Pregnancy is one human being growing inside another. It's tempting to pretend that one of those two human beings isn't there. But they're both there.https://twitter.com/NappNazworth/status/1073316270072827904 …
-
This Tweet is unavailable.
-
This Tweet is unavailable.
-
Good question, and we're not gonna settle it here. My view is that an embryo, unlike a culture, is a being (defined by organization or self-organization) but is not yet a person (defined by developed capacities). I'm just trying to describe the paradox, with no illusions.
I just wondered if you bought into a frame w/o fully examining it. “Being” is not a well-defined word in English. Granting human origin to cells with human dna is trivial, but saying ‘human being” has emotionally resonance. It’s equivalent to person in common usage.
-
-
To say a X is a person or X is a human will sound equivalent to most speakers. If the reasoning behind why a fetus is a human being hinges on it being human (for what other animal could it be?) the work the word being is doing is left unexamined.
-
Since person and human being will seem equivalent to most English speakers, this suggests that being carries with it a suggestion of sentience, thought, independent life. None of which exists in an early stage embryo. It may have human dna but it is not yet an independent being.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
I'm for making language complex enough to capture the nuances of reality. The embryo is in a process of growing from zygote to child. It's human. The word human being faithfully reflects its nature. If we equate HB with person, we lose our ability to express that prior status.
-
We can accurately call it a growth of human cells which (at some statistical level depending on its maturation) has the potential to become an independent human being. Calling it that prematurely confuses things, making it sound like it has achieved what is only a possibility.
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.