life - are sperms considered living

recently i got into a debate with this question on hinduism.se ,

as the link given above shows, are sperms considered as living or non-living

as far as my knowledge is concerned, sperms undergo locomotion, senescence, more over the best thing to say they are living is they contain genome, i.e. haploid sets of chromosomes

so in short are sperms living or non-living

Answer

The question of what is living is nothing but a matter of definition. We can only tell you what are the standard definitions of what is a living thing but no absolute truth exist behind these definitions. Therefore, I am afraid that all discussions here will bring anything new to your ethic or religion related discussion.

I want to argue that the @user137's answer is very misleading for two reasons. First, he based his discussion exclusively on the "reproduction ability" definition of life. Second because his definition of reproduction might be misleading as well.

Reproduction is not only cell division obviously. Following this same definition one would not consider a human to be a living things but only to be a collection of living (and non-living) things. It is important to understand that a spermatozoid is just one phase of a life-cycle. This phase yield to the next phase. That's it. It seems weird to say that a kid is not alive just because he cannot reproduce. It seems weird to say that a grandmother is not alive because it cannot reproduce. You can say however that a kid is a living thing that cannot reproduce and at another moment of its life cycle it will be able to reproduce (assuming it will survive to this age). One should not think of spermatozoids as something totally detached from the human phase as we know it. These things just form a cycle and it seems to me miseleading to say that a part of this cycle is not alive. Saying such thing would yield someone to think that two living things create non-living things that by fusion will become alive. That seems weird. But again, it is nothing but a matter of definition. I cannot say that user137 is wrong, I cannot only say that his definition seem neither useful, intuitive nor common among biologists.

You may want to have a look to life-cycle and to understand what are the haplontic and diplontic phases with a bunch of wikipedia readings.

Other concepts such as the ability to synthesize its own components, having a boundary between interior and exterior and ability to response to environmental stimulis are often used in order to define what is a living thing and what is not.