the endless debates about exactly when in the development of an embryo it becomes human (and when, by implication, abortion should be regarded as tantamount to murder). It is no use saying to these people that, depending upon the human characteristic that interests you, a foetus can be ‘half human’ or ‘a hundredth human’. ‘Human’, to the qualitative, absolutist mind, is like ‘diamond’. There are no halfway houses. Absolutist minds can be a menace. They cause real misery, human misery. This is what I call the tyranny of the discontinuous mind, and it leads me to develop the moral of the
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