[lo_zamoyski]

We are childless. We could use legal reproductive tech like IVF, but we refuse to do so on moral grounds. This is painful for us, but we accept the reality of it, because, among other reasons, we refuse to commoditize human life and to kill human beings[0] to satisfy our desire to be parents.

So please avoid the ad hominem and do not presume that moral opposition is merely some kind of flippant and insensitive response coming from those who are not affected. There are plenty of couples who make this moral decision, because they grasp the moral reality of the situation.

No one is entitled to children. No one is entitled to any kind of child. This entitlement is precisely what makes it commodification. Children are not property. They are not a product to be customized. They’re human beings, and no one is entitled to another human being. It is good and natural to want children. It is good and natural to want healthy children. It is good and natural to marry and to try to have them. But it is not good to think you deserve them or that you are entitled to have them - and to have them in a desired condition - at any cost or by any means. A real parent puts his child’s good - real or potential - before his or her own, but this attitude of entitlement gets it exactly backwards. It involved begetting children from a fundamental position of disrespect toward them as human beings and toward all those who were thrown out in the process.

While there is no moral issue in principle with gene therapies that involve correcting genetic defects in an embryo in the abstract; in practice, there is a lot we don’t know about genetics, the details of the process matter, and the flippant overconfidence of startups is worrying But doing screening and terminating ‘undesirable’ embryos is gravely immoral.

[0] An embryo is not some ontologically other that later magically transubstantiates into a human being. “Embryo” and “fetus” describe stages of human development, like “infant”, “toddler”, “teenager”, or “adult”. It boggles the mind how blind and numb we are as a society to this reality, and so easily dehumanize human life in its early stages, simply because it doesn’t look like it does at more mature stages, and because it suits our desires.

[greygoo222]

Human life is valuable because of critical properties, such as the ability to have complex thoughts, feelings, and desires.

A couple cells in a petri dish don't gain moral status owing to having DNA matching Homo Sapiens. That's ridiculous.

[lo_zamoyski]

> Human life is valuable because of critical properties

Specifically, the capacity for rationality and the capacity to choose among alternatives (insects feel things, too, in their myriad insect ways). And these properties, far from being properties among many, are definitive, constitutive, essential* to what it means to be human. (The instantiation of other human properties is always as human-specific instantiations rooted in these above essential properties; while a cat also feels something analogous to human anger and experiences something analogous to the human desire for food, they are not univocal.)

In other words: human value comes from the kind of thing humans are, which is to say rational animals.

And these essential properties exist in potentia during the embryonic stage. A rock does not have the potential to be rational, nor does a dung beetle at any stage, nor do even human gametes, as their development does not lead to a rational being. But at fertilization, from that first cell when a new human being comes into existence, we have a being in the most literal sense that has exactly that rationality scheduled, as it were. And the degree of rationality we express is always a continuum. How much rationality has developed in an infant? How much rationality does a toddler express? The teenager or even most adults? A bed-ridden person with Alzheimer's in old age? A comatose patient? To say that human life at some stage or other does not possess humanity is drawing lines in the sand, an arbitrary threshold that we choose to rationalize some action we wish to take that is opposed to the good of such a being.

[greygoo222]

Existing "in potentia" means it doesn't exist, duh.

[lo_zamoyski]

Not actually, but it is not identical to nonexistence. It's capacity. If something didn't first have the potential for something, it could never become actual in that manner. And which potentials something has depends on the kind of thing it is. Thus, only human beings in their early stages have the potential to be adult human beings.

You're basically committing the error of Parmenides all over again.

[greygoo222]

No, it is literally identical to nonexistence. An acorn is not an oak tree. If I were looking for objects that satisfied the properties of having a trunk and providing shade, an acorn would not qualify.

On an arbitrarily large timescale, many things have the potential to become other things. Depending on your preferred theory of abiogenesis, some frothy chemical soup on early Earth had the potential to become, and did become, all of life. This does not give the soup moral value equivalent to all of life. What matters is what things are now, not the other things they could turn into.

[bonsai_spool]

I disagree with your framing around embryos being human (largely because we're using our current scientific understanding to change what was intuitive into some abstraction that, itself, we don't understand - consider that pregnancy may be much more common than we know, but that otherwise 'normal' acts may harm these otherwise unknown pregnancies. Do we then prescribe the behavior of women after every sexual act they complete? But a mother causing the unintentional death of her progeny has always been wrong and socially punished.).

I do agree that we don't consider the morality of what science is allowing us to do and I appreciate your arguments.

[lo_zamoyski]

> consider that pregnancy may be much more common than we know, but that otherwise 'normal' acts may harm these otherwise unknown pregnancies

But unintentional harm during the normal course of living is a different matter, right? There's a difference between an accident or acting out of ignorance on the one hand and intentionally harming someone. You don't provide an example of anything "normal", so I can't address it specifically.

Furthermore, moral actions involve proportionality. For instance, consider a pregnant woman who has developed cancer. Chemotherapy is quite dangerous to her child, but it may give her a very good chance of surviving. Can she licitly take chemo, knowing this risk, or even knowing that certain harm will come? Yes, she can, not because her unborn child's life is less valuable than hers, but because her life is on par with that of her unborn child, and for that reason, she may take chemo to save her life with the unintended side effect of her child's harm or even death. (She isn't using the harm or death of the child to benefit, hence "side effect".)

> I do agree that we don't consider the morality of what science is allowing us to do and I appreciate your arguments.

I appreciate your recognition. Human beings have a bad track record in the morality department, and with the power that the scientific process gives us, we are like toddlers with a a shotgun.

[Teever]

I'm curious where you place organisms like HeLa cell line[0] in your personal moral framework and world view on human biology.

It seems to me that you would consider the harvesting of these cells to be immoral but also that you'd consider killing these cell lines to be unacceptable.

In your opinion Henrietta Lacks still alive as long as this cell line is alive somewhere in a lab? What if the cells are frozen? If she died what remains? How is it different from an embryo?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

[lo_zamoyski]

These are good questions. Let's enumerate the essential ones.

1. Is harvesting cells in the manner of the HeLa cell line morally licit?

2. Is killing such cells morally licit?

3. Is Henrietta Lacks still alive through this cell line?

4. How are the cells in this line different from an embryo?

(1) No, I would not say this is immoral. First, these are cancer cells. If removing cancer cells from a human body is immoral, then it would follow that removing tumors would be immoral, which it isn't, because a tumor is a defect - it deviates from the norm of a healthy, functioning body and interferes with its operation. Removing such cells is a corrective procedure. It restores the body's healthy function, which is the entire point of medicine.

Now, what if the cells were healthy? Here, it would depend on the aim of doing so as well as the impact. For example, removing cells from a healthy heart because you wish to diagnose a patient with a minor illness would be bad if doing so also damaged the heart in some way surpassing the good enabled by such extraction and diagnosis.

However, say the person in question is suffering from a serious illness, and the damage or resulting risks of such an extraction is proportionately less than the good of the life-saving effect it would enable, then this would be morally licit.

(2) No, I would not find killing such cells immoral either, because...

(3) ...Henrietta Lacks is not alive anymore than a hand severed from my body and kept alive artificially is still me. Indeed, that hand is no longer a hand, because a hand is only a hand when it is a integral part of an organism and functioning as part of that organism. If you reattached that hand to my body while I am still alive, then it would be my hand.

(4) These are not embryonic cells. They will not develop into a human being.

Now, even if we ignore that they are cancerous, you may say that such cells can be modified or "reprogrammed" into embryonic cells. Yes, they can, but that involves modification. The result of that modification would not be Henrietta Lacks, but a clone, or a distinct person with the same DNA. I would reject such cloning as immoral.

--

Now, developing cell lines derived from adult cells is different from developing cell lines from the destruction of embryos, which brings us back full circle. It's the destruction of a human being in the embryonic stage that is categorically immoral.