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Comment Re:Tough choice (Score 1) 259

I disagree. Most of those eggs in the supermarket are unfertilized. A fertilized egg is an actual chicken. I just don't care about chickens as much as I do people. You can't point to any one spot in an embryo's development (except fertilization) and say "There. Now it is human." With that ambiguity, is it not better to err on the side of caution?

That's called the argument of the beard, and is a fallacy.

Quoting:

http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/Pages/LogArgBeard.html

This is a paradoxical argument which derives from the impossibility of answering the question "How many hairs does a man have to grow before he has a beard?" Since there is no specific number at which an unsightly clump of hairs becomes a beard, the argument is that no useful distinction can be made between a clean-shaven man and Santa Claus.

Another way of expressing the fallacy is in the argument that there is no harm in removing one hair from a beard since it will not stop it being a beard; the argument is superficially convincing until you realise that eventually the beard will indeed disappear, even if it is plucked one hair at a time.

Thus the argument of the beard suggests that there is no difference between those things which occupy opposite ends of a continuum, because there is no definable moment at which one becomes the other: day and night, or childhood and adulthood, for example. This fallacy often turns up in essays that discuss such subjects as the appropriate age for drinking, voting, or driving.

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