Truth To Power wrote:actual vs potential persons, the physical rather than conceptual sense of "entity" is required. Or is your whole argument just an equivocation fallacy? I was hoping not, but it is by far the most common fallacy in modern philosophy.
That is true in the abortion debate exclusively where fetuses are argued to be potential persons
ipso facto, the contraception debate does not necessitate this and it is not equivocation for the subject of a proposition to be conceptual (and corresponding to physical) and the predicate to be physical in-itself in reference to "entities," the common aspect to the subject and predicate in my syllogism would not be the potential v actual aspects anyway, but "person," Thus, for there to be equivocation with both subject and predicate, I must be using "person" in an equivocal manner, or for there to be a general equivocation, I must be using my definitions inconsistently. Neither is true.
Likewise, potential v. actual assumes a distinction, potential person is conceptual, but has physical referents, which are the conditions/components necessary in which an actual person "becomes."
Truth To Power wrote:But the concept of murder only applies to actual persons, entities in the physical sense, not "corresponding" conceptual ones.
Yes, but its not the destruction of potential persons itself that constitutes the murder, but because potential persons are logically connected to actual ones; hence, potential person destroying is only murder because it is a preemptive action of actual-person destroying. (assuming a particular ethical definition of murder, which depends on your ethical school)
Truth To Power wrote:The caterpillar was a physical entity; but that is not what you seem to mean by "actual" in the case of persons.
The caterpillar is a potential-butterfly, and is potentially a
particular butterfly. If you destroy the caterpillar, you likewise eliminate the particular butterfly
it would have otherwise become. (note my stress on
particular, I will be discussing that below).
Truth To Power wrote:I think it would be easier to understand an argument from logical analogy that had the claimed truth values.
Agreed. My bad.
Truth To Power wrote:No, because the negation does not conserve truth value, as I said before. Even if there is a non-apple that corresponds to every non-grape, there does not necessarily have to be a corresponding apple for every grape.
This would only be true if the correspondent was not particular. All grapes (every
particular grape) are (corresponding to) All Apples (particular apples).
Thus if you eliminate a grape, you eliminate
the particular apple to which it corresponds (not just any apple). This is also the point in using the terminator analogy at the start of the OP.
The Terminator's ultimate (teleological) goal was to kill the leader of the human resistance, retroactively, by eliminating his potentiality (in this case, his mother prior to his conception). My point,
is that the Terminator could have accomplished this same goal by disguising himself as a Gynecologist and permanently sterilizing Sarah Connor before Kyle Reese could impregnate her.
In logical terms, in order to eliminate an actual person that would otherwise come into existence,
one must eliminate the conditions of his potentiality. Thus, if you destroy a person's potential existence, you will as a consequence, destroy his actual existence (that he would otherwise have become) just as destroying a caterpillar would destroy the particular butterfly it would otherwise have become.
This is so common sense, I am shocked it had invoked so much confusion. The fact is, if your eliminate potentiality, you eliminate the actuality that otherwise would have been. The syllogism merely expresses this reality.
Truth To Power wrote:You'll have to do better than that.
Pants-of-dog wrote:Are you arguing that if I die, my wife cannot (in the future) imagine the life we could have had? Because she can.
Sure she can, but how does that "idea" in her head have any potentiality? (it doesn't) What physical referents does it correspond to, without which, the actual you in the future could not be? (it has none)
Once again, just because something is a logical concept does not put in on par with every chimera one can conjure up in his imagination.
Your wife's imagining what you would be like in the future
is not the same as your potential-self. Your potential self assumes real potentiality and therefore has real physical conditions attached to it. Imagining something that cannot be or is impossible is completely different.
If you die right now, your potential-you is gone. It does not matter who "thinks" about what you might be like, those ideas or concepts are not connected to real conditions,
potential persons are. In the case of contraception, I can imagine what a child of mine would have been like had I not used a rubber, but that is not the same as the real potentiality that existed in the midst of intercourse, for during that moment of time, the physical conditions made the arising of an actual person
a real potential. That potential-person was destroyed by the use of contraception
and thus the corresponding actuality that otherwise could have been was likewise destroyed. Its that simple. Pants-of-dog wrote:Actually, you are attempting to benefit from the confusion by pretending that potential people also have identities as I do.
Pure Presumption.
Pants-of-dog wrote:This disregards biology as you are assuming that a specific person will arise from a specific sexual union, which is incorrect. From any one sexual union, there are millions of possible specfic people, and they are all tied to the same physical objects.
The potentiality will always match the actual entities, which in the case of potential persons that are destroyed, is not known to us. We know that, controlling for extraneous circumstances (all things being equal), when conception is possible, coition will result in said conception. Whatever potential persons (including the number of such) exists under such conditions is not known (and it does not matter), but according to the logic of the case, its always at least one. So in contraception, at least one potential person and therefore at least one actual person is destroyed. This is because whatever particular or specific person that would have otherwise existed (which included their particular identity) was made to not exist because their potentiality was eliminated via contraception.