96
votes
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
A toddler can (with a minimal amount of assistance) continue living and developing on its own. Setting aside that you underestimate the cognitive capacities of infants, an infant is a fully formed and ...
- 16.8k
28
votes
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
There's no one answer to your question, because this is a live debate, and different thinkers have very different moral intuitions about it. Traditional Catholic theology represents perhaps the ...
- 25k
20
votes
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
First, a toddler is a child in the technical sense approximately between 12-36 months year old. If you're looking for a counter argument to your specific wording:
Some would say you can abort a ...
- 17.3k
10
votes
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
To answer the question in the title, the matter of abortion revolves around two aspects: the killing of a developing human and the capacity to which a pregnant woman has bodily autonomy. So a moral ...
- 1,136
9
votes
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
I'll offer an emphatic answer by Philip K. Dick. Wikipedia claims without corroboration that it is a response to the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade.
In his chilling story "The Pre-Persons"1 ...
- 1,378
6
votes
Accepted
The Immortal Jellyfish
Welcome to SE Philosophy!
This is what is known in philosophy as a question of identity and is related to the metaphysical discipline of ontology, or the study of what is. In essence, identity is the ...
- 17.3k
5
votes
Does a transgender person become a different person after transitioning?
Philosophy makes a distinction between the identity of material objects* (and immaterial objects if those are thought to exist) and what is called "personal identity." From the Stanford ...
- 2,831
5
votes
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
There's some great philosophy written on this topic (see Thomson). Suffice to say, even if you assume that a fetus is a child, a pregnant person still has the right to terminate the pregnancy. The ...
- 174
4
votes
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
This remains a subjective debate and it is impossible to draw a clear line, due to the paradox of the heap (also known as the sorites paradox)
If a heap of sand is reduced by a single grain at a ...
- 286
4
votes
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
where is the philosophical line here?
There is no such line post-conception. Human life is initiated at conception, and only disease, injury, natural and innate responses to inviability can terminate ...
- 297
3
votes
Accepted
Would Singer believe a person needs to be self-conscious or just conscious? What even is the difference?
There are two layers mixed here (see this paper for reference):
Personhood
Firstly, there is personhood. Personal life constitutes an almost incomparably high value:
Singer holds a non-speciesist ...
- 12.9k
3
votes
What determines a person's gender identity?
Identity is always subjective. You are not you except to the extent that you experience you-ness. Societies try to find objective means of guaranteeing identity — they will keep records, issue ...
- 16.8k
2
votes
Does a transgender person become a different person after transitioning?
Like so many terms, "person" is ambiguous as to epistemic considerations (what we can say we know of any person) and ontological ones (what exists of any person). If a white canvas has a speck of blue ...
- 2,401
2
votes
Why am I myself rather than someone else?
I formulate this question thus: If Elvis Presley's twin had lived, and Elvis had died at birth, or had never been born, then Elvis would never have existed, even if his twin had been named Elvis and ...
- 21
2
votes
Does a transgender person become a different person after transitioning?
Change of social role or change of person?
None of a person's memories, plans, intentions, history, friendships, and family relationships will necessarily be other than they were before the ...
- 4,030
2
votes
Accepted
How does Epictetus define personhood?
Short Answer
Epictetus was a stoic. Stoics as a general characterization have little regard for abstract metaphysical speculation about the nature of personhood and the divine. As a student of human ...
- 17.3k
1
vote
Is the ideal agent the ideal observer?
Five cents.
According to philosophical traditions like marxism, existentialism and pragmatism, one cannot separate knowledge from practice and interaction.
That is, an observer can only know through ...
- 2,048
1
vote
What is the moral difference between abortion and infanticide?
While a great number of arguments have been advanced in an attempt to justify elective abortion (we'll lay aside the rape/incest/danger to the health of the mother cases for now since those are a ...
- 51
1
vote
The Immortal Jellyfish
Eternal life and youth, rejuvenation to the youthful state - all these are hot topics of the current cell biology and medicine, see, e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41556-018-0206-0 especially ...
- 179
1
vote
What does the term "ego" really mean?
Greetings to Everyone,
“To my mind, "Ego", conveys the idea of the "person" as the one responsible for subjectively making judgments about that which is external.
In non-...
- 11
1
vote
Accepted
What does the term "ego" really mean?
Welcome, gartien asimbahwe.
'Ego' is the Latin word for 'I' but its sense in modern philosophy depends very much on its context. In Descartes' 'cogito, ergo sum' (not his own phrase but a Latin ...
- 35.2k
1
vote
Why am I myself rather than someone else?
In short, if there exists anything at all attributable to you and only you, then you are you and not anyone else.
Consider two molecules of water (i.e., two atoms of hydrogen bonded to an atom of ...
- 42
1
vote
Why am I myself rather than someone else?
It is impossible for you to be someone other than yourself - by definition!
By definition, someone else is different (in some way) from you. If (somehow) you were changed to be the same as the ...
- 1,744
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible