| What is really unethical is retarding process, and not allowing people to have the best possible medical care. Oh, give me a break here. Take your emotions out of the argument. Cutting edge medical experimentation does not necessarily equal "best possible care". And if by innovative medical care you mean human guinea pig, then by all means buy the ticket now and head over. Is it really a problem to want to be on the "safe side" when dealing with medical treatments on humans? You're the one who has it backwards. In your convoluted sense of ethics you somehow equate "doing nothing" and "being cautious" with "doing harm". What sort of stupidity is that? Do you consider yourself an unethical greedy person each time you deny a beggar money on the streets? Do you consider yourself doing harm if you deny tackling a robber who has a gun pointed at a bank teller? How selfish of you to eat three meals each day and deny food to the millions of starving children in Africa. In each of these situations you had the capability to help, yet you chose to deny it to those people and it resulted in needless suffering. Am I correctly understanding your system of ethics where you are saying that choosing to do nothing = doing harm? Even if "doing nothing" did equal "doing harm", I would be willing to wager that doing nothing and being cautious statistically does FAR LESS "harm" than attempting a number of untested medical experiments on human guinea pigs for the sake of trying to save one person's dying grandparent. |
Give me a break. Didn't you read the article? Humans are waiting 2-3 years for a hip replacement; dogs are waiting one week. We're way past "experimentation".
I really don't know what you're imagining with all this talk of "human guinea pigs" etc. We're not talking about some crazy experimentation with live subjects, companies with carte blanche to do what they will. We're talking about new remedies, with high success rates in (genetically very similar) animals, which really need to be investigated.
"Am I correctly understanding your system of ethics where you are saying that choosing to do nothing = doing harm?"
Your examples are all biased. If you really do have the ability to apprehend an armed robber with no risk to yourself, then of course you should. The Africa situation is complex and it's not a matter of money but if you could really press a button and just fix it all, of course you'd be derelict in your duty if you didn't press that button.
The problem is the government isn't doing "nothing", it's actively retarding progress. I wish they would do nothing.
You seem to have this image in your head of some kind of large scale Nazi medical experimentation or something. I assure you that is not the case, and not what I am talking about. It is illegal to even research this shit, even if it works fine in animals, even if the patient is desperate and willing to take the risk.
The government is actively impeding this research and, by extension, medical progress. This is abhorrent and needs to change. Luckily, other countries are picking up the torch and soon you may indeed see sick Americans heading overseas for the treatment they need as America slides further into a complacent abyss of risk-averse stagnation.