"Wrong to kill, always" is an appeal to emotion, a purely rhetorial approach.
I, too, believe in trying my hardest to avoid unnecessary killing (primarily of animals rather than plants etc). I don't see what is so bad about basing how I try to behave on how I feel.
Where I am responsible* for something being killed, it doesn't make it right, it just makes it necessary. If I don't have a viable alternative then there's not a lot I can do about it. But I still think it's important for me to try to avoid killing.
(*Usually by a failure to act rather than by an act)
Why is it acceptable to kill the former but not the latter? Surely being in pieces is not the fundamental issue here...
Being useless, I'll not answer it directly, I'll just ask: Well, what is the alternative?
Your approach does not seem to depend on a hypothetical distinction between two microscopic pieces of tissue and one such piece of tissue; and isn't being used as a purely rhetorical technique. Act on your emotions, sure; but if you try to justify actions that affect others (such as compelling women to continue with unwanted - even involuntary - pregnancies) purely on the basis of an appeal to the audience's emotions, you can't expect that to work.
The alternative, I think, is to recognise that there is a continuum; a just-fertilised egg is not a human life any more than a sperm and an unfertilised egg in close proximity are; a baby on the point of being born is a human life; the states in between should be assessed as to their degree of sentience. The law has to draw a line, but that line will of necessity be drawn on a shade of grey; there's no one point at which we can say "up to this point this is not a human, but after this point it is".
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-13 06:11 am (UTC)I, too, believe in trying my hardest to avoid unnecessary killing (primarily of animals rather than plants etc). I don't see what is so bad about basing how I try to behave on how I feel.
Where I am responsible* for something being killed, it doesn't make it right, it just makes it necessary. If I don't have a viable alternative then there's not a lot I can do about it. But I still think it's important for me to try to avoid killing.
(*Usually by a failure to act rather than by an act)
Why is it acceptable to kill the former but not the latter? Surely being in pieces is not the fundamental issue here...
Being useless, I'll not answer it directly, I'll just ask: Well, what is the alternative?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-14 06:08 am (UTC)The alternative, I think, is to recognise that there is a continuum; a just-fertilised egg is not a human life any more than a sperm and an unfertilised egg in close proximity are; a baby on the point of being born is a human life; the states in between should be assessed as to their degree of sentience. The law has to draw a line, but that line will of necessity be drawn on a shade of grey; there's no one point at which we can say "up to this point this is not a human, but after this point it is".