[Suggesting there is no moral difference between potential people and actual people]
Potentials can have value. Incidentally, this is true also in science. There is such a thing as potential energy, and it has real value.
['The only thing potential humans and potential energy have in common are the words that they use, but otherwise they are distinct ideas that have no logical relationship with one another. Its "comparing apples to oranges" so-to-speak.']
Both apples and oranges have value. One can compare that. Do you feel silly?
20 comments
Yea, I know where the person etahng5's arguing with is coming from. The problem is, this particular pro-choice stance gets bogged down in semantics when dealing with ANYONE who is pro-life.
It's explained rather well here: http://elroy.net/ehr/abortion.html
Apples and oranges sure do have value! I particularly enjoy eating them. Is he suggesting I should be eating the unborn children? I mean, if they all have value, they all must have the same TYPE of value, right?
Right?
The fundie, ethang5, went from being surprisingly rational and intelligent at the beginning of the thread, but he degenerated in his successive posts.
He's at the point now where he is reduced down to a sniveling fussbucket.
Yahweh,
You should have invited your lemmings to view the convo instead of posting a snippet here for them to all run off a cliff over. You lost the argument and ran away. You were invited to my site because one of your lemmings couldn't defend your flawed argument and ran back to you. You came, you lost, but you can always give out of context snippets to the lemmings as consolation. Hmmm?
No, you resorted to fallacy and a continual redefinition of terms in support of a flawed argument.
Your quote, repeoduced above, reduces apples and oranges to a commodity and then uses an assigned value to compare them. This neither demonstrates that an apple is better (or worse) than an orange, nor supports your point. Or are you actually suggesting that embryos have 'value' as a commodity?
ethang5, you just used some logical fallacies. Check them out here.
"Potentials can have value. Incidentally, this is true also in science. There is such a thing as potential energy, and it has real value."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
"Both apples and oranges have value. One can compare that. Do you feel silly?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextomy
Besides, even if we accept your premise that potential people do count, real live people count much, much more. Proof: We can use statistical analysis to decide how many potential people can real people produce. Same cannot be said for potential people.
> [Suggesting there is no moral difference between potential people and actual people]
>
> Potentials can have value. Incidentally, this is true also in science.
> There is such a thing as potential energy, and it has real value.
Potential energy is defined in terms of a mass positioned in a gravitational field. Are you positing the existence of some sort of moral field?
No, you're not. You're confusing the various meanings of a common word, most likely because you are either ignorant or mendacious. You're no different to the quacks who claim their particular choice of alt-med works on 'the body's natural energy field' without ever describing how that energy might be empirically measured or described.
"There is such a thing as potential energy, and it has real value.
Specifically, a negative one.
Ironically, ethang's equivocation is actually arguing potential people have negative value compared to real people's positive one.
Hence any utilitarian calculation of "moral impact" should seek to minimise the cost (and maximise the benefit) to real people, and maximise the cost (minimise the benefit) to the potentials.
Basically, by ethang's way of thinking we should be screwing over future generations for our own short term gains, which...
Oh, I see... Well played, sir!
A minute ago they were arguing about ethics. In ethics there is considerable difference between a deed and a potential deed.
Well, except in Christianity where just thinking about a deed will get you damned as sure and committing the deed.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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