excreationist

Theli:
If Alzheimer's and things like that were cured then that wouldn't be a problem. BTW, neurons can regrow if some happen to die.

During that time they probably would have the technology to build you cheap artificial legs or clone legs from your DNA and graft them on, etc.

Demosthenes

additionally, we will have the means to manipulate the body at the molecular level, thus giving us a nearly unlimited repair abilies.

tronvillain

Theli:
My deeds will obviously affect a person whether he is "granted" rights or not. So? Now, I do not steal rights from this future person, I violate them.

No, my action should be considered immoral because I have violated the rights of a future person. That they do not currently exist is irrelevant, since is that they are going to be alive and in possession of rights when the bomb goes off.

Ah, but they will never exist, and so will never have any rights to be violated.

As I said, I have little idea what those effects will be, not that I have no idea what those effects will be. In the case of those specific actions we know the specifi consequences, but I was talking in more general terms.

It is a combination of both. I do not steal or kill or steal partially because of the potential societal consequences, and partially because I would feel for the victim.

I do not see it as a "flaw." I do not want to care as much about stangers as I do about people I know. Of course, I also see nothing grossly unbalanced about choosing a job that causes thousands of others to lose their job. It is balanced because I am the most important person in the world. *chuckle*

*shrugs* It depends on what I have to do to save that one person. Now, what did that have to do with what you quoted? My point was that every action we take results in countless potential individuals never becoming actual, but that our actions usually also result in countless other potential individuals becomging actual.

Why exactly is that a problem? A virtually infinite number of unborn people never have a chance to argue for their life. Why are fourteen short lives better than one long one?

[ December 15, 2002: Message edited by: tronvillain ]</p>

Theli

tronvillain...

Is that the only things that hold your argument?
1. So? I don't care.
2. Theli used a word I didn't like.
Is it your opinion that the worst thing you can do to a person is violate his rights, and if you do not grant him any rights your actions are justified?
Are rights like some how-to-treat sign hanging from our necks? If your actions prevents someone's happiness then they are wrong (unless they do more good), it doesn't matter who it is or what rights you have given that person.

That is the flaw. If you didn't want to sprout wings and fly, but it would be beneficial for our race, then the lack of wings would still be a flaw. And your fear of flying would be a flaw aswell. And in the same way, if we could feel for people who's pain we doesn't see (only know about) I'm positive that our race and society would gain from it. So, wouldn't you think that our lacking inability in that matter should be considered a flaw after all?

You pointed out the death of millions of sperms, and it seemed from your argument that as millions of sperms "gets unborn", one of them shouldn't matter.
But as the example doesn't refer to any specific unborn individual, the death of the sperms is irrelavent.

Read above, their unbirth is unavoidable so they aren't a factor. If you murder someone you cannot justify it by the millions that dies of cancer, can you?

Do you base the worth of a human life only on the number of years the person is espected to live? So that 1 person living in 800 years is worth the same as 10 people living in 80 years. That sounds pretty strange.

Theli

excreationist...
I'm not so concerned with the deterioration of the brain, but with remembering such a long life. Think about it, how would it feel having your childhood 2000 years ago? How would you ever remember that? And yet keep what has happened since that.

tronvillain

When I say "So?" it means "What is your point?", not "I don't care." My actions will affect a person regardless of whether he has been granted rights or not, by me or by anyone.

Well, most of the worst things you can do to a person tend to involve violating their rights, but certainly not all of them. Since rights are not granted arbitrarily you cannot justify actions by simply choosing to not grant them to people.

Yes, in a way rights are like some "how-to-treat sign hanging from our necks" - they are the bare minimum that society expects. If my actions prevent someone's happiness, are they wrong? It depends on your perspective. From mine, perhaps no, from yours, perhaps yes.

I made no such argument.

I was simply making a point about the unborn not being able to argue for their life. There are countless decisions you could make that would result in a specific person being born, yet you do not make them. Why don't you feel bad about that? NOt being born is not the same as being murdered.

excreationist

Theli:
Well there is an interesting book by Neil Postman called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679751661/thesecularweb/" target="_blank">The Disappearance of Childhood</a> which talks about the history of childhood. Neil Postman says that in the Middle Ages, kids under the age of about seven ("the age of reason") were "infants" who often didn't even have names - they died a lot anyway. Then at the age of about 7, they were "adults". They worked, wore identical clothing to older workers and were good friends with the older people. Basically to be an "equal" they just had to know language. Then with the printing press and the reformation, parents wanted their kids to go to school to learn language. The kids eventually went into age segregated language and they began their own culture. About 200 years ago or so there was special furniture for kids and it was only about then when birthday's were celebrated. I think he says Rosseau? and the romantic movement made childhood a thing to nurture. When there was literacy in the Victorian era, there was a big separation between children and adults - children had to master the difficult task of literacy before they could enter the adult world. And adults kept lots of "secret knowledge" about how society works, etc, in their books.
Then in about the 1950's, movies allowed kids to see the secret life of adults, and with TV, they can see it even easier... to learn a lot about sex, etc, from TV you don't need to be literate...
Neil Postman also says that besides childhood starting to disappear in modern life (except for in the very young who like Barney and Teletubbies, etc), adults want to go back to their childhood - e.g. by wearing T-shirts, watching cartoons, etc.
Anyway, today adults can act like kids a bit - we can go to waterslides, play paintball, get kids meals at McDonald's, collect barbies or Lego, etc. And we can play with big toys too, like real cars. For many of us, our actually childhoods were filled with a lot of drudgery associated with school, the longing to be an adult, or some kind of trauma like a bullying sibling, etc. The main disadvantage of an adult childhood is that adults aren't little and can't date real kids, etc. But otherwise it is the same, or better.

Theli

Tronvillian...

I have no way of knowing that, your response was unclear. I had to make a guess of what you meant.

Excacly, but why did you involve "rights" as a factor earlier in this thread when you now question it's relevance? Your argument was that our actions could be moraly justifiable if the victim was not born yet, thus having no rights to be violated. Do you deny this argument now?

How do you suggest a moral code based only on the person's subjective opinion? I would rather think that a moral code would have to trancend the individual to bare that name, or we could just aswell use the same logic when it comes to murder and rape. It would be nothing more than an opinion. We could aproach the question from another view:
1. Do you think murder is wrong? (this being in a general sense, no special selfdefence pleading)
2. If so - why?
3. Would you count murder as being a "wrong" in our moral code? (is it justifiable to have murder illegal in our laws)

I never said you made an argument, I said you mentioned the sperms and it seemed to me that you counted those as a factor (we couldn't save them). If not, then why did you even mention them?

There's a difference here. If I buy a new can, as a result someone might die. The car might have a defect, something I didn't know. But should I be blamed for the person's death? No. I couldn't possibly forsee his death caused by my purchase. But in the example of immortality, birth-control would be imperative for a society and I should know the consequence of me extending my own life. Pleading ignorance in that situation would be like saying "I didn't know he was going to die when I shot him".

If my not being born is a product of a persons conscious actions, then I don't see much of a difference.

Jamie_L

I don't know that we've positively established that. But even so, see below.

If I have sex with my wife on Thursday and she gets pregnant, Person X is conceived. If we postpone sex until Friday, Person Y is conceived instead, and Person X never has a chance to exist. Have I murdered Person X?

If we use birth control on Friday, Person Y isn't born either. Have we now murdered both Person X and Person Y through our conscious choices about sex?

If we get into a fight on Wednesday and decide to get a divorce, we will never have any children. Our conscious choice has prevented the birth of who knows how many kids.

This is the kind of thing tronvillain and I are talking about. Possible people are prevented from existing all the time. Attaching morality to their possible existence is, IMHO, untenable. We couldn't live like that, and, in fact, we don't. Even Catholics don't worry about preventing Person Z from being born because someone has a headache one night.

Jamie

[ December 18, 2002: Message edited by: Jamie_L ]</p>

tronvillain

Theli:
My argument is that our actions can be morally justified because there is no victim - no one's rights are ever violated, no one is ever harmed.

A "moral code" is simply a collection of rules and principles which emerge from the interplay of individual subjective moral systems. It is true that we can apply the same logic to anything, including murder and rape. Of course, that is the point - from the perspective of some people, it is not wrong for them to commit murder or rape.

1) Do I think murder is wrong? Yes. Of course, I do not think murder is always wrong - fear, pain, and money are all things that could potentially induce me to commit murder.

2) Why do I think murder is wrong? Various reasons - I fear the murder of myself and those close to me, and I feel empathy for murder victims and their families. Murder simply bothers me enough for me to call it "wrong".

3) Is it justifiable for murder to be a crime? Yes. Most people apparently share my feelings on the subject.

Except that I did not mention sper, - I pointed out that our every action results in countless individuals never being born, but you were the one who brought up sperm. *chuckle*

Apparently you consider remaining celibate, or using birth control, or even ovulating without conception to be the same as murder. After all, in every one of those situations you make choices which you know result in someone not being born.

*shrugs* Then we will simply have to agree to disagree. Apparently you consider preventing someone from existing to be the same as ending someone's existence. I do not.