If I didn’t kill a chicken, by way of semantics, I still caused a chicken that would exist to not exist, what the hell are you supposed to call that?
What if two chickens are about to copulate, and I separate them before they get a chance to get it on? I just prevented a future chicken from existing, so did I just kill it?
This is what I mean about this being a semantic debate. There’s no way to objectively measure the “chickenness” of something, especially not in the grey area that lies between disorganized atoms and a fully-formed hen. I don’t think an egg is literally a chicken, at least not early in the chicken fetus’ development. At some point it becomes one, but nailing down the exact moment is not something that’s amenable to rigorous definition. We’re never going to have a scanner that we can train on a developing egg and have it go “ping!” The moment the chicken threshold has been passed.
What if two chickens are about to copulate, and I separate them before they get a chance to get it on? I just prevented a future chicken from existing, so did I just kill it?
This is what I mean about this being a semantic debate. There’s no way to objectively measure the “chickenness” of something, especially not in the grey area that lies between disorganized atoms and a fully-formed hen. I don’t think an egg is literally a chicken, at least not early in the chicken fetus’ development. At some point it becomes one, but nailing down the exact moment is not something that’s amenable to rigorous definition. We’re never going to have a scanner that we can train on a developing egg and have it go “ping!” The moment the chicken threshold has been passed.