From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 23:34:11 MDT
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. 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'. 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.
Damien Broderick
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