From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon May 13 2002 - 23:29:48 MDT
Phil writes
> Here's another vote for infanticide.
Good heavens! You make it sound as though you recommend
the practice ;-) I assume that you mean that you'd
prefer that it to be legal.
> Human infants are really not yet persons.
Quite so. Yet to snuff out a life that requires *so*
little further work in order to cause it to become
human, is heinous. Like you say below, such an infant
should be worth a fair amount of money, and (again,
alas, *if* we had freedom) it should be possible to
sell it into a loving home.
> Clearly a human embryo is not a human being any more
> than a human fingernail is. Just a potential human
> being. But so is every epithelial cell in my mouth
> - or it soon will be.
And of course you understand the difference in effort
required to turn each of those examples into a person.
> Rather than forceing someone to keep an infant alive,
> regardless of the quality of that life, I would rather
> see an normal market in parenting rights, which is
> forbidden by law now (but still exists, for sure). I
> say "parently rights," not "selling children." Once a
> person does qualify as a person, you can't buy or sell
> it, because you can't own it.
Why not? Specifically, what do you see wrong with
gradually moving towards the legal status of children
as property?
(Yes, for many, images of the abuses that would occur
come too quickly to mind: the sexual abuse of children,
and so on. But in normal, healthy human communities
where tradition is strong, and government has not yet
succeeded in destroying productivity and motivation,
such cases will be vastly outnumbered by beneficial
instances.)
Lee
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