Granny Weatherwax and the Chimeras
A young woman has fallen into a coma, and may die within a week. The only thing we know that will waken her from her coma and save her life is a kiss on the brow from George Clooney. (Just roll with it, okay?) A classic question in ethics asks: is it permissible to kidnap George Clooney and force him to perform the act? It'll only take a few hours to fly him to the hospital, and we'll release him immediately afterwards, with a plane ticket home and a suitable amount of cash for his time. Is this an ethical act?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is "no." We're not allowed to treat another human being as a thing, not even to save the life of another. We're going to respect George's bodily autonomy. Barring extenuating circumstances, we might heap opprobium upon George for not doing such a simple act. And we (sometimes) recognize someone for a unique and extraordinary service, such as Australian James Harrison, a man with the universal donor bloodtype and the incredibly rare Rho(D) subtype who has donated so much blood over his lifetime he's estimated to have saved 2.4 million infants from premature death. Mr. Harrison volunteered, and he certainly deserves recognition for his service, but even knowing that 2.4 million children would not be walking around now but for his service, we still view it unethical to treat him as a resource to be mined and extracted, his own views on the matter neglected and ignored.
Down that road, "making exceptions," is where you start to slide back into a world of slavery, where some people, for whatever reason, are treated as things.
As Granny Weatherwax says in Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum:
Which brings me to the topic of China is Making Human-Monkey Hybrids. A lot of people are having strong negative reactions to this work, but so far I don't seem to see wha the problem is. When I read this, I have to ask: whose bodily autonomy is being violated by this work? If we accept, as I do, that fetal tissue is not a human being, that a woman has a right to abortion and that the Cleveland University Hospital Meltdown was not the "murder of 2000 unborn children," (not even the far right claims that; they don't believe the embryo is a baby, they just want to hurt women), then so far we don't have "people." We just have biological tissue.
There are warning signs to watch. "We're not bringing them to viability yet," says one researcher. But even there, we don't have a measure of their humanity until we start communicating with them.
As someone who both likes meat and hates suffering, I do, like everyone who's thought about this at all, compartmentalize my guilt and my notions of "who deserves my compassion" to include other people first but not the farm animals. That may be wrong, and like Potter Steward I may be wrong in my personal judgements of "I know sapience when I see it." I'm willing to re-examine that judgement, time and time again. I may even continue to be wrong, and even embrace being wrong in some cases, with the debt of evolution "red in tooth and claw" at my back for all time.
But in this case, we're not talking about beings with sentience or sapience that can live outside a laboratory. This is research that, so far, has resulted in no deaths and no discernable suffering, no matter how closely examined. I would start to worry if we reach the point where we're creating living, feeling creatures just to harvest their organs, which unfortunately seems to be the point of the research.
I think it comes down to this: if I'm willing to enjoy a pulled pork sandwich then I have no ethical stance from which to object to a decerebrate (i.e. literally without a brain) hunk of living meat that produces organs for transplants. The ethics line up. In neither case are we treating a person as a thing.
A young woman has fallen into a coma, and may die within a week. The only thing we know that will waken her from her coma and save her life is a kiss on the brow from George Clooney. (Just roll with it, okay?) A classic question in ethics asks: is it permissible to kidnap George Clooney and force him to perform the act? It'll only take a few hours to fly him to the hospital, and we'll release him immediately afterwards, with a plane ticket home and a suitable amount of cash for his time. Is this an ethical act?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is "no." We're not allowed to treat another human being as a thing, not even to save the life of another. We're going to respect George's bodily autonomy. Barring extenuating circumstances, we might heap opprobium upon George for not doing such a simple act. And we (sometimes) recognize someone for a unique and extraordinary service, such as Australian James Harrison, a man with the universal donor bloodtype and the incredibly rare Rho(D) subtype who has donated so much blood over his lifetime he's estimated to have saved 2.4 million infants from premature death. Mr. Harrison volunteered, and he certainly deserves recognition for his service, but even knowing that 2.4 million children would not be walking around now but for his service, we still view it unethical to treat him as a resource to be mined and extracted, his own views on the matter neglected and ignored.
Down that road, "making exceptions," is where you start to slide back into a world of slavery, where some people, for whatever reason, are treated as things.
As Granny Weatherwax says in Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum:
"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."
Which brings me to the topic of China is Making Human-Monkey Hybrids. A lot of people are having strong negative reactions to this work, but so far I don't seem to see wha the problem is. When I read this, I have to ask: whose bodily autonomy is being violated by this work? If we accept, as I do, that fetal tissue is not a human being, that a woman has a right to abortion and that the Cleveland University Hospital Meltdown was not the "murder of 2000 unborn children," (not even the far right claims that; they don't believe the embryo is a baby, they just want to hurt women), then so far we don't have "people." We just have biological tissue.
There are warning signs to watch. "We're not bringing them to viability yet," says one researcher. But even there, we don't have a measure of their humanity until we start communicating with them.
As someone who both likes meat and hates suffering, I do, like everyone who's thought about this at all, compartmentalize my guilt and my notions of "who deserves my compassion" to include other people first but not the farm animals. That may be wrong, and like Potter Steward I may be wrong in my personal judgements of "I know sapience when I see it." I'm willing to re-examine that judgement, time and time again. I may even continue to be wrong, and even embrace being wrong in some cases, with the debt of evolution "red in tooth and claw" at my back for all time.
But in this case, we're not talking about beings with sentience or sapience that can live outside a laboratory. This is research that, so far, has resulted in no deaths and no discernable suffering, no matter how closely examined. I would start to worry if we reach the point where we're creating living, feeling creatures just to harvest their organs, which unfortunately seems to be the point of the research.
I think it comes down to this: if I'm willing to enjoy a pulled pork sandwich then I have no ethical stance from which to object to a decerebrate (i.e. literally without a brain) hunk of living meat that produces organs for transplants. The ethics line up. In neither case are we treating a person as a thing.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}