What's Wrong With Cloning?

MHGinTN ^ | 1/31/2003 | MHGinTN

[hocndoc]

You are comparing normally functioning complete organisms with dead organisms or portions of organisms.

[hocndoc]

Excellent
First, do no harm.

[hocndoc]

That knowledge is not present at birth, realpatriot.
You are describing a function or capacity that we can assume will be present in the human if we don't kill him early in life. Must every function that is considered normal for a species be present at the moment you decide whether he has the human right not to be killed?
How many qualifications, to what extent, where is the bar? I could decide that I will recognize only a minimum IQ or skin color or birth nation or.....
Why should I respect your criteria for quality of being?
If you only hold to personal criteria or to the majority or strongest rule, then we are each at risk: we are only one vote or one ruling or one coup away from being declared "non-persons."

[MHGinTN]

"... one cannot inflict force or fraud against that which cannot take exception to said force or fraud." Please, you can do better than that, surely! Too many contradictions are immediately evident that refute that hollow assertion, as inhumane. Is that what a 'true libertarian' professes?

[hocndoc]

You're a few years behind on your technology. 19 to 21 weeks are considered viable in neonatal ICU's, now.

You are also confusing function with species and the individual, subjective opinion of "person" with the inalienable right not to be killed.

[realpatriot71]

That knowledge is not present at birth

Babies are born able to think, feel, and experience. They are sentient. Sentience is impossible without a CNS. My "line in the sand" is not arbitrary.

[MHGinTN]

Assigning sentience age as the argument for worthy to live is arbitrary. As to CNS, that is one form/function along the continuum. You cloud also choose individual fertility. Why didn't you?... Because you arbitrarily picked a more nebulus point.

[unspun]

Not true at all. I just posit that there are certain necessary conditions needed in order for tissue to become a person. I am sorry that this bothers you.

Demonstrate if you will, that tissue ever becomes a person... and not that a person may exist, both before and after that tissue functions.

Your body is you, but... are you your body? Can you prove you do not exist before or after any particular cells of your body perform in any particular way?

[hocndoc]

Have you heard of Medical Students for Life, supported by Physicians Life Alliance.
http://www.physicianslifealliance.org/

Or Libertarians for Life
http://www.l4l.org/library/index.html

[realpatriot71]

From #155 "Simply put, one cannot make a creature's life good or bad, better or worse unless that creature is capable of experiencing and, in particular, capable of experiencing pleasure, satisfaction, happiness, pain, dissatisfaction, or anguish. One cannot help or harm another creature unless that creature is capable of help or harm, capable of having experiences consonant with help or harm. Clearly, a creature that has no experiences is not capable of having experiences consonant with helping or harming the creature. If the creature is destroyed before it becomes sentient, appeal to the better or worse condition of its future experiences is irrelevant. Hence, one cannot have moral obligations to a being that is not sentient and will not become sentient and, thereby, such a being cannot have moral rights."

This is my position. I ask you again how many persons do you know who are NOT sentient?

[realpatriot71]

Because you arbitrarily picked a more nebulus point.

No. I picked a point where the development of such organs is that which leads to sentience

[realpatriot71]

Demonstrate if you will, that tissue ever becomes a person

I'm here, so are you, and everyone else - all persons - once merely tissue, now persons

Can you prove you do not exist before or after any particular cells of your body perform in any particular way?

Like I said before I cannot point to the magical moment you want me to point to. However, I know a person cannot be a person without sentience, and this sentience comes after the beginning of CNS development, as the CNS is key to knowing one is alive. I can say before CNS development the tissue down not know it is alive.

[realpatriot71]

down = does

Not sure how I got "down" instead of "does"

[hocndoc]

The one thing that separates humans from the other animals is the desire/yearning/knowledge of the Perfect: Love, Truth, Beauty, Good.
As far as we can tell, while many primates seem to have self-awareness, there is no record of any other species having the sorts of discussions that you and I are having, or cutting off an ear because of unrequited love or the inability to paint perfect beauty.
And yet, not all members of the human species even have this actual function in its fullest. A four year old may know that there is better justice without being able to explain to you what "That's not fair!" means. Many adults never function much past this level. The difference is that many do. And because any of them may, or out of respect for those who do, and to protect ourselves from those who do not respect us, we should agree not to kill them, to respect and protect the right to life.
You might want to read Dr. Robert Spitzer's "Healing the Culture" (from which I stole the above).
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0898707862/qid=1044253680/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/002-4150258-6226432?v=glance&s=books
Hopefully, it's in your local library.

[MHGinTN]

I'm really beginning to wonder if you are sentient, but that arbitrary designation wouldn't lead me to exploit your body parts if someone's definition of sentience didn't quite fit your condition.

[MHGinTN]

Also found in #155 is the answer you may wish to ignore: "To kill a small, very young, nonsentient baby in the womb, or to kill an adult under anesthesia, both are cases of killing a nonsentient being who, were he not killed, would wake up to sentience. The only difference is that the child was never sentient while the adult was. But this makes no moral difference. To kill the child is to deprive him of the only sentient existence he would ever have. If anything, abortion is therefore a still greater evil."

[realpatriot71]

I can't make anyone happy (is that the sound of the world's smallest fiddle?). The "protect life from conception" crowd takes exception to my position on when life begins and cloning, and the "abort babies until the day before birth" crowd takes exception to my anti-abortion stance.

I personally feel my position is consistant with what I understand from science, natural rights philosophy, and scripture, and I make no apologies or bones about it. I respect everyone's opinion here, but also have to respectfully disagree. I think we have all stated where we stand, and are getting nowhere on this issue. I have tests all week long, and I'm going to try and get a few hours of sleep before getting up at 4:00 to study more.

God Bless and Good Night

[hocndoc]

There is no organism present in germ cells such as sperm or oocytes.
The zygote and embryo and fetus are complete organisms. If they are human, they have the same right not to be killed that you do, or you must discriminate between the right to life of one human and another, by labeling them as "persons," "white," "slave," "male," "dissident," etc.

[beavus]

People have a lot of wierd mystical 1950's science fiction B movie type ideas about cloning which have everything to do with shallow media hype and nothing to do with reality. If cloning were successful not one of these Fred-Barnes-type nonthinkers would be able to tell a clone from a non-clone by interacting with them.

That being said, it is an unproven technology and cloning humans today is as ethically wrong as forcing a person to try an untested drug.

[realpatriot71]

Well, one last post, because I can never help it:

(1)I'm not advocating killing babies, in the womb or otherwise, nor killing of people under anethesia or in comas

(2)You never answered my question: how many non-sentient persons do you know?

(3)During the entire discourse I tried to be courteous and respectful. Something I noticed you decided not to return.

God Bless