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For me the contradictions inherent in giving human rights to the mentally incompetent are irrelevant. We give rights to such people because of irrational human sentiments that cannot be ignored and the potential for people with a different kind of irrational sentiment (prejudice) to take away the rights of healthy individuals (see the history of lobotomy or  ). Trying to be all beep boop logical about it leads you into Peter Singer territory.And we give personhood to babies because babies become adults.
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Dec 24, 2014 17:51
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 03:53 |
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Humans giving preferential treatment to other humans seems pretty much universal. A blanket personhood is applied to humans because we can't accept the logical consequences as a society and we shouldn't accept what unethical people will use the revocation of human rights of mentally incompetent humans as an excuse for (again, look up lobotomy. Rebellious teenagers got declared insane so their brains could be carved up). Legal insanity is necessarily but on dangerous ethical ground already, making the mentally incompetent into unpersons would is unacceptable. These cases are exceptions to the rule that a person is an agent capable of consenting to and abiding by the social contract. Animals cannot follow the social contract and the dividing line between H. sapiens and the rest is absolutely clear, unlike trying to compare the sanity or intelligence of different humans, which is murky and ethically treacherous. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 21:01
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