Sorry verithrax, if your going to dismiss ideas because you don't like them, there is no point in talking to you.

Your definitions are arbitrary and you keep briniing up figures that quick searches on the internet prove to be false.


I'm not sure what makes you think something has sapience or not, but embryos respond to thier environment and react as well as they can. The only argument you seem to have is "they look like goo!"

Also, I'm starting to get sick from people mentioning people in comas as if they are no longer worthy of life if I chose to kill them.

And a cow has a fully developed brain, but I don't see you turning to vegetarianism soon. The 'spinal cord' at that point is actually a soft, primitive cord that can still be found in some animals of the Chordata filum (Or whatever taxonomical thing it is, I forget). It doesn't have a defined brain (As in, an organ that is distinct from the spinal cord, which isn't really there yet) and the brain hasn't formed proper synapses already. Also, it still lacks sensory organs and thus sentience, and thus the basic facilities for sapience.


Fetuses do that. Embryos have no organs that let them be aware of their environment (Eyes aren't developed, nervous system hasn't got to the point where they can feel pressure/pain, ears haven't formed, mouth hasn't formed, respiratory system hasn't formed.

And again, beings without any capacity for conscious thought are essentially dead and even less alive or aware of their environment than the typical lab rat. If we can support lab rats or animals being used for research, we can support beings that are less aware than them (And don't ever become aware of anything at all, in fact) being used in experiments.

Here, read this.

http://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles...ryoquotes2.html

Yes, it's saying life starts with fertilization. I've said life doesn't automatically grant the right to be alive. Your point?

Verithrax, plants which have no organs, no brain, no nervous system still responds and reacts and is aware of its surrounding.

I'm not sure what these arbitrary rules you come up with are from.

Plants, however, have no means of storing information, transforming it, or making decisions. Also, they are not 'sensing', as one part of the plant isn't aware of what another is doing in any way and there is no centralized intelligence. It's reacting on a local way to the environment by growing in a certain direction, for example, but those effects are distributed and made by actuators that have no choice on the matter and are just reacting chemically to what is going on now, rather than a set of experiences stored previously. It's the same kind of 'sentience' and 'intelligence' your skin has, reacting to the sun and producing melanin, a process that has no interaction with the nervous system.

That page is generally making a case for rethinking our morality, as far as I can understand. The two arguments presented at the end don't apply for everyone, as not everyone is a Protestant or a Catholic, and even if I was against stem cell research I'd oppose them being used as an argument for law - People against research for religious reasons should be free to refuse stem cell treatments from being used on them and to make sure any embryos they freeze or donate won't be used in research, but their morality shouldn't be imposed as law.

http://www.cellmedicine.com/cloning.asp is basically saying, "Reproductive cloning doesn't work, so we have to stop research", which is bogus. If something doesn't work, you have to continue research until it does. That's how science works. You start out with crap and work your way to a working process. You can't expect new techniques to work out ideally. As for saying "Reproductive cloning is wrong, so we have to forbid any form of cloning" is like saying "We shouldn't make kitchen knifes because they might be used to stab people." While I can't see why anyone would have interest in growing a human clone to term ("I must train a little me!"), and since most clones aren't viable anyaway, why, exactly, is cloning dangerous? It also solves the problem of stem cells. Instead of taking from some random embryo, you cultivate stem cells with your own genes. If it doesn't work in the first try, tough luck. That's why the terminal cases are the first ones thrown at medical research.

Can you point to a specific url in the Harvard site? I don't have time to read everything to look for arguments that support your proposition.

I am anti murder and anti theft for religious reasons. Does that mean that such things should not be in Law?


But anyway, I just pulled all the links from the bottom of the ethics section of the wikipedia, I didn't actually read any of them.

I'm pretty certain that each link gives a different argument, since I skimmed them.


I'm not sure what repoductive cloning not working means, but I assume it means something along the lines of the movie Alien where we see hundreds of deformed births in jars of fermaldihide. Each of those deformed births are wrong to have unless you nurture the deformed creation as any other human and give it full potential of life that it deserves, instead of throwing it in the garbage because you don't like teh way it looks.

Lastly, in nature non viable embryos are discarded, however viable embryos become people. So before we start discarding embryos we need to make sure they arn't viable ... at that point I assume that a non viable embryo isn't very usefull for stem cell research in teh first place.

No, but it means that the religious reasons are no valid arguments for them not being law - You can't argue religiously against murder and theft and expect that to be a valid argument for laws against it. There are secular reasons for anti-murder and anti-theft laws.

To put it another way, I'm opposed to eating hot dog buns, except alone in Fridays. Does that mean it should be outlawed?

Reproductive cloning not working is an argument against banning all cloning because it means people don't have a reason to clone for reasons other than the therapeutical. I'm not saying you can discard non-viable embryos, I'm saying you can discard any embryo, and thousands of viable ones are going to be discarded, whether you like it or not - I think it's better to use them for something, rather than just throw them away or let them stay frozen forever because 'they might someday go to college'.

The way law use to work, yes, if enough people are against that type of behavior you outlaw it.

Now adays, I doubt you could outlaw it but I bet you could sue anyone who creates an atmosphere where eating hotdog buns is "normal"!

Most people in the US are against premarital sex (Or at least they say so.). Does that mean it should be illegal? What about gay sex? Where do you draw the line? The majority's opinion of what is wrong hasn't been the basis for any democratic legal system for ages, thankfully.

I move that any woman who miscarries be tried for murder.

I don't really understand the fervour with which people argue an embryo is suddenly 'life' and therefore sacred and holy etc etc.

We slaughter tens of thousands of perfectly happy and healthy animals every day so we can eat, aren't they alive too? What makes the well-being of a brain-dead woman who can't think or feel more important than a pig who can do both? Without falling back on religious arguments, it's a bit absurd.

It's a little late to start thinking our society is founded on this 'reverence for life' crap.

It always comes back to religious arguments. "We can't kill this, it has a soul" sounds much better than "We can't kill this because we have the innate creepy feeling higher social animals get when observing the death of a groupmate".

Religiously, I'm cool with it. If an embryo is endowed at that point with a soul, well, it'll be a damn short turn of the wheel this time around, but it'll be back. Christians and such I think see death as much more of a Bad Thing because they figure you only live once, and if you kill an embryo you've robbed it of it's entire life. I think that's total bull.

Same reason I don't have anything against abortion done that early.

You really don't get the difference between someone dieing of natural causes and killing someone?



The argument is not that it is life, the argument is that it is alive. Proving that it is life, is how you prove that something is alive, and thus can be killed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_expe...al_implications




Whats the difference between 3 months of having a soul and 10 months of having a soul or 100 years of having a soul?

...this thread is coming dangerously close to a Flaming Match, please try to keep your ego's in check and discuss, not insult.

Again, how exactly is being alive, or having a life (Which are the same thing, by the way, until you clarify yourself) an argument against it? Cows have a life too! Don't eat meat. Actually, don't eat anything. Plants have a life. Oh, and don't move, you might kill some living unicellular organisms.

That's a religious argument.

Verithrax, When Sylphas gives a religious argument, I argue a religious argument. Your not the only person on the thread.

Lastly, I think people are forggeting here what the debate is. The debate is not if it should be legal, the debate is if Governments should be funding it.

since there are many people the government represents who legitamtly think its immoral, and there are many people the governement represents who legitimatly believe its moral, the compromise is to not fund it, but not make it illegal.



Are you suggesting that a human embryo has a greater than 0 chance of becoming a plant or a cow?