I'm excited that Ramesh Ponnuru has responded to my review of The Party of Death with a long article of his own. It goes into a few issues that I would've discussed in the review, if not for length limits. So if you liked Monday's Goldberg-Klein intra-ethnic conflict between this blog and the National Review, sit back and enjoy today's Indian-American action! (We were thinking of hiring George Allen for halftime entertainment, but we decided that'd be a bit too edgy.)
I argued in my review that the rights a creature has (including the right to life) depend on the nature of its mind. Ponnuru responds that they can't depend on the immediate state of a creature's mind:
It cannot be that human beings (or any other beings) have value because they have the immediately exercisable capacity to perform mental functions (or to laugh, sing, love, or mourn). Plainly people who are asleep, under anaesthesia, or in reversible comas have value.
