Yes? There's no reason that we should be committed to saying that only humans have rights. For one thing, if peaceful intelligent aliens showed up tomorrow I doubt we'd want to say that it's perfectly permissible to kill them. More realistically, animals seem to have quite a few rights. Whether or not it's permissible to kill animals for food, people generally seem to agree that abusing animals for amusement is wrong. Of course there may be ways to cash this out without involving rights, but at least the rights-based approach could explain the wrongness of such acts.

My point was that using 'desire' lowers the standard for what constitutes a life with rights. The idea of aliens with human or super-human attributes having rights would still comport with the idea of a higher threshold, so I'm not sure how that could be an objection. Animals may have different kinds of rights, "animal rights," corresponding to their different attributes. This would with our intuition that needless torture of a sentient being is wrong.

Not necessarily. In particular, in order to desire that my life continue I'd need to have a concept of my life continuing. People who take this approach point out, I think rightly, that neither a fetus nor a newborn could have this sort of concept, so they can't desire it. Whether or not newborns can desire anything is another question, but I don't think it's one that either of us is in a position to answer.

I'm not sure why desire would require a concept. Animals are a great example of this. They desire their life without having an idea of what their life is. At least any meaningful idea detached from the here-and-now of their existence.

Sure. Soda could be bad for me in a health sense, but it could be good for me insofar as it satisfies my desire for soda. The most promising account of harm these days turns around desire-satisfaction, so I assumed that that's what you meant when you said "harm," but maybe you had something else in mind.

Sam desires, at this moment, to kill himself because he's been bullied. Would Sam be harmed by the satisfaction of this desire? I think most would say 'yes.' Even in the soda example, someone not getting what they want seems a far cry from being harmed- since we can desire things that are harmful to us.

Except in the case of actual persons, they already have rights that can be frustrated by killing or whatever. If we kill a potential person, however, then the rights that we would be violating if they became an actual person never come to exist. And you can't violate non-existent rights.

Right. So given this, we can speak to a crime committed against someone in terms of the damage done to them at that time and violating their rights. However, we would not be able to speak of the harm done by depriving them of a future- since we cannot be sure they had a future (despite being a living adult). This seems odd, and the authors do seem to believe that future harm is a crime against "actual" people.

Let me put it like this- if the claim here is that potential people can't be harmed by being deprived of their potential future, then actual people face the same problem. The latter category could be harmed in different ways, but none of them in regard to being deprived of their potential future.

Uh, what? Unless you think there's some vast philosophical tradition proceeding the ancient Greeks, I don't know where you're getting this from. As well I don't see how this is relevant. The practice of particle physics is very recent in the history of natural philosophy or science, but I still take the consensus of particle physicists on issues in their field very seriously.

We're probably talking about the last one-hundred or so years in comparison to 4,000 years of written philosophic tradition (depending on when you want to define the raise of modern academia). The success of the sciences does not entail the success of philosophy. Indeed, the sciences seems to have flourished at the expense of philosophy.

So basically you don't take any contemporary philosophy seriously. Why are you even here?

Because not everything here is about temporary philosophy and I do value conversations with people- I just don't think citing the consensus of professional philosophers on something like abortion settles the matter.

Possibly, but there's no reason to think that that's what's going on with abortion and infanticide.

Well, one reason to be concerned from the outset is that the ideas morality and what constitutes person hood (I prefer, humanity), have been less than clear at every other point in history. Still- I agree that the ideas should be explored with an open mind to the greatest extent possible.