Quote:
Originally Posted by Abbaddabba
The issue is more analogous to something like abortion.
You could set an arbitrary cutoff where non-life becomes life, in which case if you choose birth to be that cutoff point, then anything that limits peoples freedom to do it is immoral. Or you could set it conception in which case anything that permits it is immoral. Or alternatively, as was implicit in previous religious standards that discouraged contraception, that life in some way begins before conception.
But i'd argue that a better standard would be not to choose an arbitrary cutoff and instead have a graduated scale of value, where terminating any pregnancy is considered undesirable, but not equivalent. And you can impose taxes in proportion to how much harm is being done to try and oblige people to internalize the harm (cost) being done.
The foetus is a special case because (unless you are a religious nut) it is not a human being but it can become a human being under most circumstances if you don't act against it, so the gradual value-scale makes sense for that special case.
Not sure taxes are the solution, i think the normal european approach to that is a good solution; abortion in the first weeks incredibly easy, second trimester needs some qualification, 3rd trimester exceptionally rare and almost only under severe health risks for the mother or similar rare occurrences.
But the cutoff is still "when it becomes a human being with intrisic value". The gradual scale is justified because we are not 100% sure when that happens.
In a hypothetical world where all fetuses could be grown outside a womb and become human beings at reasonable cost for society abortion should be illegal imho, provided that the removal from the womb and subsequent growing in artifical womb, and the cost of raising the child afterwards is payed for by the public.
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But this still doesn't have anything to do with animal rights.
Animal though aren't human beings and can't become human beings so they have no similarities with the abortion problem.
Animal rights can be linked to human being intrinsic values only if, after the massive eugenetics we applied to domestic animals, we start to see humanity into animals. But that happens because we selected animals to be cute when puppies (and cuteness is selected by visual similarities to human babies, big eyes and so on), and we selected them for good behaviour around humans.
The fact that we manipulated the genetic pool of the animals we want to deal with in a massive way, in order for them to satisfy our requirements better, can't be used to then justify that they have intrisic value as human beings do, not even "partial" intrisic value.
It's actually proof of the fact that humans as a specie are in control of the rest of nature and in a strictly, well defined, position of intrisic superiority.