The Christian Vanguard

I wrote the following for my medical ethics class. Nothing in here is original. There were footnotes, but they don't transfer over in a copy-paste.  In this paper, I will argue that abortion is morally impermissible. I will begin with narrowing down questions that need to be answered in the debate. From there, I will examine what it is that I am, then explore why I have moral status, and argue that I am numerically identical to the fetus. Throughout all this, I will be contrasting it with the personhood view, which I take to be the strongest opposing view.  Suppose one day you are washing dishes, and your child comes up behind you and asks, “Mommy, can I kill this?” It would be foolish to answer without turning around and seeing what “this” refers to. If it is a worm on a fishing hook, it’s probably permissible to say, “Sure. Go do it outside.” However, if you saw your child was holding a knife to a puppy’s throat, you probably would not respond the same way. This sho...

Qualitative identity and numerical identity are different in that you can have multiple instances of a thing qualitatively but you cannot have multiple instances of the same numerical thing. Shoemaker uses a suitcase as an example. You can have multiple suitcases that have the same qualities, that it is a certain color, a certain shape, made of a certain material, or even have the same model number. Two people can buy the same suitcase in this sense. But numerical identity is a stronger claim in that it is really unique in what it points out. This numerical identity has an indiscernibility. So for example, if I have a Pen A, and I want to know that it is identical to Pen B, there should be no property that A has that B doesn’t have. So even if I have the same model number of pen, that Pen A is in my left hand while Pen B is in my right shows that there is something Pen A had that Pen B doesn’t, which is a particular location, and would thus be qualitative identity. There would be no s...

There is the view that ones gender is whatever you feel. I've heard this view in my schools philosophy club, and you can see it in the popular media here . But the criteria that gender is whatever you feel is too vague. Of course, those LGBT advocates want to say that if you feel like a boy or if you feel like a girl then that is your gender (or any other sort of gender according to these people, since according to them it's like infinite). But what kind of feeling is the feeling of "boy" or "girl"? We know there are feelings like anger, happiness, pain, anxiety, and boredom. But they don't say "My gender is boredom because I feel bored." (Well, I have heard one of their advocates say that being a rock is a gender, so maybe I shouldn't put this pass them, but I think a more serious advocate would say that's not possible) No, the type of feeling one has as being a boy or girl is a different kind of feeling as being angry. But the defin...