From: Nick Bostrom (nick@nickbostrom.com)
Date: Sat May 25 2002 - 20:58:40 MDT
Damian wrote:
>At 06:21 PM 5/24/02 -0400, Nick Bostrom wrote:
>
> >As my original post made clear, I
> >am referring to those who assign a zygote moral status on the grounds that
> >it is a potential person. Their objection is met by pointing out that in my
> >scenario the zygote is not a potential person (according to their
> >definition of potential person).
>
>Harvey is right; you're just not grokking the mindset.
I'm under no illusion of the suggestion brining about a mass conversion to
the cause of therapeutic cloning.
> To push the analysis
>to a ludicrous extreme, but one which I think such ethicists would see as
>continuous with the genomic crippling you suggest: suppose you intervened
>so that a developing foetus failed to grow lungs. I assume that in utero it
>would survive handily on energy supplied from the placenta, but would die
>immediately following birth, thereby demonstrating that it was `not a
>potential person'.
This would be problematic for other reasons. For starters, it is very
likely that an infant born without lungs would suffer a painful death,
which would by itself be enough to rule this out. Further, it may weaken
our protective drive and maybe even damage the taboo on killing infants,
which would set a dangerous precedent. It would also have an enormous great
yuk factor associated with it. A more careful analysis might reveal
additional problems.
> How handy as a source of tissues. (I too would find this
>repugnant and impermissible, just to be clear.) Suppose you could tweak
>some genes so that the foetus could not grow more than a basic brainstem,
>just enough for vegetable survival. Such a being would also `not be a
>potential person' but, rather, a kind of botched parody of a human. Mr
>Spock might regard this as a useful project; I think anyone here who finds
>the idea appealing should consider a career in a concentration camp.
I think you are grossly overstating the accusation against those who would
find this idea acceptable. While it's hard not to find the idea of creating
and then slaughtering anencephalics repugnant, it is also hard to make any
good sense of this aversion. Assuming the brain is completely lacking so
that there is no sentience and no hope of any sentience ever developing,
and that by taking the organs of what is in effect merely a human-shaped
lump of flesh we could save real sentient people from misery and death,
then I think it would be very difficult to argue that the right thing to do
is to let the sentients die and the anencephalic continue vegetating; it
seems cruel. And creating an anencephalic might then perhaps be just the
right thing to do, to save human persons. Nonetheless, the yuk factor might
be so extreme in this case that overriding it would constitute a greater
assault on our sense of human dignity than the corresponding gains could
justify. It seems far from clear-cut.
As a transhumanist I feel drawn in two directions here. On the one hand, I
believe it is extra important for those who propose to radically alter
human nature to first of all have some sense of and respect for human
dignity and for life in general; shutting off our emotional responsiveness
in this regard could be a recipe for disaster. On the other hand, I think
we should seek to define our dignity less in terms of contingent biological
aspects and more in terms of our essential sentience and personhood. I
would avoid taking a stance on whether the creation of anencephalics for
medical purposes should be permitted until I knew more about the specifics.
What would be the social context? How much human suffering it could save?
Would the practise in fact dehumanize us or instead encourage us to be more
mature in our moral thinking?
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy, Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520 | Phone: (203) 500-0021 | Fax: (203) 432-7950
Homepage: http://www.nickbostrom.com
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