Quote:
Originally Posted by C-D-P
My grandfather could not remember what he had for breakfast the last few years of his life. Would it have been ok to kill him?
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I get what you're saying and it's a good question - however not quite the same thing. Your grandfather has lived a full and conscious life - with awareness, memory, experience, influence, legacy and so forth. So losing his memory now, later in life, does not mean he's never had one.
A foetus has never had consciousness or awareness - in fact cannot even possibly be equipped to know what these things are, has not experienced life or contributed or influenced life, has no concept of anything - is a bundle of sensation and primal instincts and that is all, when talking about consciousness.
Now, that does not make it `ok' to kill it - but what it does is make it irrelevant about asking how it would `feel' to be killed. It wouldn't know. That's my point. Your grandfather WOULD know - and therein lies the difference.
On that note, I cannot remember something for more than 10 minutes these days - 15 if I'm lucky. That does NOT make it ok to kill me!!