Message

BH> Can you give us a list of all the different kinds of ownership, or do you just invent new ones when you're losing an argument? <BH

PI> Whether or not the pilot owns the plane is irrelevant unless the plane is in his body. <PI

Thus you still have no response to my direct challenge to distinguish body ownership from plane ownership.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading: "a form of spurious argumentation alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations themselves".

PI> Then and only then would he be allowed to make life and death decisions for the people inside the plane because they would have no rights. <PI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question: "a type of fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises".

PI> A fetus has no more claim to personhood than a tapeworm. <PI

As I said before, "both extreme positions on fetal personhood are obviously wrong". It's laughable to claim that a fetus one minute from being born has no more claim to personhood than a tapeworm. By the way, does this laughable claim mean you're abandoning your even more laughable claim that there are types of property (e.g. one's epidermis) with magical powers that nullify all the rights of persons who find themselves inside it?

PI> They are both biological parasites. <PI

No, a fetus is closer to being an endosymbiotic mutualist than to being a parasite. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis to correct your ignorance here. Oh wait, you don't read Wikipedia, so your ignorance will remain proudly uncorrected...

PI> The moment her body was no longer in the body of your wife, she was imbued with human rights; one second before she was outside your wife's body, she had no rights. <PI

So as long as her foot is still inside the mother's C-section incision, the OB can kill the baby without committing murder? What if after the baby is taken out the mother doesn't like how the baby looks and wants to commit infanticide -- do you still say that if the OB just puts the baby back inside the incision then they can kill it?

PI> Also, being inside the body of another person doesn't make someone lose their rights, it means they never had rights to begin with. <PI

So in principle, we can't know if an entity has any rights in the present unless we know that it will never be inside another person's body at any time in the future? The Registrar of Voters is going to need a lot of crystal balls....

PI> I can see that your penchant for making ridiculous and irrelevant analogies with unrealistic situations knows no bounds. <PI

My analogies and scenarios go only as far as your ridiculous ethical precepts allow them. Because my own criteria for personhood are far more sensible, they are immune from any similar efforts to undermine them. Go ahead and try. Make my day.

PI> As far as the tandem skydiving thing goes, I mentioned it specifically because the person skydiving is already born and has a right to life, but if they are endangering another, that person can choose to end their life. <PI

And as I pointed out, "your analogy is worthless except in the uncontroversial case of abortions to save the life of the mother".

PI> The only thing you've eviscerated was your own credibility. <PI

So here you've merely repeated your inept analogy, ignored my critique of it, and then used a kindergarten I'm-rubber-you're-glue retort. LOL.

And thanks for sparing us all the embarrassment of watching you try to salvage your contract response to the airplane analogy:

PI> anyone on the airplane has a right to life, and the right to enforce the contract they made when they bought their ticket to be taken all the way to thier destination. <PI

BH> Bzzzt. My question was about "a person who involuntarily finds himself in my plane". To play again, please insert another token. <BH

William Fason wrote:

WF> When a "pro-lifer's" pregnancy ends without a live birth due to natural causes such as miscarriage or spontaneous abortion, does her family have a funeral? Of course not. <WF

When our eight-day-old (baptized) son died, the Catholic Church told us they don't do funerals for babies that young. Are you saying this is an argument that an eight-day-old baby is not a person?

I don't know about pro-lifers, but we pro-choicers in the local neo-natal loss support group indeed sometimes hold memorial services for late-term still-births. The behavior -- and anguish -- I observe is completely consistent with my position that there is no sharp line for fetal personhood, and is completely inconsistent with Paul's idea that clearing the epidermis is such a line.

Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley) http://marketliberal.org