a newly fertilized human egg then there's
not much ground for a very positive answer than there is
when you ask it about a sloughed-off skin cell or something.

(Note: I am not endorsing every detail of this; just suggesting
a line of thought that seems to me extremely plausible and
that involves an appeal to the fuzziness of boundaries but
doesn't make what Peter said irrelevant to what David was
saying.)

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

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