{"id":1849,"date":"2022-09-29T12:36:31","date_gmt":"2022-09-29T12:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/09\/29\/a-common-mistake-in-the-abortion-discussion\/"},"modified":"2022-09-29T12:36:31","modified_gmt":"2022-09-29T12:36:31","slug":"a-common-mistake-in-the-abortion-discussion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/09\/29\/a-common-mistake-in-the-abortion-discussion\/","title":{"rendered":"A Common Mistake in the Abortion Discussion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It is often said that a human fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A human fetus is an actual human life.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And let's be clear that a potential X is not an X. A potential oak tree is not an oak tree. A potential neonate is <\/a>not a neonate. A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker. But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn. And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.<\/span><\/div>\n
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The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities. So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition. You need to find a morally relevant difference — not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference — between the fetus and any born human individual.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is often said that a human fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A human fetus is an actual human life.   Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an … Continue reading “A Common Mistake in the Abortion Discussion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[313],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}