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AngelicDevilz t1_j49nd81 wrote

Reply to comment by Sad-Hunt1141 in Underdefined Terms in the Abortion Debate by ADefiniteDescription

Corpses are not alive. Are you talking about bacteria inside a corpse? I don't understand.

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Sad-Hunt1141 t1_j49oh0w wrote

Do you value a brain-dead human on ventilation the same way you value a teenager?

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AngelicDevilz t1_j49rodd wrote

There is a guy I don't like, a guy most people hate because he is a theif, scam artist, etc. A few months back he finally screwed over the wrong person and was jumped by two guys. He got hit in the head with a blunt object and then punched and his head slammed into the pavement hard. He was taken to a hospital and after a few days declared braindead. They reached out to his family and his mother was suppose to come see him the next day and they were going to pull the plug. His few friends spread the word that night thinking someone might actually be sad about it.

Well when I heard the news I was esctastic that the piece of shit was dead. A group of us in the same circle were celebrating. This dude had stolen from or mugged almost everyone in our social circle at some point so we drank shots to his karma catching up to him.

Skip forward a few months to last week. This guy walks up to me and says he remembers me but not my name. I had to do a double take, it was the very same piece of shit only instead of being a huge hulk of a man he was now skin and bones. He had a hole in his head and a hair piece that covered it. He feigned having no memory from before his attack but I told him to stay the hell away from me even if he is special needs now or whatever.

The point is though he was alive and well. I asked a friend that actually was friends with him what the deal was. Apparently his sister flipped out when their mother explained about the plan to come say goodbye and pull the plug. She convinced her mom not to do it and so the plug was not pulled despite him being braindead. Three days later he started recovering and showing brain activity again and then woke up.

So i have to say thay are just as valued as if a piece of shit with very negative karma can recover from being braindead in a coma I guess anyone has a shot if the plug isn't pulled.

We just don't understand the brain well enough yet to really understand it.

So even with a fetus we just don't know enough about the brain to be 100% on consciousness or lack of if that's what you are getting at. Even before there is any brain they are still a living human. If we grew brainless humans in labs for donor organs, kept alive just to take parts from as they live alone in a tube people would be outraged and sickened, even without a brain.

I know atheists against abortion like myself are rare but I believe it wrong. I'll stick to human and alive as my red line for when executing the innocent is wrong

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Sad-Hunt1141 t1_j49wvzk wrote

First, that was a pretty amusing story, so thank you for taking the time to write that.

I'll just say these few things:

In the case of the guy in your story, he certainly is an anomaly. The doctor probably mislabeled him as brain-dead. People who are descriptively brain-dead, by definition, can't come back to consciousness. Without the brain being able to be supplied with blood and oxygen, the rest of the body just can't work.

>So even with a fetus we just don't know enough about the brain to be 100% on consciousness or lack of if that's what you are getting at.

This is where I was getting at. Consciousness/sentience seems to be the foundation for how we value humans. We may not have perfect knowledge of the brain, but we do know quite a bit. A priori wise, we can deduce that zygotes probably don't have brains and 8 month old fetuses probably do. Furthermore, there is solid scientific evidence that the brain develops the capacity for consciousness at around 6 months.

>If we grew brainless humans in labs for donor organs, kept alive just to take parts from as they live alone in a tube people would be outraged and sickened, even without a brain.

I can understand that people would be sickened/outraged by this thought experiment. However, arguably moral conclusions shouldn't stem directly from our intuition about things. In the past, many people intuitively thought slavery was acceptable, but those intuitions don't justify the conclusion.

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AngelicDevilz t1_j49xieo wrote

We will have to agree to disagree. Even without conciousness (which we cannot be sure of either way) I still think it's wrong. People spend hours unconscious every night, doesn't make it okay to murder them in their sleep.

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Sad-Hunt1141 t1_j4a8upg wrote

The argument against that would be that the value is on the capacity of consciousness and that sleeping people can be brought back to a state of consciousness. But yeah, we could debate this for hours.

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Senior-Garden-6369 t1_j4kfoai wrote

Could you say then that the brain dead corpse has no capacity of consciousness therefore shouldn't be valued. However the fetus does have a capacity for consciousness therefore should be valued?

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