[BRIEF NOTE] Bioethics Question
Apr. 6th, 2005 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI was disturbed to read Margaret Atwood's review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go at Slate. She, in the course of a strongly positive commentary, talks about how Ishiguro treats the ethics of dehumanization. This may well be true, and I do want to read Never Let Me Go.
But since when has it been legally possible to harvest organs from any human being without their consent regardless of their origins, save in bad science fiction? If you the reader, after Ishiguro, take this point--the moral degeneration of humanity, the denial of basic individual rights--for granted, fine. I don't know, however, of any halfway-decent that would discriminate in such a radical manner towards people based solely on the manner of their conception.
It worries me that people do have what seems to be almost an instinctual tendency to discount the products of "unnatural births"--whether test-tube babies or future clones, or even twins or triplets--as non-human.
But since when has it been legally possible to harvest organs from any human being without their consent regardless of their origins, save in bad science fiction? If you the reader, after Ishiguro, take this point--the moral degeneration of humanity, the denial of basic individual rights--for granted, fine. I don't know, however, of any halfway-decent that would discriminate in such a radical manner towards people based solely on the manner of their conception.
It worries me that people do have what seems to be almost an instinctual tendency to discount the products of "unnatural births"--whether test-tube babies or future clones, or even twins or triplets--as non-human.
