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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that There must exist some difference in a human body's origins such that neither natural language nor intuition determines whether that difference alters the identity of the human body.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Kripke's essentialist framework entails that origins are metaphysically determinate even when epistemically inaccessible to intuition or natural language.
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    • 2.The indeterminacy the argument locates is semantic or epistemic, not ontological, so it fails to establish genuine indeterminacy in identity itself.
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    • 3.A body either did or did not originate from a particular sperm-egg pair; vagueness in our concepts does not make the underlying fact indeterminate.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Parfit's reductionist view dissolves the problem differently: personal identity is not a further determinate fact beyond physical and psychological continuity relations.
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    • 2.If identity is not a separately existing fact, then the regress through origins does not produce indeterminacy but rather reveals that the identity question was not well-formed to begin with.
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    • 3.The claim therefore misdiagnoses vagueness in origins as threatening identity when reductionism shows the concept of bodily identity itself carries no hidden determinate content to be threatened.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.For any human individual, we can consider a counterpart with different origins where it is not obvious whether the difference affects who that individual is.
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    • 2.If sameness of sperm is held essential to personal identity, we can further ask whether a counterpart sperm with some different molecules is the same sperm.
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    • 3.Pursuing such questions far enough produces indeterminacy in the identity of the sperm, which infects the identity of the resulting body.
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    Strongest counterpoint
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