[ExI] morals

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Wed Jan 23 00:18:09 UTC 2019


On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 11:32 AM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> > What unethical experiment would have the most positive impact on the
> society as a whole?   (This is the question I was asked on Quora.  Here is
> my answer:
>
Easy - genetic manipulation of ova and sperm to create designer babies.
>

I would tend to agree except if it has a positive impact, if it reduced the
general level of misery in the world, how is it unethical? Well perhaps it
is because I've notice whenever ethicists, that is to say experts who are
far more moral than you or me, pontificate about what is right and what is
wrong more often than not what they insist is the most ethical thing to do
is whatever will cause the most suffering.

I just finished Siddhartha Mukherjee's book "The Gene" and one chapter is
about the death of Jesse Gelsinger during failed gene therapy in 1999. A
company thought they had a cure for a rare disease called "ornithine
transcarbamylase deficiency" and asked for approval of a test. It can be
fatal but Gelsinger only had a mild form of the disease, so why was
Gelsinger the first test patients in a procedure that was known to be
risky? That was the brilliant idea of the ethicists, they maintained that
if they offered it to somebody with a severe form of the disease they
would, in their words "be pressured" to consent to this risky treatment
because the only alternative was death. Therefore medical ethicists (aka
nitwits) ordered that the therapy only be offered to somebody who had such
a mild form of the illness it was just a nuisance and not a threat to life.

On another list I mentioned that every single year that we DON'T use Gene
Drive we are condemning 725,000 people to die from malaria. I was told it
would be unethical to use it because if we did it would caused 40 malaria
causing mosquito species to go extinct and even though there would still be
3500 mosquito species around it still might make a environmental
catastrophe as great as the cane toad problem. The cane toad problem!

If the net result of ethics is more death and human misery then what's the
point of ethics?

John K Clark
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