Peter Singer’s New Competition

[Gabriel_Gale]

Michael Gazzaniga, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Gazzaniga is said to the model for the neuroscientist in Tom Wolfe’s latest book, I AM Charlotte Simmons. Lately Gazzaniga has put on the robes of philosopher and priest. He has decided that scientist must enlighten us about true ethics.

Gazzaniga embarked on The Ethical Brain

, a 2005 book published by the Dana Foundation, out of a sense of noblesse oblige: “Those of us who focus on how the nervous system works,” he explains, “must begin to address larger issues even though the ones we are working on are large enough.” These other issues are the kind ordinary citizens might worry about—like whether human embryos are a fit object for experimentation, what to do about grandparents with dementia, and whether it’s OK to select traits in our children or give them drugs to improve their mental performance.

The Editors of The New Atlantis, “Morals and the Mind,” The New Atlantis, Number 11, Winter 2006, pp. 121-125. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/11/soa/ethicalbrain.htm

Here are some of examples of his insights from his book:

What are we to make of it all? For Gazzaniga, neuroscience tells us that “life begins with a sentient being,” around week twenty-three, or around the same time that the fetus can survive outside the womb with medical support.

….To explain his argument, Gazzaniga uses an analogy: the embryo is like housing materials found at a Home Depot. Says Gazzaniga: “When a Home Depot burns down, the headline in the paper is not ‘30 Houses Burn Down.’ It is ‘Home Depot Burned Down.’” Similarly, to destroy a fetus is not to destroy a human life, but merely the “materials” of life……

Gazzaniga’s sweeping claim is that “demented patients … are no longer even members of our species.” To demonstrate this, he offers another analogy. Imagine, he says, that you have an old car “Nelly,” your very first car. “Nelly is part of your life and mind and story. You learned to drive her, your first date was in Nelly, and who knows what else happened inside Nelly.” But now Nelly’s motor is broken beyond repair and her body is rusting away……The “neuroscientific truth” is “that Gramps is not really with us anymore.” Gramps has all the moral worth of, well, Nelly, and in “our pluralistic society” there should be a right “to euthanize him.”

The Editors of The New Atlantis, “Morals and the Mind,” The New Atlantis, Number 11, Winter 2006, pp. 121-125. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/11/soa/ethicalbrain.htm

 

[Lisa4Catholics]

:banghead: grrrrrrrrr!

 

[dafalax]

So plants aren’t alive because they’re non-sentient, right? All those poor foolish botanists.

 

[BlindSheep]

“When a Home Depot burns down, the headline in the paper is not ‘30 Houses Burn Down.’ It is ‘Home Depot Burned Down.’” Similarly, to destroy a fetus is not to destroy a human life, but merely the “materials” of life……

Well, I may not be a brain surgeon, but I can’t help but think that there is some significance in the fact that, while 2 by 4’s don’t spontaneously assemble themselves into a house, embryos do spontaneously grow a mature human body…

 

[dafalax]

BlindSheep:

Well, I may not be a brain surgeon, but I can’t help but think that there is some significance in the fact that, while 2 by 4’s don’t spontaneously assemble themselves into a house, embryos do spontaneously grow a mature human body…

Furthermore, a growing child is not the material for 30 houses; it is one complete one. Our bodies continue to grow and change over the course of our entire lives. The only way to make that stop is to kill us. Only one thing in the world has a full set of human DNA, and that’s a human. Bad science and idiotic analogies sound good to these people, but anyone with half a brain could see how wrong their reasoning is. Oftentimes they don’t because they don’t want it to be true. Anyway, many brain-damaged people are non-sentient. This would negate their humanity as well. But then again, if you’re pro-abortion . . .