[extropy-chat] Medical ethics

[Adrian Tymes]

--- David Lubkin <extropy at unreasonable.com> wrote:
> My daughter, a fourth-generation sf reader, has a
> term paper coming up on 
> medical ethics. Noting the card-carrying and de
> facto philosophers in our 
> community, I thought I'd ask for links to sites and
> printed works that you 
> have found well-written and thoughtful (non-fiction
> or sf).
> 
> Unfortunately, she is not free to choose any topic
> within medical ethics. 
> The paper must deal with reproductive medicine
> (including surrogacy), AIDS, 
> or cloning, but she may want to read works on other
> areas on her own.

Where I've seen reproductive cloning touched on in
science-compatible fiction, it's usually fallen into
one of three camps:
* A means of creating identical twins/triplets/etc.
* A means of creating children very similar to their
  parent.  (One example is the backstory behind SJ
  Games' OGRE universe, where Japan has reverted to
  its WWII-era imperial ambitions.  Some of the top
  officials are deemed too important to be distracted
  by marriages to obtain offspring, while for others a
  source of compatible parts is desired should their
  organs fail - and children are expected to give
  everything possible to support their ancestors.  In
  both cases, clones are allowed.)
* A means of creating blank bodies, when combined with
  accelerated aging (to force a body through puberty
  in much less than 20 years) and some method of mind
  transfer (which probably puts this camp's proposed
  technology well beyond what your daughter would want
  to cite for her essay, except as a possible far
  future goal).

In each case, the decision to clone is made without
input from the person-to-be - and has to be, since a
non-entity (or more precisely, a not-yet-entity) is by
definition unable to do anything, including give
input.

She might want to make an analogy to Hitchhiker's
Guide To The Galaxy, wherein the debate over food
animals was resolved by creating a species that wanted
to be eaten and could say so in no uncertain terms.
Likewise, there have been many instances of humans
born and raised for a certain purpose, and when the
time came quite voluntarily serving that purpose.
(Yes, there are always rebels, but in most cases most
such people have not rebelled.  Otherwise, no society
would have tried this practice for long.)  Even if
embryos do have souls, what does it say when they are
destroyed for no gain rather than letting their very
brief lives at least serve some purpose (even just
serving in an experiment to further the health of
people they'll never meet)?

Googling on relevant topics might also produce a few
good hits.  For instance, "artificial wombs" produced
http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/genbio/biolink/student/olc2/g-bioe-17.htm
and
http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/phil/blphil_ethbio_wombs.htm
.  (But, of course, these links need to be reviewed to
see if they're any good; these are two that I reviewed
that seem to present a rather balanced picture.  There
were other results that were somewhat hysterical.)