Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

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Tazo
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Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by Tazo »

This is a very theoretical question based entirely on made-up situational elements. In this situation you are given a mother who needs an urgent heart transplant (I am no scientist, so I apologize if this it completely unrealistic). In this made-up world, scientists have created test-tube babies with no conscience, as in... they do not think for themselves nor do they want or dream. One of these beings can give the mother a heart. Is it just to preform the procedure? Is taking from a being with no thought the same as killing a chicken to eat and survive?

In a sense, I am asking what makes a human being. If it the organs in their body or something more? Does taking this being's heart count as murder? If the scientist saves the woman, are they a murderer or a savior?
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by LuckyR »

Tazo wrote: March 27th, 2021, 8:22 pm This is a very theoretical question based entirely on made-up situational elements. In this situation you are given a mother who needs an urgent heart transplant (I am no scientist, so I apologize if this it completely unrealistic). In this made-up world, scientists have created test-tube babies with no conscience, as in... they do not think for themselves nor do they want or dream. One of these beings can give the mother a heart. Is it just to preform the procedure? Is taking from a being with no thought the same as killing a chicken to eat and survive?

In a sense, I am asking what makes a human being. If it the organs in their body or something more? Does taking this being's heart count as murder? If the scientist saves the woman, are they a murderer or a savior?
Interesting questions. Some of this is known, some unknown. It is known that parents (in this case the mother) can ethically bring a child into the world, partially, and perhaps wholely, to provide donor "organs" for a family member. It is also ethical to harvest organs from a braindead individual that results in the death of that individual. Classically the individual would have to give consent to this before they were declared incompetent, though for minor children, the parents, say the mother, would give this consent. Since all of the above is ethically justified, the practice would not be murder, thus the surgeon would not be a murderer.

The unknown is the feasibility of creating a baby without brain function on purpose, in this case to provide organs.
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Tazo wrote: March 27th, 2021, 8:22 pm Is taking from a being with no thought the same as killing a chicken to eat and survive?

As far as I know, chickens think. Not like we do, but thought is thought, I think. I imagine that a human completely without thought would need to be placed on life support machinery to preserve its existence. In this case, the issue is surely whether humans without thought could or should be created?
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Tazo wrote: March 27th, 2021, 8:22 pm This is a very theoretical question based entirely on made-up situational elements. In this situation you are given a mother who needs an urgent heart transplant (I am no scientist, so I apologize if this it completely unrealistic). In this made-up world, scientists have created test-tube babies with no conscience, as in... they do not think for themselves nor do they want or dream. One of these beings can give the mother a heart. Is it just to preform the procedure? Is taking from a being with no thought the same as killing a chicken to eat and survive?

In a sense, I am asking what makes a human being. If it the organs in their body or something more? Does taking this being's heart count as murder? If the scientist saves the woman, are they a murderer or a savior?
You're talking hypothetically about non-sentient beings, which by no stretch of the imagination could be considered human beings. It is no different than developing specific human organs and then transplanting them to a human being.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by The Beast »

The philosophical killing does not compare with the philosophical saving. There is dying after disconnecting the life support system and there is the constitutional right to property and against assault. More with the times is the ethical or not-ethical debate of growing human organs based on stem cells and the regulations to control them. Another consideration of human nature is survival vs consciousness in the form of: How easy or difficult is for you… to save yourself since you never know for sure of anything and the status of living? We kill cows all the time, but killing and eating humans is outlaw by everyone… some otherwise law-abiding humans ate corpses to live, and some others die for not doing it as in famous airplane accidents.
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by Alias »

Tazo wrote: March 27th, 2021, 8:22 pm In this made-up world, scientists have created test-tube babies with no conscience, as in... they do not think for themselves nor do they want or dream.
It it your premise that the test-tube not only have no sense of right and wrong, but no consciousness at all? It's a question that has been raised regarding clones - as in, "What if everyone had a mindless twin stashed away in a vat, in case they need spare parts?" Then they are not persons, but organ-banks.
Is it just to preform the procedure? Is taking from a being with no thought the same as killing a chicken to eat and survive?
I think that performing such an operation would be even more routine than working in a slaughterhouse (killing innocent animals that clearly do think, feel and desire to escape) or, as the same doctors must have done, experimenting on innocent animals to learn the procedure, or executing convicted murderers (most of whom, even if they don't show remorse, make every conscious effort to avoid that fate) or bombing enemies about whose guilt or innocence one knows nothing at all.
If doctors, butchers, soldiers and executioners are not hampered by empathy for the self-aware beings they kill in the service of their fellow humans, I can't imagine them hesitating at a human clone.
Personally, I could not do any of those things. However, I am very much troubled by the work of research scientists, butchers, soldiers and executioners, yet would not object to organ-clones and more strenuously than I do to abortion.
OTOH, if there were less wasteful*, less graphically disturbing** options, I would certainly prefer to explore those before I supported a major initiative in cloning technology.
* Most of each body would never be used: you'd have to keep them hydrated, nourished, housed and protected for 60-70 years. Granted, they'd have a small ecological footprint, but how many would you need in a society that didn't cater exclusively to small elite class? Once all the high-demand organs had been harvested, the body would have to be recycled. Overall, a huge undertaking!
** Because most of us have very strong identification of body and mind as a human unit, like ourselves. I wonder about the psychological effect of producing, tending and mutilating these creatures, both on the health-care community and the society at large.
For both of those reasons, it would be far more efficient and less problematic to clone organs without the bodies - vats full of hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers, glands, in an assorment of size and age.
In a sense, I am asking what makes a human being.
I'm less concerned with drawing distinctions between self-aware species than reconciling self-aware species.
If it the organs in their body or something more?
It is the interaction of organs - notably a brain and its life-support system - to produce a conscious entity.
Does taking this being's heart count as murder?
Obviously not, since the legal question will have been decided before the technology was made available.
If the scientist saves the woman, are they a murderer or a savior?
Just a surgeon, doing a day's work.
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by subatomic »

This relates a lot to ethics and morality. How conscious does an entity have to be until it will be "morally wrong" to destroy them? Or, if we simulate a human mind in a computer and just isolate them and torture them in the simulation, will that be "wrong?" I think this really has to do with the consciousness's past experiences. We feel pain and loss because we've experienced better things before (reference to value theory from the behavioural economics book Misbehaving)(e.g. if you have 1000 dollars and you lose the 1000 dollars, you feel pain because now you have less money than you originally had. But if you never had the 1000 dollars in the first place, you wouldn't feel anything). If these "tube babies" don't have past experience, then they have nothing to feel pain relative to, so I'd say it's not morally wrong. Same thing goes with abortion.
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by Alias »

You don't need to go through such hypothetical contortions to consider ethics. You don't need to wait for speculative technology.
All the horrors you can imagine are already being done, and have been done for several thousand years.
Just look at what people actually do, every day - to other humans and to other sentient species - and analyze why they think, or at least say, that it's okay to do those things, and how they designate acceptable victims.
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by Pattern-chaser »

subatomic wrote: March 29th, 2021, 8:55 am How conscious does an entity have to be until it will be "morally wrong" to destroy them?
I would say it's morally wrong to destroy any entity, living or not, without a good reason. I destroy the creatures I kill to eat, but I don't casually destroy trees or sculptures (etc) as I walk past them; that would be morally wrong, IMO. Do you have a justification for killing entities that are of 'lesser' consciousness?
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by Pattern-chaser »

subatomic wrote: March 29th, 2021, 8:55 am e.g. if you have 1000 dollars and you lose the 1000 dollars, you feel pain because now you have less money than you originally had.

No, you feel pain when I stick a pin in you. What you feel when you have somehow lost $1000 is capitalist angst, not pain. Given that Capitalism is the state religion of your country, I accept that your upset could be significant, but I think calling it "pain" is going too far.
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Re: Would you kill a human with no conscience to save one with?

Post by LuckyR »

Ending life support for the braindead is absolutely not controversial. Not a thing.
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