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Originally Posted by duga
Of course I wouldn't condone harvesting stem cells from an aborted embryo unless permission was given by the mother. I feel any argument past that is your typical right vs. left squabbling that will never be solved.
I would never support outright stem cell harvesting, though. That would be horribly wrong.
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Mind you, duga, I'm playing "Devil's advocate" here, because I support a mother's choice to have the embryo in her body killed, after which I feel that
both parents' permission should be needed when dictating what happens to their offspring once out of her body.
However, I think people who oppose killing/murdering a very undeveloped human organism might argue that the crux of the problem is that
permission was not gained from the killed/murdered individual, who had the potential to develop greater awareness if left unharmed. They might argue that the ethical thing to do would be to let that individual grow until its potential for future awareness comes to fruition. If one wants to gain permission about what to do with someone, shouldn't one wait until that person "wakes up?"
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Originally Posted by tore
I like ethical debates as well, although much of philosophy seems so flaky and opinionated compared to the natural sciences I'm used to  |
Yep, there is no "right" or "wrong" in ethical views, although there are ethical fallacies we can attack. Science is much simpler in some ways (and sometimes much more boring, which is why I'm typing this and delaying going to work!).
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Utilitarianism does this and says someone's worth and how much ethical consideration they deserve depends on their capability of feeling pain and pleasure, their ability to emotionally experience the consequences of your moral actions. As a moral being, your job is to cause the most happiness/reduce the amount of suffering in the world.
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Agreed. This is the main moral approach I use for determining if a being deserves my ethical consideration. However, when Utilitarianism violates what I perceive as someone's rights (to life, etc.), then I pause and reflect more. For example, if you had to kill one person to save five, I don't know if I could do it. I wouldn't want to take an action that directly harms someone.
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To use a practical example, if you are the only paramedic at a scene of an accident and there's a young man and an old man both about to die and you can only save one of them, then you have an moral dilemma.
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Like in this example, I would save the young man. Non-profit organizations face this sort of issue all the time: do you use your limited funds to get food or resources to some children who live in an easily accessed city, or to children who live out in rural areas, which are more costly to reach. And, unfortunately, you have to choose because you can't save both sets of children. It's like a scene, Tore, that haunts me in the movie
Sophie's Choice, in case you've seen that movie.
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Fetuses do not require a lot of moral consideration on their own because they are, when compared to the average human, little able to feel happiness or suffering. In a moral dilemma concerning abortion, you should prioritize the mother and her happiness/suffering over that of the unborn fetus. If abortion maximizes her happiness or eases her suffering the most, then abortion is the right moral course of action.
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I have the same view.
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From a utilitaristic point of view, a fetus which is dead doesn't require much ethical concern at all. If you don't know if using it in stem cell research will cause suffering but you think it is likely to cause "happiness" in the rough shape of advances in medical treatment, then using them for research becomes the right moral action.
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I'd say a fetus who is dead doesn't require
any ethical concern.
When
I'm dead, someone can flush my ashes down the toilet...I don't care!
The issue in embryonic stem cell research, though, is whether benefitting from someone else's loss (of its own life) is ethical. I think people who oppose abortion and embryonic stem cell research feel it is wrong to ignore that this little, living being has the potential to develop greater awareness.
I would counterargue, when talking with someone holding this view that "potential" is what matters, that every cell of my body could potentially be used to clone me, so all cells have that potential and thus potential alone isn't a precise enough criterion to use to determine if some group of cells should be protected.
Also, fertility clinics go through a lot of fertilized eggs that don't successfully attach to a woman's uterus, yet I don't hear opponents of embryonic stem cell research decrying the death of fertilized eggs/embryos that occurs during assisted reproduction.
Do people complain about fertility clinics because of the embryos who die there?
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Also, from a utilitaristic point of view, using data from holocaust victims is not a problem if you can maximize happiness/reduce suffering that way. Using a non-utilitaristic argument, I guess you could also say it would be sad if they died for "nothing".
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Use of Nazi experiment data is still controversial and I feel mirrors somewhat the controversy over embryonic stem cell research, since both ethical issues involve how to use something from humans who have been killed. Here's an interesting article written about it in on Jewish Virtual Library website created by an American-Israeli group:
The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments