Does "no higher brain function" mean not human?

[GPLindsey]

I didn't have a problem with pulling the plug on Terri Schiavo because it was clear that the part of her brain that gave her thoughts, feelings, and consciousness was destroyed. Sadly, she was a body with a bit of brain stem running the machinery, and that was it. I also do not oppose abortion, until the point in the pregnancy is reached when the fetus has developed that portion of the brain that controls the higher order brain functions and can arguably begin thinking. At that point, it goes from being a fetus to a baby IMO.

While this is wonderfully consistent, I like to challenge my thinking on stuff like this, so I imagined a future society where organ donations for various conditions are desperately needed. Further, doctors in this society can genetically alter a developing fetus at an early stage, removing its ability to develop higher order brain functions. What is born is a perfectly healthy human body with no consciousness, thoughts, feelings. It can be fed and cared for, and at a given point destroyed so that its organs can be used to help others (those with real brains!). Imagine rows of human vegatables being intentially born and harvested just for their organs.

Is there a moral problem here? If so, what is it, given that most Americans agreed that Terri Schiavo's life was over and her body's continued existence was meaningless? If human life is only of value once some measure of consciousness is present, what would be wrong with creating a new category of non-thinking sub-humans that are created solely for their parts?

[Anat]

I don't have a problem with your scenario. It is a total tragedy when such a child is born naturally. Look up lissencephaly, for example.

[Coooolo70]

I didn't have a problem with pulling the plug on Terri Schiavo because it was clear that the part of her brain that gave her thoughts, feelings, and consciousness was destroyed. Sadly, she was a body with a bit of brain stem running the machinery, and that was it. I also do not oppose abortion, until the point in the pregnancy is reached when the fetus has developed that portion of the brain that controls the higher order brain functions and can arguably begin thinking. At that point, it goes from being a fetus to a baby IMO.

While this is wonderfully consistent, I like to challenge my thinking on stuff like this, so I imagined a future society where organ donations for various conditions are desperately needed. Further, doctors in this society can genetically alter a developing fetus at an early stage, removing its ability to develop higher order brain functions. What is born is a perfectly healthy human body with no consciousness, thoughts, feelings. It can be fed and cared for, and at a given point destroyed so that its organs can be used to help others (those with real brains!). Imagine rows of human vegatables being intentially born and harvested just for their organs.

Is there a moral problem here? If so, what is it, given that most Americans agreed that Terri Schiavo's life was over and her body's continued existence was meaningless? If human life is only of value once some measure of consciousness is present, what would be wrong with creating a new category of non-thinking sub-humans that are created solely for their parts?

well.... yes. i'm against abortion mainly because it destroys a potential life. i mean, you may not care if it happened to you, but do you right now wish you had never been born? you'd be doing the same thing here.

[Anat]

but do you right now wish you had never been born?
I wouldn't mind to never have been born. Just like I don't mind the eons I did not exist in prior to my birth, or those I will not exist in after my death. It's just a non-consequence.

[Smullyan-esque]

While your scenario does give me an eerie feeling, I don't think that feeling really means anything moral. I mean, I get that same eerie feeling when I think of cattle being led in through that ramp, into the slaughterhouse. Or when I think about the fact that there is shit inside me, right now, in my large intestine...

Some things just make us uncomfortable when we look directly at them. That does not imply anything about the morality of the thing. Am I a disgusting, dirty person because my intestines makes food into shit? All this feeling really means is that our species is sentimental and emotional.

So, as long as these "donors" really didn't have higher brain functions (and it would be best to make sure they didn't grow brains in the first place, just to be sure) I don't really think there's anything morally wrong with it.

[Castorama]

The body would still be human, but a modified human. The valuable part of 'human' would not exist, so the scenario would be acceptable, as long as you do not destroy valuable higher brain function to achieve it. I would also look at ways to grow these organs without pregnancy or apart from the whole body (which is the current scientific emphasis). They can therefore be 'on demand', with no waste.

Coooolo70:i'm against abortion mainly because it destroys a potential life. i mean, you may not care if it happened to you, but do you right now wish you had never been born? you'd be doing the same thing here.I find that this take on the issue implies that we must have no conception without a fully respected pregnancy, as allowing embryo to progress to foetus is just like allowing the blastocyst to implant. In fact, as the sex act is a potential act of conception, involving the projection of sperm towards egg, you could even say that contraception is out of order. You could even say that as we are surrounded by this potential life (in the form of sperm and egg), we are morally obligated to help them conjoin and fulfil their potential.

As a result, I prefer to respect only what a being is at that very moment in time.

This has to be reasoned structurally, i.e. the structure is in place, to achieve higher brain function, otherwise I could excuse killing an unconscious or temporarily traumatised man, on the grounds of his lack of consciousness. Note that potential structure is not existent structure.

[Angrillori]

In fact, I see that situation as a moral good. If a method was found of ensuring people who need organs get them, and no one is harmed in the process, then more power to it. Those "donors" would be like Terri Schaivo--merely life support for the organs in them, merely machines keeping those organs alive until needed.

Now, are there slippery slope arguments about the potential effects on the women giving birth?

Yes, if this scenario came about there would be ethical considerations. However they would not be (in my mind) concerned with the organ-sacks to which the women give birth, but rather to the women involved. Pregnancy is a pretty intensive and dangerous undertaking. Many many many women die or suffer sever injuries during childbirth. If there were a monetary incentive for giving birth to these organ-sacks, would poor women be implicitly economically coerced into undertaking this dangerous event? Would there be psychological effects on the women when they give birth to what amounts to an organ-sack? The answers to these questions MIGHT lead one to consider the fetal-organ-sack scenario an immoral one. But none of those are directly related to the harvesting of organs from brainless sacks of skin, but are directly related to the suffering and condition of the women with the functioning brains.

[Coooolo70]

The body would still be human, but a modified human. The valuable part of 'human' would not exist, so the scenario would be acceptable, as long as you do not destroy valuable higher brain function to achieve it. I would also look at ways to grow these organs without pregnancy or apart from the whole body (which is the current scientific emphasis). They can therefore be 'on demand', with no waste.

Coooolo70:I find that this take on the issue implies that we must have no conception without a fully respected pregnancy, as allowing embryo to progress to foetus is just like allowing the blastocyst to implant. In fact, as the sex act is a potential act of conception, involving the projection of sperm towards egg, you could even say that contraception is out of order. You could even say that as we are surrounded by this potential life (in the form of sperm and egg), we are morally obligated to help them conjoin and fulfil their potential.

As a result, I prefer to respect only what a being is at that very moment in time.

This has to be reasoned structurally, i.e. the structure is in place, to achieve higher brain function, otherwise I could excuse killing an unconscious or temporarily traumatised man, on the grounds of his lack of consciousness. Note that potential structure is not existent structure.

hmm... yea ok you know what i'll give you that... screw potential lives. i'm here to learn, i'm not above admitting something i say is wrong.

[Smullyan-esque]

hmm... yea ok you know what i'll give you that... screw potential lives. i'm here to learn, i'm not above admitting something i say is wrong.

Wow! You get 1000 cool points! People hardly EVER do this!

In fact, didn't we just have a thread where someone was complaining that folks on this board never change their minds?

[Tom Sawyer]

hmm... yea ok you know what i'll give you that... screw potential lives. i'm here to learn, i'm not above admitting something i say is wrong.


What the hell kind of internet debater are you? NEVER EVER admit that you were wrong about something.

Have you never heard of changing the topic while claiming to speak about the same thing? Did you not think to reply to irrelevant side notes in someone's posts and ignore their main points to make it look like you were defending your position while just talking about nothing and hoping people got fed up with your nonsense and went away so that you could claim victory? You didn't even deliberately take some offhand jibe out of context and claim that they were making a personal insult and so you were going to ignore them for the rest of the thread in order to cover up for the fact that you can't beat them on the issues.

It makes me sick how quickly you folded here. How do you look at yourself in the mirror?

[Castorama]

It's nice to see the actual process of freethinking in at least one of the board's members. Everyone claims to have practiced it themselves and that's why they appear to be so sure of what they believe in, because of course, each one holds the ultimate logical conclusion, just like every religion holds the ultimate theological conclusion. But we all know that a few of our bases are left uncovered, and thus, there should be no shame in changing opinion, especially where the previous version was a 153rd priority, or a work in progress, possibly among a host of other fine works.

[_Naturalist_]

I have no problems with your scenario. No one would come to harm, while a body with a mind is saved.

[Coooolo70]

What the hell kind of internet debater are you? NEVER EVER admit that you were wrong about something.

Have you never heard of changing the topic while claiming to speak about the same thing? Did you not think to reply to irrelevant side notes in someone's posts and ignore their main points to make it look like you were defending your position while just talking about nothing and hoping people got fed up with your nonsense and went away so that you could claim victory? You didn't even deliberately take some offhand jibe out of context and claim that they were making a personal insult and so you were going to ignore them for the rest of the thread in order to cover up for the fact that you can't beat them on the issues.

It makes me sick how quickly you folded here. How do you look at yourself in the mirror?

lol...

you know, i like to think of myself as a philosopher, and the meaning of the word is 'to seek reason and truth'. if i were to ignore reason when i see it, what type of philosopher would i be?

[atonal chaotic]

"No higher brain function" would not mean "not human." It would mean "not person."
This is an important distinction. Any ethical theory that can't accommodate the possibility of persons who are not human is flawed from the get-go.

[Jennie]

It sounds very wasteful to me, it would be more efficient to just grow organs as needed rather than keep them around all the time just in case they're needed. It's very expensive to keep someone in a PVS alive and healthy.

[Mav]

I think that if they came up with a hybrid human that would never develop any type of higher brain function nor have any chance to, no body would have a problem. The genes that develop the higher brain functions were removed so that only the lower functioning brain areas develop. This hybrid human could then be cloned over and over and over providing parts for many. It would never have a chance to become anything even if allowed to live out a full life span.

Religions might have a problem with this, but I'll bet that if one of them needed a part, and had no idea where it came from, guess who they would give credit to....... Religions would claim this as "Man playing God", which in turn cuts into the Holy Offering Plate.

[Marc Higbie]

It sounds very wasteful to me, it would be more efficient to just grow organs as needed rather than keep them around all the time just in case they're needed. It's very expensive to keep someone in a PVS alive and healthy.

Well it might be true in the future, at the moment growing whole bodies would certinaly not be wasteful, as the tissue donation industry would use nearly every scrap of matierial from a body (although I would think the muscle tissue from PVS donors would be fairly useless).

The real issue is the 16ish year lead time to get them up to size for harvesting, and even then given the apparent dollar value of tissue on the market these days it might be commercially viable until a way to speed it up is found.

Given the OP scenario of genetically built zombies, we might also have some way to speed up growth at the same level (maybe fill that empty skull space with a pituitary the size of a cantaloupe)

Marc

[nightwyrm]

Didn't they just do a movie like this?

It seems to me that it would be quicker and cheaper to grow a specific body part than to grow a whole new body, and more likely to get pass the ethical issues too.

[dmarker]

I didn't have a problem with pulling the plug on Terri Schiavo because it was clear that the part of her brain that gave her thoughts, feelings, and consciousness was destroyed. Sadly, she was a body with a bit of brain stem running the machinery, and that was it. I also do not oppose abortion, until the point in the pregnancy is reached when the fetus has developed that portion of the brain that controls the higher order brain functions and can arguably begin thinking. At that point, it goes from being a fetus to a baby IMO.

While this is wonderfully consistent, I like to challenge my thinking on stuff like this, so I imagined a future society where organ donations for various conditions are desperately needed. Further, doctors in this society can genetically alter a developing fetus at an early stage, removing its ability to develop higher order brain functions. What is born is a perfectly healthy human body with no consciousness, thoughts, feelings. It can be fed and cared for, and at a given point destroyed so that its organs can be used to help others (those with real brains!). Imagine rows of human vegatables being intentially born and harvested just for their organs.

Is there a moral problem here? If so, what is it, given that most Americans agreed that Terri Schiavo's life was over and her body's continued existence was meaningless? If human life is only of value once some measure of consciousness is present, what would be wrong with creating a new category of non-thinking sub-humans that are created solely for their parts?

I doubt that this will ever happen in real life. First reason, the time involved would be too long. Second, unless it is a clone, then you still have all the compatibility issues. Third, caring for a body for that long would be tremendously expensive. Fourth, not many would volunteer or even be paid to carry the body until it is born, so you still have shortages.

Cloning is the future. Take a few cells and grow a new heart, liver, et. in a nutrient solution. Since the cells came from the patient originally, compatibility isn't an issue. Since it's just an organ, it is less controversal; it would be a tech version of a scab and new skin. And because you are just using cells from the patient's body, everyone who needs an organ has an organ.

[GPLindsey]

In a way, my original scenario would be viewed by the Religious Right as the slippery slope end result of the embryonic stem cell debate. If we can do whatever we want to embryos and fetuses before they develop personhood, then we can do whatever we want to babies born without personhood, like organ harvesting. "Do you want to live in a sicko, nightmare world like that America?!?!"

I'm for embryonic stem cell research. I think that a fertilized egg or a fetus is fair game for research, up until the fetus is developed enough to begin thinking. My "Wisdom of Solomon" solution to the abortion debate is to cut the baby in two--before sentience, its a fetus and not a human being, so the woman's choice on abortion prevails, but after sentience its a baby and should be protected. Male and female human bodies product zillions of sperm cells and eggs, of which the tiniest fraction are used for procreation. Why not use all those leftovers, by themselves or after fertilization, to do life saving research?

Another observation I would make is that this kind of debate, unfortunately, makes religious conservatives gleeful, because the mere fact we can give serious thought to this scenario makes us look dangerous, in their view. Their common refrain is that, without God and his moral guidance, there is no standards of right and wrong and humans can decide that any and all bizarre practices are morally justified. Any fundie looking at this site could point to this thread as Exhibit A. But hey, so be it.