Value of Life
Being intellectually honest AND intellectually consistent.
I have heard an argument made by many that both pro-lifers and pro-choicers are somewhat intellectually dishonest in that they don’t want to admit that there might be a point at which the living tissue that is a fetus in its early stages goes from being a clump of cells to a sentient being.
The point seems to be that many people on the choice side see this as the day the baby is born whereas on the life side, many claim the date of conception. Those are 9 months apart give or take. It’s a big gap.
I am all in favor of this argument, knowing no one can really know for sure when a soul or being is fortified in the body. So, I am willing to be intellectually honest as a somewhat pro-life person about this distinction period from development to sentience. Still, does the possible lack of sentience necessitate a reduction in value? I don’t know who is equipped to make such an evaluation. It’s probably somewhat relative. Value is generally kind of subjective.
Hence, I find it a little bit intellectually inconsistent that the same people who seem to suggest (in the name of intellectual honesty) the clump of evolving human cells with their own unique genetic code absent sentience likely have little to no value, also argue vehemently over the value of a clump of 5 whole quarks being discovered through the dubiously unverifiable outcomes of a hadron collider experiment. These alleged quarks are far smaller than human cells and unprovable in their very existence without happening to personally own and operate one’s own hadron collider. I mean, otherwise, you are merely only able to take the owner and operator’s word for what they found and how they happened to locate it. You can look over their alleged findings, but you have little to no assurances that the data wasn’t manipulated prior to being published. Furthermore, the implications of the existence of this clump of “exotic” (pattern buzzword similar to “novel” to infer significance) quarks has yet to be established beyond, happening to find it.
But yes, unverified cluster of quarks 1, certain living, evolving cluster of human cells/embryo 0.
No intellectual inconsistency happening there…
Pretty weird month so far. Am I right?