(June 20, 2011 at 6:40 pm)BloodyHeretic Wrote: It's not unethical to make metal into a tool. If you use that for evil, then it is. How about a living being? Is it right to make that into any form we desire? My point was that metal has no 'rights' in and of itself, life does.But life does not have endemic rights. Life is merely a collection of processes encased in some container. The lowest levels of what we consider life are merely mindless automatons, following complex algorithms and feedback systems.
We grant rights to thinking beings like ourselves, a statement of equality between similarly capable organisms. But have you considered what a right truly is?
A worry I might have, that many have, is the possibility for humans to become callous and lack empathy, turning their very tools to destructive and monstrous purposes. Between modifying a thinking being into a slave organism or incinerating alive another thinking being, there is little difference when it comes to man's inhumanity to man.
(June 20, 2011 at 6:40 pm)BloodyHeretic Wrote: I didn't say I feared bioengineering, just that the possibilities it's offering are providing huge new moral questions that will have massive consequences on the future. That we hold the power to decide these things now, the responsibility to choose wisely, is a very sobering thought. Maybe sobering is a better word than scary. Does it not chill you even a little to think of what getting these things wrong will mean?Things, though, do not "go wrong". Only the men who use them are astray. And yes, it chills me, every time I witness the inhumanity of humans.
