Debate: Abortion is it right or wrong?
Side: against abortion

No, this is not how it works. There is still sufficient mental activity in your brain, and since we know that people who are asleep or drugged generally do recover, there is no sense in "killing" them just because they were not externally conscious at this exact moment. Perhaps they are dreaming, or perhaps they are on a DMT drug trip. Only in the realm of coma's does it get tricky. The medical field already struggles with issues of ethics in this situation.Mental activity can also be that of unconscious nature. Consciousness by definition involves self-awareness and the ability to control your actions and to make willful decisions. To equate consciousness with ''sufficient mental activity'' is rather ambiguous, because the mind doesn't need to be in a conscious state at all for mental experiences to take place. In any case you are critically deviating from your personhood criterias in favor of more ambiguous characteristics. I may have dreams, but in no way am I conscious. Brain activity is a pre-condition to consciousness, not consciousness itself.So, once again I'm forced to ask what you mean by ''sufficient mental activity'', because the term is quite vague. Does it mean electrical impulses in the brain? You said dreams - not all people dream every time they sleep, you know? Do those who do not dream not have sufficient mental activity?Also, you said that there is no sense in killing sleeping people because we know they will generally recover - we can say the same for fetuses as well. We know that fetuses will ''recover'' after 9 months. But in any case - isn't that irrelevant? Just because they will recover their personhood in the future - that doesn't meant that they are persons now. Mark, you are one of the last persons I expected to invoke a form of the potentiality argument, which you continue to dismiss yourself. A drugged human's capability to regain their personhood in the future has no bearing on their present state. It does not exclude sleeping, or drugged people. Like I said earlier, there is always activity in the brain (otherwise they would be brain dead, which is synonymous with death), and it is fairly likely that they could be dreaming or having a drug trip. And like I said before, the coma issue is tricky.But activity in the brain does not mean that the subject is conscious, which was your proposed criteria. Are you abandoning your criteria of consciousness and the characteristics it spawns (reasoning, self-perception etc)?Because if you do, personhood is no longer the criteria for the right to life - only brain activity is.I disagree. If you were to cut out every single non essential to you, part of your body, you would end up with your brain. Let's say we put your brain in a robot. Is the robot "you" ? This is what you're saying with your body, it came with your brain. But you are not your body, you are your brain.What you're saying is that if you were brain dead, and ceased being a person, you would still qualify for rights. This is ridiculous. If you cease being a person, your brain gets destroyed or something, you are no longer you. You cease to exist. Why do your human rights matter if there is no one home in your body?We still attribute rights to dead people - the right to not have their corpse violated for example. But this is beside the point.I am not my brain in the same way an engine is not a car. I am the person the brain arbitrarily spawns. It is not uncommon for people to lose their memory and become completely different persons with a different set of values, views and morals. While the person may change, the organism that spawned the person will always, in essence, remain the same - a human being.Personness simply cannot be the default definitions for a human. If an A.I is ever created - does this mean that the presence of consciousness/personhood makes the A.I into a human being? It would appear not.While you exist, you are both a person and a human being. But when you cease to exist, for example with brain death, how can you still be a human if you've stopped existing in the first place?You are essentially saying that if I, as a human person , cease to function - then I also cease being a human being.Imagine an arm - it is an appendage that has the function of picking things up, holding things, punching things etc etc. If that arm now sustains enough damage to be unable to do all these things - does it cease to be an arm? No, it doesn't - it merely becomes a broken arm. Just because it loses its functionality doesn't mean that it ceases to be an arm.You however maintain that if my brain ceases to function - I cease being a human being. This is akin to saying that broken arm is no longer an arm. Or that a car without an engine is no longer a car - or better yet, an engine is a car.The entirety of your argument rested on a misinterpretation of person hood on your part. Sleeping humans are still people, as I explained above.But as we've found out, your criteria - sufficient mental/brain activity - has practically nothing to do with personhood at all. You have shifted away from consciousness, reasoning etc. to something even more vague and ambiguous.This whole discussion is about abortion, not the murder of full grown humans. In regards to a fetus less than roughly 24 weeks, it is not murder because it is not a person since it lacks all qualities of person hood.Well, according to you right now, personhood qualities are not necessary at all - only activity in the brain is necessary regardless whether the activity happnes in the conscious state or unconscious state.It is the killing of something that is alive, but people do that everyday. When you take a shower, you kill thousands if not millions of cells. Same thing happened when you scraped your elbow as a child.Except that abortion involves critical damage to the whole of the human in question whereas scraping my skin is quite neligible to my wholeness. A lot more damage is necessary in my case to be in equal proportion to that of the fetus.