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The usual argument against granting suffrage to people below voting age is that their mental capacity is not sufficient to form useful political opinions, and they can be influenced to vote a certain way by people around them. However, the same applies to senile and people with cognitive disabilities. Since those people have a right to vote as long as they have reached the voting age, is the argument still valid?
Does any other argument remain against granting suffrage to people who haven't reached that age?
Should we abolish the voting age, or are we wrong in not revoking suffrage from the cognitively impaired?
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I'm finding it hard to see what would be wrong with the act of a sex-selective abortion. It may reveal something deeper about the mindset of the person who opts for the abortion, but that mindset existed before the abortion, and afaik thoughts aren't often argued to be wrong by themselves.
The abortion itself, though, harms nobody, as the fetus is not a sentient being capable of being harmed. Is the idea repellent only due to a reflexive reaction to sexism?
From Wikipedia: "Clive Wearing (born 11 May 1938) is a British former musicologist, conductor, tenor and pianist who developed chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia in 1985. Since then, he has lacked the ability to form new memories and cannot recall aspects of his memories, frequently believing that he has only recently awoken from a comatose state."
"In a diary provided by his carers, Wearing was encouraged to record his thoughts. Page after page was filled with entries similar to the following:
8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake. (1st Time)
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake. (1st Time)
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake. (1st Time)
Earlier entries were usually partially crossed out, since he forgot having made an entry within minutes and dismissed the writings. He did not know how the entries were made or by whom, although he did recognise his own handwriting. Wishing to record 'waking up for the first time', he still wrote diary entries in 2007, more than 20 years after he started them."
"In a documentary broadcast in 2005, Wearing was interviewed about the experience of his condition:
You're the first human beings I've seen, the three of you. Two men and one lady. The first ... people I've seen since I've been ill. No difference between day and night. No thoughts at all. No dreams. Day and night, the same – blank. Precisely like death.
No. It's exactly the same as being dead, which is not difficult, is it? To be dead is easy. You don't do anything at all. You can't do anything, when you are dead. It's been the same. Exactly.
Yes. But I've never been conscious to think that. So I've never been bored or upset. I've never been anything at all, it's exactly the same as death. No dreams even. Day and night, the same.
The fact that I was a musician. And in love."
Clive can acquire and sustain procedural memories, which is why he's still able to play music very well on the piano. He remembers his wife and that he has children, although he does not remember his children's names.
But, is the persistence of his procedural and some bits of past semantic memory enough to argue for a continuous self, even when that self does not recognize its own continuity?
"He spends every day 'waking up' every 20 seconds or so, 'restarting' his consciousness once the timespan of his short-term memory has elapsed. During this time, he repeatedly questions why he has not seen a doctor, as he constantly believes that he has only recently awoken from a comatose state."
Peter Singer said the following about the 2015 Stubblefield sexual abuse case:
"If we assume that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed, he may lack the concept of consent altogether. This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him; for even if he is cognitively impaired, he was capable of struggling to resist"
It appears to me that the same can be applied to beastiality, where similarly, an animal is incapable to understand the "significance of sexual relations ... and significance of sexual violation".
So, my question is, what could be the nature of the wrong, deontologically or otherwise, and how his arguments for the Stubblefield case can be thereby attacked?
Is it the disabled person's (and the animal's) theoretical possibility of understanding the significance of the violation, had their cognitive abilities not been impaired?
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Ones drawing parallels to some other obviously objective thing that is intangible would be best I think, like math.
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