So what part of “babies are humans that deserve constitutional rights” do you not believe in?
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"human" isn't a binary category, it's a fuzzy cluster of concepts, and fetuses are too far outside the edge of fuzzy cluster for it to trigger any sort of moral responsibility for me
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This really strikes me as a belief that is held merely as an excuse to justify abortion rather than one that is logical, much less scientific. It’s at the very least an extremely subjective belief.
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I hold the belief about a lot of things - this is at the core of how I engage with concepts. Concepts are not (rarely?) binary; they are clusters. It's a pretty common thing in ratspace with a lot of writing about it, and I've discussed it before in not-abortion contexts.
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Aella is probably referring to stuff like this;
The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
lesswrong.com/posts/aMHq4mA2
and the Noncentral Fallacy
lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8
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Fish and humans are real categories though. There are important things that distinguish whales from fish. What distinguishes babies from humans? I think any argument used to justify abortion could also be used to justify other kinds of homicide, because babies are humans.
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There's a lot of concepts that I perceive as mixed together in this your tweet. If you *assume* babies are humans in the way that we ascribe moral personhood to humans, then I agree that argument could be used to justify homicide. But the debate here *is the assumption itself*.
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There is no debate about whether or not personhood should be ascribed to adults (thankfully). What makes babies any different?
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We're using the word 'babies,' which evokes to mind something I'm not talking about, to be clear. In the interest of conceptual clarity I'd rather use words that evoke to mind exactly what it is I'm talking about. We can make up a fully neutral word for this if you like.
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The lack of clairty comes from something like, if I go around saying 'I think we should kill babies,' people will grab their 3-month old in fear, even if I don't think we should kill their 3-month old. I'd like to use a word that is not incongruous with my intent.
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We can use "whatever is happening in the womb very early on in a pregnancy" and shorten it to WIHITWVEOIAP , or shorten that to WITOP, which will be my proposed neutral ground we both can meet