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Watch Tacitus equivocate:
it's not convenience, but humanity that is the core question. Is the fetus, embyro, blastula, et al., human? There are only three possible answers: provably not, provably so, or possibly. We can discard the first, since even pro-abortion, anti-life types implicitly concede the humanity of the fertilized egg and beyond by dint of their position on stem cells, the purported utility of which is premised entirely upon their humanity.Tacitus uses the word "humanity" to mean two different things. In the first sense, the sense in which humanity is indeed important, having humanity is having a certain moral standing and deserving moral concern from others in something like the way that adult, living human beings do. In the second sense, having humanity or "being human" is simply a matter of falling into a particular biological category, as stem cells do. The two concepts are wholly distinct. Galadriel, Lt. Worf, and Chewbacca have humanity in the first sense but not in the second. Corpses, spilled blood, and stem cell lines have humanity in the second sense and not the first. The humanness of something is no guarantee of humanity, and vice versa. --Neil the Werewolf
