Sentience

[theapportioner]

I introduced the example partly to highlight the difficulties of trying to define what is human. I prefer the word "metaphysical" over "moral" (as you know, I like to limit the usage of the latter word to general statements of conduct... but that's just me). Anyway, point is, one can define "humanness" in terms of what occurs when a sperm and an egg meet, the onset of consciousness, the onset of self awareness, intrinsic genetic differences between homo sapiens and other species, the ability to reason, the ability to create language and skyscrapers, the ability to do evil... Whatever. There cannot be a "correct" explanation of what is human because the contexts in which these definitions operate are distinct. The meaning of the word human depends on the context. And for many of us, most if not all of these explanations are relevant in our super-definition of "humanness".

Be aware of the contexts in which you are defining what is human. What happens all too often in the abortion and stem cell debates (and I've been guilty of this before) is that people get the contexts mixed up when using their definition of "humanness" to prohibit abortion and stem cell research -- they take a biological definition of "humanness" and apply it to a moral context without realizing that this is a completely arbitrary thing to do. Science does not make value judgements.

In fact, thinking about this a bit more, I'm seeing how this, if approached in any other way than as a moral claim it can be dangerously misleading. There is a very strong "I believe it should be so" in your statement :it is what we do with our intelligence that makes us "human".

Value is implicit in the statement, yes, as with many such statements except perhaps logical, empirical, and some other ones.