That was when you stopped responding . It ' s because you ' re running around in circles . I told you that If you think fetuses are conscious by any criteria , you don ' t need a full accounting of every aspect of someone else ' s definition of consciousness to describe it . For me , conciousness is not a necessary feature to have rights . It ' s sufficient , but not necessary . Morality is not based solely on if I can harm it , it ' s bad . There are other cases in where I ' d grant morality , outside of experiencing harm like the simple fact that someone is a human living being . Not really . We both know you already understand these concepts , and are merely playing contrarian to avoid defending your own position . I ' m not playing contrarian . I ' m actually trying and hopelessly continuing to show you what I call shaky in your reasoning . Your definition of consciousness is blurry . If you ' re aware of the Sorites paradox , this is exactly the case here . Cogito ergo sum , you think and therefore you exist . This only works for the person expressing it . When you say you think , you ' re already conceding the fact that you exist . You can ' t have that on a third or second person account of that ! I mean , a computer can play the sound of the sentence , that doesn ' t mean the computer thinks . Heard of solipsism ? That some essential part of the characteristics that allow you to think can be measured in both you and those around you . As an example , we can literally detect the presence of activity in the part of the brain necessary for conscious thought . Correction , you ' re having a strictly empiricist stance here . And you should know that one of the most famous empiricists who ever existed , David Hume , explicitely showed why this line of defense doesn ' t work . When you ' re saying that someone thinks and exists and is conscious while you observe that he ' s having brain scans activating , that ' s correlation not causation . I do agree that a functioning brain is required to think but you cannot prove that on purely empiricist grounds . You have to have something else to say that it ' s not mere causation a belief , an epistemological stance , pragmatism , etc . . That these characteristics are not present in fetuses . They have rudimentary brain activity , but the part of the brain responsible for conscious thought has not developed before 28 weeks into the pregnancy . Therefore fetuses do not think , therefore fetuses don ' t meet the criteria you use to determine if you are a person . They ' re incapable of experience . Exactly the same previous point . That if something isn ' t capable of experiencing injustice there ' s no need to ask the question about whether it should be protected from injustice . If something can ' t experience harm , there ' s no need to protect it from harm . That only works for subjective morality . And again , harm is very subjective here ! You do assume that justice only works for the aforementioned parts . That ' s not the case when you subscribe to an objective morality . Morality isn ' t just what it suffices to a society , because societies evolve slavery was considered to be okay in ancient times . What makes you think it ' s not okay today ? Summing up my points Making morality dependent on consciousness could work , but you must thus choose to make morality subjective to a local set of people . It ' s no longer objective , it ' s arbitrary morality is what I feel right , and what I feel bad . We do on here subscribe to a morality which is not related only to feelings . Consciousness is not something we know what it is . Sure , you can tell me that what we know about is sufficient , but you ' ll end up the same way as a flat earth what we know today is not entirely true . There are parts of consciousness we don ' t know about . It ' s a blurry concept . And that ' s enough for me to disagree and use it as the ultimate moral principle .