Skepdick wrote: ↑Fri Nov 15, 2019 11:20 pm
So you (the social animal) are going to re-define the ontological status of a human being
No. That's the point -- it cannot be done. A baby is what a baby is. Nobody's opinion is going to change that, whether mine, yours or a whole group's. But Sculptor thinks it will. He thinks a "person" is only as much a person as some group of people want him to be.
And that would totally free the ontological status of a human from being a social definition.
Now you've got it.
A rock is a rock, no matter what you believe it is. A tree is a tree, no matter if you think it's your mother. A dog is a dog, a cat is a cat. Poison remains poison, even if you think it's ambrosia. And a person is a person, no matter what anybody else thinks.
It may be that that Nazi German society defined Jews, Poles, gypsies and the handicapped as non-persons. But their agreement on that didn't make it true. It just made Nazis wrong. And evil.
Meanwhile, social agreement is nowhere near so unproblematic as Sculptor would like to tell himself. Few societies today are anything close to ideologically homogeneous or unanimous on questions of who counts as a person and who doesn't. So this allegedly single-minded "society," or "my society" that has a single opinion is simply a myth. No such thing exists, and social constituencies disagree.
And yet some still talk about "social definitions" of personhood, as if the idea were plausible, or even coherent?
What nonsense.