Superbabies: Putting the pieces together

The statement quoted by the parent is a moral claim (from which there are follow-on legal implications).

These are all connected. The positive law, lex, is part of the broader law jus, which includes the ius civile, ius gentium, and ius naturale, all of which inform the positive law, or rather, are what positive law determines. Otherwise, what is law? Arbitrary? Of course not, even if in practice it can be. It is a determination of the moral law, which is rooted in the human good which is itself determined by human nature, which itself is or has a biological component. The purpose of the law is the human good, which includes the common good. It is absurd to think these can be considered separately as if they have nothing to do with one another. On the contrary.

> Your statement is a legal claim, but is not backed up by how societies define or think about human personhood.

The Aztecs thought large scale human sacrifice was fine. Am I to take the culturally relativist stance that this was simply viewed as morally good in their culture, and therefore beyond moral criticism and condemnation? Or that I cannot judge their actions from outside their culture, or that in judging them, I would be doing so by my culture's moral criteria?

If we can take this meta view, then we have a problem. This normative claim that I cannot judge is itself a moral claim, in which case you are either appealing to your own cultural norms, in which case it isn't meta, or morality is objective, in which case, I can judge Aztec human sacrifice as objectively immoral.

In any case, closer inspection reveals the incoherence of cultural relativism. We can have debates about moral principles, but once one accepts that moral principles are culturally relative, then it immediately follows that morality simply does not exist, since something like the good either has an objective reality or it does not, and denying objective moral principles necessarily means denying the objective good. To claim that cultures disagree about moral principles is uninteresting as such, since disagreement over what is true is a quotidian fact about human beings, as is the fact that human beings err. This fact does not justify the conclusion that morality is culturally relative, or that facts are culturally relative.

Culture is a medium and a tradition that sustains and transmits knowledge across the generations. It is not in itself a fiction that permits arbitrary invention. Personhood either has an objective reality, or it does not. It is meaningless to speak of convention. What matters is establishing what it is, and whether it is true of the unborn. And, again, closer examination shows that it is. You will not find better support for the contrary position if you do your homework.

> Whether or not the legal framework is morally correct or not is a different issue, but it is worth noting that conventionally, societies also think that human personhood starts at birth, as witnessed by gravestones on which we mark someone's life as starting at birth.

Who cares? Some could claim that personhood begins at puberty. What matter is objective fact.