Ah, dear david. You will find that the Times comments board is more receptive to your kind of thinking. Good bye.

Let me give you a spot of advice, Liberal. When you lay down a challenge on a subject, make sure you know what you are talking about first. Intellectual vanity alone will not get you very far. It may impress a few but eventually you will come unstuck. I am not about to get into the merits and demerits of the abortion debate with you, as you clearly barely even have a passing acquaintance with the matter. When you are prepared to get your hands dirty, you’ll have taken the first step towards earning the right to lecture others. Until then, migrate to the comments section of the Malta Times where you’ll find an audience more suited to your posturing
[with apologies to our esteemed hostess for taking up so much unnecessary time and space].

[Daphne – Well, I was about to tell you that this discussion is now closed. To quote the prime minister and Henley & Partners: let’s move on.]

No, david C, I haven’t had a great deal of experience with abortion. This is due to three reasons: I am not a woman, so I can’t have one; my wife has never had one; and I am not a doctor and so cannot perform one.

Regarding your second question, first of all I never made the claim that “dropping the criterion of being human is a recent amendment to the definition of an experiential welfare” (whatever that means). In fact I have always asserted that both human and non-human animals can have an experiential welfare.

Similarly, I have never claimed that “dropping the criterion of being alive is a recent amendment to the definition of an experiential welfare (again, whatever that means), although it is obvious to any rational being that although all beings that have an experiential welfare must necessarily be alive, it doesn’t follow that all living things have an experiential welfare.

Finally, I never claimed that “dropping the criterion of the capability of being harmed is a recent amendment to the definition of an experiential welfare” (once again, whatever that means). But again, it is obvious to all thinking people that experiential welfare by definition includes the possibility of being harmed.

Please avoid discussing topics you don’t understand. Stick to religion.

Dear Liberal – you haven’t had a great deal of experience with abortion, have you? And is the dropping of the criterion ‘being human, being alive and capable of being harmed’ a recent amendment to the definition of an experiential welfare?

No, David C, you got it all wrong. The rationale behind those who agree with the option of (early) abortion, is that there is no issue at all if there is no person who by definition must have an experiential welfare. I await non-religious arguments rebutting this claim.

Regarding your views on euthanasia (which is rare and practised in very few countries), you are letting your own prejudices distort your views. Euthanasia is either requested by the patient himself, or else the decision is taken on the patient’s behalf when he is in a vegetative state, cannot respond to stimuli, and there is no foreseeable chance that he ever will. If the killing does not meet these criteria, it is simply murder, no matter how much you wish to call it euthanasia.

Incidentally, do you consider doctors who switch off life-support machines to be murderers?

Neither can one have a rational debate if one insists on aping the baseless rationale of the inexcusable. The so-called rationale behind those who agree with the the option of abortion is based on hiding the actual reasons for wanting an abortion behind a smokescreen of distorted arguments attempting to re-classify a sector of the human population as non-human.

Similarly, euthanasia is not about compassion for the sick and suffering, as the pseudo-rationalists would have us believe but about disposing of those whose presence makes us uncomfortable as quickly as possible so that we can get on with other stuff. It is not so much about elevated empathy as about base convenience.

Abortion (whether one agrees with it or not) is not about killing the young. The rationale behind those who agree with the option of abortion is that an early foetus neither has a sufficiently developed brain nor a sufficiently developed nervous system to have an experiential welfare, which is what distinguishes beings to objects.

Euthanasia, on the other hand, is not about killing the old and infirm, but about ending the suffering (with the consent of the individual in question) of someone who is terminally ill in any case.

One cannot have a rational debate if one doesn’t even get the facts right.

I agree with what you wrote, except the bit where you said that the basis of animal rights is compassion. If natural (or moral) rights depended on compassion, they would not be rights, but privileges.

If moral rights exist at all (and I believe they do), they must exist in the bearer of the rights prior to anyone else feeling compassion about him or her.

Animals have been reduced to slavery by man since ancient times. They are made to do man’s work such as carrying huge burdens and they have been subjected to untold suffering on the strength of the argument that, though they are sentient, they are not humans.

Minors cannot exercise certain rights and neither can persons with certain disabilities. For this purpose, courts can appoint curators to take care of the rights of persons who cannot do so themselves. Laws may come into effect so that curators (by whatever name called) may be appointed to take care of the rights of animals, collectively not individually. Such rights would include, for instance, that whenever an animal is required to be put down or transported or neutered etc, this would be done in a humane manner. This does not mean that animal rights will be the same as human rights but they will be based on human compassion with all sentient beings.

The basis of animal rights is human compassion (unfortunately a diminishing commodity in our times). Said Einstein: “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

http://www.nycanimalrights.com/excuses.htm