@Shamar
IMO that's spiecist. We shouldn't be judging by spiecies.

@Shamar
I mean, yes, you cannot become or stop being a human.
But being human doesn't matter.
Or at least shouldn't matter.

@Shamar
IMO, it is wrong to define murder as killing a human.

It's almost as wrong, as defining murder as killing an europid.

btw. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/anthropomorphization.html

@Shamar
Ok, but if you go with such definition of murder, then I'll argue that whether a killing is a murder or not should have no effect on it being morally ok or wrong.

@Shamar
I'm not disagreeing that oppression is the purpose/motivation. Haven't thought about that yet.

As for killing:
IMO it's ok to kill non-intelligent creatures. It is not ok to kill intelligent creatures.
I don't know where to draw a line, i.e. how intelligent a creature needs to be for it to be not ok to kill it. But an average healthy adult human is definitely above the threshold, while a bacterium is definitely below the threshold.

@Shamar
I don't know.

@Shamar
>wait to have for your first child in your arms

Then the irrational insticts will take over. The instincts that were designed by the evolution to maximize the number of living humans.
(Sorry for ruining the mood)

@Shamar
By irrational I don't mean "wrong" or "not real". I mean something closer to "not supported with logical arguments", "not supported with symbolic reasoning" or "a result of thalamus processing, as opposed to cerebral cortex processing".

@Shamar
IOW, a heuristic.

@Shamar
I think that if we only operated on experience, we'd end up with a situation where some people think eg. "vim is objectively and morally good, emacs is objectively and morally evil" and some other people think the same, but with vim and emacs swapped.

@Shamar
But if we move a level of abstraction above, from "I like my editor" to "everyone likes their editor" and from "I should be allowed to like my editor" to "everyone should be allowed to like their editor"
then we can come up with something that both of these groups can agree with.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl As someone who *has* held their newborn children in their arms, I think that infanticide *is* ethically justifiable.

It's much like euthanasia. There's a lot of ethical complexity *around* infanticide - to what extent is the parents' choice free, to what extent does it problematically devalue human life, and so on.

But the raw act of killing a newborn is, in my opinion, less bad than killing an adult chimpanzee; it has greater capacity for suffering.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl As an ex-infant I now have the capability to anticipate the future and feel loss. A newborn can do neither.

I don't think that arguments-from-potential are valid. I continually shed skin cells which are genetically complete and have the potential to be cloned into fully-capable humans. Is it immoral to not clone my shed skin cells into people?

@Shamar @Wolf480pl

Why not?

It's a hypothetical intended to get you to expand on *why* you think human life is valuable.

Because I don't think that merely being genetically-human is the property that makes life valuable, and examples of genetically-human life being worthless are a valuable illustration of that.

For a real example: the HeLa cells are genetically human life we've been experimenting on. Do you object? Why?

This question is the crux of the abortion debate.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl Why should we kill anything at all?

Ideally, we wouldn't!

But we're compelled to kill billions of bacteria every day; we willingly kill any number of plants and animals, and we'll sometimes kill just because it's convenient.

Which is ok, as long as the benefit we're getting from the destruction is worth it.

For abortion the benefits can be huge - children require a huge amount of emotional and financial resources.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl And it's great that you love your daughters and have been able to provide for them!

But not everyone is you!

Not everyone has the same experiences, or will have the same response to the same experiences as you.

There are people who really hate their kids; who didn't want them, regret having them, and resent the sacrifices they've been compelled to make. In that situation both the parents *and* the children would have been better off with abortion.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl
No!

Not just cheaper!

The mother is pregnant for 9 months! During which she's at risk of a bunch of serious health complications. She might get terrible morning sickness. She's prevented from doing a whole lot of things, and, towards the end, she's literally exhausted by it.

Abortion is not JUST financially cheaper!

@Shamar @Wolf480pl
Now, if we happened to be able to remove the fetus from the mother and gestate it outside, *then* abortion would be just cheaper.

And *even* *then* being cheaper is ethically important!

External gestation would take significant resources; those resources would be unavailable for other purposes. If you can treat 100 cancer patients with the resources it would take to externally gestate one baby, is it still ethical?

@Shamar @Wolf480pl And, to be clear, I love *my* daughters. But we planned, we delayed having them until we were ready - both financially and emotionally - to support them.

That's not *just* The Dreaded Capitalism™ that's oppressing women. Even in a post-scarcity utopia where all material needs were freely available having a baby requires a huge investment of emotional resources.

Not everybody has those resources, and not everybody wants to spend them on childrearing.

@Shamar

Also, I think giving special treatment to humans, irrespective of whether their externally observable behaviour is similar to an intelligent creature, or more similar to a worm or plant, is spiecist.