Cloning. What if any should be the limits?

[lemur]

You may be right about the nouveau riche but as I also stated above, we already have the political and government workers above the rest of us, generelly speaking that is, and it would get worse if the rich and powerful were longer lived or could download into cloned bodies.

If sustainable culture was dominant and all individuals utilized minimum resources regardless of their level of wealth or income, why would it matter if people cloned themselves? In fact, downloading into a cloned body could be a way of reducing the resource-waste of prolonging the life of unhealthy bodies, no? Of, course this assumes that it is not a waste of a human life to utilize a body for "uploading" someone else's consciousness into it.

[Marat]

A lot of 'veneration of life' turns out to be nothing more than a kind of superstitious worshipping of the supposed sacredness of the integrity of the human body rather than a rational promotion of real human happiness. Thus the laws against people selling a surplus kidney to someone who will die without a transplant operate on the premise that what is sacred in humans is never touching or exploiting their flesh, while in fact what is sacred about humans is their free will, their right to continue to live, and their moral entitlement to as much freedom from the suffering caused by disease as human ingenuity can provide. Cloning seems unethical because it represents an imaginative manipulation of the human body to promote real human happiness, but the essence of our moral duty is to promote human well-being, not worship the integrity of the normal body.

 

It is important to note that the ready provision of replacement organs without the need to resort to toxic immunosuppression will greatly help the very small percentage of the population who suffer endstage organ failure during their lives, but it will not help much for extending overall life expectancy. People don't generally die from organ failure, but from calcification of the arteries, cancer, and infection.

[imatfaal]

I think the opponents of cloning and other "human-technologies" rely on the discredited and illogical slippery slope argument. It is arbitrary line-drawing with post-hoc rationalisation and moral justification

[Greatest I am]

If sustainable culture was dominant and all individuals utilized minimum resources regardless of their level of wealth or income, why would it matter if people cloned themselves? In fact, downloading into a cloned body could be a way of reducing the resource-waste of prolonging the life of unhealthy bodies, no? Of, course this assumes that it is not a waste of a human life to utilize a body for "uploading" someone else's consciousness into it.

 

 

If, and that is a big if, that culture ever developed then it likely would not matter as all would share in the opportunities of cloning.

 

We presently have a normal pyramid type of socio economic demographic pyramid.

 

Your scenario would need a flat, communistic type of socio economic demographic shape.

 

Do you really see the world going to that type of system.

 

That is rather Star Trek type of world and we may never get to it.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

 

 

A lot of 'veneration of life' turns out to be nothing more than a kind of superstitious worshipping of the supposed sacredness of the integrity of the human body rather than a rational promotion of real human happiness. Thus the laws against people selling a surplus kidney to someone who will die without a transplant operate on the premise that what is sacred in humans is never touching or exploiting their flesh, while in fact what is sacred about humans is their free will, their right to continue to live, and their moral entitlement to as much freedom from the suffering caused by disease as human ingenuity can provide. Cloning seems unethical because it represents an imaginative manipulation of the human body to promote real human happiness, but the essence of our moral duty is to promote human well-being, not worship the integrity of the normal body.

 

It is important to note that the ready provision of replacement organs without the need to resort to toxic immunosuppression will greatly help the very small percentage of the population who suffer endstage organ failure during their lives, but it will not help much for extending overall life expectancy. People don't generally die from organ failure, but from calcification of the arteries, cancer, and infection.

 

 

I do not think the jury is in yet as to the morals of cloning and while you are correct as to what kills us, there is no reason to think that in the future, we will not develop or clone systems of arteries or whatever we need to prolong life.

 

Not to go too far off the topic but think nano technology.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

I think the opponents of cloning and other "human-technologies" rely on the discredited and illogical slippery slope argument. It is arbitrary line-drawing with post-hoc rationalisation and moral justification

 

Perhaps.

I do not mind them so much though because they help us think outside of our own box and helps us solidify our pro arguments.

 

Regards

DL

Edited March 30, 2011 by Greatest I am

[lemur]

A lot of 'veneration of life' turns out to be nothing more than a kind of superstitious worshipping of the supposed sacredness of the integrity of the human body rather than a rational promotion of real human happiness. Thus the laws against people selling a surplus kidney to someone who will die without a transplant operate on the premise that what is sacred in humans is never touching or exploiting their flesh, while in fact what is sacred about humans is their free will, their right to continue to live, and their moral entitlement to as much freedom from the suffering caused by disease as human ingenuity can provide.

Why would one individual's right to freedom from suffering validate the sacrifice of another individual's right to choose to refuse surgery? Granted, buying a kidney is not the same as taking it by force, but the issue that arises is manipulation/exploitation. Why would someone choose to sacrifice their body/health for money unless they were addicted to money for some purpose(s)? It's not that the body is sacred; it's that the individual's right to control their own individual body trumps the rights of any other individuals to use it to that person's detriment (exploit them) - or at least it should, though it doesn't always work out that way in practice. So the focus isn't the body but the individual person as a being.

 

 

Cloning seems unethical because it represents an imaginative manipulation of the human body to promote real human happiness, but the essence of our moral duty is to promote human well-being, not worship the integrity of the normal body.

You're right that normalizing non-clone reproduction is just status-quo reactionism, but that doesn't mean that there may not be other, more substantial ethical issues involved.

 

It is important to note that the ready provision of replacement organs without the need to resort to toxic immunosuppression will greatly help the very small percentage of the population who suffer endstage organ failure during their lives, but it will not help much for extending overall life expectancy. People don't generally die from organ failure, but from calcification of the arteries, cancer, and infection.

The problem is determining when a living host is not a person and whether it can be exploited as such. Personally, I don't think it's a very good idea to cultivate anecephalic living corpses and utilize resources to nourish them and keep them healthy only to ensure that individuals can have organ-transplants ready and waiting. Keeping your body healthy prevents the need for organ transplants in many cases and it's not as if you can keep your body alive forever with transplants. As cell-reproduction continues over longer periods of time, the chance of mutations continues to increase as well, so how would cancer ever be less than an eventual inevitability in any medically sustained body? Also, why did the cloned sheep exhibit signs of being the same age as the sheep it was cloned from? Why do cloned DNA not result in a "blank slate?"

 

 

[ecoli]

As I said. just the stratification of our socio economic demographic pyramid.

 

You may be right about the nouveau riche but as I also stated above, we already have the political and government workers above the rest of us, generelly speaking that is, and it would get worse if the rich and powerful were longer lived or could download into cloned bodies.

 

Regards

DL

 

If this was true, in principle, than only the rich and powerful could afford automobiles and laptops.

[Greatest I am]

If this was true, in principle, than only the rich and powerful could afford automobiles and laptops.

 

That was the past.

 

Now it is Lear jets and trips to outer space. Get with the new program. LOL.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

 

[Marat]

While the general public usually assumes that they can more or less ensure that they will never need a transplant as long as they cultivate a healthy lifestyle, that is unfortunately very far from the truth. About half of all demand for renal transplants cannot be prevented, since it is the result of genetic causes (polycystic kidney disease), teratomas, autoimmune diseases whose cause and cure are unknown (lupus, vasculitis), crush injuries (earthquakes), inadequate numbers of nephrons formed during gestation for unknown reasons, etc. Even in those renal diseases where some measure of preventation can be undertaken, such as in diabetes and hypertension, the preventive measures are themselves often dangerous and difficult to apply correctly, and usually they can at most delay the inevitable decline to endstage renal failure. Any highly vascularized organ tends to undergo progressive decline once it experiences any injury or stress, and this makes the kidney often unsalvageable. Similarly bleak prognoses for preventive medicine apply to other organs needed for transplant, such as the pancreas, lungs, liver, and heart.

 

With respect to buying organs, the argument that poor people are somehow exploited by being offered a very large sum of money for their donation of a surplus kidney, without which medically suitable candidates can live a perfectly healthy life with a normal life expectancy, seems difficult to comprehend, though it is often cited. How is someone living in desperate poverty 'exploited' by being enormously empowered through the offer of an additional opportunity to escape that poverty? Exploitation implies some sort of entrapment and abuse of someone, while augmenting someone's opportunities hardly qualifies as that. No one sells a kidney unless he wants to, so given that the odds of experiencing death or serious injury by working in a coal mine or volunteering for the military during wartime are much greater and the money much less than in selling a kidney, I can't see how the bargain can be unethical only in the kidney sale situation, as many people assume. Medically, your blood is just as much an organ as your kidney, though because the general public doesn't know that blood sales are legal but kidney sales are not.

 

If we could clone anencephalic humanoids, would we be compelled to regard them as human and extend them full human rights? The issue has to be considered in terms of all our decisions about what is human and what is not. When orangutans were first seen by Europeans, they assumed that they were humans. Since they have intelligence and human-like behavior, why not assign them human rights rather than just assume, as we now do, that they are legally chattels and can be owned, sold, and killed without a murder charge being laid? The answer is that nature gives us no bright-line distinctions as to what is human and what is not, so we always make arbitrary cut-offs. Often we make those arbitrary cut-offs to advance social interests, such as when we decided, as a society, that a fetus is not a person, essentially because we wanted to promote women's liberation from the burden of unwanted pregnancy. Similarly, in the case of anencephalic humanoids, since their ontological status as humans or not is factually ambiguous, why not allow our ethical interest in helping relieve the terrible suffering of people enduring endstage organ failure to prompt our decision to define them as non-human, as we did with the fetus for the sake of a different human interest of much less importance, women's freedom from unwanted pregnancies?

[lemur]

How is someone living in desperate poverty 'exploited' by being enormously empowered through the offer of an additional opportunity to escape that poverty? Exploitation implies some sort of entrapment and abuse of someone, while augmenting someone's opportunities hardly qualifies as that.

The assumption is that if someone is desperate enough in poverty to sell an organ, that they lack access to more constructive opportunities to economically sustain themselves. E.g. if a person can choose to sell their labor to a non-exploitative buyer, or if they can use it to sustain themselves directly through economically productive activities, why would they choose to subject themselves to surgery that has no health benefit to themselves? If the issue is seeking a more privileged economic position, the question is why someone would be so desperate as to deplete their body to do so. It's sort of like the issue of exploitation in selling your body for prostitution - if you're doing it because you like your work or your client, that's one thing, but if you're doing it despite hating the work and the client(s), that signals other problems going on, no?

 

 

No one sells a kidney unless he wants to, so given that the odds of experiencing death or serious injury by working in a coal mine or volunteering for the military during wartime are much greater and the money much less than in selling a kidney, I can't see how the bargain can be unethical only in the kidney sale situation, as many people assume. Medically, your blood is just as much an organ as your kidney, though because the general public doesn't know that blood sales are legal but kidney sales are not.

But doesn't losing a kidney have the potential to result in health complications later on or shorten life expectancy? Isn't giving up a kidney more of a sacrifice than giving blood, which is regenerated constantly? If frequent giving of blood was associated with any kind of health depletion, wouldn't it be unethical for blood banks to allow people to donate more often than is good for them?

 

If we could clone anencephalic humanoids, would we be compelled to regard them as human and extend them full human rights? The issue has to be considered in terms of all our decisions about what is human and what is not. When orangutans were first seen by Europeans, they assumed that they were humans. Since they have intelligence and human-like behavior, why not assign them human rights rather than just assume, as we now do, that they are legally chattels and can be owned, sold, and killed without a murder charge being laid? The answer is that nature gives us no bright-line distinctions as to what is human and what is not, so we always make arbitrary cut-offs. Often we make those arbitrary cut-offs to advance social interests, such as when we decided, as a society, that a fetus is not a person, essentially because we wanted to promote women's liberation from the burden of unwanted pregnancy. Similarly, in the case of anencephalic humanoids, since their ontological status as humans or not is factually ambiguous, why not allow our ethical interest in helping relieve the terrible suffering of people enduring endstage organ failure to prompt our decision to define them as non-human, as we did with the fetus for the sake of a different human interest of much less importance, women's freedom from unwanted pregnancies?

First of all, why is it necessary to clone anencephalic bodies? Why not just modify ivf zygotes? Would that be less ethical than cloning them when they occur naturally? Second, your reasoning about chattel status and rights is an interesting one - and it reminds me of the old testament ethics regarding the treatment of slaves, who could be disciplined but not in an ultimately destructive way. I don't see the right of abortion as liberation from unwanted pregnancies so much as it is meant to localize authority over the fetus with the person whose body is required to sustain that fetus until the point of independent viability. Actually, it's not even a good example since it's been emotionally politicized far beyond any reasonable political debate - since people simply want the freedom to make autonomous decisions independently of any moral reasoning or rationality other than their own prerogative. If the same logic as abortion was extended to cloning, chattel-management, etc. then property owners would become absolute sovereigns free to create and destroy life at will. I don't think it is currently legal to kill animals for any reason whatsoever. I think there are usually ethical procedures established for when and how euthanasia processes may be undertaken.

 

The biggest problem with using anencephalic bodies exploitatively is that how can you ultimately be sure they feel absolutely nothing? I mean, they may not be able to communicate and their brains may resemble more a lizard's or some other animal's, but how can you be certain enough that they don't have feelings to subject them to potential torture for the sake of organ-harvesting? I also think it would be unethical to solicit women to carry and give birth purely for the sake of producing organ-donors. I have a feeling, btw, that like paid kidney-donation, it would not be people in stable economic situations who would be volunteering to do this work.

 

Also, let's say some woman decided that she wanted to give birth to her own anencephalic clone at age 20 to use as a potential organ donor for herself, later on, AND she would not be able to sell the clone's organs; would she then choose to not only carry and birth the clone, but also care for it through its whole life for in the event she needed its organs? I don't think most people would take on all this work and sacrifice on themselves, so this raises the question of how ethical it is for them to pay other people to do this work for their benefit.

 

 

Edited March 30, 2011 by lemur

[Ringer]

Don't identical twins use each other as sex surrogates? Wasn't this the premise of the Parent Trap movies (in a quaint, non-chalant way)?

Not that I'm aware of, and even if they do they still have the right to refuse to be a surrogate.

 

If we engineered them to lack consciousness, it would be no different to farming human-looking animals.

 

 

That depends on the assumption that we A.) know what consciousness is B.) have the knowledge to engineer genes to ONLY act upon neurons that influence consciousness and no others C.) we somehow are able to think of a clone as not human which out of all of these I find the least likely.

 

 

 

I think that all the technical problems will eventually be taken care of and as far as human rights go, the mindless hulk of organs that we end up growing will not be thought of as human.

 

Regards

DL

 

Do you have any basis whatsoever that they will only be thought of as mindless hulks? Do you realize that if they have the same genes that they will, more or less, develop the same as the person cloned so they will not be mindless? Or how about the problem with the time it would take to actually let them grow and mature to where their organs are even the least bit usable? It would probably cost much more in upkeep and such than they would help just so they could be organ farms or sex slaves.

 

 

 

 

[Greatest I am]

 

Do you have any basis whatsoever that they will only be thought of as mindless hulks? Do you realize that if they have the same genes that they will, more or less, develop the same as the person cloned so they will not be mindless? Or how about the problem with the time it would take to actually let them grow and mature to where their organs are even the least bit usable? It would probably cost much more in upkeep and such than they would help just so they could be organ farms or sex slaves.

 

 

No. I have no basis for my opinions. I am only speculating.

 

As to your issues of cost. Like most things, I imagine the fist one will cost million, if not billions. After a time, they will be relatively cheep.

 

Look at any product ever produced. That is the trend and you might trust me on this because my opinion may have value to that statement because I was in sales and marketing for most of my working career.

 

Regardless, cost is a side issue and has nothing to do with the limits we should or should not set to cloning.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

 

[Marat]

Lemur: I don't think someone having the additional freedom to sell a surplus organ where before he had none can be considered as an exploitation of that person with his now greatly augmented options in life. Exploitation implies that the exploited person becomes less free since he is now under greater control by the exploiter. But in fact, there is no way that gaining an option, such as the legal right to sell a kidney, fits this typical definition of exploitation.

 

The sale doesn't exploit, only the poverty, to which the sale is a voluntarily chosen solution. You would arguably intensify the exploitation of poor people if you denied them the option to sell a kidney, since you decide to confine someone else's potential sphere of liberty because of your own option about how far his liberty should extend. You are thus using him for your own purposes without regard for his own wishes, which is the definition of exploitation.

 

Animals don't have legal rights. You can kill a pig to eat it, or kill a cow just because you want to use the hide for a coat. So why should an anencephalic who has much less awareness, volition, feeling, or desire than a pig, a cow, or even a mole be given human rights?

 

A long-term of several hundred Swedish kidney donors showed that they actually live longer than people who don't donate kidneys. This longer than normal life span was because they had to pass a health screening before being allowed to donate, as any well-regulated kidney market would also require. The study indicates that there is minimal harm to the donor from kidney donation. A study by Santiago in 1972 showed that even then there was no loss of life expectancy among renal donors.

 

Since transplants can be performed painlessly, I don't see where the concern for anencephalics suffering comes from. They don't have the intellect to regret that they don't live to learn a trade, or to miss their friends and relatives, assuming that lizards, who have about the same brain development, also don't experience these losses consciously.

 

Ringer: It seems anti-positivist to attribute the possibility of consciousness where there is no empirical data to support that attribution, and then to worry on the basis of that attribution that we may be doing something harmful in using anencephalics. On that type of reasoning, you should be very gentle in opening doors on the basis of the theoretical possibility that the door knob is conscious. When there is undeniably real and enormous human suffering which could be assuaged by using anencephalics, it seems morally unbalanced to fret about the vague possibility that a lizard brain located in an humanoid body might have a consciousness so sophisticated that we dare not harm it, and then to cite this fragile, essentially imaginary possibility as a good reason to let the massive human suffering continue.

[lemur]

Lemur: I don't think someone having the additional freedom to sell a surplus organ where before he had none can be considered as an exploitation of that person with his now greatly augmented options in life. Exploitation implies that the exploited person becomes less free since he is now under greater control by the exploiter. But in fact, there is no way that gaining an option, such as the legal right to sell a kidney, fits this typical definition of exploitation.

So if I offered someone $100k to have their genitals surgically removed, that wouldn't be exploitative if they valued the money more than their use of their genitals? What if I offered them $1million? What about $10 million? At what point would it become exploitative to seduce them into self-sacrifice? What if it wasn't just their genitals but their life? What if I offered to pay someone's child a billion dollars if they would commit suicide? Would that be exploitative?

 

You are thus using him for your own purposes without regard for his own wishes, which is the definition of exploitation.

What about manipulating someone's wishes to contradict their self-interest voluntarily?

 

Animals don't have legal rights. You can kill a pig to eat it, or kill a cow just because you want to use the hide for a coat. So why should an anencephalic who has much less awareness, volition, feeling, or desire than a pig, a cow, or even a mole be given human rights?

But there are rules and conditions for when and how you can kill a pig or a cow. Even livestock meant for slaughter have rights against cruelty and unwarranted exploitation. You can slaughter a cow, but I bet you'd get in trouble if you drove it to the point of collapse every day and someone reported you.

 

A long-term of several hundred Swedish kidney donors showed that they actually live longer than people who don't donate kidneys. This longer than normal life span was because they had to pass a health screening before being allowed to donate, as any well-regulated kidney market would also require. The study indicates that there is minimal harm to the donor from kidney donation. A study by Santiago in 1972 showed that even then there was no loss of life expectancy among renal donors.

Then people should be donating kidneys for free, just for the health benefits, right?

 

Since transplants can be performed painlessly, I don't see where the concern for anencephalics suffering comes from. They don't have the intellect to regret that they don't live to learn a trade, or to miss their friends and relatives, assuming that lizards, who have about the same brain development, also don't experience these losses consciously.

I think it's the idea that they are being intentionally kept alive to be used deleteriously. It's also the fact that it is/was a person with a family (at some point). Imagine knowing that your mother gave birth several times but all your "siblings" were just organ-donor bodies sold to pay for your college fund.

 

[Ringer]

No. I have no basis for my opinions. I am only speculating.

 

As to your issues of cost. Like most things, I imagine the fist one will cost million, if not billions. After a time, they will be relatively cheep.

 

Look at any product ever produced. That is the trend and you might trust me on this because my opinion may have value to that statement because I was in sales and marketing for most of my working career.

 

Regardless, cost is a side issue and has nothing to do with the limits we should or should not set to cloning.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

 

 

 

You may have been in sales and marketing, but that has nothing to do with production. Human's dietary needs are a pretty far cry from most of the other animals we tend to farm. Not to mention they would have to be kept fairly healthy for organ donation and fairly attractive for a sex slave.

 

I'm going to the issue of cost because you are assuming that human cloning will get to a point where that would be an issue. For purely civil liberty reasons I don't believe that will be an issue. So I am just ignoring that issue and pursuing other reasons why it would not be feasible to 'grow' humans for commercialization.

[Greatest I am]

You may have been in sales and marketing, but that has nothing to do with production. Human's dietary needs are a pretty far cry from most of the other animals we tend to farm. Not to mention they would have to be kept fairly healthy for organ donation and fairly attractive for a sex slave.

 

I'm going to the issue of cost because you are assuming that human cloning will get to a point where that would be an issue. For purely civil liberty reasons I don't believe that will be an issue. So I am just ignoring that issue and pursuing other reasons why it would not be feasible to 'grow' humans for commercialization.

 

 

I worked with many on prototypes that eventually went into production. The first might have cost a million $ but the millionth may have cost only $10.00.

 

 

There is actually a formula out there.

 

Usually, the cost of a part for a prototype can and is way more expensive than the same part, bought in masse, for production, making the mass produced item way cheaper than the prototype. I don’t care if you believe that or not.

 

Try it. Go to the grocer and ask the price of one steak. Now ask the price per lb for a whole cow. See the huge difference?

 

Your comment on diet and growing costs are thus handled.

 

Regards

 

DL

 

 

[Marat]

You could really only be said to exploit a poor person by offering him a lot of money to do something he would otherwise not want to do if you were also responsible for making and keeping him poor until you approached him with your offer. The pressure exerted on him by his poverty to accept your offer is the responsibility of other forces. If a surgeon charges you $200,000 to make you walk again through a complex operation, and you are only crippled in the first place because of an accident the surgeon did not cause, he is hardly exploiting you by offering you this empowering option of trading a lot of money for digging yourself out of the oppressive trap you now find yourself in.

 

People make much worse sacrifices of their safety and health in choosing to escape poverty by becoming prize fighters, firemen, soldiers in time of war, daredevils, stuntmen, policemen, etc., but since our society finds those choices perfectly ethical, it doesn't make sense to single out organ transplant payments as uniquely unethical, unless we fall back on some superstitious argument about the sacred inviolability of human flesh, which I think is what really underlies these objections.

 

Giving up a kidney does not improve health. The Swedish study by Ekholm found that Swedish kidney donors live longer than non-donors only because there is a rigorous health screening for those who are allowed to donate a kidney, so the population of donors is healthier than average to start with. But the study does indicate that the health effects of parting with a surplus kidney are minimal. Many people are born with only one kidney and never know it, and the fact is only first revealed at autopsy.

 

Positivistically, it seems impossible to induce someone to violate his own self-interest by prompting him to accept a bargain voluntarily, since the only tangible measure we have of a free person's ultimate self-interest is whatever he happens to decide to do. Since organ sales only occur if the donor agrees, the donor's agreement is the positivistic measure of his self-interest, so the sale cannot be exploitative. These arguments about the donor being exploited by a monetary offer which is just too good is like a rapist saying "It is all her fault; she forced me to rape her because she is just too beautiful. I was exploited into my legal predicament by her beauty."

 

The problem is that people imagine that it cannot ever be rational to exchange an organ for money, but this comes from the inaccurate notion among the non-medical public that a duplicate organ must necessarily be more precious than any amount of money, so the donor's acceptance of the bargain is logically irrational and against his true interests. But aside from the medical fact that an extra kidney is not more valuable than money, it seems arrogantly paternalistic for society to say to a poor person asserting his own autonomous choice to sell a spare kidney that he will not be allowed to do so because society knows his own true interests better than he ever could.

[lemur]

People make much worse sacrifices of their safety and health in choosing to escape poverty by becoming prize fighters, firemen, soldiers in time of war, daredevils, stuntmen, policemen, etc., but since our society finds those choices perfectly ethical, it doesn't make sense to single out organ transplant payments as uniquely unethical, unless we fall back on some superstitious argument about the sacred inviolability of human flesh, which I think is what really underlies these objections.

If human flesh was sacred, then it would be considered unethical to perform surgery at all, wouldn't it? I'm getting sort of tired of this topic as the politics of human sacrifice are sickening. I guess I'll have to side with Bush's famous reasoning regarding stem cells that he would never sign a bill that advocated promoting life by the destruction of other life. He said if congress would send him a bill where life was promoted without any life-destruction involved, he would support it. That makes sense to me. Although sacrifice sometimes occurs voluntarily, it's never an ethical happy ending.

[Ringer]

I worked with many on prototypes that eventually went into production. The first might have cost a million $ but the millionth may have cost only $10.00.

 

 

There is actually a formula out there.

 

Usually, the cost of a part for a prototype can and is way more expensive than the same part, bought in masse, for production, making the mass produced item way cheaper than the prototype. I don't care if you believe that or not.

 

I am going to have to assume that you mean Moore's law which only applies to electronics, not to livestock. There is a very large difference between producing livestock and an electronic device.

 

Try it. Go to the grocer and ask the price of one steak. Now ask the price per lb for a whole cow. See the huge difference?

 

Your comment on diet and growing costs are thus handled.

 

 

No they are not handled at all. You are specifically referencing clones, so it's assumed that they do not reproduce so they would not be cost effective to buy/sell because once one reaches maturity you would not have more that were produced from it like you would cows and other livestock, otherwise it's just slavery which is illegal. When I was a child I helped my dad and uncle on a farm that raised pigs and cattle; if you just bought a set and didn't plan on breeding it would not be worth your time or money. Also like anything else there are differences in price between regular old herd cattle and stock angus, most of the steaks you are going to buy are coming from quality cattle while most of the cattle at auction wont be extremely high quality. You also have to take into account all the middle men that the meat goes through to get to the grocery, and you don't take into account the amount it cost to keep the cows alive. In short, your argument that 'handled' my comment did no such thing. The laws of contamination would also be much more strict so the organs would not be infectious to the person receiving them. You would also have the problem with spending that kind of money and not know whether you would even need the organ transplant in the first place! Clones don't just form into grown organisms immediately, they have the same developmental times we do. So to spend that kind of money for a just in case scenario would be ignorant. Not to mention cows can eat, bath, etc on their own, for these clones to be considered less than human it was said they would have no consciousness, so they would probably not be able to do these things so would require constant supervision. The list of why farming humans isn't cost effective goes on and on.

 

 

 

[Greatest I am]

I am going to have to assume that you mean Moore's law which only applies to electronics, not to livestock. There is a very large difference between producing livestock and an electronic device.

 

 

 

 

No they are not handled at all. You are specifically referencing clones, so it's assumed that they do not reproduce so they would not be cost effective to buy/sell because once one reaches maturity you would not have more that were produced from it like you would cows and other livestock, otherwise it's just slavery which is illegal. When I was a child I helped my dad and uncle on a farm that raised pigs and cattle; if you just bought a set and didn't plan on breeding it would not be worth your time or money. Also like anything else there are differences in price between regular old herd cattle and stock angus, most of the steaks you are going to buy are coming from quality cattle while most of the cattle at auction wont be extremely high quality. You also have to take into account all the middle men that the meat goes through to get to the grocery, and you don't take into account the amount it cost to keep the cows alive. In short, your argument that 'handled' my comment did no such thing. The laws of contamination would also be much more strict so the organs would not be infectious to the person receiving them. You would also have the problem with spending that kind of money and not know whether you would even need the organ transplant in the first place! Clones don't just form into grown organisms immediately, they have the same developmental times we do. So to spend that kind of money for a just in case scenario would be ignorant. Not to mention cows can eat, bath, etc on their own, for these clones to be considered less than human it was said they would have no consciousness, so they would probably not be able to do these things so would require constant supervision. The list of why farming humans isn't cost effective goes on and on.

 

 

 

 

 

Strange how you would already know for a fact that farming humans is not cost effective when they would likely sell for much more than cows. One last phrase for you and I guess I am done here.

 

Economy of scale.

 

Regards

DL

[Ringer]

I never said I know for a fact it wouldn't be cost effective, I just have yet to see an argument that convinces me otherwise. Farming humans would be fairly cost effective, else the slave trade never would have prospered; farming clones, on the other hand, is different entirely. Like I said the clones put forth in this discussion would have to be 'less' than human or not conscious. In that regard they would be very difficult to take care of. Plus it is a very specialized market when talking about things like organ farming, by the time we are at a point it is easy to make clones for organ donation it would most likely be cheaper to create organs by themselves without the hassle of all out cloning.

 

Economies of scale don't usually work with forms of farming so far as I'm aware. The only way to make it into an economy of scale would be to produce in bulk, which would only work for sex trade and even then you would have to take care of them. I could be wrong since I haven't taken an economics course since I was in high school.

 

[Marat]

If you look at the economics of transplantation today, you realize that a major cost inflation comes from the fact that transplanted organs do not survive anywhere near as long in their recipients as they would have in their donors. Thus a kidney from a healthy, 20-year-old donor which would normally have continued functioning perfectly for another 70 years if left in the donor will only function for about another 20 years if it is transplanted into another human while the donor is still alive, or only about 10 years if it is transplanted after the donor has already died. The rapid decline of functioning of transplanted organs (the results are even worse for cardiac transplants) is of imperfectly understood etiology, but the primary problem seems to be that the immunosuppressive drugs which have to be used with non-clone donors are toxic to the transplanted organs.

 

Now since it costs about $240,000 to transplant a kidney, if we could avoid having to transplant kidneys repeatedly by having the renal grafts last longer, we could avoid a huge cost, since there are now some renal patients who have had as many as four successive transplants. Any analysis of the economics of cloning would have to compare the money saved by using organs from clones which would have a much longer functional life in the recipient than is presently the case with toxic immunosuppressive drugs with the amount that the cloning would cost.

[jimmydasaint]

The most sensible use of cloning would be to produce nearly genetically-identical matches to existing humans in order to provide a source of spare body parts for people who are now desperately suffering due to major organ failure. There is now a huge shortage of organs for transplant, which causes enormous human suffering and death all throughout the developed world where transplants would otherwise be feasible, and it is a moral imperative to reduce this as far as possible. If anencephalic clones genetically matching those needing organs were available, the organs could be freely harvested from them without harming truly human entities, since anencephalics have less brain than a lizard and so although they look humanoid they should not really be given the same ethical status as humans.

 

I commend your intellectual honesty. However, is it not considered ethical to care about all life in general that happen to share this planet with us? This category would include anencephalic clones, or any other clones for that matter. I consider it a personal ethical duty to care for most (but not all) creatures and bemoan the damage that we do to the environment for greed or lebensraum. Additionally, IMHO, the way we think about humans in general is also important. If we consider humans to be no more than animals, then there should be no objection to cloning humans or to construct chimeras, or indeed, to make transgenic humans. However, if we consider humans to be something separate from the animal kingdom, and we cannot risk DNA damage and the possible suffering to human foetuses or babies, from poor cloning technique: then the problem is both technical and moral.

Edited April 1, 2011 by jimmydasaint

[Marat]

Given that our society now accepts it as moral to kill pigs just for the delight of eating hotdogs, surely it could not be unethical in terms of this socially-defined moral standard to harvest organs to save human lives from an anencephalic humanoid much less aware of its surroundings than a pig.

 

While humans are biologically animals, the entire meaning-world in which humans live is not constituted by the perspective of natural science, but also contains another, separate, and equally valid dimension of ethical value. It is just as real to say that the force of gravity has a given value as it is to say that murdering humans is wrong, even though the former is a truth of natural science, while the latter is a truth of ethics. Just because humans are animals in the perspective of natural science does not mean that humans are not inflnitely more important and valuable than animals in the perspective of ethics.

 

Seen from an ethical perspective, nothing can justifiably make rights claims unless it is also bound by corresponding duties, since otherwise it could not live in a society of equals, since it would have only rights and no duties to respect the rights of others. For humans and human society there is no problem in recognizing that all humans have both rights to be respected for their own autonomy as well as duties to respect the equal autonomy of other people.

 

But this cannot possibly apply to animals, which are totally incapable of recognizing or acting on moral duties to respect the equal autonomy of other animals or humans. If animals are assigned rights, then they hold these rights with no corresponding duties being imposed on them to ensure that they behave as ethical members of a community of mutual respect, so they would become selfish monsters having rights but no duties, which would destroy all sense of ethics. Thus we have a short proof that animals cannot have rights.

[Guest lab_supplies]

I don't like the idea of cloning. While the physical body may be the same, I don't see how the people will be the same. That is kind of like creating your own person which I don't agree with.

[questionposter]

I don't think there should be or not be limits, if it happens it happens. I wouldn't condone cloning for labor or anything like that, but it's not just the DNA that makes up something, its also the experiences and thinking, otherwise since 99.99% of all human DNA is the same, most people would think almost exactly the same. This is why I believe a clone is a whole separate living thing that is virtually in now way connected to the thing it was cloned from. With humans you'd have the consider all the psychological impacts, but with animals, they don't seem to care if they aren't being treated poorly. Plus if something is about to go extinct, why not?

Edited October 28, 2011 by questionposter