I'm reading this book, Sophie's World, about philosophy, and I was reading about Aristotle and potentialities, and remembering this argument I got into with my parents last week...
We were talking about abortion (we're all pro-life) and my mom said something about it being wrong to kill something when it had the potential to become human. And although it's stupid since I'm on the same side as her, the debating side of me couldn't resist being just a little obnoxoius and asking when exactly that was. My mom said it was a fertlilized egg. "Well what about just a non-fertilized egg?" I asked, "Doesn't that have the potential to become a human?" "Not without sperm," my mom said.
"But what about me?" I asked, "Do I not have the potential of becoming pregnant?" I had backed her into a corner with that one... "No, she said, not without sex." "But sex is the means that brings it about, sex is an agent... I right now, being a female, sitting in this chair, do have the potential of becoming pregnant. I do believe that. And if I, without sex, have the potential to become pregnant, why shouldn't an unfertilized egg have the potential to become human?"
I was just being annoying of course, but there is truth to it. I'm not sure if I agree with my mom on when it becomes murder. I don't think her potentialities argument is very strong. If it were, then every month I do not have sex, and the egg in me dies, I am committing murder, which I don't believe.
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