dfx
Contributor
Here's an exhaustive list of references. Enjoy.
Another straw-man. I don't know how a reasonable person could decide that the moment of birth marks the transition from non-human to human. I'm not denying that this is what some people think, but it's a stance that is as unreasonable as saying that life begins at conception. It has no basis in reality.
The correct way to figure this out is to ask, at which point does a human fetus start to be capable of experiencing pain or suffering? I don't have an answer and I don't think anybody does. But that doesn't mean that we will never know. It's probably a gradual process, which makes it even harder to draw a solid line, but as of yet, the best we can do is make an educated guess and perhaps try to err on the safe side.
One thing is for sure though. A human blastocyst, which is what's being used in stem cell research, is in absolutely no way equipped to experience pain, suffering or end of life in any way. Every time you swat a mosquito, you kill an animal with hundreds of thousands of nerve cells, but a human blastocyst has nothing of that sort. Yet, people generally have no second thoughts when swatting a mosquito, but some people feel horrified at the thought of using human blastocysts for stem cell research (or aborting one). An understandable feeling, but an irrational one, as evidence tells us that every time we scratch our nose, we kill more human cells than when destroying a blastocyst. This is one thing that we do have solid evidence for.
Yet, religious dogma is unmovable on the stance that human life begins at conception and thus is sacred and must be protected. This has hindered stem cell research considerably in the past, despite the prospect of overwhelming medical advances that stem cell techniques can bring and the ability to cure currently untreatable conditions and alleviate human suffering on a large scale.
Again, you almost had it right until that last part. There is a moral truth to get, just like there's a truth in physics to get. We just don't know all the details yet, just as we don't know all the details of physics yet, and perhaps we never will. It's a process of development, learning more about ourselves and the universe. Modern societies are morally more developed as ancient societies, because we know more of the moral truth than they did back in the day. Just as we know more about physics today than we did in the past. Same is true between different societies of today's world.
And in the same way, some areas of physics are currently very open to debate with a lot of disagreement between physicists. In the same way, some areas of morality are very open to debate. But that still doesn't mean that there isn't a moral (or physical) truth still to be found. Disagreement, or opinions if you will, are a result of a lack of evidence. Discover more evidence and the disagreement between physicist will disappear, as will the different opinions on morality.
So it's not divine morality that changes over time, but humanity's understanding of that morality. OK. But how is that in any way better than secular morality, which also leads to a changing understanding of morality? If ancient Israel's understanding of divine morality was that it's OK to own slaves and have multiple wives, but today's understanding is that these things are not OK, how is that not a matter of opinion? If "thou shalt not murder" can be interpreted as "Jews shalt not kill other Jews," who is to say that this is not the right interpretation? After all, there are no further explanations and the bible (or Torah) contains many instances of Jews killing non-Jews in the most vile ways with no indication that there's anything wrong with that. How would you go about determining that this is the wrong interpretation?
This is why secular morality is vastly superior than any moral code based on written rules. Secular morality doesn't just give a list of Dos and Don'ts and then leaves it up to the reader to try to interpret them and make sense of them, but instead it provides explanations as to why some things are good and others are bad, and then the moral code is derived from that. Which necessarily leads to the moral code adapting and changing over time. New evidence can change the conclusions derived from the explanations, and this is a good thing as it allows us to develop into better human beings.
---------- Post added July 22nd, 2015 at 09:31 AM ----------
Rationalizing terrorism through infanticide as collateral damage
And that's not even mentioning that Hiroshima also was an absolutely heinous act.
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