Monday, August 03, 2015

Be Afraid, be very afraid

Pinker insists we discard ethics to get cures for rich first world people. After all, what could go wrong?

A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as “dignity,” “sacredness,” or “social justice.”


Then he uses the strawman argument: some treatment like vaccines, blood transfusions and anesthesia were considered immoral. Yes, but only by splinter groups, like George Bernard Shaw and his friends, who opposed both vivisection and vaccines, or Jehovah witnesses who oppose blood transfusions.

True, Catholics opposed IVF, because it separates baby making from love making, and makes babies a commodity (rich couples paying poor women in India as incubators) (and of course, just ignore the hundred thousand frozen babies in the freezer ethical dilemma).

So why did he publish this article now? Maybe the Youtube video of babies being cut up need to be dismissed as necessary and good.

ironically, in today's world you can always find an ethicist to okay your actions, so bioethics is not what is standing in the way.

Blame it on Hollywood: only they dare to write about an agenda that is lurking deep in the bioethics literature but rarely discussed in the MSM.

 Nor should it thwart research that has likely benefits now or in the near future by sowing panic about speculative harms in the distant future. These include perverse analogies with nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like “Brave New World’’ and “Gattaca,’’ and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs.

True.

but if you want to see how money manages to run around the paper thin ethical barriers, just come here.

Who needs warehouses of zombies when you can just give a thousand dollars to a poor Indian or Filipino for his kidneys? Or get it from a Chinese political prisoner scheduled for execution. Need to see if your vaccines or antibiotics work? Just go overseas (or use American Indians to see if Hep A vaccine works or if treating strep stops kidney damage).(for those of you who insist poor people benefit from the money when they grow babies or donate organs, the answer is: no they end up with poor health, and the middle man gets most of the profit.)

as for Nazi atrocities: killing and dismembering babies old enough to live outside the womb does resemble them. And in the wings: Using the brain damaged who are not brain dead but only handicapped, for experimentation and organ donation that will kill them.

article headsup from Arts and Letters daily

No comments: