I never ever said that "human" equaled "person." As we've already discussed, 'human' is clearly defined by being Homo sapiens. "Person" is a legal designation in the US and as such, is a not simply 'human.'
U.S. Code § 8 - “Person”, “human being”, “child”, and “individual” as including born-alive infant
"Human" is objective. The law, and 'person,' are subjective. Exactly what 'ignorance' am I displaying?
Before I write my entire reply ALL OVER AGAIN I want to mention another reason why I stayed away from this site for a long time. Those running the site STILL have a way-too-short time-out setting, forcing someone like me to log in again after writing a long message, before the message gets posted,
and sometimes LOSING that long message in the process! I generally have too many other things to do than to rewrite long messages, when that time-wastage could so-easily be prevented!
Now that that's off my chest, I urge you to keep in mind that the Law existed long before the scientists started studying the concept of personhood --
it is no longer a purely Subjective thing!-- else why would anyone bother to find out whether or not dolphins qualified as persons? Furthermore, modern developments have
proved that there is a difference between the dictionary definitions of "human being" and "person" --and so the definitions need to be corrected. Remember, a living but brain-dead adult human body on full life-support absolutely is a fully-developed member of the H.Sapiens species, and therefore can be called a "human being" --but medically and scientifically
and even Legally, the person is dead, and so it is OK to pull the life-support plug. Even though the body is still alive and human, it is
not automatically also a person!
Since the current definition of "human being" is provably flawed, it needs to be corrected. The simplest way to go about correcting it involves paying attention to lots of ordinary conversations, in which phrases like "snail being" and "dandelion being"
never get used, while phrases like "intelligent being", "alien being", and "extraterrestrial being"
do sometimes get used. By inspection, the word "being" all by itself is a synonym for "person", and the other word in each of the quoted phrases is simply a type-modifier. Since no snail is a person, that's why the phrase "snail being" never gets used.
We can note that the word "being" has another definition, associated with "existence". By that definition, an ordinary snail
can legitimately be called a "snail being" (it
has existence, after all), and that definition is sometimes used by abortion opponents when talking about unborn human entities. Nevertheless, this is a silly thing to do, because Logical Consistency would require us to use seemingly-endless numbers of similar phrases, like "rock being", "door being", "shoe being", "dung being", and so on, simply because all those things exist, too. We generally don't need to waste language on constantly reiterating the obvious, that physical things exist!
Therefore the simple phrase "a human" suffices to be used when talking about some entity that is associated with membership in the H.Sapiens species. A brain-dead adult most certainly be called "a human". A single isolated cuticle cell can also be called "a human" (remember that stem-cell researchers are trying to discover how to make a specialized cell start processing zygote DNA code instead of its normal DNA code, because the zygote
is a stem cell; remember that an ordinary virus can easily make a cell stop processing its normal DNA code, and start processing viral DNA code; remember that "cloning" researchers
have been able to get the zygote code processed, that was originally located in a specialized cell's DNA.) The phrase "human being" should
only be used when talking about some entity that is
both human
and a person --which a cuticle cell isn't, and still won't be even after getting stimulated to start processing the zygote code in its DNA.
A person is a mind, not a body!
So, you should now no longer be ignorant of the fact that the concept of personhood is no longer subjective, since scientists are specifically looking for Objective data explaining how a typical walking-about human qualifies as a person, while most members of most other species don't. Haven't you noticed how restrictions against killing dolphins have been put into place, the more that Objective data is gathered showing how they can qualify as persons? You should no longer be ignorant of the fact that the old-fashioned definitions that equate "human being" and "person" are provably flawed (what IS your Answer to my Decapitation Question?), and need correction.
