echi wrote:Wolf_ODonnell wrote:You see, the problem I have with echi's view is that you can split the "blob of human cells" twice and create two human beings. You can theoretically destroy the entire thing and grow the ES cells until you have enough to make four or five or ten or a hundred etc. human beings. You can take two and merge them together to get a chimera and form one human being.
Does anybody else see the philosophical conundrum this raises?
I don't see any philosophical conundrum... only a lack of ethics.
I am not arguing for the existence of a "soul".
I don't know, maybe I missed your point.
You don't see it?
How many lives are you "killing" when you destroy a blastocyst to harvest its ES cells for medical purposes? One? Well, not necessarily. The blastocyst could have, if left naturally, split into two.
In fact, you're not killing very much. You're only killing the outer layer of cells that make up the trophoderm (I think that's how it's spelt). What makes up the normal human being has been extracted in the form of ES cells.
These ES cells are still alive. They still have the potential, if you create some trophoderm cells, to create a human being. For the purposes of medical use, they will be grown indefinitely and the majority of them kept as ES cells.
Ironically, this potential human being will exist forever. It is immortal. It will forever be a potential human being. Theoretically, it will never die. The biggest irony, of course, would be the fact that this potential human being isn't conscious enough to enjoy its immortality.
Later, if you really wish, you can take these ES cells and implant them into an empty blastocyst. Implant it into a mother's womb and let it grow into a human being.
At the time being, this is only theoretical because we have no way to create an empty blastocyst without removing the ES cells from another.
Also, at this time, we can only create chimeras. I've worked in a lab where this has been done. The ES cells were modified and then transplanted into a blastocyst that had a few ES cells removed. This grew into a chimera, with the qualities of two mice.
What was once two potential mice became one. What would have been two separate lives are now one?
What are the ethical problems involved in that? I tell you this, the philosophical conundrums I talked about are linked to the ethical ones because they both address the same problem: that it is possible that these ES cells are nothing more than building blocks and that potentially none of us are really who we think we are and that our personalities and mental behaviours are merely the survival mechanisms of a biological machine and nothing more.
All of this raises the question of whether our concepts of individuality are merely illusions created by our biological bodies to satiate us and comfort us so we don't go insane and potentially harm the biological machine in our insanity.
Do you still not see what I'm getting at?
The very nature of a chimera draws up the ethical problem itself. Two become one. What happened to the second potential human being? It lives on within the other, but at what cost? At the cost of its individuality, its thoughts, its own memories and personality? Or is such a thought ridiculous, in which case it doesn't matter what happened to the ES cells?
