7 ms·
Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
by eye8one2 6y ago
Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoWhy not? I'd like to live as long as possible, and I'm not squeamish about life forms with consciousness at the level of what we eat every day. You're free not to use the outputs if you have personal objections.
- mrfinn 6y agoWell, if media is making us aware that scientists are already doing this using mices, you can be pretty sure that by now, at some random place in the world, somebody is already trying it using human fetuses. Oh boy how quickly we are running into the dystopia.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoI'm not sure it really plays out like that. At least the 'monkeys and typewriters' scale setup is not there, I think. Maybe if you asked me five years ago, I'd have ventured that China will try some out-there genetic stuff with some successes, but we haven't really seen much. And (not to get into politics) but China is not too concerned about traditional Western ethical boundaries, it seems.
- staticman2 6y agoThere's nothing unethical about artificial wombs if they work well, it's the whole "just because I can build it doesn't mean it will result in a healthy baby" aspect where the problem lies.
- mrfinn 6y agoThe whole issue is unethical as... For starters, to reach the "work well" status is going to require a ton of failures, at any level of the "pregnancy". Anyway, any possible concern we could express about it doesn't matter at all, somebody is going to do it. Of course it won't be shown in the news.
- konjin 6y agoThe dystopia of gender equality, where a women don't have to spend 9 months being a life support system in their 20s/30s.
- ScoobleDoodle 6y agoAnd other people aren’t squeamish about murder or genocide. Just because one person, or you, aren’t squeamish about something doesn’t make it right for society. That’s why we look to history and anticipate possible future consequences and make decisions about current regulations based on the future we want to bring about. I prefer a future without harvesting humans for the members of dynasties that can afford it, while those with ethics are left behind or destroyed.
- Sporktacular 6y ago300 years ago: I'm not squeamish about life forms with consciousness at the level of what we enslave every day. The cases aren't the same, but the lazy callousness is.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoThe difference is, we know that slaves have equally developed consciousness. So that wasn't based in fact. Animals don't have human-level consciousness. We're not going to discover some day that they do.
- Sporktacular 6y agoProve it - we do't understand consciousness enough to make such claims. Or at least have the wisdom to apply the precautionary principle when you don't know.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoProof is a Math thing. I'm comfortable with the weight of evidence from all the tests we devise for this purpose, combined with the fact we actively strive to show the consciousness of animals in a way we never did with slaves. You're free to disagree and consider it hubris, many animal rights activists do. N.B. I don't believe we fully understand consciousness. Just that factory farm animal consciousness is categorically not at a human level.
- throwaway316943 6y agoProof is a Math and Logic thing.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoIf we're being pedantic, I just consider Logic a branch of Mathematics.
- bpodgursky 6y agoThis is so trite. How do you feel about artificial legs? Hearts? There are a lot of women who would love to have children, but have PCOS, hysterectomies, or other problems becoming pregnant naturally. Why is it totally OK for me to wear glasses, half the country to have an artificial hip, but totally 100% unnatural and terrible for women to use an artificial womb?
- Sporktacular 6y agoIt's not if it's developed ethically. The price of this research is often paid by the suffering of countless animals. Aa externality that may be slightly less odious if it is at least there to reduce our suffering, not simply cash in on making more humans.
- bpodgursky 6y agoI don't think you understand the human condition (or how to think outside your own life) if you think that infertility doesn't count as suffering.
- Sporktacular 6y agoTrying for a kid with my partner actually. It doesn't mean we're entitled to one or that my child will have more of a right to exist than 100s of some other mammals. And I think it's clear that I am considering more than just my own life.
- bpodgursky 6y agoI personally believe your child has more right to exist than 1 mouse, 1,000 mice, or 1,000,000 mice. People are people. It's a different bar, and I'm not going to equate people lives with animal lives.
- Sporktacular 6y agoA bar set by people, in the interest of people. What we personally believe is subject to biases, in this case speciesism. A human would say what you say, a monkey's claim to superiority might be branch selection skills. What makes your red line inherently stronger? And it's not like you defined one or attempt to find a rational underpinning to check for your bias. That's the tribal, conservative basis for many of the injustices over immutable differences we see every day (racial, sexual etc.) Rational inquiry is about transcending this.
- hackeraccount 6y agoWe do what we must because we can.
- cblconfederate 6y agoThere some less-ethically challenging reasons, explained well in their nature paper, namely that using controlled environment they learn a ton of things about how embryos grow > The ability to remove a mammalian embryo from the uterine environment and grow it normally in controlled conditions constitutes a powerful tool to characterize the effect of different perturbations on development during the period from gastrulation to organogenesis, that can be combined with genetic modification, chemical screens, tissue manipulation and microscopy methods
- boxed 6y agoWe really should though. If we can get this to work it would mean we could save lots of species that are endangered. Elephants and rhinos come to mind.
- cblconfederate 6y agounless those species are dying because of human activity, why would we want to save them?
- boxed 6y ago"Unless"? Yes that is exactly why they are threatened. Have you been living under a rock?
- throwaway316943 6y agoI don’t think there’s an ecosystem left that is free from influence from human activity so you would have to include all of them for that reason alone. Preserving genetic diversity is probably a good enough reason, you never know when that next asteroid is due.
- cblconfederate 6y agogenetic diversity for its own sake is hard to justify as a goal, or else indeed we wouldnt be fighting this virus to extinction
- loa_in_ 6y agoIt's really easy to justify. A very prominent example of why would be penicillin. Who knows how many useful things we'll find and where?
- rory 6y agoBecause elephants and rhinos are cool and interesting, and their existence doesn't cause substantial harm to us or the planet. Do we really need another reason?
- miguelmota 6y agoHumans aren't going to stop consuming meat any time soon. It makes sense to try create more efficient 'farms' to minimize waste and engineer meat without a central nervous system.