Life - Personhood, Death by popular decision
Wesley Smith provides a chilling article on where using a metaphysical concept such as personhood logically leads.

Personhood theory would reduce some of us into killable and harvestable people. Harris wrote explicitly that killing human non-persons would be fine because “Non-persons or potential persons cannot be wronged” by being killed “because death does not deprive them of something they can value. If they cannot wish to live, they cannot have that wish frustrated by being killed.”

Essentially, using 'personhood' enables a group of influential 'people' to decide which other 'people' don't meet their standard of living. Essentially, creating a popular decision to decide whose life is worth living and whose life is valuable enough to protect.

If this sounds familiar, just consider Slavery. In the US in 1857 in the Dredd Scott case, the court ruled that blacks (African-Americans) were not people and so with a wave of the metaphysical 'personhood' criteria, slavery became legal, and moral.

You would think we would learn from all the past oppressions that define their own criteria for the value of groups of humans, but here we go again. What is especially sad, is that this is happening again in a country who so boldly claimed the self-evidence truth that ALL men (humans) are created equal.

Read the whole artile
- posted by Alan Grey @ Tuesday, April 05, 2005