Then there is a concrete future person you're doing an injustice to by poisoning their life. If they never become a concrete person in the first place, you aren't doing an injustice to anyone.
But now you're again talking about denying something to an "entity" that doesn't actually exist. When you try to frame the problem you're inserting entities that keep having meaning in your mind even if you then try to tag them with "nonexistent", which I think is preventing you from seeing the problem properly for what it is. It's not a nonexistent entity; it just isn't an entity. You can only talk about an entity that doesn't exist yet if it will in fact exist, but if it never comes into existence it never was even an entity that didn't exist "yet".
Emphasis mine. In the brainwashing analogy, you could say that the person, as a non-brainwashed person, never comes into existence because you interfered. You prevented someone from growing up naturally when they otherwise would have.
I would say that the entity/person will in fact exist, unless (the fetus is) otherwise messed with, in the same way that the entity of a normal future for a person will in fact exist, unless otherwise messed with through killing or brainwashing or any other thing.
But the fetus doesn't give a damn, because it's simply a cluster of cells made of chemicals reacting with one another as dictated by physics.
See, I don't think it matters if the fetus doesn't care. There's plenty of people that don't care about their future or themselves, but does that mean it's okay to kill all of them since they won't mind?
There isn't a little tag on the fetus saying "This is going to become person 404509832498273509"; the only reason you even know it would become a person at all is indirectly.
I'm not saying I agree with this idea, but couldn't one say that, from a purely deterministic perspective, that there essentially is a tag?
Otherwise, that makes sense, I suppose. But even if you don't know who or what might become of the fetus, you do know that, unchecked, it will become
something.
If pure potential has rights, is it an injustice to (say) the potential gardener me who will never exist if I become a programmer instead? It's a potential entity and I'm denying it the chance to exist. How about potential not-liking-Pokémon me? Am I being cruel to all the potential future mes that will never exist because I chose not to become them?
I'm not really saying that pure potential has rights, more that it's better not to interfere with something before it does. It's kind of like minor's rights. People make life decisions for their child at a young age, discarding their input since 'they can't choose for themselves yet'. With the reasoning, partially, that once they're older they'll say they were glad the parents made the decision. Of course, they'll agree with the decision, since they haven't known anything else in their life. They'll never know what life would have been like had that decision not been made.
I don't know if that made sense, but I'm just trying to wrap my head around all this.
Harlequin said:
This seems dangerously close to saying that sex should be for making babies and making babies only, since every time someone uses a condom millions of potential babies go (sometimes literally) down the drain..
I hadn't thought about that... That's difficult, since if I say that the fetus has potential, then so does the younger fetus, then the zygote, etc.
I guess that one could say there's a much smaller chance of an individual sperm becoming a baby than an already growing fetus, but that seems contrived...
Maybe I'll say that, well, maybe you can't save every potential future, but why not try to save the ones you can? ie, the fetuses once they've begun growing. I know that's a weak argument, but I can't think of much better right now. I will say this though, that just because this is a valid point doesn't necessarily mean to me that it undermines the whole argument.
Harlequin said:
I'm in total agreement with Bachuru here. The reason you dislike the idea of being aborted is because you're already a person, a person with hopes and dreams and desires and a life. The foetus isn't. It doesn't even know it's a thing. It's most certainly not the same thing as killing me -- I know I'm a thing, and I'm a thing with tons and tons of plans and relationships and whatnot, so there would definitely be something lost there.
I don't particularly dislike the idea of being aborted. I agree, I wouldn't know any different. But it doesn't seem right to impose that decision on other people.
I've rethought it and I don't think I would say that denying the potential is equivalent to killing the person. After all, the person as a person is a collection of experiences and memories and emotions that would all be lost in death (for all we know, at least), as opposed to the fetus who doesn't have any of that. So I agree with you on that.
What everyone's saying makes sense, but I'm still not sure. I don't think that there should be any idea of the fetus having rights or wishing to be a person; that's a little silly. But I feel like as long as there's a person they could be, it's not within anybody else's rights to stop that from happening.
