There is no need to try to make the argument that personhood is based on the genome so that is not the basis for my position.
My position is much like a tripod. The first leg is the proposition that this nation was founded on the idea that we come into being with certain rights and the right to live is the first and foremost of them and it is the responsibility of the government to protect those rights, not dole them out. If one lives in a nation in which one's rights come from government, then this position might be hard to grasp, but here, in the US, the principle purpose of government is to protect the rights that we came into being with.
As I said - jurisprudence is based largely on natural law.
No political philosophy advocating natural law - neither john locke's treatise on civil government nor montesque's natural rights of man - ever gave a rigorous attempt to define person within the context of natural law. It is accepted intuitively. The most compelling basis of natural law, ironically, comes from st thomas acquainas in his summa theologia. For him, natural law is an immutable order in creation - which is exactly like saying 'because god made it so'.
The second leg of my position is biological. We are human beings from the time we are concieved. This is not a point that can be argued against with anything that even resembles credibility. We are human beings no matter how young and immature we are.
As I said, this is circular. It attempts to prove that the offspring of human beings is a human being WITHOUT actually defining what a human being is.
And since natural law has taken the definition for granted, suggesting that it is 'self-evident' or 'intuitive', then the question necessarily reverts to an epistemological inquiry.
What is the
STANDARD for which we
KNOW the existence of a human being? What ever standard is reached, it certainly cannot come from the human genome, as you candidly admitted here.
In the absence of a clearer retort, we are left with the cartesian epistemological standard of
cogito ergo sum.
The third leg of my position is based in the law. In the eyes of the law, the terms person and human being are interchangable and all persons/human beings in the US are entitled to the protection of the 14th amendment. Roe was decided on faulty information and in his majority decision, justice blackmun acknowledged that should a case for the personhood of the unborn ever be made, that roe will collapse in upon itself as unborns, being persons, would be protected by the 14th amendment. Not only do all legal dictionaries state explicitly that person and human being are one in the same, but a growing body of legal precedent exists that establishes the personhood of the unborn. People are in jail today having been charged, tried for, and convicted of killing unborns in the course of killing their mothers. In this country, one can not be convicted of either manslaughter or murder unless one has killed a person. This may be an unintended consequence of those decisions, but it is what it is.
I understand legal precedent. I also know that it is not only dependent on a particular interpretation, it is also subject to judicial review. So, the more legal precedent only means the possibility that the courts erred is smaller, not that it is itself infallible proof.
And of course there are tons of absurd and archaic laws in existence today that no one even bothers to repeal or correct. Surely, they are considered legal precedents as well.
If I had to make my argument on nothing more than the genome, I probably wouldn't involve myself in it as my case would be as much a house of cards as the pro choice side's.
Which is precisely why my position isn't philosophical in nature. The leg of my position that is founded upon the idea that we come into being with certain rights may have been philosophical at the time of the founding of the country, but at this point, an entire government and set of laws is built upon it and to deny the idea at this point would be to deny everything that has been built upon the idea. In short, it would be to deny the very legitimacy of the US.
I am not denying the idea of human rights. I am questioning the CRITERIA by which you KNOW human existence. And if the entire legal system is built on the idea of the natural rights of man, it is all the more imperative that this criteria is defined infallibly.
Only if your position is one that requires that you attempt to unilatarally redefine words. Logical rigor was thoroughly applied to the word person before it ever showed up in the first legal dictionary as a synonym for "human being". An "logical rigor" applied at this point in an attempt to redefine the word is sophistry at best.
Im sorry but I have never encountered a political philosophy that subjected the idea of personhood to logical rigor. If I am simply misinformed, then you wouldn't mind posting it here, would you?
Of course it is. If there were a real and valid argument to be made on the pro choice side, words would not need to be redefined to support this particular case. Feel free to prove that there is no philosophical slight of hand on the pro choice side of the argument if you wish. You can do that by fashioning an argument that denies the right to live to unborns that would equally apply to those who are already born and be as widely accepted.
I have already demonstrated that your definition of personhood is at best paradoxical and at worst an outright fallacy. If you are familiar with rhetorical paradoxes, you would be aware that most of them arise from self-referencing statements - your definition being a good example of it.
In mathematical logic, self-referencing statements are easily seen and are NEVER allowed except, perhaps, for stating identity axioms.
Once again, fashion an argument that denies the right to live to the unborn that you can apply equally to all human beings. An inability to fashion such an argument exposes the specious nature of the entire line of thought. Or demonstrate conclusively that there is some point at which the offspring of two human beings is something other than a human being, in which case, you would be relieved of the necessity to fashion an argument that applies equally to all human beings.
I am employing dialectics in your argument. The question of personhood is an 'or' proposition or what is known in mathematics as excluded middle.
Exposing the weakness in your argument validates the opposite position.
