So what do you want to name your clone?Follow

The underlying question is when someone/thing is considered a "human" and qualifies for rights. And much like abortion, the issue generally resolves around a matter of degrees. Some cells in a petri dish? Probably safe to consider not human. Fully formed fetus, with potential for survival on its own? Probably should be considered human.

So at 37 weeks, then? Or by "fully formed" do you mean "looks sort of like a baby?" Because there are quite a few dolls that will likely be delighted to gain full human rights.

Consciousness is the determining factor for qualifying for rights. Not complicated. Brain dead people don't have "full human rights". We restrict "human" rights in wide variety of ways in the US. "Human" rights for children are vastly different than "human" rights for adults, etc. If we clone something that becomes conscious, it should have rights. Again, not tricky. If we clone entire humans but have a technique to prevent consciousness from taking place (non cerebellum/brain stem functions never develop or whatever), those humans should be considered meat.

The ethics are really straight forward if you aren't a squishy brained believer in the invisible man in the sky and "souls" and all that nonsense. It should be a non issue. It'll be a huge divisive issue.

It's statements like this that make me wonder how you can continue to claim you are no kind of deist.

You earlier claimed you were not a Christian. Are you Jewish? Moslem? Unitarian?


I R

If you're not a deist or a humanist....what the **** are you?

I'm a guy who would love for society to produce good rules for good reasons looking around and seeing an equal amount of stupidity from both "sides" apparently purely because they've decided to be on "sides" in the first place. I'm looking for the actual rational decision making the secularists claim to be all about and finding that it's not there.

The very fact that you seem to be having a hard time even considering that one might step outside those "sides" kinda supports my point. Secularism should not be opposed to religion. It should be actually trying to make the case that it's *better* than religion. But it doesn't. Which is an utter waste of an otherwise promising idea.

No government is perfect, but to make a stupid *** claim that because a government is ineffective or inefficient or broke because it doesn't support a state religion is extremely short-sighted. It's not the lack of a god that is causing it to fail.

Secularism, religion, gods and other fantasy constructs shouldn't be included in a discussion about the best methods of democratically 'governing a country.

It's all human, we just haven't really had an appreciation of what that really means for long enough for the law to play catchup. The underlying philosophies are thousands of years old and view a "human" through those filters. The blob of cells isn't any less human, it just lacks the characteristics a collective of diploid cells can take on. Not that this makes the science any more palatable mind you, and that rat with a bunch of human genes is quite an interesting moral experiment to say the least. For my money were way past the point where we should be concerned about the muddying the waters, they're pretty darn opaque at the moment.

Morality will eventually catch up, in the mean time those diploid collectives would prefer not to die, and have no problem paying for scientists to do morally questionable things to make that happen. It's like industrial farming, everyone wants cheap meat, nobody wants to see the slaughterhouse, or the conditions the animals are raised in. Footage of that stuff gets out, and people throw a fit for a while about it for a while, then go back to eating their KFC. Same way these moral issues make their way into the light when something like this paper comes out, and then quickly fades away once people realize they want us to cure some disease and are willing to overlook moral issues if it means they live 5 years longer. So long as it stays out of sight and out of mind.

First off, I never mentioned government. Secondly, you utterly missed the point I made about it *not* being an us vs them either/or kind of thing and by viewing it that way we fall into a silly and irrational pattern of behavior.



I was talking about ethics and social morals. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

I'm an equal opportunity critic really, doubly so on this kind of subject. If I defend one "side" more than the other it's because of the people I'm responding to taking one position more than the other. If I were posting on a predominantly conservative or religious site, there would be a guy like you making the exact opposite observation about me.

"Contrarian," and it's not like that's surprising to anyone. If this were a predominantly conservative or religious site, you'd be the guy posting exactly the same, but liberal, and I'd be the guy making the exact same observation about you: That you're a contrarian. Even the whole agnostic thing is just you being too weak willed to take a stand on any opinion on your own.

Edited, May 21st 2013 1:21pm by lolgaxe

If that's your round about way of saying "I was wrong", I guess I'll take it.

Fair enough. It's a broad topic, so no worries.



I didn't make the group though (didn't make the label either). I'm observing that many people who decide that they want to derive ethics and social mores without relying on religious fiat (which, btw, I actually think is a good thing) often fail to focus on making those positive social/ethical actions and instead fall into a trap of simply opposing any position people who are religious take. This leads to the kind of statement that Smash made, which in turn polarizes people. What he did was associate caring about when a person should count as a human with blind adherence to religious beliefs. Which should be an absurd statement, but is unfortunately common.


I believe that people *can* make good ethical decisions without basing it on "god tells me so". It's just hard to do so in an environment where you're branded a religious nut if you attempt to actually do so.



Lol. Good one! Honestly though, secularism *could* be better than religion if it could derive the same sorts of useful social rules absent the religious dogma bits. That is, in fact, the entire premise behind philosophies like secular humanism. Unfortunately, as I observed earlier, it often fails to do so. And for really really silly reasons.

I'm not saying that they do. I'm saying that they often fail because those making them (or at least the most vocal about them) are more interested in attacking the beliefs of religious people than they are with creating good social rules. I find it ironic because the starting point is "let's make rules that don't take into account religious beliefs", but then tend to devolve into "let's make rules that oppose those created by those with religious beliefs", which ultimately means that they're still reacting to the same irrational input, just in the opposite direction.

If supporting an ethical position "because god says so" is wrong, it's equally wrong to oppose that position "because god says so". The correct answer should be "because this makes the most sense" or "because this will produce the best social outcomes". The problem is that sometimes (quite often in fact) social rules that are derived "because god says so" also happen to make the most sense and/or produce the best social outcomes. But many secularists will reject them, not because of an assessment of the rule itself but because religious people adopt it for what they consider to be the wrong reasons.

And I think that's silly.



Social norms should not be defined as "religious" or "secular" though. That's the point I'm trying to make. The reasons one might adopt or reject them may be religious or secular, but the norms themselves aren't inherently one or the other. The problem is that too many people label a position as "religious" and judge it based on that, and not its own merits.

Here's an example:



Smash equates merely considering the ethics of cloning to be complex as something only "squishy brained" religious people would do. So he's basically trying to convince people to not bother to consider the ethical issue at all under threat of being labeled as "religious" (and presumably all the negatives that entails). That's not terribly useful from a social examination perspective though, and one can assume leads many secularists who might otherwise be willing and able to engage in good ethical examinations of given subjects to shy away from them instead.


This is why I say that secularism *could* be better than religion at generating good usable social rules. But it often doesn't because its hampered by the more hard core folks like Smash who constantly threaten them with the "religious" label if they stray into any sort of ethical position which might just happen to be similar to one that religious folks happen to agree with. As I said earlier, it's become more about "us vs them" than doing the right thing.