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I don't think that's a good example because whilst it's called "potential" energy it is actually a genuine form of energy. A potential person is not a person at all, its not a form of a person it is simply a possible future person, a maybe (which doesn't apply to PE at all).
Ok, more like amortized analysis. Because potential energy is only called energy to have the conservation of energy hold, there shouldn't be any problem using potential here. A potential person, whether a fetus or a baby, owns their potential to become a person. Stopping that potential, allowing the baby to become feral is wrong. Now this abuse is done to a baby, a human being, but not a fully developed person. Are babies persons by your definition?
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If you really want to invoke ownership, then ownership of our own bodies is enough to rule out rape.
Yes, and I'd think those cells are a part of our bodies.
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Your usuage is arbitrary for the reason i layed out in the post above.
You arbitrarly ascribe "ownership of potential" to a fertilised egg, or a collection of cells in a fetus but not to a sperm/egg.
The ethical concept of ownership can apply to the fetus because the fetus is a human being. The sperm and the egg are human cells, but not human beings. They don't have any ethical considerations in of themselves.
Why doesn't this concept apply to the sperm and the egg? Well, the sperm and egg's potential is owned by the respective human beings; their potential cannot have two owners. Of course, the cells could own their own potential without their human counterparts owning them.
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Furthermore one need not base ethics entirely on the concept of ownership, people suffer when raped, people suffer when abused or neglected that is enough to justify their ethical status on utilitarian grounds.
Basing ethics on a slice such as ethical ownership is easier than using a mix of values. Moreover, every ethical decision can be based by ownership, given that society owns certain unlawful freedoms. Of course, ethical laws are different from what's moral, which must be based upon love or higher principle. Obviously someone can avoid criminal behavior while also being wicked. But our laws are to protect the people, first and foremost, while not becoming impractical.
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It is the standard figure i've heard quoted, i can't recall where i heard it first probably biology A-level but i'm sure the medics i lived with mentioned before.
No, there's no standard figure. They're all based upon estimates. But there was recently a new technique--actually predicting greater spontaneous abortions than had previously been indicated--but I'm not knowledgeble enough to evaluate it. In any case, when the fetus as reached a certain point of development, when most of the deformed fetuses have died, then I'd say the odds are pretty good for success.
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If we accept your overall "potential" premise then the only conclusion is that we encourage, nay force, all women to start having children the instant they reach reproductive maturity and only stop when their dead.
No, as I mentioned before, these women have reproductive rights, and they can choose whether to have sex or not. In other words, the potential they have to reproduce is owned by them. They don't, however, have the right to kill another human being, because each human being owns their ethical potential to become a person. Furthermore, ownership of potential doesn't mean fulfilling the potential is necessarily a good thing, only that whoever owns the potential has the right to do as they please.
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Issues of abortion (or indeed almost any modern ethical debate) fall outside core ethical principles and so we must appeal to some kind of theoretical treatment to resolve them.
No, I don't think so. Abortions are well attested to as being wrong in early literature. The Didache banned abortions, associating it with infanticide, and I'm aware of an early Christian authors to have used abortion (as one of many issues) to attack pagan roman culture. Presumably the author believed the roman he was arguing against had similar thoughts upon abortions. Zorastrians, too, wrote against abortions. For these authors, however, their ethical systems were more based upon gut-feelings, along with their perception of natural order. ( ie., they could reason that God created the fetus, and taking the fetus' life was wrong. )
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From a utilitarian perspective we can justify murder as wrong because most people have loved ones who will suffer if they are killed. One could propose a thought experiment where our victim does not have any loved ones, but such a thought experiment is meaningless because (atleast statistically) in the real world we wouldn't know that.
Well, not only is that thought experiment valid but someone could go and kill everyone, eliminating all loved ones.