Christ in Limbo, by an unnamed follower of Hieronymus Bosch, ca. 1575, via Wikipedia. I think the really important thing about the "frozen embryos are babies" fiasco is the way it revealed that everybody actually knows they are not, right down to Nikki Haley and Donald J. Trump. This is something I've been thinking about for quite a while, not really reducing it to writing beyond the occasional Twitter thread, and I thought I might make it an occasion for laying my argument out at some length.
>a lot of conservatives react very angrily when you say "race is a social construct" because they think you're claiming it doesn't exist
Because they have a notion of reality where the reality of social constructs is inferior, or nonexistent, compared to the reality of say gravity or the Gas Law. At least in some cases this is the problem.
Social realities are not real realities, IOW. Because grasping that social realities are real realities requires the capacity to inhabit other mental and moral landscapes than your own. Which is almost exclusively the province of people who aren't conservatives.
yes--they're turning the Great Chain of Being upside down (obviously social reality is infinitely richer and more complex than cell biology and can never be reduced to it)
Ah, I missed your finale at the blog stand. Calling the soul "socially constructed" is blasphemy. The soul is created by God, not society. A Believer would be horrified by this claim. This is why they had to abandon the argument that a fertilized egg is a human being because it has a soul, created and endowed by God, because only Believers find this a compelling argument, and they need outsiders to agree with them. All the shouting and handwaving about "babies", such as the heavy promotion of "late-term" abortions as a common occurrence, is meant to convince people who don't want to think too deeply about it, or much of anything that defines who they are, where they belong, and what they believe.
Your argument is a very elegant summation of how a society not based on magical thinking should look at human life, but that's not American society. I am grateful that you made it, though. Far better than I could do. Thanks.
Thanks for that. I disagree a little bit on American society. Like Nancy Reagan switching her view on stem cells (another thing accused of being for abortion), I think Americans are pretty good at bypassing magical thinking when they're personally interested. It's just that we usually aren't.
The whole "ensoulment at conception" doctrine is entirely a post-modern invention, which would not even have been possible to hold before the scientific clarification of what exactly "conception" means in terms of biology. Which ties right in to your cite's observations about the awkward consequences of insisting on that approach to figuring out who's a person and what's not.
It's likewise with death, where we have worn through a succession of rules-of-thumb about when life is over ("heart stopped beating" through several stages to "cerebral EEG flatlined") just in the course of my lifetime.
I remember being outraged, as a young biologist, when some First Wave Religious Right Republicans, probably in the Senate, organized some hearings on abortion issues and called various witnesses to testify that "actual human life" begins at the moment the ovum fuses with the spermatozoon, as though it were possible for a scientist to give testimony to that effect. Several *did*, which also was an outrage.
"Is this entity a person" is not a question that you should be asking biologists to answer in their professional capacities. It is a question for the ethicists. And for a discussion on the pitfalls of deontological approaches, consider Religious History Nerd's latest. The best we can get is those rules of thumb.
>a lot of conservatives react very angrily when you say "race is a social construct" because they think you're claiming it doesn't exist
Because they have a notion of reality where the reality of social constructs is inferior, or nonexistent, compared to the reality of say gravity or the Gas Law. At least in some cases this is the problem.
Social realities are not real realities, IOW. Because grasping that social realities are real realities requires the capacity to inhabit other mental and moral landscapes than your own. Which is almost exclusively the province of people who aren't conservatives.
yes--they're turning the Great Chain of Being upside down (obviously social reality is infinitely richer and more complex than cell biology and can never be reduced to it)
Ah, I missed your finale at the blog stand. Calling the soul "socially constructed" is blasphemy. The soul is created by God, not society. A Believer would be horrified by this claim. This is why they had to abandon the argument that a fertilized egg is a human being because it has a soul, created and endowed by God, because only Believers find this a compelling argument, and they need outsiders to agree with them. All the shouting and handwaving about "babies", such as the heavy promotion of "late-term" abortions as a common occurrence, is meant to convince people who don't want to think too deeply about it, or much of anything that defines who they are, where they belong, and what they believe.
Your argument is a very elegant summation of how a society not based on magical thinking should look at human life, but that's not American society. I am grateful that you made it, though. Far better than I could do. Thanks.
Thanks for that. I disagree a little bit on American society. Like Nancy Reagan switching her view on stem cells (another thing accused of being for abortion), I think Americans are pretty good at bypassing magical thinking when they're personally interested. It's just that we usually aren't.
Fair cop. American shallowness is our great weakness and great strength.
The whole "ensoulment at conception" doctrine is entirely a post-modern invention, which would not even have been possible to hold before the scientific clarification of what exactly "conception" means in terms of biology. Which ties right in to your cite's observations about the awkward consequences of insisting on that approach to figuring out who's a person and what's not.
It's likewise with death, where we have worn through a succession of rules-of-thumb about when life is over ("heart stopped beating" through several stages to "cerebral EEG flatlined") just in the course of my lifetime.
I remember being outraged, as a young biologist, when some First Wave Religious Right Republicans, probably in the Senate, organized some hearings on abortion issues and called various witnesses to testify that "actual human life" begins at the moment the ovum fuses with the spermatozoon, as though it were possible for a scientist to give testimony to that effect. Several *did*, which also was an outrage.
"Is this entity a person" is not a question that you should be asking biologists to answer in their professional capacities. It is a question for the ethicists. And for a discussion on the pitfalls of deontological approaches, consider Religious History Nerd's latest. The best we can get is those rules of thumb.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thereligioushistorynerd/