1000 Fetuses or 1 Baby (Part II)
The comment thread grows longer on The Dallas Morning News Religion blog about the ethical challenge, whether to save 1000 fetuses or 1 baby. So, it leads me to a second day of commenting myself.
Scientists haven't come up with a satisfactory definition of life, and it's not for lack of reasoned analysis. Every definition they try either includes too many things people consider living (computer programs, chemical reactions, etc.) or excludes some very odd life forms that scientists universally recognize as living.
Obviously, a fetus is alive. Obviously, it's human. (So is a human cancer cell, as someone pointed out.) Whether or not the fetus deserves legal rights identical to a baby, an adult, the mentally retarded, a comatose patient, a brain-dead accident victim, embryonic stem cells, etc., is a question society does not agree on, and it's not for lack of reasoned analysis.
I still find it telling that no one has responded in this thread with the answer that they would save the thousand fetuses (not even RelicMM, who, knowing that he couldn't save both buildings, would let both fetuses and baby perish). To me, that tells me that as much as people say they believe conception marks the creation of a fully human person, in reality they act as if the worth of that life is something that develops more gradually over time.
2 comments:
Scientists cannot come up with a definition of life because -- bluntly -- its not in their job description.
The definition of life is ultimately a philosophic problem. Science is subservient to philosophy as science is a practice on knowledge with some specific assumptions about knowledge built into it.
Science is also limited in what it can discover. It has a specific scope of what it can tell us but it stops there.
I have to differ with you. Scientists have been categorizing nature since forever. The whole genus/species system is all about that. Scientists argue over how to classify horses, donkeys and mules. They argue over what to call Pluto -- a planet, a dwarf planet, a plutoid, what? They argue over what constitutes intelligence, what sets humans apart from the great apes, what constitutes life itself. Defining terms is a fundamental aspect of science. "Life" has so far defied definition.
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