Tag Archives: ethics

Rabid Dogs

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Some people don’t care who gets trampled in the mad rush to uncover the truth.

There’s a side to RatherGate that not everyone knows about. Not everyone who said the memos were real were maliciously trying to deceive the public. Some people, like David Hailey, Utah State University associate professor of technical
communications, actually believed the memos to be real and wrote a paper attempting to prove it. This action was not well received, and Hailey’s reputation was dragged through the mud by the lynch mob looking for liberals to string up for daring to
trust the documents.

Bene Diction sums up the events nicely.

This is the bad side of blogging – the drunk driving so to speak – uncivil, hateful, vindictive, swarming.

Anybody Game?

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I am here today to go on the record with my bewilderment with opponents of embryonic stem cell research.

Here’s how I understand stem cell research: Fertilize an egg and let it divide a few times. Take the resulting clump of cells and use them to see what kinds of tissues you can grow on command. Repeat until you get something useful. Put cotton in your ears while Christians scream at you for being a genocidal maniac.

So who wants to respond to this?

Unfit Parents

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Words fail me.

Oprah Winfrey: agent of moral insanity.

“Oprah Winfrey, widely cited as one of the most influential and admired women in America, showed herself to be an agent of moral insanity when she featured a program celebrating young children seeking sex-change procedures and transgender identities. In one episode of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’ the true nature of our modern sexual confusion was made clear, and the broadcast should long be remembered as one of the most frightening hours in television history.”

(Thanks to Mark Shea via Quenta Narwenion)

Sacrilege and Medical Science

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Fabian of Report from Greater Tokyo has responded to Jerry's stem cell primer.

"On the medical science issue, once upon a time, it was considered sacriligious to cut open a human corpse. Early doctors' methods were notoriously unreliable, and early post-mortems were unlikely to either find the exact cause of death or provide immediately useful data for medical research.

However, although no one knew exactly how that research might be beneficial in the future, we know now that it was invaluable to almost every modern surgical technique.

Similarly, although we don't yet know which way stem cell research may take medical science, and we don't even know of any specific benefits, but it seems reasonable to believe that there will be some tangible medical benefit in the future. If the anti-stem cell research people had won back then, modern medical surgery would still be at the amputate and cauterize stage. Stuff as basic as resetting a broken bone would be life-threatening, and almost certainly result in long term problems.

Comments? Criticisms? My gut reaction is to say that cutting open a corpse is not the same as destroying a living creature. Whether killing that creature is killing a person or not is a matter for debate, but that a living thing is killed is not."

Thoughts? 

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UK Seeks Global Support for Stem Cell Research

Although member nations would not be compelled to sign up to it, the Royal Society argues a treaty banning all forms of human cloning would place a major obstacle in the way of stem cell research which could provide new treatments for diseases including diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

The ends don’t justify the means. Just ask Josef Mengele.