Dan said: > Let's use that arguement. What about infants? The intellectual > functional ability of a 8 week premature baby is certainly not > functioanlly equivalent to even a full term infant. Indeed, one > could make a strong arguement that an adult chimp functions at a > superior level than a premature infant. Thus, since it is not > murder to kill the chimp, it is not murder to kill the premature > infant...since potential doesn't count.
Personally, I would push the boundary out to include great apes in the category of things protected from murder. Certainly, I think adult chimps, human infants and premature babies are not things that it should be possible to kill if one so wishes. But equally, I think that blastocysts are not something that should be protected from destruction. Where the boundary should be, however, I do not know. [Human-chimp hybrids] > Isn't this just Zeno's paradox? No, it's not just Zeno's paradox. In fact, I'm not sure I see the analogy between my thought experiment and Zeno's paradox. It is, instead, an attempt to demolish the essentialist view of humanity that JDG is using. It seems to me that even if one thinks that everything from fertilised ova on up is a human being, one could not equally well claim that everything from the 99% (or 99.9% or 99.99%) hybrid outwards towards chimps is human, and that the criterion for human-ness (or at least for the granting of various legal rights) must in this case be a functional one in some sense. I would be interested to see where and how JDG positions this boundary (or series of boundaries). Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
