> The French right wing of the senate has made this seemingly unimportant edit: it's not a right to abortion, it's a freedom.

How are 'conflicting freedoms' resolved? If two people have freedom of bodily autonomy, is there a priority?

Or taking a step back, what responsibilities (if any) do we have towards other people?

> Plenty of philosophers have argued that personhood hinges on rational capacity: that a being cannot be said to be owed the rights and protections promised in the Declaration of Independence unless it is capable of higher-level reasoning or unless it has, among other things, a sense of self, and can desire not to be killed. Personhood understood in this way legitimizes abortion at any stage, since what is killed does not, on this view, have rights. But it also legitimizes the killing of infants and young children, of the severely mentally disabled, and some of those suffering from dementia.

> If one rejects this restrictive, ableist understanding of personhood, what are the other options? Some philosophers point out that we do tend to make assessments of moral worth on capacity, but that we tend to make those assessments not on individual capacity, but on the capacities characteristic of the species to which the individual in question belongs. We think it worse to kill a dolphin than an ant because dolphins as a species have more sophisticated rational capacities than ants do. If we understand personhood in this way, then all members of our species — the elderly, the mentally disabled, infants and fetuses — are people.

[…]

> It is possible, of course, to acknowledge the personhood of the fetus and still defend abortion. Half a century ago the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, conceding that the fetus becomes a person well before birth, famously argued that the personhood of the fetus does not make the mother’s decision to kill it unjust. Killing the fetus is unjust, Thomson argued, only if the mother first agrees to carry it. But this, again, is a philosophical question. Do we owe others only what we agree to owe them?

> Some philosophers, like Thomson, think so, but very many philosophers disagree. If I live alone in the woods and wake one day to find an infant on my doorstep, am I obligated to care for it? Or may I simply step over it and go on about my day, until it dies from exposure and neglect? To think I am obligated in justice to help it, as a great many people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) do, is to think we owe things to other people simply because they are people. And if we can owe things to other people simply because they are people, then Thomson’s argument falls apart. If the fetus becomes a person long before birth — as even Thomson concedes — and if we can owe things to people simply because they are people, then we can owe things to the fetus as well, long before birth.

* https://archive.is/y3DVM

* https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/06/05/phi...

What is the zygote/fetus/whatever? Is it human? If it is human, is it a person? When / At what point does it/he/she go from being a not-a-person to being a person? Why at that point and not some other? Do we have any responsibilities to the (non-)persons?

Is it possible to have "objective" answers to any of these questions, or are they 'simply' determined by "subjective" feelings?