1. The Metaphysics, of Language of Abortion.

With any talk on subject, especially one involving philosophical analysis, one must be clear in what one is talking about. For example, one can of course define the words 'human being' to mean whatever one wishes, allow the category 'humanity' to include whatever one wants. Nature does not have the distinctions we use embedded in it, we impose them. Perhaps upon a certain suggestiveness, perhaps not; certainly for the explicit or implicit purposes we have. For the problem of when human life begins, there can be no settling by recourse to any empirical tests, there can't be such tests. This is a problem of language: what it is one means by one's terms, what it is one includes in one's categories.

One important language problem in discussion on abortion is that of the confusion of identifying 'human being' with moral being'. It doesn't follow simply from the fact that something is called 'hum-in being' that it has any official status: one assigns this, and not in metaphysics, one's description or attitudes about the world, but in ethics. Values are not found in the world as objects are, we impose them. Strongly, whether one regards the foetus as human or not is irrelevant to how one ethically regards or is to treat it.