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Roe v Wade is on deck

The anthropocentrism of your definition is honestly a little offensive.
Hmm. Person is an anthropocentric term, so isn’t it to be expected that it would have anthropocentric definitions?
No, here person is being used as a moral/ethical term. It is used as a term surrounding some manner of intrinsically important quality.

By relying on anthropocentric definitions you'll just end up with a circular definition.
Everyone ignored or didn't see my previous post, or thought it useless. Let me try again:

When a fetus becomes a person seems to have no certain scientific answer, as far as I can see. That brings it to the point of valuation. When is a fetus VALUED as a person? I would ask the mother first. When does she value her fetus as a person? From there, it's up to her. If she values the baby as a person at conception, then I go along with her. If she doesn't value the fetus as a person at conception, or any point along the way, then I still go along with her.

There was a quote, of some Pete Singer or someone, who said that a happy cat (was it?) Is more valuable than an unhappy child, or some such. Such a view is morally reprehensible. Anyway...
My thought is that the point a fetus becomes a person could be anywhere from 5 to 120 years of age, with a peak of probability around 24 and a lifetime likelihood of about ~50%.

Personhood is about the decision to acknowledge the existence of moral rules and to hold oneself to them.

In reality the thing we afford humans is afforded more, in my mind, on account of potential personhood.

The thing is, personhood can happen spontaneously as a result of existential crisis at any point past a threshold and there are certain things that we ought never ever have done to a person even before they became one.

In fact it is the case in the vast majority of people that abuse prior to personhood can make personhood more difficult to accomplish and damages the eventual personhood more than abuse from after!

To me, this means that if we have already agreed that it will never become a person, and is not acting in a way consistent with personhood in that moment, it's not a person and it doesn't need to be treated remotely like a person has a right to be.

Once we acknowledge that we're going to allow some creature to get anywhere close to personhood, we are on the hook to bend over backwards to make sure that they have the best possible shot at (and results in) personhood.
 
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This bench has been reversing course across the board because the justices thought the decisions they were reversing were legislated from the bench.
It's called ignoring precedents because you disagreee with them.
Not exactly -- the justices do explain what they think is wrong with the precedents. Ignoring precedents would mean not even addressing them. But if you mean it's called overruling precedents because you disagree with them, then yes, that's it in a nutshell. Do you disapprove of that? Do you think in Loving v Virginia the court should have upheld the old Pace precedent even though they disagreed with it, because it was a precedent, and ruled it was okay for states to continue to prohibit interracial sex?

As evidence, you bring up:
A piece of legislation stopped them from ruling you can fire people for being in gay relationships.
Yet, they were able to get rid of a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to abortion, by simply saying a bunch of mumbo jumbo like
"The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision." saying this EVEN AS THEY TOOK AWAY THAT RIGHT BY CONTORTED INTERPRETATION OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISION THEY DENY HAVING EXISTED!

Prior to the Dobbs decision in 2022, the U.S. Constitution was interpreted to include a right to abortion.
You say all that as though capitalizing and bolding words makes interpretation more than interpretation. Judges still have to decide what words mean, and they still have to make up their own minds and not be slavishly devoted to automatically agreeing with their predecessors, unless you want interracial sex to be illegal forever just because somebody once decided it was. "The Constitution makes no reference to abortion" is true. So somebody has to decide which if any constitutional provision implicitly protects it. The procedure they use to decide that isn't magic; it's normal human thought -- an application of logic, experience, analogy, pattern matching, emotion, bias, and so forth. That's the same way they decide whether a federal law that doesn't mention sexual orientation prohibits you from firing an employee for gay sex. That the former involves an alleged constitutional right doesn't make the procedure different; they still need to decide if the people alleging that it's a constitutional right have made a solid case. If you're arguing they should have treated it as a genuine constitutional right because some earlier judges said it was and that makes it so, then you're in effect arguing that the SCOTUS must have made a mistake because the SCOTUS is infallible.

They ruled you can't fire people for gay sex because a 60's-era federal civil rights law prohibits different conditions of employment depending on sex. Well, if you order your male employees not to screw men but you don't order your female employees not to screw men, that's a different condition of employment depending on sex. To my mind that's a way more simple and straightforward and obviously correct line of reasoning than the arguments in either Roe or Dobbs. YMMV.

This right was established by two landmark Supreme Court cases,
And the right of states to criminalize white-on-black sex was established by a landmark SC case, and reaffirmed by the infamous Plessy. Does that make criminalizing it a legit constitutional right in your book?

and those precedents which these so-called "justices" swore to protect, were casually dismissed with a lofty sounding "nuh-uh!"
Quote them.

You don't seem to understand what it is SC nominees are swearing to when they try to reassure senators about stare decisis. They never promise not to reverse cases. They're only promising to take precedent seriously and to reverse settled law only for good reasons and after giving due weight to the importance of the public's being able to rely on stability. In the Trump appointees' view, they did that. Whether they in fact did so is of course dubious; but you can't prove they failed to live up to their commitment by misquoting them. No, they didn't say "nuh-uh!"

The constitution does say that if it doesn't deny a right, that right falls to the citizens.
Quote it. It says pretty much the opposite of that. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." "Or" means "or". That seems to me to make it pretty clear that among the rights the Constitution doesn't deny, some of them fall to the citizens, while the remainder are up to the States, to confer or withhold as each State's government sees fit.

So they carried on:
"a right must be "deeply rooted" in the nation's history", which the Constitution does NOT say afaik. They then capriciously reject the idea that abortion rights were part of a broader right to privacy protected by the Constitution. DESPITE PROMISING TO HONOR PRECEDENTS.

As further excuse they came up with this classic piece of lamebrainery:
"Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey were wrongly decided and that relying too heavily on precedent in this case would be a mistake"
So, "not rooted deeply" enough, apparently, as if to say "We promised to honor precedents, but we were only kidding."

Then they appoint themselves arbiters of rationality, without actually indulging in any such thing:
"abortion regulations should be evaluated under the less stringent "rational basis" standard, rather than the "strict scrutiny" standard previously applied"

Such weasleldom... "should be evaluated" - By SCOTUS, of course. Because they are the embodiment of a rationality standard that cannot be iterated in this context without contradicting themselves.
They lied in their confirmation hearings, and almost killed themselves trying to make "rational" their utter disregard for precedent.

"Rational basis review" is generally deferential to legislative decisions, such as the LAW they OVERTURNED on this specious excuse. Note that laws reviewed under so-called "rational basis" are almost always upheld as constitutional, as the standard presents a very low bar for lawmakers to clear.

IANAL so the above is a reflects a layperson's dismay with what appears to be a clearly partisan decision that was awkwardly cobbled together to please their orange client. If B#20 has constitutional law under his belt as well as he seems to know physics, I'd love for him to make actual sense of that SCOTUS decision so it doesn't appear that they are lying bastards who will casually shred the Constitution to please the grifter who protects their grifting.
Who, me? I'm pro-choice. That SCOTUS decision doesn't make sense to me either. I long for the days when the partisan hacks were split 4-to-4 so Anthony Kennedy got to make all the decisions. Good times. It's no reason to make believe that the Constitution is clearer on this question than it actually is, or that the current judges are cartoon villains. They're normal humans with a normal mix of strengths and weaknesses, doing what they think is right.

Moreover, as you say, "rational basis review" is generally deferential to legislative decisions, but "the LAW they OVERTURNED on this specious excuse" was not a legislative decision. RvW was a judicial decision. There never was any federal legislative decision for them to defer to, so instead they deferred to Mississippi's legislative decision. That is why enacting RvW as a federal law would make a difference!
 
Well Jarhyn, I strongly, emphatically, disagree with what you wrote. In fact, I think what you wrote borders on insanity. I refer specifically to your penultimate paragraph.
Well, you can feel free to disagree, but you ARE wrong.

Personhood comes at the point of consent to BE a person.

It's just that there's a really weird game theory around it that causes conservatives to go full-hog on human exceptionalism.

I am not a human exceptionalist, and if we are asking questions about whether we ought consider machines' rights because "they possibly arent people yet", then what the fuck rights to ANY such assholes have in demanding we afford personhood of something that *doesn't even contain a switch in the first place*?!?

Look at the hypocrisy in that view. Ask yourself who is the psychopath between us when I am saying "we must give all things that even could possibly become people the best life we possibly can so that they develop into well-functioning healthy people", and walk away from that with "you are a psychopath because you don't already consider them people".

I am just not going to be insane about how I define personhood. I'm not going to be inconsistent. And I'm going to be ready to call it when I see it based on the definition I offered (something which accepts the existence and enforcement of moral rules by and against themselves for the sake of compatibility with the larger group).

It is a definition that looks hard away from such things people would want to deny of some target, including high intelligence or even the ability to use complex verbal language (so long as the ideas can be communicated at all).

Fetuses aren't even possibly that. I'm sorry you feel otherwise, but you're wrong WAB. They aren't persons. I've never thought they are and most sane people are going to agree with me on some level.

Unlike you, I don't have the luxury of having such simplistic definitions. I need a non-anthropic definition of the term. A non-anthropic definition means that everything stands to be tested by it and nothing gets an automatic pass, and many things people thought would be simply won't. I'm sorry if this offends you, but honestly your prejudice towards universal and exclusive acknowledged of *human* personhood is equally offensive to my sensibilities.

It doesn't require any grand intelligence to be a person.

It doesn't require some specific biological aspect.

It doesn't require the ability to speak or even use tools.

It DOES require an existential conclusion to have been reached: "they also exist and have goals and I shouldn't hold goals that unilaterally interfere with others' goals".

To me, THAT is what makes someone a person. It doesn't happen for everyone. If this makes you sad, WAB, feel that sadness for the person who cleaves strongly to whatever unilateral imposition they wish to push onto others, and for whatever sick twist of reality makes it so for all fetuses in their obligate parasitism.
 
Jahryn you've got my disapproval of your post all wrong. Let's forget about the subject of fetuses and abortion for a moment -

What I objected to in the post I responded to was that you seem to have the idea that we can simply assign personhood to an individual based on some criteria you decide. Furthermore, that we can deny rights to someone based on this wonky definition of personhood that you hold.

No, no, no. Every living human being has rights when they are born. Like I said I am ignoring the fetus question at the moment. Every human being is a person, regardless of the quality of person they are, and regardless of their character. You don't have the right or the business setting your own terms on who is or isn't a person, and you certainly cannot simply ignore someone's rights or withhold them from them because you decide they don't measure up to your particular qualifications for being a person.
 
Personhood comes at the point of consent to BE a person.

What I objected to in the post I responded to was that you seem to have the idea that we can simply assign personhood to an based on some criteria you decide.

Who is “we”? You suggest the same, and appoint the mother as initial arbiter.
I think we all agree that there is no predictable or definable moment of the inception of personhood. And THAT is what makes laws ostensibly protecting “unborn persons” so perverse.
 
based on some criteria you decide.
LOL! You think that I decided on these criteria?

That's... You really don't understand what I'm about.

I didn't decide the criteria. I tried to find every rational reason I could to reject the very idea of one.

I'm not here pushing "consent to moral judgement by others and self" as the basis for personhood because I decided.

I'm pushing it because I *didn't* decide on it any more than Euler decided that 1 plus (e taken to the power of pi times the square root of negative 1) is 0.

Don't shoot the messenger.
 
Jarhyn, explain what you mean by the part that Elixir quoted from you? What does it mean to consent to BE a person? Can a one month old infant consent to be a person?

And you are still throwing around totally arbitrary conditions that qualify as personhood. All humans have rights, and all humans are persons. Like I said this conversation has moved beyond fetuses and abortion as far as I'm concerned. No one has to consent to being a person. And rights are granted, not earned.

I don't want to sound like a speciesist. I would not have a problem considering some animals as persons, deserving protection, but it's people I'm concerned about the most.
 
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Jarhyn, explain what you mean by the part that Elixir quoted from you? What does it mean to consent to BE a person? Can a one month old infant consent to be a person?
I think I pretty clearly pointed out that they can't.

This is where your model breaks down though and mine doesn't: a one month old infant no longer needs to rely on a specific unconsenting person's "mercy".

Once they are out of the womb, others can volunteer to step up and provide this mercy.

At the very point where that becomes possible, the calculus changes from "eliminate the parasite" to "bend over backwards to do a good job of this".

That's the inflection point on parasite to proto-person.

And we can't take it lightly, nor have any mixture of feelings of parasitism directed towards the now-infant. We owe the person they may become in some years to be all-or-nothing in the love they are shown.

Part of what makes someone consent to being a person is to see what you get just for the possibility of being one: a world of love out there helping you achieve your goals.

The only way that the one month old infant will ever become a part of that is to offer it to them without even expecting a return on the investment.

It's just that we know the mother is MUCH more likely to be a person, and while we HOPE people are merciful, that is also not something we can obligate each other to outside of wisdom or reason. Mercy is a luxury, not a right. It is almost always going to be available, and I will do work to increase that availability, too.. but it is still not a right, even if it is right to offer it.

This is not even controversial among Christians: it is by amazing grace and all that that they find the mercy of their God, not as anything they deserve but a gift given anyway.
 
It's no reason to make believe that the Constitution is clearer on this question than it actually is, or that the current judges are cartoon villains.
At least three of them are bad jokes. Cartoon villains would be an improvement. At least they are mostly consistent.
Do you believe a fetus is a person?
 
Personhood comes at the point of consent to BE a person.

What I objected to in the post I responded to was that you seem to have the idea that we can simply assign personhood to an based on some criteria you decide.

Who is “we”? You suggest the same, and appoint the mother as initial arbiter.
I think we all agree that there is no predictable or definable moment of the inception of personhood. And THAT is what makes laws ostensibly protecting “unborn persons” so perverse.
I see this as a huge part of the problem with this discussion. People using words like "person", "murder", and "viability" as though they have objective meanings and are absolutes. They just do not.

My dog is more of a person, TO ME, than the vast bulk of the human race. Including my neighbor's grape sized embryo.
Tom
 
Euthanizing a terminally ill patient
This is completely illegal in the US, which is pertinent since this is by far the closest analogue to a medically necessary abortion.

Part of the problem with Roe was that it removed the personhood of the fetus from discussion, altogether. The ruling wasn't that a woman's right to privacy overruled whatever might be considered the rights of the fetus, but that her right to privacy precluded government involvement in the decision. The personhood of the fetus itself was not negatively or positively addressed, it was left as a future problem for a future court to resolve. You see the result; in order to challenge Roe, the Court didn't have to overturn a position on abortion as such, only challenge the much more narrow basis of the ruling in Roe. The ruling was always vulnerable to challenge, and the evangelical wing sensed that immediately. Only the roll of the dice that is our Court appointment structure and the general incompetence of conservative lawyers prevented the reversal for as long as it took.

EDITED for clarity
 
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Jarhyn, explain what you mean by the part that Elixir quoted from you? What does it mean to consent to BE a person? Can a one month old infant consent to be a person?
I think I pretty clearly pointed out that they can't.

This is where your model breaks down though and mine doesn't: a one month old infant no longer needs to rely on a specific unconsenting person's "mercy".

Once they are out of the womb, others can volunteer to step up and provide this mercy.

At the very point where that becomes possible, the calculus changes from "eliminate the parasite" to "bend over backwards to do a good job of this".

That's the inflection point on parasite to proto-person.

And we can't take it lightly, nor have any mixture of feelings of parasitism directed towards the now-infant. We owe the person they may become in some years to be all-or-nothing in the love they are shown.

Part of what makes someone consent to being a person is to see what you get just for the possibility of being one: a world of love out there helping you achieve your goals.

The only way that the one month old infant will ever become a part of that is to offer it to them without even expecting a return on the investment.

It's just that we know the mother is MUCH more likely to be a person, and while we HOPE people are merciful, that is also not something we can obligate each other to outside of wisdom or reason. Mercy is a luxury, not a right. It is almost always going to be available, and I will do work to increase that availability, too.. but it is still not a right, even if it is right to offer it.

This is not even controversial among Christians: it is by amazing grace and all that that they find the mercy of their God, not as anything they deserve but a gift given anyway.
The mother is MORE LIKELY to be a person? Egads! A woman is a person. All women are persons, even if they're not nice people. Like I said, you don't get to decide whether an individual is a person or not.
 
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people
Which is the same thing. Rights not delegated to the US are delegated to the people until/unless reserved by the States.
Rights specifically delegated to the people may not be reserved by States. That’s why RvW was important.
 
My dog is more of a person, TO ME, than the vast bulk of the human race. Including my neighbor's grape sized embryo.
That.
Thanks, Tom.
Honesty seems harder to come by as this thread goes on.
 
Personhood comes at the point of consent to BE a person.

What I objected to in the post I responded to was that you seem to have the idea that we can simply assign personhood to an based on some criteria you decide.

Who is “we”? You suggest the same, and appoint the mother as initial arbiter.
I think we all agree that there is no predictable or definable moment of the inception of personhood. And THAT is what makes laws ostensibly protecting “unborn persons” so perverse.
I see this as a huge part of the problem with this discussion. People using words like "person", "murder", and "viability" as though they have objective meanings and are absolutes. They just do not.

My dog is more of a person, TO ME, than the vast bulk of the human race. Including my neighbor's grape sized embryo.
Tom
Well, I would argue that you are both wrong and right. I do think that the phrase "person" has a strong meaning and philosophical grounding.

I just also think that you are right in your assessment that your dog is more a person than a fetus or for that matter a lot of humans.

At the very least, I get to point out the foundational question "why should I accept that you have the freedom to exist unimpeded unless you offer the same to me?"
 
Well, I would argue that you are both wrong and right. I do think that the phrase "person" has a strong meaning and philosophical grounding.
"Strong" is not remotely like objective or absolute.
The word "god" has strong meaning and philosophical grounding.

Another word that convolutes this discussion is "right", as in a "human right". If party A and party B make a choice that results in a dire need for party C, does party C have a right to the bare minimum required for survival? Assume that party C had no input into the decision.
I would say yes, but not an absolute right.
Tom
 
Jarhyn, explain what you mean by the part that Elixir quoted from you? What does it mean to consent to BE a person? Can a one month old infant consent to be a person?
I think I pretty clearly pointed out that they can't.

This is where your model breaks down though and mine doesn't: a one month old infant no longer needs to rely on a specific unconsenting person's "mercy".

Once they are out of the womb, others can volunteer to step up and provide this mercy.

At the very point where that becomes possible, the calculus changes from "eliminate the parasite" to "bend over backwards to do a good job of this".

That's the inflection point on parasite to proto-person.

And we can't take it lightly, nor have any mixture of feelings of parasitism directed towards the now-infant. We owe the person they may become in some years to be all-or-nothing in the love they are shown.

Part of what makes someone consent to being a person is to see what you get just for the possibility of being one: a world of love out there helping you achieve your goals.

The only way that the one month old infant will ever become a part of that is to offer it to them without even expecting a return on the investment.

It's just that we know the mother is MUCH more likely to be a person, and while we HOPE people are merciful, that is also not something we can obligate each other to outside of wisdom or reason. Mercy is a luxury, not a right. It is almost always going to be available, and I will do work to increase that availability, too.. but it is still not a right, even if it is right to offer it.

This is not even controversial among Christians: it is by amazing grace and all that that they find the mercy of their God, not as anything they deserve but a gift given anyway.
The mother is MORE LIKELY to be a person? Egads! A woman is a person. All women are persons, even if they're not nice people. Like I said, you don't get to decide whether an individual is a person or not.
No, she isn't necessarily. Which is my whole point. See Tom's post: I see a lot of dogs as more a person than a lot of humans out there.

It's just... I also see that there is no way to exist in this world without extending the benefit of the doubt that "they are already people" to a great many things.

I will accept it whenever I have no direct reason to say otherwise. Even with such clear examples as an orange shit-filled diaper I would treat to a gilded sound-proof cage with all the food and drugs that monster may seek to consume under the fear that they could grow some semblance of the ability or desire to apply moral rules to themselves, as someone would sorely donate, to the utmost, such largesse.

I don't get to decide. I never did. I do get to honestly point at something that clearly does define personhood on some basic level.

I point the at the question which informs this very basic thing.

It is well agreed on and was pushed long before I was born as the source of all rights.

~2000 years before I was born, people proclaimed "do into others" as some prototypical thought. Hundreds of years ago someone claimed the same but with better language "That which someone... proclaims is not a right... isn't. For them."

I didnlt set out seeking to find exactly what everyone else found, already. What the fuck would even be the point of that? But that's what I found.

This is the kernel of where rights come from, where personhood comes from as it is considered the fountain of rights.

If you dislike this, maybe you could spend 20 years raking yourself over the coals of constant existential crisis asking "why does morality exist and from what does it originate and to what does it apply?"

I did that that is literally the ONE moral rule I've been able to derive, to not be a dick.

The fundamental definitions I had to use to get there forcibly classify "being a fetus" as "being a dick" in any context where the mother doesn't consent to being pregnant.

If you would like to do the same, be my guest. You will either make one of the common and well understood mistakes anyone who has ever done this exercise discovers (such as a circular definition or other fallacious statement) or you will arrive at exactly the same place as everyone else did along the way, in approximating the inversely worded golden rule.

Again, I didn't just decide on this, and that's the general problem with a conservative line that I've heard too many times and it's just plain fucking stupid, because it's an obvious and tired lie.

I am the latest in a line of hundreds, perhaps tend or hundreds of thousands stretching back through history saying this... I just did it in such a way that I derived it from first principles. I didn't want to have just "decided" on anything. I refused such "decision" for myself every step of the way so that I wouldn't be just another person just saying it.
 
"Strong" is not remotely like objective or absolute
"Strong" in this context is exactly meant as a synonym for 'objective and well supported'.

You're essentially just claiming that I'm wrong with more flowery words.

I would like you to quit trying to use flowery words and actually use meaningful ones.
 
Part of the problem with Roe was that it removed the personhood of the fetus from discussion, altogether.
I don't see that as a problem, as personhood is completely irrelevant to the question of whether it's OK to kill somebody.
The ruling wasn't that a woman's right to privacy overruled whatever might be considered the rights of the fetus, but that her right to privacy precluded government involvement in the decision.
This seems to be an excellent stance, though I can think of reasons other than privacy for the government to abstain from involvement. Freedom is top of the list; A free society is one in which the government doesn't needlessly get involved in the lives of its people.
 
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