So, guess what happened when a bill was introduced to outlaw the waste of any semen (because after all, it is human life, which means that every sperm is sacred, as Monty Python famously parodied), and a man's inalienable right to masturbate was at stake!: of course, all of a sudden pro-life conservatives, completely oblivious to the irony and the double standard, started coming up with the most hilarious and twisted arguments you could ever imagine.. Al Madrigal reports:
Of course, philosophers mostly agree that the question of personhood is actually kind of irrelevant. Mainly, it's just an emotional distraction that does no ethical explanatory work, only emotional work...
And in case you're not following the Monty Python reference, here you go:
''Every Sperm is Sacred'' remains as one of the greatest 5 minute skits, in movie comedy history!
ReplyDeleteNearly everybody agrees that killing a human life is wrong but what is disagreed upon is the point at which a life becomes human. Is a sperm an individual human life or a cell within a human life? How about a fertilised egg? How about a foetus? How about a foetus that responds to stimulus? How about a concious foetus? How about a newborn baby? How about a dependent 1 year old?
ReplyDeleteActually, the wrongness of killing is not relegated to the fact that a being is human (the arguments for the "sanctity" of human life simply do not hold up to rational scrutiny) but to a combination of sentience and consciousness. If you have a patient who is brain dead, for instance, that patient may be human (a member of the homo sapiens species), and there may be all kinds of emotional reasons why we might not want to kill him, but if we do kill him, we would not be doing anything wrong to him, since there is no longer a him who could be the harmed. That's part of what I meant by arguing that the question of personhood is actually kind of irrelevant.
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