Admittedly, some people wouldn’t be caught dead talking about souls or spirits. But even for those people who would explicitly reject the notion of a body-soul split, dualist assumptions still frame how these issues are thought about. You can see this when people appeal to science to answer the question "When does life begin?" as if this is an empirical question, and an objective answer would settle the moral debate once and for all. But the question is not really about life in any biological sense. It is instead asking about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells becomes more than a mere physical thing. It is a question about the soul.

Interesting talk.