Well, perhaps, but there doesn't seem to be another one that holds up to any scrutiny. Heartbeat is arbitrary, brain activity is speciesist.
Hah, I'm actually not nitpicking. I think murder has no impact on the person you're murdering.
Radical, no? But a subject for another thread.
Someone's probably a person at about three. When they have an idea of who they are, who other people are and some kind of conception of time (so that they are able to have preferences -- the ability to have preferences, I think, makes you a person). Killing a child of under three -- assuming it was instantaneous and painless -- doesn't hurt the child, but the people who are attached to it. It is an incredibly vile thing because of the inconceivable pain it'd cause those people, not because it is ending the life of a being who, after the act, would not be around to suffer for it afterwards.
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