Timothy Murray lost his father earlier this year and had been asking his principal for counseling when she called in the police

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Your argument works by creating your very own definition of what it is to be “a human” to then say “you can’t kill a human”.

    Redefining the meaning of the words used and then claiming that you’re right because there exists widelly accepted moral rules which use those words - but not as you defined it to be - isn’t actual logic, it’s wordplay.

    The foundation of all your arguments on this is a “trust me” definition of “a human”, provided as an unchallangeable, undetailed and unsubstantiated axion - change that definition to, for example, “a human is somebody born from a woman” and that entire argumentative structure of yours collapses since in that alternative definition until the moment of birth a fetus is a thing, not “a human”.

    So you pointedly bypass the actual hard part that matters the most and were the main disagreement is - the whole “when do human cells stop being just cells that happen to have human DNA and become ‘a human’” - with an “it is as I say” definition on top of which you made your entire case. That’s like going “assume the sun is purple” to make the case for painting the walls of a house with a specific color.

    All this would be an absolutelly fine and entertaining intellectual game, if you weren’t defending that people should go to Jail when they do not obbey the boundaries derived from your definition of “a human” and treat as “not a human” that which you chose to define as “a human”, which is the logic of the madman.

    • jasory@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Nope. You are committing a categorical error.

      Human is very well defined biological definition, objects within the human set are classified according to material properties that are empirically observable, you are falsely equating it with the philosophical concept of personhood.

      “Change that definition…”

      Changing the symbol used to represent an object with the same properties as a fetus, does absolutely nothing to the reasoning. Because we are not reasoning about the symbol represented by the string “human”, we are reasoning about objects with shared properties (well you aren’t, actual philosophers are). Some of those objects have moral value based on these properties, therefore all objects that have these properties also have moral value. What we call it doesn’t matter. It seems so ironic that you whine about wordplay, when you literally confused yourself over it.

      My argument is that relying on personhood (which you didn’t you hilariously relied on bodily autonomy), is still insufficient because personhood membership does not account for wrongness of killing. Remember our moral principle of who is allowed to be killed is derived from determining what categories we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill. This is called analytic descriptivism, and you are trying to use it too, you are just completely incompetent. I did not rigorously prove it to be insufficient, because you never actually made the argument, you simply dropped the bodily autonomy argument like everyone does (unless of course you want to accept the premises, and reasoning and deny the conclusion like your intellectual peers in Bedlam).

      “If you weren’t defending that people go to jail”

      Arguing that an action is immoral, is not the same as arguing that it must be punished. You need a separate argument that immoral actions should be punished or deterred in someway. This is simply a fabrication on your part. In fact if you are such an intelligent logician, can you tell me what logical error you are making here? (Hint: it starts with “affirming”, to help you find it since you clearly have no idea).

      There is a very large body of philosophical work on this subject, everything you have been arguing is pop philosophy that has been rejected as false for decades to even centuries.

      If you were even remotely educated on this topic you would realize that you are intellectually equivalent to a flat-earther. There are so many comical errors I can’t address them all.

      This discussion however is hilarious to me, next time instead of jerking yourself off over word salad consider that the person you are trying to refute is possibly very knowledgeable on the subject (and possibly has an academic background in it :) ).