It is literally the same thing as the abortion issue. You'd merely be aborting a cerebrum, to bring about brain-death before brain-life can begin. If abortion isn't killing, then neither is this.
If you want to support abortion but oppose this, then you need to say that a fetus is alive -- is a person with some rights -- but that those rights are superseded by a woman's absolute bodily autonomy. This would be a stronger position: Rather than saying that fetuses aren't alive, you'd be saying that women have a right to kill in certain circumstances.
We don't even need mechanical wombs to bring these clones to term. A woman could gestate her own braindead clone to provide organs for herself later in life, or a man could work with a female partner or paid surrogate. The only missing technology is that needed to allow the braindead body to develop from a baby into an adult. We already have life support technologies that seem applicable, but they've never been applied in this way. Possibly certain hormone injections would also be needed, to transition through puberty.
This is all so logically clear, and the stakes so high -- immortality? -- that I'm a little surprised nobody has been ruthless enough to attempt it yet.
There used to be Forbidden Cities with water-clocks to track the ovulation of concubines. The ancients could ruthlessly apply logic. Moderns seem not to. I guess it's about avoiding retaliation.
I'm not sure it's quite immortality but yes, the stakes are pretty high. It seems likely that you'd not go public if you did this, though, so it's possible someone has already tried.
There are probably people ruthless enough and resourced enough that they might just grow a perfectly normal (i.e. full brain development) human and harvest them anyway. If you're rich through (say) organized crime already, what's the difference when it's your life at stake?
Ostensibly the only issues for those people are lead time (they'd need to plan ahead of critical illness) and sustaining a minor conspiracy (paying off the medical team and surrogate, managing trust, or just cleaning up loose ends).
You could just bribe yourself unto an organ donors list in some country. This isn't anywhere close to immortality it just conceivably makes the line shorter for some surgeries.
> just grow a perfectly normal (i.e. full brain development) human and harvest them anyway. If you're rich through (say) organized crime already, what's the difference when it's your life at stake?
True. If you throw ethics out the window and accept murder, then "immortality" may be possible with today's technology. Probably you run into problems with mutations eventually, but you could throw more bodies at the problem and use a selection process.
You'd think someone would be attempting this in mice.
I've got to wonder about the level of experimentation it takes to get to the point where you can actually effectively create a genuinely braindead, but otherwise wholly functional human unit. From a genetics standpoint, I believe it's a fractaline system, meaning recursive elements, which is (and quite probably wrongly) to say that removing one piece of DNA, or favorably altering it to fit the outcome, could result in unexpected outcomes in the development of other necessary components. Like, there's a good deal of the endocrine system that's tucked away in the brain, delete the PFC and what results? We don't understand consciousness to the degree this demands for a "truly ethical" criterion anyways; and that may be a moot point, as it may be beyond comprehension. And that's discounting a lot of other things. Are organs grown in vitro adapted to actual use? What about epigenetics and possible incompatibilities generated by them? For major endocrine organs, what kind of reaction will the whole have receiving a 1:1 transplant with a 20 year old liver in an 80 year old? And so on...
If we were to mass grow clones for organs we would probably start with whatever causes this and then add an engineered pituitary gland organioid that is added via surgery to develop the anencephalic clone to maturity for proper organ extraction.
You could even use this to grow bodies for eventual head transplants.
> From a genetics standpoint, I believe [...] removing one piece of DNA, or favorably altering it to fit the outcome, could result in unexpected outcomes in the development of other necessary components.
I wasn't suggesting that gene editing be used to prevent a cerebrum from developing, but merely that an in-utero surgical procedure be used to destroy the cerebrum at some early stage of development. That seems doable. (This whole thing does, however, disturb me.)
> Like, there's a good deal of the endocrine system that's tucked away in the brain, delete the PFC and what results?
That's why I was speculating that the external supply of certain hormones would be required, particularly to get through puberty.
> Are organs grown in vitro adapted to actual use?
Yeah, also a good question.
I was assuming that the technique I was proposing, that of using a whole body -- as different from growing organs in-vitro -- would obviate the worst problems.
(There are still concerns about making sure the body doesn't atrophy, but I think something could be worked out. You can even imagine (again disturbingly) some serious exercise regimen, administered via electrostimulation of the muscles. Or occasional stress to the pulmonary system by injecting adrenaline.)
But in-vitro growth of isolated organs might also be possible. That would immediately skip the worst ethical issues, but it requires more discoveries than the full-body method. We're already getting there for simple organs, though it requires a donor organ to be used as a scaffolding, which is a problem.
> What about epigenetics and possible incompatibilities generated by them?
There must be case studies about organ transplants between twins? Presumably immunosuppressants were not needed?
> what kind of reaction will the whole have receiving a 1:1 transplant with a 20 year old liver in an 80 year old?
What little I've seen, from pop-science releases about experiments with mice, is that some rejuvenation tends to come from that sort of thing.
What makes someone human, or what makes them a person?
It's the mental aspects of humans which matter, not the genome; we wouldn't deny human rights to a conscious space alien, while we commonly do deny them to non-conscious (and not capable of being conscious) beings with human DNA, such as zygotes or molar pregnancies.
"Those who look/think differently than me aren't human."
Who does and doesn't count as a human/person are questions that we should avoid if at all possible. The moral costs of a false negative are tremendous.
Also, regardless of your political or moral beliefs on abortion, the unborn are certainly "human".
I am pretty comfortable calling a body without a head or brain "not human" (this was what the OP suggested).
> ... the unborn are certainly "human".
You would be surprised how many people would disagree with you about that. I personally definitely would not call a freshly-fertilized egg in a womb a human. I would agree that the fetus just before birth is human. I do not have an answer for how far back you have to rewind for the unborn fetus to not be human (no one has a universal answer to this).
More radically, you can also go in the opposite direction. Infants have no memories for the first year or two. They see upside-down at first. Brain development is clearly continuing after birth. So you might be able to justify infanticide for some time after birth. I don't recommend this, of course.
There's no sense in assigning value to life as a step function, where one nanosecond before it it's categorically not human and therefore disposable, yet one nanosecond afterwards it's a human and therefore killing it is immoral.
It may make practical sense to define laws that pretend that it's a step function, but it makes no moral reasoning sense.
I lean more towards the "early fetus is valuable" side of things, since I view future human life that hasn't been experienced yet as valuable. This is, after all, the main reason we care about rather nebulous existential risks - it'd be a shame if future humans never got the chance to exist. We therefore recognize that future human life has some value. Also, I'm well aware of the reductio ad absurdum that can be levied against my position, but I believe that that runs both ways.
Another point in support of this (rather horrific and terrifying) view is how babies were treated 200 years ago. Names were not given at birth, important religious events were postponed, etc. Until the parents had some reason to believe the baby will survive more than a year (which was not all that certain), they were not bestowing much humanity on the kid.
Is an egg fertilised by only one parent and genetically modified to lack any higher brain structures (and therefore any function of mind) still a “human being”?
Can anyone who answers that question with “yes” justify it without reference to supernatural beliefs?
> "Those who look/think differently than me aren't human."
Sure, if by "think differently" you mean "don't think at all". There's a big difference between "eh, Jewish brains are not developed like ours" and actual rigor. I'm comfortable with the latter.
> Also, regardless of your political or moral beliefs on abortion, the unborn are certainly "human".
Well, I think you're manoeuvring around the point here. Clearly some combination of life and humanity is what matters, depending on what definitions people are glossing over at the time. Most people aren't upset by autopsies or cadaver work.
I think of my pet cat as a "person". Maybe you think that's crazy but I would suggest it's more person-like than a fetus, and that therefore I have a better definition of person than you are using.
At any rate the real issue is not who is a "person" but who is worthy of moral consideration.
Pretty sure the, "depends what you think makes us human" line was used by quite a few folks to justify enslaving and slaughtering various ethnic groups throughout history. Since they were lesser or sub human.
Yes, and autopsy and anatomical study of cadavers was once considered immoral. Just because our lizard-brain has a "that's gross" reaction, it doesn't mean it's the right reaction. Millions and millions of people are alive because of what we learned studying dead bodies.
We are ok unplugging life support if someone is well and truly braindead because they aren't a sentient, thinking self-aware being at that point. How is this different? Show your work. :-)
I could just as well say the same arguments were made against a ton of medical progress we take for granted today. People argue that stem cells are genocide, even. So what?
We are trying to be better not worse right? I mean if there was no gain at all we wouldn't do any of it but we're willing to do things that have plausible arguments against them because of the value they bring.
I _think_ that's better then just saying we can't see any objections at all. Maybe.
And pure "logic" is a fallacy within itself. Mass starvation and pandemic deaths are extremely to justify the moment you believe human life is worth zero. Vaccines are the enemy because the planet will have a net positive with the death of millions of humans. Genocide solves climate change, diminishing land resources and unemployment.
And dont excuse my language because it is appropriate, how in the fuck do people still not understand the dangers to slippery slope? How incredibly stupid are you? The events leading up to the Holocaust are the modern textbook example of philosophies and laws that ramp to mass evil action. Pick any murderous tyrant in history and every time, they take inch by inch to erode a society into a wasteland. No, it's not a poor argument. You're ignorant.
Slippery slope is considered a fallacy because not all things vaguely similar to previous paths to X result in X, obviously. Nobody looks at a well-run public rail schedule and thinks 'uh-oh, Fascism is just around the corner' [1]. You're conflating your personal strongly held beliefs about it with imagined inevitable consequences. We don't agree that they're inevitable at all.
No, it's not true that slippery slopes are automatically fallacious, that's a misunderstanding of the fallacy.
The fallacy pertains to people who argue that a causal chain will necessarily play out, or that a particularly implausible chain will play out with high probability.
The fallacy does not assert that slippery slopes don't exist, and the mere act of arguing that a plausible slippery slope has a nontrivial chance of occurring is certainly not the Slippery Slope Fallacy as it's formally defined. Saying that slippery slopes are inherently fallacious may be aptly labelled the "Slippery Slope Fallacy Fallacy".
> The fallacy pertains to people who argue that a causal chain will necessarily play out, or that a particularly implausible chain will play out with high probability.
Isn't this exactly what I described in that comment? I'm confused. Or maybe I was just not clear in my writing. Re-emphasized:
> not all things vaguely similar to previous paths to X result in X, obviously [=> even though some things do]
Also, I didn't really introduce slippery slope as a strict logical fallacy. I said they were making a poor argument and identified it as being of slippery slope form. They responded to that talking about logical fallacies so we went on that tangent, but really I just found their specific instance not credibly inevitable.
I was just responding to the statement "Slippery slope is considered a fallacy", by saying that slippery slope arguments aren't necessarily fallacious, but it seems you largely agree with that already. I wasn't so much endorsing or commenting on the logic in the original comment.
My postulate: while the slippery slope won't necessarily find itself at the prescribed (induced) endpoint, there is a virtually unlimited timeline for the slippery slope to find itself to that endpoint. With that virtually unlimited running space, if continued attempts are made, eventually probability will necessarily yield a result.
I think this applies more to wider generalizations as opposed to very specific instances due to the nature of probability and finity of resources invested in continued attempts, but it can be applied in either scenario. Think Murphy's Law.
Again, since you don't know the answer to this, and since I don't know, why don't we just avoid going down a path that we DO know creates pain and misery.
