🚀 go-pugleaf

benny_patrick@hotmail.com (Fabrikant) wrote:
> It does not really make any moral difference, that the
> scientists have created the foetus.  The killing of the foetus is
> either legal or it is illegal, regardless of how it was created.

Legal vs illegal is a matter of law, not a matter of fact.  And the laws
can be written any way people want to write them.  There's nothing
technically wrong with a law that treats a "natural" fetus different
from an "artifically created" fetus.

> Here
> is my understanding of the situation.  Any human cell (egg,
> spermatozoa, etc.) is the property of the person from whom it was
> taken, and this person can do with it whatever he wants.  This right
> of property continues until this cell (or group of cells, including
> foetus) can survive on its own.  From the moment it can survive on its
> own, it becomes a separate human being and has full protection of the
> law.

That's a good place to start, but the laws will need to be much more
complex than that in the end.

The laws will need to address the moral concerns of the people, so that's
going to require a complex set of rules (such as who is allowed to create
life and who is allowed to kill life, and under what special conditions,
etc.).

It's going to take a LONG time for society to get used to all this.

> The cloning will and should proceed.

Well, I'm on the side of "sure clone ahead".  But you really don't want to
create a big riff in society by allowing too much of this when socity as a
whole just isn't ready for it yet.  It really is a lot more complex than
many people realize.

Cloning humans of course will advance science, and science is something you
should never stop advancing.  We need to understand everything.  But not
only do we need to understand the science, we also need to understand how
to create a society which can live with this knowledge.

The atom bomb was knowledge so powerful that it could have (and may still
one day) distroy us.

Cloning of humans, and genetic engineering in general is likely to be far
more dangerous than the atom bomb.

We can't solve the "dangers" of this technology by pretending it doesn't
exist - by simply making the technology illegal.  The science and
technology of all this will advance, even if it's made illegal.  But we
want to advance slowly and make sure we aren't opening a Pandor's box which
we later find we can't control.  The box will open one day, but we want to
make sure society is ready for it before we open that lid.

For example, what happens when we get to the point that we can manipulate
human DNA and grow any type of lifeform we want in the lab.  i.e., just
manipulate the DNA on the computer and then hit the "grow" button and a few
months later the "thing" drops out of the machine. (you can do a complete
computer simulation first so you will know whether it will "work" or not
before you grow it).

This is going to create a huge gray area that current society just can't
deal with.  All the current laws and morals are created for "humans" and
"non-humans" (property).  What happens when we have the power to create
humans with the mind of a dog?  What rights will something like this get
under the law? Or maybe a dog with the mind of a human?  Todays' society
just isn't ready for this stuff yet.

Then there's the whole AI problem.  One day, before too long (relative to
the history of man), we will know how to build a machine that can think
just like a human.  When you have the knowledge and power to build a robot
that has all the mental capacity of a human (and more), and all the same
emotional issues and drives, what will happen to society?  Who will be
allowed to build these machines?  What rights will these machines have?
What rights will we have?

As we get closer to these technologies, the world as we know it will change
completely.  It probably won't be like anything you have seen in any Sci-Fi
book or movie (just because anyone trying to predict the future never seems
to get it even close to right).

These changes will happen.  We can't stop them.  But you have to make sure
they don't happen too quickly and cause the boat to rock too much in the
processes.  That really can end up tearing society apart.

So if people want to outlaw human cloning for a few years as everyone
figures out what this means, I have no problem with that.  One day, we will
be cloning humans. But we don't need to do it today just because we think
we can.  There's still plenty more to learn about all this technology.

-- 
Curt Welch                                            http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@kcwc.com                          Webmaster for http://NewsReader.Com/