You are trying to make moral status rest on species, which is totally irrelevant. By your criterion, if we should discover a species (like Bigfoot) which is smarter than humans, uses language and tools, lives in complex societies, etc., it would still be okay to kill and eat them, since they are not human. This is absurd. It is more plausible to say that moral status doesn’t rest on species, but instead requires that you have some minimum threshhold of mental ability. As **Apos ** says, we don’t know where to draw the line, but we can be pretty sure which side of that line an embryo is on. I am willing to say that we should err on the side of caution and prohibit abortions upon attainment of consciousness. But before that, I cannot see any plausible reason attributing any particular status to the developing embryo.
What difference does that make in and of itself? My toenail clippings are human in that sense. So the fuck what?
This is exactly what I mean. There is no coherent moral ethic behind your opinion here. Humans good! Why? Ted has no idea! Certainly not for any bundle of moral REASONS that he can articulate, and probably just because he thinks he read it in a book somewhere that also tells him not to masturbate, as much good as that proclaimation did.
I am willing to sit on a blastocyst and crush it to death for no reason because, yes, I don’t think it is valuable at all in terms of its continued existence or not. If it doesn’t even have the capacity to value ANYTHING, much less its own life, how can it be valuable?
In my opinion, they both are roughly similar in moral value. I would never condone the killing of a chimp, or even a chimp baby.
A one day old baby? There’s no way Michael J. Fox is going to eat day old babies. He only likes them fresh.
The embryos destroyed to get the stem cells are alive.
They let people eat babies?
Because I so want in on that action.
Your mother was a human being. So was your grandmother. So was your great-great-great-great-grandmother. But, if you go back far enough, you find someone who was not a human being, in the sense of being a member of our species, Homo sapiens–you get to a Homo habilis or an Australopithecine or something. But these ape-men or whatever you want to call them are still your direct ancestors, in exactly the same way your great-great-grandmother is your direct ancestor. In fact, go way, way back, and you run into living things that look rather like that blastocyst–just a clump of cells with no brain or nervous system; go back further still and you get things that are only one cell. But they’re still your direct ancestors; in principle, you could make a family tree leading from you to them.
Thus, every living thing on Earth is your kin, in the same way any brothers or sisters you might have are your kin, or the way your second cousins once removed are your kin–somewhere back there you share a common ancestor with them. All living things are your flesh and blood (even those living things which don’t have flesh or blood as such).
Thus, everytime you eat a carrot, it’s exactly the same as if you went into an orphanage run by kindly, selfless nuns, and brutally hacked one of the nuns to pieces and ATE her, right in front of an entire roomful of screaming, terrified orphans.
Again: Learn to read before endeavouring to have an opinion. Thank you.
Hate to break it to you, but plenty of those fertility labs essentially throw out extra fertilized eggs after a while, and have been doing so for years before the idea of embryonic stem cell experimentation was even thought of. I guess they’re murderers too, as is every woman who’s ever undergone IVF?
Babies are safe, anyway, as the cells come from 4-5 days post-fertilization only, to the best of my understanding.
(On that topic, it’s thought that women’s bodies spontaneously miscarry many pregnancies, and [url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10362823]one study showed that 25% of pregnancies spontaneously miscarry before week 6 of development. Whoa, lots of murderous uteruses out there!)
But hey, you’d rather force couples with fertility problems to turn over their own flesh and blood (cue dramatic music here) to total strangers to raise! What happens when unhappy people who were the products of the embryo-napping turn up on their biological parents’ doorstep, asking why their blastocyst wasn’t good enough to be implanted in the biological mother’s womb? Oh, the humanity! [/sarcasm]
Seriously, though, do you realize the implications of forcing people to give up their extra embryos to strangers to raise?
The difference is that the human baby probably has the potential and the necessary environment for growing up into a member of our society. A chimp does not, and neither does a surplus blastocyst.
Well played, sir!
I really want an answer to my question about how you’re defining human, ted. For example: I personally define a human as a member of the species homo sapiens which has matured to the point of A) having been born, either via natural vaginal birth or ceasarian section.
Your turn!
Chimps can use tools.
They are alive as cells, not as human beings. They are about as different as any living thing can BE from human beings without being, like bacteria.
There are no words. Ignorance this well-established simply can’t be defeated.
How much longer does your guest membership run? PLEASE do not pay to become a member of this board.
Dumb. Dumb de dumb dumb dumb.
Fuckwit and buttwhistle.
I suck at linking and previewing, so I’ll fix the former here. (I blame my blastocyst-rejecting murderous uterus for that one.)
I suspect he doesn’t realize any such things, given that he hasn’t (and I bet won’t) explain what he means when he says “they can raise them.” Even if we were to assume that all fertilized eggs implanted into a womb would really implant… damn it, I can’t even bother getting through this. It’s too stupid.
I guess it is easier to insult me with lies than to deal with the FACT you support killing humans.
You know, I made a rule for myself, not to be quick to anger or insulting on the internet. But dude, you are one stupid mother fucker. My suggestion is this…increase your medication. If you’re not on any, start drinking heavily.
Give them the chance. Don’t just kill them.
I am crying here. How can you support jsut killing humans without giving them a chance.
What like these?
