I distinguish a fertilized human ovum from a human person in the same way I distinguish an acorn from an oak tree and a chicken egg from a chicken. It’s pretty simple, really, and I’m the argument “a person may reasonably be imagined by considering a genome” is fairly astonishing on its own, much less as theology.

Unless you want to buy contraceptives for employees of Catholic hospitals and universities in the US. Your call, just so long as potential human beings (pre- or post-conception, it doesn’t matter) are destroyed.

Language-learning should be one of life’s greatest pleasures (and challenges—we should be encouraging the young, especially, not to think that “difficult” rules out “gratifying” or even “fun”—rather, the opposite.) Learning “foreign” languages as well as one’s “own” should be pleasurable, if often difficult. (There are still so many “Englishes” for me to learn! And more will come after I die, so I can never become engaged with them all…. Sad.) For me, it’s my wonder at the way languages change (yep, English is sure changing—inevitable and wonderful), the sheer profligacy of their growth, that makes me a stickler for standardized grammar and usage, at least for certain contexts. For democratic purposes, we need a standardized form of a given language that we can all share— in civic contexts, for instance. And even standardized forms will change over time—no one need worry about that. But we (speakers of a given “language,” whatever the “dialect” each of us speaks) need to be able to talk to and understand one another, every bit as much as native speakers of wholly different languages do.
This is the opposite, btw, of the state’s banning Irish and the other Gaelic languages (as happened, historically). Irish and English both, I say. Challenging—and also more fun. But a common (bound to be standardized) language is also needed, as well and all the more.

Of course. Which is why I added my “for English-speakers at least” qualification wrt Russian.

So nice to see that someone still remembers the difference. :)

Failure to grasp the distinction is so common that surely language change will do away with it one of these decades. Examples from my collection:

“If the Times had printed only one review of Keegan, readers may take it as a lesser work than McPherson’s, to be sure, but one that deserves a place on the shelf. McPherson’s review suggests otherwise.” (from a reader comment here)

and

“Lamarckism…would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.” (from a defunct Lawyers, Guns, and Money link)

This (mis)usage drives me crazy. Then again, I’m getting older and crankier every day, so a lot of things drive me crazy. (Like when people leave out “that” between “ensure” and a following clause. That file isn’t as big as the may/might one, but it’s growing.)

*****

Second point: surely how difficult a language is to learn is heavily dependent on which language(s) the learner is already familiar with. … ?

Granted. It’s just that as an applicant to grad school and master’s student I had no idea that that mattered at all and this seems to be generally true of new entrants into the program. It’s certainly true that people get hired at universities who don’t have any faculty that personally know your adviser and their work, but I’m claiming this tends to happen only when the university didn’t have any faculty that personally knew the advisers of the other applicants. (For some definition of tends to that’s sufficiently expansive to accommodate the overgeneralization, and some definition of personally know that emphasizes familiarity with the adviser’s work and career, and willingness to argue on behalf of the advisee because of that familiarity, e.g. that the advisee will ‘fit in’ well and be able to contribute to the department’s various research goals as a colleague. I should also mention that I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with this, it’s just a true thing that bears consideration—dependence on one’s adviser’s recommendation is quite strong in a way that dependence on one’s former boss’s recommendation is generally not.)

I think you’re overgeneralizing here. Many potential (academic) employers will care about both the school and the adviser, and what your diss. was about, and other things… Depends on the particular field and the circumstances, I would say. (Written as one whose own foray into the ac. job market of some several yrs ago was not successful, but who is reasonably sure that the identity of my adviser was not the reason for that.)

Conjoined twinship and intersexuality both deserve much more compassion and study than they currently receive. But the existence of hard cases doesn’t exactly make biologists stop talking about organisms and their sex, either.

I genuinely don’t understand. Contraceptive sex is wrong, but it isn’t murder. Choosing not to have sex at a particular time is a human right, not murder. An unfertilized egg is not a person, and therefore its expulsion is not a moral problem of any kind…

On what grounds do you think that a fertilized egg is not a new organism?

I don’t know that we do shrug off implantation failure (see: opposition to hormonal birth control as an abortifacient), but in the natural case what are we to do about it?

The condemnation of contraception is part of the Catholic understanding of the marital relationship. I don’t understand the logic that Catholic stance on contraception leads to an increase in abortions—why would you keep a derivative rule if you’re going to ignore one of the first order? Again, not being consequentialists, the question is what actions are permitted, not what lesser evils we should tolerate. Evil may never be done in the service of a greater good.

In short, why can’t one say that abortion is murder, and that contraception makes otherwise licit sex illicit?