#personhood argument

[thepro-lifemovement]

I’ve been arguing with two people on Twitter on whether an unborn human is a “child” or not. They equate “child” to mean “person.” I give them definitions for child and offspring. They ignore and just tell me it’s not a child until they’re born or reached “gestational term.” People on Twitter are just so bad at arguing and logical thinking. I think I’ll just stick with Tumblr.

[autismswagsummit]

Getting a lot of terfs reccomended to me by tumblr's shoddy algorithm so let me make this one thing clear:

This is a blog run by a proud queer and trans gender freak and no amount of attention will be given to the people who hate me for being alive as I am. You do not deserve my time or my attention and my blog has never been and will never be for you.

Goodnight everyone.

[krashlite]

I p I promise I’m not trying to vilify c!Scott but so many problems keep leading back to him the more I analyze this goddamn series and I’m shaking him around like a goddamn ragdoll Sir why are you Like This

Edit: in trying to unpack why he’s like this I went down a very parasocial rabbit hole so I’m j I’m just gonna put that one back in the box actually

[cactusflowerfemme]

“My wife is actually for repealing the 19th amendment and thinks other women should be too” is such a red flag. Is she though. Does she really.

(For my non-American followers, the 19th amendment gurantees women the right to vote)

[ekourege]

ghost is so hard to characterize because there are so many interesting angles. a muted, generally unaffected vessel more void than bug, still living but in a way very detached from convention and feelings. a normal little not-bug under a stiff, emotionless shell that brims with the full spectrum of emotion. curious, or dutiful. prideful or stoic. I'm excited to explore some of these interpretations!!!!

[watermelinoe]

and see how dialogue isn't possible when you block someone who doesn't even disagree with your movement, just with certain premises behind it? see how it doesn't allow for practicing harm reduction or nuance? when i'm struggling to get myself to eat anything at all, which can last for days or weeks at a time, what i do eat needs to count. sorry, i'm eating the cheese stick because it's the only thing that sounds palatable and it gives me seven grams of protein. sorry there's no room for women with eating disorders and deficiencies because "eat less animal products" isn't good enough when your ideology values non-human animals more than women's health. but of course the burden falls on women to make ourselves tired and weak while the male-led industry overproduces and overconsumes. at least you stayed true to your logically inconsistent, female-socialized emotion-based beliefs and allowed for zero compromise! there's no way your airtight ethical philosophy has blatant logical flaws at the slightest nudge of critical thought, the people who point out fallacies are just heartless!

[pagan-corruption]

The pro lifers found my post on why zygote is babby and it's a lot of appeal to authority in regards to biology (which I already addressed) and circular logic. When I say circular I mean like pure, textbook example, circular logic.

Like I have never seen someone hit the speedrun record of circular logic before.

[nicollekidman]

sorry but this is kind of annoying to me. that is the uh. point of this show. 

[mpregdextermorgan]

okay i started reading iola leroy and it's the first time in the two decades since i've read uncle tom's cabin where i'm actually like "i need to reread it" because iola leroy truly feels like an answer to it? i'm very early into it still of course but it reads like an abolitionist pamphlet (which is what uncle tom's cabin is), except slightly truer to life? i've only briefly met them but both iola and her mother marie very much follow the regular archetypes for "good" women in european literature: they're beautiful, well-read, gracious and noble, more of a goal than reality (like cosette or kitty).

then the decision to focus on light-skinned/passing black women is interesting. i think it's supposed to appeal to the sentimentality of the white readers (like a good pamphlet does). like these women are so good, so nice, so close to being just like you wish to be, and yet due to arbitrary rules they're thrown into abject cruelty (i'm not there yet but it seems like this is where it's working up to). and this is what i remember the best about uncle tom's cabin as well, how noble tom was and how unjust his situation was.

[purpleisnotacolor]

Pro-life people have got to stop referring to the unborn as objects.

They're people, call them people! Stop using object gender for people, that's literal dehumanization.

[emberoops]

okay so i am doing some preliminary googling before i reach out to Professional, and there's a framework for personhood which breaks it down into multiple different categories, which i think is very helpful?

like, it talks about moral personhood - which isn't what most people mean, but includes both regular people and corporations - the capacity to behave in a moral or immoral way, and going along with that, the presumed obligation to behave in a moral way. i can think of some people who would object with this notion (goldwave, im looking at you mostly, although im sure there are others who would object also)

then theres metaphysical personhood, which is what most people are discussing, and the qualities that make someone a person in this way aren't pinned down; it's very hotly debated. there's a number of different schools of thought who all view this completely differently.

there's physical personhood, which is mostly not debated but is also viewed very differently by different schools of thought

and there's legal personhood, which is important to the novel, but not the question of it. like, it's integral to the setting, and probably i will have it so that legal personhood has been extended to artificial lifeforms, but that doesn't answer the question of what makes a person, really, because the type of personhood the book is about it more metaphysical.

anyways, this breakdown is really useful. i can automatically say that artificial life forms would be moral persons in this setting; they have ethical programming, surely. if you understand what is moral and immoral, you have to choose between them; you behave in either a moral or immoral fashion. having the capacity to understand these things, i think, is the bar - otherwise people who haven't studied enough philosophy to have a strong system of ethics could be argued to not be moral persons, and i disagree with that. (I don't think the argument would be sucessful, anyways.)

the article i read also breaks down some of the proposed qualities of metaphysical personhood, and this opens the door for a sort of metric through which personhood can be evaluated.

[roobylavender]

i think one of the most frustrating things to see whenever people get into spats about bruce’s romances is the intentional reduction of selina as a character solely in pursuit of establishing her as the superior love interest. it’s baffling how people retroactively rewrite her history prior to helena’s introduction via the idea she was always written to end up in a marital relationship with bruce. selina was set up as a formidable femme fatale counterpart to bruce and maintained a significant independence as a character for years despite expressing her occasional sympathies with him. the earth two story where she ended up married to bruce did so and killed her off within its first five pages to prop up her daughter’s character, and the subsequent earth one stories of the 80s near completely reduced selina’s personal priorities to being with bruce rather than keeping the focus on any of her moral complexities. obv the way their romance can be executed effectively varies but i don’t understand how no one sees a problem with arguing that selina’s one true purpose is to be the love of bruce’s life. it completely erases any contention with her personal circumstances or morals bc in any scenario where this ideology is posited her personhood has to come second to wanting to fit into bruce’s life. it shouldn’t be any prominent bruce love interest’s purpose to be the love of bruce’s life even if you could find a way to argue for it. that’s the last thing i would be worrying about when approaching female characters within a genre that already affords them so little consistency outside of their relationships with men 

[angelsaxis]

Severance is about capitalisms destruction of personhood

[lumalalu]

man it makes me so mad when people try to punish transphobes w it pronouns

[quijotesca]

Is this real life?

Basically, a pregnant woman claimed that she should be able to drive in a car pool lane because fetuses are people. And yet they are not.

[carpathxanridge]

what this has taught me though is a lot of yall’s pro-choice arguments are not that ideologically sound, or at least don’t get to the heart of the argument. i know there are a lot of common abortion arguments that we like to default to, and none of these are wholly original arguments on either side, but i can’t emphasize enough the process of thinking deeply about these common arguments and understanding what the actual warrant for the claim is.

for example, if you say “a fetus is not a person.” and then the person you’re arguing with says, “it’s a literal human being,” and instead of refuting why the fetus does not have “personhood” in the legal sense and then making a broader philosophical claim that we shouldn’t view a fetus as a person, switching to the argument “okay even if it is a person it doesn’t matter because no person can be forced to be an organ donor even if the other person will die otherwise etc.”…. kind of makes you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about and are conceding that a fetus is a person.

similarly, if someone says “okay but there’s a difference between a nonaction (organ donation) and an action (abortion), there is no moral justification to abort because if the pregnancy progresses naturally the fetus will become a baby”… the crux of that argument isn’t answered by making a convoluted scenario (i haven’t seen it used in this particular argument but i’ve seen it in other context) where “ok someone connected all your vitals to a dude on life support against your will, do you have the moral justification to pull the plug?” no, the crux of that argument is that the pro life person is making an appeal to nature, usually paired with the argument that a pregnancy and its outcome is god’s will, and is suggesting that women’s role in the pregnancy is passive, just letting nature take its course. you might better be able to engage that particular argument by interrogating “why isn’t abortion natural when there are natural methods to abortion, when medical abortion has only made safer what women have done all throughout history? when miscarriage too is natural, happens in nature all the time, and isn’t always experienced as a loss by the mother—often it’s mundane, a woman’s body making the decision to terminate an unviable pregnancy, often before she’s even aware of it. so why is it natural for a woman’s body to terminate a pregnancy for her own survival and wellbeing, but as soon as she wills it and takes steps to do so it’s unnatural and immoral? yes, abortion is an action, but why do you see it as a perverse and immoral choice for a woman to make equivalent to murder, rather than her natural domain?”

and following these kinds of lines of questioning (rather than just switching to another stock pro-choice argument) will always get you closer to the heart of the disagreement, that which cannot be resolved over the course of a single conversation. which is that feminists simply believe that in a humane, moral society, women should get to choose whether or not to bring life into the world, whereas forced birthers believe a fetus is a life from conception, willed by god, and that women must surrender to god’s will.