termi
bike is short for bichael
Dece1t sentience does not determine whether something is alive or not but it does determine our moral duties towards it. a lifeform of which we cannot say that it is self-conscious, of which we cannot say that it experiences pain (experience being more than the mere reflex of a nervous system) simply cannot hold the same moral status as what we would typically consider a person. asking "why is killing bad" may seem bizarre since we think of killing being bad as self-evident, but it's an important question to ask, since without asking this question we can hardly figure out why different creatures hold different moral status unless we defer to religion (and afaik you're attempting to argue why abortion is bad even if human life isnt special because of the existende of an immortal soul or whatever). if the taking of a life itself is categorically wrong then what difference does it make whether i take the life of an embryo or a cow or a bug or a plant or the president of the USA?
as far as comatose patients are concerned, i would argue they are temporarily incapacitated (assuming they are expected to be able to wake up from the coma), they have already been sentient and arguably still are, they are vastly more neurologically developed than an embryo, and aside from that i would simply grant them the right to live based on their already established wants in life and the connections others have made with these persons. they have a more explicit interest in the continuation of their lives than embryos which have yet to acquire sentience. this may not be a fully satisfying answer, and i concede that it is a moral grey zone, but to say that we cannot ever kill something/a human that has the potential to live leads into even more absurd grey zones, as already demonstrated by myzo.
as far as comatose patients are concerned, i would argue they are temporarily incapacitated (assuming they are expected to be able to wake up from the coma), they have already been sentient and arguably still are, they are vastly more neurologically developed than an embryo, and aside from that i would simply grant them the right to live based on their already established wants in life and the connections others have made with these persons. they have a more explicit interest in the continuation of their lives than embryos which have yet to acquire sentience. this may not be a fully satisfying answer, and i concede that it is a moral grey zone, but to say that we cannot ever kill something/a human that has the potential to live leads into even more absurd grey zones, as already demonstrated by myzo.