If you believe that humans have a soul and a spirit that begins at conception then there is definitely a reason to care about a single isolated cell.Dilettante said:
When I say life, I'm talking about anything which is alive. I wouldn't say "a life". I don't think that's a meaningful statement. All life is made of cells. A cell is the only discrete living unit which can be concretely defined in space (not time) in a non arbitrary way. Multicellular organisms are not indivisible units of life, and they are technically many lives, not one. This isn't usually very useful information, but it is in this case.
You and I are a bunch of cells. They're all unique. They're all human (which itself is technically an arbitrary concept, but the edge cases don't really occur often enough for it to be a problem). Which ones do we care about? We don't care about all of them. Some of your cells may split off and fuse with someone else's. That makes a new cell, which is more unique than most others for a little while.
Why is uniqueness important? Why should I care? How unique does it have to be?
You would probably describe all this as technicality, but I don't think it is. I think we describe the world in ways that work pretty well, but this is an edge case. There is no reason to care about a single isolated cell.
And obviously a zygote that has the potential to become a human is different than cells sloughed from the body daily.
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