(February 6, 2013 at 10:20 am)TaraJo Wrote: I posted this article here a while back. Yeah, I'm kinda reposting it because I'm coming at it from a more philosophical perspective.There is no person/animal line. We are all animals. I think what you really mean is: What should make us treat another being as a moral agent, (or possibly a potential moral agent), entitled to inclusion in our "in group"?
http://www.completegenomics.net/adventur...thal-baby/
The idea is that they're planning on creating a neanderthal baby. The question I want to ask, is this going to be a person? Surely he wouldn't have a normal life, regardless of how psychologically developed he is. The thing is, though, if it were just some ancient species of monkey, we wouldn't hesitate to put him in a cage, check his blood on a damn near daily basis, scan and test him for pretty much everything under the sun and, eventually, disect him and his brain.
But, in a very real sense, all of us are just a mutated breed of monkey. So, let's suppose we could go back and get samples from different time periods and clone babies from all along the evolutionary tree from apes to modern humans; where would we draw the line between beast and man?
I suspect the answer is: if we suspect a neanderthal baby might become an effective moral agent we should treat it as one.
On a practical note I suspect the baby will not have defences against the millions of microbes that have evolved in the last 40,000 years. So if it lives at all it will have a very restricted existence.
