What I mean by worth, and also human dignity, is that a certain 'ultimate value' is placed on the individual by society -- a certain value which the Utilitarian/consequentialist position seems to neglect. The inadequacies of the Consequentialist position on agency is well known. I understand that defining exactly what deserves protection by society is a complex ethical issue, but I do believe that the most significant support of modern western democracies is the relative equality of each and every human life. Once we begin to tamper with this base line assumption, we run the risk of destabilizing civilization. I will elaborate on this point further as I continue with my presentation.
"Personally, I think it's a bit late in the day to protest commoditization of human life."
It is never too late. Human life should never be a commodity.
"Humans are hardwired to commoditize everything - we cannot avoid assigning value; it's in our nature. We like to pretend that we don't, but I think that it's much more honest to take it as written that we do and try to proceed as intelligent people from there. In a libertarian society, this is simply the rational view of the world - everything can be valued, everything can be owned, but everyone has the protections of their own property rights."
I agree with you here in a certain sense. Humans do tend to commoditize everything. Slavery was a reality of the western world up until a 150 years ago, and it is still a reality in some places. I'm confident that we can all agree that slavery is morally wrong. Likewise, property rights are an essential aspect of a free and open society, but we can not extend property rights to owning other humans. By doing this we degrade the 'value' of the individual. To me, this seems to be an almost axiomatic statement.
I would contend that one of the goals of western, secular societies should be to limit this tendency (the tendency to own property) when it effects the rights of the individual citizen.
As someone who has spent many an hour in debate about nuclear power, I've heard the phrase, 'Nothing is worth the cost of a human life' quite a few times. Unfortunately, we don't live in a society where we have the resources for every person to be completely stand-alone. Everytime we get into a car, we acknowledge a person-to-person acceptance of the very real possibility of destroying someone else's life. This is okay in today's society, and even expected; We'll participate in a extremely dangerous activity because it's neccessary in today's world, where we need to get from A to B so quickly. As much as I appreciate human life, it's important to take a step back and look at what the world would be like if we absolutely refused to ever risk a human life, as if nothing was worth a human life.
In reality, human lives are worth dollars. Cars allow us to produce more money faster than they cost us money by killing people so they're overall beneficial to us... Coal power plants are judged worth the impact they have on your lungs everytime you flip your lightswitch. Being productive is worth a few lives to us. Sure, we'd hate them to be our lives, but we think given the probability and the value of the commodity provided in the exchange, we'll take that risk.
As I understand it, therapuetic cloning doesn't neccessarily have to come from a viable embryo or anything or the sort, so I think it's completely a non-issue about wiether it costs 'human dignity' or not.
But... why not use viable embryos? I would argue that a human life is valuable in terms of information. As a brick of protein that could benefit my personal health, I don't see anything unethical in taking a non-sentient blob of cells with no personality and using it for my own benefit. It would certainly be unethical to take another living, breathing, thinking human being with a personality, history, experiences, and responses and steal something essential to their nature to make them... inviable as a human being. I don't think anybody would think that's the right thing to do. An embryo, though, is totally lacking in the mental structures that makes us human. Sure, with the right conditioning and engineering, it can be made into a baby, which can be raised into sentience and become a valuable living person. With the right engineering, you can even get spermatazo and ova to become a living person. With a longer process and even more conditiong/engineering, you can turn soybeans into a living person. How far back in the 'potential' human debate do you want to go?
Though it sounds ghoulish and hardly would be approved by most members of this organization and society in general, I'd say it'd be perfectly ethical to produce full clones of ourselves to be harvested for medical purposes. The clones would, of course, be brain-damaged or genetically altered to never have anything more than the bare minimum autonomous nervous response neccessary to run their bodies. Maybe make a simple nerve-computer interface for the brain stem that just makes the biomass excersize an hour aerobically a day and eat. They'd be expensive but very useful. They'd be less thinking than a chicken or a cow, which we kill all the time in various stages of development. They'd be magnitudes less human than chimps, which are still used for research in some places. The only similiarities would be in the non-thinking biological structures of the biomass. I don't think anyone would find it apalling to make plants that construct hemoglobin or other biological structures. This is basically the same thing, just a more direct and sensical approach.
As far as your viewpoint of not supporting immortality, but arguing against something like this, I can't help but feel there is some kind of mixup in your priorities. It seems you think potential human life is more or as valuable than established/existing human life. I think human life begins when we learn languages and start to label and model the world around us. We can't get hung up worrying about 'potential' people, when real, established people are dying by the hundred thousand every day.
In short, I don't think human biology has any intrinstic value because it could possibly result in an intelligent creature anymore than rocks do. Other than the value we should assign on the material for medical benefit for those that are already alive. The difference between your 'light cone' of probable formation into a human being is puzzling. Basically, you are saying the value of life is intrinsically tied to the probability of it becoming a living, intelligent creature?
Why set the margin in the past? No embryo can turn into a baby without help from it's mother, so the probability of survival for an embryo is never 100%. I don't think inalienable human rights work opposite the arrow of time. There is a possible future where every 'passive' gamete becomes an 'active' zygote. Every time a child is created, millions of potentially 'active' gametes' future is denied. In the spectrum of quantum possibility, trying to take responsibility to ensure everything that can be has a chance at life is utter madness.
I should hope immortals destablize all culture. Delusions of grandeur about our own mythical 'transcendence' aside, almost all of mainstream culture is built up around death, dualism, religious beliefs about law and punishment, the illusion of free will. I dream of a world where every person is an unsinkable ship, except from within. I imagine a world where it killing someone might be possible, but would probably take as much resources as destroying the universe. In a world like that, governments can't hold any power at all: If there are no human weaknesses to cater to servicing, how would they exist? If you can't take anything from anyone else, how can you fight a war? If you can't force pain or suffering onto anyone, how can you commit a violent crime?
--armrha, strange mood today...