Re: The wicked untruths of our church leaders

On 2008-04-29, Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaughan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The "gradualist" view could lead someone to think that
*very small* children are less fully human beings
in some relevant sense than adults are, but I think
it would be very difficult to make a gradualism-based
argument that (say) a 5-year-old's life should be
treated with any less deference than a 35-year-old's.
The sorts of argument a gradualist defender of
infanticide might deploy are things like "an infant
doesn't yet have much particular personality and is
therefore much more replaceable than an adult" and
"an infant doesn't have the sort of concept of
{him,her,it}self that's needed to have desires or
interests", etc. Leaving aside the question of whether
those statements about infants are actually true and
how much relevance they have to the wrongness of
killing an infant, they quite certainly aren't true
about a 5-year-old.

There are still many parts of the world where the child death rate is
very high, where loss of small children is normal. This may change
things in the attitudes of those people.

- Richard

--
_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield at gmail dot com
_/ _/ _/ _/
_/_/ _/ _/ Time is a one way street,
_/ _/ _/_/ _/_/_/ except in the Twilight Zone
.

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