In answer to your post, I will address this last point. The reason our emotions suggest something different from what is moral is because of the science & technology that allow for situations that evolution never could have prepared us for. Allowing our emotions to rule our behaviors is a rather primitive way to make decisions, IMO. You are absolutely right that introspection is what is needed, and mine tells me two things: 1) Once conception has occurred, there is no fundamental difference that I can see from one developmental stage to another, that tells me "ok, now we have gone from no person existing to one existing. There is no magical moment that defines it. Therefore, I don’t see why it is moral to end that life one day, and not moral the next. 2) Once we create life, it is our duty to do what we can to protect it.
Well, there’s one thing that is pretty easy to get consensus on…a human being possesses a human brain. An entity with no nervous system, let alone a brain, is a different sort of entity than a human being. A totally brain dead human is a dead human, not a human with no brain. But even that dead body doesn’t become property, we still have an ethical responsibility as human beings not to, say, eat the dead body (barring real starvation), or treat the body disrepectfully. Likewise, before the embryo develops a nervous system, I can’t call that entity a living human being, any more than a living biopsy sample is a human being.
I agree that fertillized egg cells/embryos have a different moral status than, say, planaria, because they have the potential to develop into human beings. So to kill a fertillized egg cell or early embryo doesn’t seem more immoral than killing a planarium, or killing the cells in a biopsy sample. But genetically or developmentally modifying that zygote is another story…it would definately be immoral to modify that embryo such that it will grow up to become a circus freak, or a natural slave. I think helpful modifications would be ethical, under the principle of implied consent…we give medical treatment to unconscious people under this principle all the time. So curing an early embryo of a genetic disease is ethical, since we can’t imagine any reasonable adult refusing such treatment retroactively.
What science tells us is that there is no such thing as a bright line that defines a human with human rights. Genetic individuality isn’t it, witness natural clones like my identical twin sisters. Physical autonomy isn’t it, witness conjoined twins…what makes an entity one individual or two individuals? Sentience isn’t it, since a newborn baby can’t recognize itself in a mirror or do much of anything besides poop, pee, and nurse. We can take a somatic cell and turn it into an embryo…not in humans yet, but soon we’ll work out techniques that could work with humans. We aren’t clear exactly when people die…obviously when their brains die they’re dead, but what if their brain is just MOSTLY dead? What about people with developmental disabilities that will never develop mentally beyond early childhood? A disabled human being as smart as a dog cannot be ethically treated the way we treat a dog. And on and on.
But just because there aren’t any flashing neon lights doesn’t mean we can’t draw some boundaries. A rotting corpse is dead. An unfertillized egg or sperm or somatic cell is not a human being. And I contend that even a fertillized egg, or early embryo shouldn’t be considered a human being, since they possess no nervous system, no brain. But when does the brain unambiguously develop? We can point to milestones where no one would argue there is no brain (like when a baby is able to survive outside the womb), but there is no earliest point were everyone agrees a functioning brain.
Anyway, the ethics of abortion and related topics like cloning, germ line genetic modification, IVF, in vitro gestation, and all kinds of other biotechnology aren’t clear cut. And I’m sick and tired of people taking dogmatic stances that aren’t based on any sort of reason or logic. And that includes people on all 12 major sides, plus all the other sides too.
That’s why the hypothetical scenario Apos poses is so hard to answer…because there are no clear-cut answers to all of this. All I can do is try to explain my personal reasoning, but applying it to such a scenario is difficult at best.
I should add that this is one of the reasons that my “pro-life” stance doesn’t necessarily include working to make abortion illegal. The idea that everyone, or even the majority, will agree on one set of ethics or morality for all of these different issues is a pipe dream. I believe that “safe, legal, and rare” are reasonable goals to work towards, and I personally focus on the “rare” as the most important of these 3 goals.
The problem with the abortion debate, at least as it applies to overturning Roe v. Wade, is that it’s not about permitting or not permitting abortion in the absolute.
It’s effectively about permitting or not permitting poor people to have the same access to abortion as rich people.
When abortion was illegal everywhere, was there a plague of pregnant debutantes? Was there social issue with unwed senators’ daughters whelping out babies? No.
The rich quietly and effectively took care of pregnancies that would affect the marriageability, careers, and well-being of their daughters. Often girls “in trouble” were sent to a family specialist, or even over the border. Girls were sent “to Europe” or whatnot. It was understood that certain things had to be done, and they were taken care of.
That wasn’t an option for poor folks, hence the infamous coat hanger and the back alley abortionist.
That’s why pro-choice people talk about access to abortion. The rich always had access, and if abortion is made illegal, they will, by and large, retain access, using money, connections, and power to take care of their own. And they’ll (very quietly) make certain they do, make no mistake about that. Nodbody and no law stopped them before.
It is the poor who would lose access.
So while the surface debate is all about government involvement, and killing vs. choice, the real issue is about fairness to the poor.
Sailboat
Nonsense: you’re misrepresenting what I was saying. It’s a perfectly legitimate comparison. Early embryos/zygotes are far far more like colonial bacteria than they are like even a fetus: they are in that class of living thing, rather than in the class that what we all think of as a “human being” is. They are cells who communicate via chemicals according to an explicitly laid out genetic plan. They have no nervous system, and not even one of the most basic functions related to things like cognition, volition, concern, feeling, etc.
In that sense, they are everything like what bacteria are as a form of life, and nothing like the beings which we have come to regard as deserving of rights, moral concern, and so forth.
True, but moral decisions that are completely out of whack with emotions is often a good sign that some obscure logic has led us off the trolley track of what morality is supposed to be about, which is some sense of why certain things have value and are worth protecting or advancing.
Just because there is no bright line doesn’t mean that we can’t see when something is very very clearly on a particular side of things. If there is a swath of black for two miles, followed by half a mile of a smooth gradient from black to white, followed by two miles of pure white, I just don’t see how one can legitimately declare that there is no way to make distinctions and we must declare every part of the stretch “white.”
But it can’t really be that simple. Because you probably of course ONLY mean genetically human life, and only very particular dividing cell lines and not others. The question is: why those specific things and only those? Wouldn’t a sound guide to what moral beings should be protected deal with particular sorts of functional capacity rather than the particulars of genetic code? After all, if intelligent aliens existed, or if we created super-intelligent apes or what have you, you wouldn’t want to rule them out of consideration based purely on who has the right genes.
Does a bacteria have a nucleus? Mitochondria? A bacterial cell is much different than a eukaryotic cell. Bacteria are a completely different kind of organism. You’re much more like a plant or a fungus than you are like a bacteria. Or to say the same thing in a different way, a plant is much more like an animal or human being than it is like a bacteria. Protozoans are not the same thing as bacteria. A human somatic cell is many times larger and more complex than a bacteria.
Like I said, nitpick. But how can we have a conversation about the biology behind the ethics of human reproduction when people don’t know much about biology, period?
Should we treat fertillized embryos as human beings? Up for argument. We certainly don’t treat chimpanzees as human beings, and they unarguably share more characteristics with adult human beings than an early human embryo does. Even if an early embryo has no more moral status than a bacterium or a planaria, that doesn’t make it “like” a bacteria. That chimpanzee that we don’t give human status has cognition, volition, concern, feeling, and more. An adult chimp exhibits these qualities much more strongly than a human baby. Yet we don’t put human babies in zoos or use them for medical experiments. Why is that? A retarded adult is given full human rights, even though they may be dumber than a chimp. Why is that?
My point is that laying out a set of ethical axioms and then rigorously applying their logical corrolaries in every case will invariably lead us to abhorrent actions. And it doesn’t matter what set of ethical axioms we choose, eventually we’ll end up turning into monsters. We can’t just say “A fertillized egg must be treated exactly the same as a human baby”, as the fire in the fertillity clinic example shows. We can’t say that a mother’s right to terminate a pregnancy at any time is absolute, since that’s infanticide. Or you could go the Blalron route and declare that therefore infanticide must be ethical, since there’s no meaningful distinction. And so on.
And of course, there’s a distinction between what someone advocates as the correct moral stance to take regarding an issue, compared to what someone advocates the law regarding an issue should be. I could believe it’s unethical to forget your wife’s birthday, or unethical to commit adultery, that doesn’t mean I want to criminalize forgetting your wife’s birthday, or criminalize adultery.
All of this is irrelevant to what I said. I was talking about functional capacities that anyone might consider relevant to moral status. Yes, I could have easily referred to any single cell or small colony of cells from any kingdom of life. In short, your nitpick is ill-aimed, misrepresenting the sort of comparison I was making.
Are you saying that mitochondria have some relevance to moral status? A Nucleus? If not, then why pretend that I am somehow misrepresenting or confusing biology? Especially after I’ve explained myself, that’s becoming more of a willful misrepresentation.
The question of course is not whether we should treat them as human beings, because they are not, but rather the latter part of what you said, which is that they have all sorts of functional capacities we would recognize as important in human beings, but fail to in chimps. And you seem to agree with me: our fellow apes undoubtedly have internal experiences, memories of traumatic events, some can be trained to communicate and express, if not Shakespearian insight, clear cognitive communicative processes distinctive from mere conditioned response. The question IS: why DON’T these things matter? What sort of bizarre misunderstanding of what “morality” is would allow us NOT to realize that they matter?
Apples aren’t “like” baseballs either but when the subject is “what things are good to huck at windows” then yes, it’s not misleading to say that they are alike.
My opinion, it’s because we are morally retarded. We have moral principles, but we don’t really like what they say: what they imply is too difficult. So we half-ass them. I think many modern moral philosophers have illustrated this quite well, pointing out how inconsistently we apply our moral judgements.