Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: What?
merphie said:
Kevin_Lowe, That's a pretty cold definition.
I realise a lot of people find rationalist morality threatening, because in our society we're very used to associating love with the highest morality. We see people as being at their best when they are making enormous sacrifices for the people and/or things that trigger our protect-the-herd hormones.
Dying to defend your country? Highly moral. Fighting to defend your family? Same. Sacrificing everything to get treatment for your sick child? Same.
Where this trips us up, though, is in cases where our instincts lead us astray. Although these instincts incline us to do good things they are inherently chauvinistic. They have evolved to make us want to protect things that look like fellow humans first and foremost, especially things that look like babies, but not so much to want to take care of non-human entities that might be just as deserving of protection as a baby.
So when I say that babies aren't anything morally special, the
instant response from a lot of people is "How could you be so unfeeling? If your moral views aren't dictated by warm fuzzy feelings about babies, I bet you don't have any real morals at all".
Who determines who has the "special mental life"? Do animals exhibit some sort of personallity? Does that not qualify? Do they not feel pain as we do?
We all do, all the time. Some of them, absolutely, some not. Absolutely. Absolutely.
It's just unfortunate that the diet of humans at the moment is in large part based on doing horrible things to animals, and that too pushes people away from rational morality.
Asking Joe Average to accept that babies aren't special is a big ask. If you ask Joe to accept at the same time that cruelty to animals is a morally important issue, which you do more or less have to ask at the same time, it's much easier for Joe not to think about it. Joe just goes home, eats a hot dog made from a sow that never saw the sun in its life, cuddles his baby and believes that all is right in his moral world.
I could not image making the choice to end the life (Breathing etc) of my wife even if she didn't response or was declared Brain dead. They may never talk but it would be so hard when you have a breathing warm person to hug. Dirt doesn't carry these qualities.
Try asking a kid to set fire to their teddy. It's just the same. Teddy has no moral value in and of itself, and neither would my girlfriend's meat and bones if she was rendered permanently comatose. It's just painful to overcome our instincts in cases like those of teddy and comatose life partners.
I have enormous sympathy for people placed in those kinds of situations, but I still think the moral case is totally clear cut. If the mental life has left the building, there's no point preserving the rest of the bits.
Any baby or fetus that is capable of becoming a human would be just a valuable just from their potential.
I just don't see that. All of my sperm have potential. Every egg has potential. Every egg that fails to implant has potential. Every egg that implants has potential. If we get cloning working, and we'll both probably live to see it, every skin cell on my bottom has potential. I simply do not see how potential matters.
I suspect that being pregnant would carry a special meaning to women. I have known women who had an abortion and lived to regret it for the rest of their lives.
They're unusual. Most women who have abortions go on to have the same number of children they would have had anyway, they just have them at better times. Apart from unfortunate infertile people nowadays almost every woman's potential reproductive capacity is much greater than the number of children she actually wants to bear.
A description of genetic chimps or headless humans is far beyond our current technology. I don't see how it pertains to the subject because you are talking about hypothetical senarios.
Okay, I'll explain what I was getting at in more detail.
Suppose I spliced together some chimp genes and some human genes and created a critter that was not human in any sense (it can't reproduce with humans and it doesn't look human) but which could read Joyce's Ulysses and discuss it intelligently, pass a driving test, and balance accounts. Would you be inclined to treat it as your moral equal, or would you be inclined to say that it can morally be treated as property? A slave, experimental subject or food source depending on our desires?
If you are inclined to treat it is as morally equal to a human, you've just agreed that being a discrete human individual is not necessary for a being to be as morally important as you or I.
Suppose I find a chemical which, if you inject it into a fertilised egg cell, causes a fetus to arise which is exactly like a normal one down to the DNA except that it doesn't have a head. Kind of like 100% effective thalidomide for heads. Would euthanasing a headless baby be wrong? (Assume we can keep it alive a good long time with life support, despite the fact it has no head).
If you are inclined to say that this headless thingy is not morally equivalent to a human, you've just agreed that being a discrete human individual is not sufficient for a being to be as morally important as you or I either.
Now if A is neither necessary nor sufficient for B, any relationship between A and B can be nothing more than an interesting correlation. Which is what I think the case is here. Generally being a discrete human being correlates with being morally important, but we shouldn't get too hung up on the "discrete human being" aspect because it's neither necessary nor sufficient. The fundamental issue must lie elsewhere.
I don't see the abortion as a simple matter of no one missing you. How would you feel about a woman who uses abortions as a method of birth control? Lets say every month this woman has an abortion because she got pregnant again from a new guy?
I say she's doing it the hard way, and she's wasting medical resources, but I don't care either way about the fetuses as long as they're early-term.
If she keeps aborting late-term fetuses because she's disorganised or dumb, she goes in the same moral category in my mind as people who let their pets reproduce freely and then have to have the resulting animals put down. I don't consider them as morally bad as serial killers, but I really wish they'd clean up their act.
If the deciding factor is how their brain works, then would it be ok to kill mentally retarded people?
I'd be relaxed about painlessly killing a mentally retarded person who was as smart as, say, a goldfish or a chicken. I'd be relaxed about painlessly killing a mentally retarded person who was as smart as a dog, cat or chimp if they had some affliction that meant there was no way of preventing them from suffering greatly if they lived. As soon as you're intelligent enough to understand what's going on and express an opinion about it, I think your opinion should carry the day.
That might place me as more individualistic than the medical mainstream, just by the way. As I understand it, children usually can't overrule their parents and refuse medical treatment. While little kids aren't smart enough to be given that responsibility, I think teenagers are. Your mileage may vary.
Who would decide what qualifies as mentally acceptible and who does not?
That's a genuine practical problem but not a moral one. We have figured out ways to decide who gets to rule us, and who gets to pass sentences on criminals, and who gets to continue or discontinue medical treatment. I'm sure we can figure out tolerable ways to decide whether a given entity goes in the "goldfish" bin or the "person" bin.
The question still comes down to where the line is drawn.
For what it's worth, trying to draw lines in ongoing natural processes that simply do not have lines in them is always going to generate screwy results. Whether it's drawing a line and saying that this line divides life from death, or adulthood from childhood, you're always going to get individual cases where the line is drawn in the wrong place.
