RE: Better never to have lived?

From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 04:34:49 MST


On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, Lee Corbin wrote:

> When you say "halt current cloning [efforts]", do you mean
>
> (a) to yourself stop your own efforts, or
> (b) to suggest and exhort others to stop theirs, or
> (c) send armed men to suppress the undesirable activity?

Look, we're discussing what makes sense. We're not in the position to make
policy, nor are we implementing policy. Whether ours or somebody elses.

So perhaps we can skip the rhetoric, and talk about what makes sense.
The Matrix has me again, so I couldn't answer the other posts in that
thread yet.

> The country I'm living in is physically larger than the
> country you are living in, and this may affect my thinking.
> Do you or do you not favor sending the police out into the
> middle of the Nevada desert to bust up a cloning effort
> hundreds of miles from nowhere, and to apprehend and
> prosecute the perpetrators?

To answer that question we must first figure out whether it's morally ok
for parents to deliberately produce a defective child. I've thought the
answer was easy, but it isn't. I have to figure out whether there is a
straightforward answer, or whether the answer is 'it depends on your frame
of reference'. (Actually, because different people seem to be having very
different opinions on the issue it is likely to be the latter).



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