The term human being is nothing more and nothing less than the mundane term we use to describe any man, woman, or child of the species homo sapiens sapiens. Living or dead.
In that case, you are simply wrong. There is no law nor jurisprudence that refers to a cadaver in the context of inalienable rights. Since your legal dictionary insists on the interchangeability of a person and a human being, a cadaver is not a human being.
Capice?
So are you saying that dead people have no form? I was just at a funeral last week and when I looked in the coffin, I didn't see a puddle of goo. The form of a human being was in there because a human being was in there. Charlie didn't turn into something else when he died. In fact, if you look up the word form, one of the definitions is "a body esp. that of a human being". Perhaps you mean that the dead lack the etherial "substance" that we call life. In any case, they most certainly have form.
Good grief! Have you never encountered plato's theory of forms????
Form is the response to the query -- what is that? One's reply -- it is (the form of) a horse, chair, human being, etc. That in the numerous particular entities, there exists a singular and universal form to it. Plato goes further in asserting that particular objects are merely particular manifestations at a particular circumstance of a universal form. By definition, the material constitution of an object is particular.
So, when one speaks of an inalienable right to live within a human being, one speaks of a human being in
FORM AND SUBSTANCE, not of substance alone.
By the way, person is a legal term. If you refer to Black's Legal Dictionary. The very legal dictionary you will find in use at the Supreme Court, you will find that the legal term person is defined as "a human being".
And your logic strays to nonsense simply because your legal dictionary failed to mention whether living or dead???
Brilliant! You have taken legal positivism to a new level of absurdity.
And of course an inalenable right to live applies to the living since the dead have no life to protect. That whole line of (thought?) belongs entirely to dawkins.
Hence a cadaver is
NOT a human being. It is merely an object, the disposition of which is left to the discretion of the immediate kin. Is there anything particularly difficult to understand in that logic, hmmm?
Again, when you find that you must redefine, or modify definitions, the problem is with your argument, not the definitions of words.
One needs to point out the defective way you employ definitions -- which, stretched to its absurd limit -- results in a contradiction.
An inalienable right is that which is
INDEPENDENT OF POSITIVE LAW. Neither the state, nor its laws, conferred said right to the human being. Neither the state, nor its laws can deny these rights.
The logic is both simple and inescapable --
the right to live of a convict deserves as much protection from the state as the right to live of a fetus. That your argument upholds one and not the other clearly demonstrates a fundamental defect in logic.
