Politesse said:
Really? When the "somethings" have names and careers and moral judgements attached to them throughout the discussion? That sure sounds like an admission of personhood to me. Things don't have agency or names or a place in history, they aren't "good" or "evil".
My assessment that killing an embryo would not be an instance of killing a person does not depend on whether other people in the thread believe that killing an embryo would be an instance of killing a person.
Also, as I said, the motivation you stated for the killing - namely, killing it "based on the person they might turn out to be" (I would say "to become", since I reckon those aren't persons - would not be an instance of either euthanasia or classism. Euthanasia is a killing intended to prevent suffering, but that's not what the motivation in your scenario involves. As for classism, also there is no such implication. Of course, you might add to your scenario a condition that it's a killing because the embryo would become a person of such-and-such social class, but you would have to explicitly say that or something that implies it or makes it probable, etc.
Politesse said:
Examples of.... people who ought to be aborted (based on their poverty or non-traditional family structure) thus "balancing out" the people who shouldn't (benevolent affluent scientist types). How is that not a eugenic argument?
I have not seen any posts stating that some people
ought to be aborted (though embryos aren't people, but regardless), let alone that they ought to be aborted based on their poverty or non-traditional family structure. Rather, lpetrich gave examples of cases in which, if someone had had an abortion, then a bad person would not have come into existence, mirroring the argument he was criticized. The reasons for the abortions were not offered as involving any sort of moral obligation to abort them. Moreover, the reasons were not of the form '
because the embryo might become such-and-such person'.
That aside, even if lpetrich had claimed that those women ought to have aborted, that would not have been an instance of the hypothetical scenario that you brought up, and that I was assessing when I said it did not sound like euthanasia or classism, namely cases in which the abortion happens "based on the person they might turn out to be". If you take a look at the stated motivations in lpetrich's scenarios, I don't see a single one of them that is based on the person the embryo might become.
That said, if you had someone else's post or posts in mind, please let me know and I will address that.