So, are trans folks immoral? Organ transplants? Prosthetics? Where do you draw the line?
I don't think anyone is saying that if a fucking Frankenstein's monster human/monkey hybrid were engineered, that people would say that the chimera itself had committed an immoral act. They would say that it was wrong to make that thing. You don't even understand what point you're trying to make.
If it is absolutely immoral to genetically engineer a human being that would require an organ transplant then it would seemingly also be immoral to not utilize readily accessible technology that could have prevented such a disorder, no?
Well, actually, no - that doesn't necessarily follow. It's not valid to say "if it's wrong to do x then it's wrong to not do things that prevent x" - you can substitute X for plenty of other things. It's wrong for me to steal money from a friend, but it doesn't logically follow that I'm morally obligated to buy a security system for my friend so he doesn't get stolen from. The analogy is kind of funky here, but I think you get what I'm saying.
There's an intentionality that exists with genetic engineering that doesn't exist with people having kids the old-fashioned way. If someone has a child, and that child turns out to have a birth defect that causes issues, that's a sad accident most of the time, and accidents don't have the same moral quality as intentional acts, like genetically engineering someone.
Let's not lose track of why this came up. The question was "So, are trans folks immoral? Organ transplants? Prosthetics? Where do you draw the line?" and that was in response to "It is immoral to create something sentient which has not been created by natural processes. To bring a sentient being into the world which is created by human engineering process is immoral because there are no guarantees that we do not create something which is horribly mutated, fucked up genetically, and experiences only pain for its entire life."
Asking if we're morally obligated to try to make super babies is a distraction from that earlier question. I said what I did not because I wanted to argue for or against the validity of eugenics, but because I wanted to call attention to how absurd the line of reasoning was.
The person commenting thought that they hit on a pretty solid point when they seemed to equivocate scientists making human-monkey chimeras with people that have to use a fucking cane. I pointed out that no one is intentionally genetically engineering people to force them to have to use canes, and then you've come along to say that if it's possible to ensure that someone will be born without having to use a cane, then they're morally obligated to do that. Somewhere we went off the rails, huh?
Already you've delved into ideology.
Organ transplants :
No, this is a life saving (or condition improving) medical procedure. Same for prosthetics.
I am referring only to experiments where the outcome might be the creation of a new species of sentient being. Pretty much I'm drawing the line at exactly the posted experiment.
Yes.
> Organ transplants?
OK, as long as they were taken from someone who was actually dead. Not all organs can be taken after death. In these cases, the transplant surgeon ends the donor's life in the process of harvesting.
> Prosthetics?
OK.
At one point, pulmonary arrest was considered death. Then, cardiac arrest. Now, we use the cessation of brain activity as an approximation, but there have been plenty of cases of patients with zero brain activity making full recoveries.
The best definition of death is probably information-theoretic death. But that's not something we know how to measure (yet), so the organ harvests continue: