Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysical Discourses on When Human Life Begins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many people believe that abortion takes a human life and is therefore tantamount to murder. If human life begins at conception, then abortion always involves the taking of human life. Thomas Aquinas, therefore, denies that human life begins at conception. Until the fetus has a human soul – it is not a human being. Thus, to destroy a fetus is not to destroy a human being. Aquinas believes the fetus will go out of existence regardless of whether it is aborted. He alludes that you and I could not have been aborted in the first trimester, because you and I did not exist then. Aquinas believes it is around mid-gestation that a fetus begins to engage in cognitive activity. It is the stadium where the brain has sufficiently develops to support the operations of intellect. If we understand a person to be an individual who possess a degree of self-consciousness, then, the fetus does not qualify to be called a person. This notion has been adopted by the South African Choice of Termination of Pregnancy Act (Act 92 of 1996), wherein someone’s right to privacy or autonomy can in some cases outweigh the value of a human life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".