ilweran on 5/11/2006 at 21:43
Quote Posted by pavlovscat
Late term spontaneous abortions are usually called premature births and every attempt is made to save them. Many premature babies end up on life support and end up with life long health problems. Modern medical progress has tried to eliminate that aspect of natural selection.
Just pointing out that nature does her bit. If we choose to nurture what she rejects that's our choice.
tbh I don't know if I agree with this or not. The risk of abuse seem high, but at the same time I have a lot of sympathy for any parent who ends killing their own child through desperation, and it's a terrible thing for them to have to live with even if they honestly believe it was the right thing.
Hell, I felt guilty for ages about having my cat put down even though it was absolutly the right thing to do, and all I had to do was sign a piece of paper.
Marecki on 5/11/2006 at 22:16
Quote Posted by Aerothorn
No, it would not be.
Hence "is" in my statement.
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As for the disease possibly being curable - doesn't work like that. We're not talking about kids with kidney disorders, we're talking about seriously deformed "I have no eyeballs and no limbs" sort of kids. I doubt they'll find a cure for that anytime soon...
I'd say you are wrong here. On one hand, if gene therapy gets cracked, this kind of thing
would be curable; on the other, there have already been successful attempts of jacking artificial eyes, ears and limbs directly into the nerve system - while their quality is (at the moment) inferior to natural ones and more complicated implants still await improvements in connecting flesh and electronics, the principle has already been proven sound. So, not only it would be entirely possible to treat such problems, but we've already got some ideas how they could be treated! In my book this is far from "not being able to find a cure any time soon".
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...but if the did it wouldn't matter. The kid would be turned to 'normal' at the age of 30 or something - would have no idea how to function in society and, yeah, just wouldn't work.
Who are you, me, or anyone else for that matter, to decide that for them? If the brain is operational no other human has the right to do that. Taking the aforementioned example of implants, in this case it would perhaps be possible to wire such kids into some larger systems while they are waiting for compact, portable ones to be prepared for them.
mopgoblin on 5/11/2006 at 22:50
Quote Posted by Marecki
Who are you, me, or anyone else for that matter, to decide that for them?
Well, if you're using medical trickery to keep them alive then you're still deciding that for them. Other than genuine accidents, or a non-wilful lack of information or capability, everything that happens (or doesn't happen) to them is decided by other people. There's no way that can be avoided, as once you're aware of these decisions, anything you do to avoid them is itself a decision.
Vigil on 5/11/2006 at 22:58
Quote Posted by Marecki
Who are you, me, or anyone else for that matter, to decide that for them?
We're the people who make decisions to put our cats and dogs down in situations where to let them continue living would put them through too much suffering. We're the people who, in times of war, will put friends and enemies out of their misery rather than let them die slow and fairly certain deaths. Are these decisions axiomatically wrong?
You're arguing the rest of your position on a contingency: the contingency that medical science will come up with a solution to bring someone's quality of life up to a level worth living. The worth of this line of reasoning is dependent on the likelihood and timeliness of that contingency coming to pass, not on there being the slightest possibility of it ever coming to pass in the first place.
Renegen on 5/11/2006 at 23:31
Quote Posted by pavlovscat
the reality is that people are getting less & less healthy with the passing of time. I do not choose to contribute to that decline.
That's completely subjective, how do you know it's true? except if you consider old people to be weaker than young people..:cheeky: one example is that in old paintings we never see crips. They didn't suddenly appear in the 20th century, they were just ignored in the old times, but were always present.
Quote Posted by pavlovscat
And, yes mutations occur constantly, good & bad. In fact, favorable mutations are how species progress evolutionarily. But,the weak wolves don't usually get to breed, so that mutation stops in a single generation. There is little propagation of unfavorable traits in a natural environment. I don't consider the way humans live to be a natural enviroment, but a totally artificial construct.
But weak, sick wolves occur every single generation, even with the alpha male breeding. Even with the alpha male breeding for hundred of generations some wolves are also just inferior to others, the bad genes don't get erased just like that because of natural selection.
Quote Posted by pavlovscat
In this artificial environment, a good provider is not necessarily the strongest or most fit candidate. How many women are attracted to, marry & have children with drunken losers who beat them? How is that a good selection?
That's really subjective again, not only can we say the majority would prefer and try to marry a good provider there's those statistics that say like for every 10 points of IQ a man is 20% more likely to get married, while a woman has about the same chance. And there's probably statistics related to income to show a similar curve. My argument is that society does create a sort of selection of the genes and I think it stands on stronger grounds than your argument.
Either way that's what opinions are, to be discussed and shared equally, and maybe then forgotten.
BrokenArts on 6/11/2006 at 00:21
I put my 13 year old cat down earlier this month, you wanna talk about agony. Everyday seeing her was torture, watching her go down hill, knowing there was nothing I could do. She was losing weight, she weighed less than 5 pounds.
She couldn't see, she'd walk into the walls, she had kidney failure, and went to the bathroom outside the litter box, everyday, I was cleaning up piss all the time, 3 to 4 times a day, talk about a fucking hassle that was, she couldn't help it, you do what you have to do.
Now tell me what is humane, she would of been dead a long time ago outside. The thought of finding her dead one day, I could do without that. She was suffering, the vet explained it would eventually be painful for her. No regrets putting her down, it was the right thing to do, and it was time.
ignatios on 6/11/2006 at 00:24
Would parents hypothetically still have the choice?
Fingernail on 6/11/2006 at 00:24
In the end I just thought: "you're not going to fuck up my life any more, mother... this is the end!!!"
and then I pulled the plug, and I've never looked back, really.
Scots Taffer on 6/11/2006 at 00:25
I think there's a cosmic realm of difference between what Para?noid posited and what most people in this thread are advocating.
TheGreatGodPan on 6/11/2006 at 01:23
My general rule of thumb in these kinds of matters is to consider whether I would be willing to kill the person in that situation. A person who committed a capital crime? Yup, so there's the death penalty. A suffering person who wanted me to help them end it all? Yup, so there's assisted suicide, or euthanasia if they had told me in advance the circumstances in which they wouldn't want to live anymore. A birth defect? I'll stop there. People can live lives with disabilities that may not be as great as they would otherwise be, but whether or not it is better than no life at all is a decision I'd have to leave up to them. So they'd have to be really, really screwed up in a sort of non-viable sense.
There's no escaping natural selection (altough Darwin distinguished between natural selection as simple survival and sexual selection for reproduction). The interaction of others when it comes to evolution is why game theory is often used in evolutionary theorizing. Humans have evolved to a point where children, no matter how lacking in defect, simply cannot survive if abandoned by their mothers and not taken care of by someone else. Modern medicine is part of our environment, and as such selection for reacting well to medicine is natural selection. Perhaps you don't like the results of natural selection, but it doesn't select for "good" or "progress", so the results are selection nevertheless.
