But is there? Is not the definition the thing on which the rights are presupposed? If A, then B: if human, then has rights?
Jnyusa wrote: There's a difference between being human by definition and having the rights accorded to a human.
Jn
A side note--many laws, when dealing with semantically tricky issues, include a beginning section which states something to the effect of: For the purposes of this Act, X shall be defined as Y" and yet the definition of the beings to whom all these laws applied is taken for granted, treated axiomatically, whether it should be or not. Curious.
It is true that science can supply only the factual descriptors of a being's state: genetics, viability, functionality. But must the process of deciding which of these will comprise the definition of "living human being" be extraempirical, or can a logical method be formed that would do the trick?
Certainly a few logical universals make sense, in terms of narrowing the discussion, but narrowing is not defining. Shakespeare WAS human, for example, but is long dead, his body disorganized at the molecular level. So an entire class of potential humans can be ruled out, but the converse is not true--having a body is required, but not sufficient. This can be applied for a number of conditions, "boxing in" as it were the definition, but never absolutely and precisely. The ultimate question, I think, becomes one of which of two alternatives this negative approach to definition yields:
One: a situation in which an example can be found to which no further boxing can apply--an "I don't know" answer to the "is this human life"
or
Two: a situation in which there is a defining line irresolvable by further reductive binaries--a Zeno's paradox-type situation in which there is always a yes/no answer to "is this human life" but without Cartesian certainty as to whether any other future answers will end up on one side or the other of the question.
I think the problem is that we have here a discrete function that we want to be continuous, but which cannot be made so through logical means. We have a large supply of data points representing potential human lives, and can make logically based decisions as to whether or not any given one of them is human, but as the supply is not infinite, we cannot derive therefrom a boundary between the classes, and being human, we want a solid boundary, a continuous line.