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Not that the title is too presumptuous, or anything. *smile
I've been piecing through how to set this out in a way that is as amenable to conversation, respectful to all participants, and as likely to avoid generating additional surly/frustrated karma in the universe as possible. This is such a potentially fraught topic that I want to do it due respect, and though it may mean that I perseverate on and on and on about extraneous details, so be it.
I'll repost the paragraphs you set out (feel free to add or delete, just let me know what to edit) and a recap of your request for my thoughts re: status arguments in general shortly. First, I'm going to tangent off in my next post about what I find particularly useful to keep in mind regarding discussions about reasoning per se.
posted
It seems like you are going to add more to this post, I guess. Did you catch my housefire:miscarriage::arson:abortion analogy I presented a while back on the other side?
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
On Reasons: The "because ofs" and the "besides"
Sometimes discussions about reasons get mired down in a confusions about what is being claimed and what isn't: i.e., about what is a substantive claim, what is just an aside, and what may lie somewhere in between. Formal logic has its own means of diagramming these relationships, but that system has its own problems, and it seems unnecessarily complicated for us.
However, I do think it's useful to distinguish between substantive claims which one takes to be real "reasons" for accepting a certain conclusion (aka "the because of-s") as opposed to things which may offer incidental support, but whose truth value doesn't really affect the strength of support for a position overall (aka "the beside-s").
An example:
Suppose one says that "I think Vancouver, British Columbia, is the place I want to live. My husband will be living there, and it's in Canada (which is a country that I love), and I've always wanted to live on the west coast. Besides, it's a very multicultural, with more than 30% of the population speaking either Cantonese or Mandarin. And I hear there is great salmon, too."
Now, this is a whole list of reasons all kind of jumbled together, much like in any regular conversation (or, frankly, what goes on in my head at any given moment). These reasons are likely to carry different weight, though, and only some of them might really be relevant to drawing the conclusion that BC is the best place for this person to live. The rest might be incidentally relevant or appreciable, but if they turn out not to be true, then it wouldn't necessarily affect the conclusion.
For me, "my husband will be living there" is a "because of" reason. That is to say, if it ended up that he'd moved to Guelph, Ontario, instead, then BC would no longer be the place for me. In contrast, the "west coast," "multicultural/multilingual," and "salmon" reasons are just what I would call "besides" reasons. That is, it would be great and cool if they were true, but if it ended up that I was wrong about one or more of them (say, for example, that Vancouver were really on the west coast, or slightly inland, or not as diverse as I'd thought, or the salmon there sucked), it wouldn't really matter to the strength of support for the conclusion that BC is where I want to be.
I'd say the "Canada" reason given above lies somewhere between "because of" and "besides." It is relevant to my conclusion, but not a deciding factor. That is, if Dave were moving to Vancouver and I found out that Vancouver was in some place with ongoing horrible internal civil war, I may or may not decide that I should move there, too. The strength of support for the conclusion would be affected in some way, even though it isn't necessarily a deal-breaker.
All this is to say that I think it's useful sometimes to figure out for ourselves which general category any given reason we have lies, and it's also sometimes useful to ask one another (when we are not sure) whether a given reason is a substantive structural reason, or whether it is just a "besides which, this is something good that would follow, too (even though if it should turn out not to be true, that doesn't really matter much)."
Are you okay with this? Make sense? Make things less sensible?
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Originally posted by pooka: It seems like you are going to add more to this post, I guess. Did you catch my housefire:miscarriage::arson:abortion analogy I presented a while back on the other side?
pooka, I haven't read through in detail the parts of that thread that occurred after my last exchange with Dagonee. I've been so busy, and I wanted to at least address that commitment, first! But I will go back once I get what I need to out here and have caught up with Dagonee here. Of course, you should feel free to bring up your points here again if there is a good spot in the conversation -- it's a totally open thread.
I do promise I will get back to the other thread eventually, though. I have a lecture to get to in 45 min though, and there's a lot of stuff left to do tonight with work stuff.
Nice to see you again! )
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Would you mind outlining (in a very general way such as I did a few posts above) a theory of human life as determined by status? We're both using the terms now without any kind of outline on what we're talking about.
One particular question I have is whether status is the determinative factor - that is, a living person exists because this status exists - or merely indicative - we know a living person exists because this status exists.
Sorry, CT. Any time you're talking about sexual reproduction in any way, shape, or form, you're gonna get a few immature gigglers. *hangs head*
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I would hope any parameters on the definiton of a person would be better than those lame ass planet definitions.
Okay, so I'd definitely start with "member of the human species".
There was an article someone linked to in an abortion debate thread about life consisting of the tendency of an organism to be physiologically self-governing, to maintain homeostasis and appropriate growth. Embarassingly enough, I would compare this to the "gravity" parameter of planethood- that something has mass enough to hold itself in a sphere-like shape.
A fertilized egg has enough physiological autonomy to begin growing without a human host. There does come a point when in order to continue, it has to implant on a vessel-rich lining where a placenta can be formed. (Have there been cases of natural extra-uterine implantation or is that some crazy thing my mom heard somewhere?) Now I think this hasn't been pursued in peer reviewed research for the same reason we havent interbred with chimpanzees (again, there are some reports that the Russians did try such a thing.) It is why late term babies are not delivered early instead of aborted. because it is bad medical practice to subject a fetus to probably disability.
I don't know, it's dawning on me for the first time the oppressiveness of a woman presuming that the late-term fetus doesn't exist unless she wishes it to. It is the same as a man of the 19th century seeing no reason his wife or sisters should vote. It's saying "this person only exists as an extension of myself, to do with as I please." But here we are getting into sloppy analogizing again.
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But I will go back once I get what I need to out here and have caught up with Dagonee here. Of course, you should feel free to bring up your points here again if there is a good spot in the conversation -- it's a totally open thread.![[Wave]](graemlins/wave.gif)
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